Irina Zhorov is probably the newest member of the Alabama writing community, having moved to Mobile only recently with her husband, Caleb Johnson, after they both took MFA’s in fiction writing from the University of Wyoming, studying there with the beloved Brad Watson. Caleb made his impressive debut with “Treeborne,” set near his home place in Arley, Alabama.
“Lost Believers” is an entirely different matter. Zhorov, originally from Uzbekistan, moved to the U.S. as a child .She trained as a geologist and although she did not find a career there, she has made excellent use of that training in this first, impressive and very refreshing novel. Hemingway knew that a major factor in the success of a novel was new material, so he acquainted himself with bullfighting, deep sea fishing, big game hunting and so on. One read, enjoyed and, in a satisfying way, learned. The content of “Lost Believers” is all new to me: no kudzu, no confederate flags—it is a miracle.
In what seems to be the early ’70s, Galina, a Russian geologist, is sent with a team of engineers to the taiga—a remote, subarctic section of Siberia, an area everyone thought to be uninhabited. But it’s not. There is a family living there, in a single room cabin, having moved there in the 1930’s in order to worship as they pleased.
They are the Old Believers, Hugo and Natalia, Christ-worshipping puritans who will not buckle under to the atheism demanded by Stalin and the Communist Party. In their little room they have a shrine: religious icons and the old three-barred cross. Their faith is defiantly unchanged. They survive on potatoes grown in their short summer, berries and fish and the occasional moose. Their children, Agafia and Dima, have known nothing else but this isolation in Siberia.
Then, one day, into this frozen Eden, a geological survey team arrives, crisscrossing the skies in a helicopter, with a magnetometer, testing for iron ore and later extracting core samples to determine if this is where a gigantic open-pit iron mine should be put. At this point several lines of plot open up and tensions increase.
As she comes to know the taiga, Galina is struck, indeed overwhelmed by the pristine beauty of this wilderness and, despite what will surely be severe consequences, increasingly reluctant to report her findings, knowing that huge open pit mines will destroy it all, forever.
