In his sixth novel, The Lady of the Mine, Russian author Sergei Lebedev delivers a story full of both striking beauty and unsettling violence.
The novel begins with Zhanna, the daughter of Marianna, who has just spent nine excruciating months watching her mother die of illness in their eastern Ukrainian town, the site of a troubled — perhaps even cursed — coal mine that seems to accumulate human evils. Tough-as-nails Marianna spent her career as a laundress there. “They came to her with the nastiest, most corrosive dirt … ” Lebedev writes. “You would remember all your life how you created that stain, what you spilled, how dirty it was — unless Marianna took pity on you and washed it.”
For years, men have descended into the town’s perilous depths to excavate the raw material of power. There have been accidents. Mass executions of Jews. Cover-ups. And there’ve been so many villains: Nazis, and then Soviet Communists, and then Putin’s ragtag Russian soldiers. History here is one layer of dark secrets spackled over another, repeatedly, all the way until the story’s present day, when a civilian Boeing 777 is shot down from the sky directly overhead. As one character observes, “All the rockets in the world share a common link in their family tree.”
If that sounds bleak — well, it is. Taut with paradox and stacked with symbolism, Lebedev’s novel resists surface readings. This slim volume is so packed with geological metaphors it can sometimes feel quite dense. But Lebedev leverages his heavy premise to explore what cannot be buried, compressed, or contained in rock, and what cannot be scrubbed away by human hands. It is no wonder Lebedev is himself a geologist, a person who so keenly understands that the earth hides no secrets. Try as we might to dig and cover, there is ultimately no escaping our accountability to ourselves.
Megan Peck Shub is an Emmy-winning producer at Last Week Tonight, the HBO political satire series. Previously she produced Finding Your Roots on PBS. Her work has been published in New York Magazine, The Missouri Review, Salamander, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other publications.
