Book: Soviet Milk (Mātes piens)/Life Stories (Dzīves stāsti)
Author: Nora Ikstena (Translator: Margita Gailitis)
Publication Year: 2015(2018)/2004(2013)
Genre: Fiction/Short Fiction
To Latvia. Middle of the triptych of Baltic states with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. Latvia was invaded and annexed by Russia in 1940 and remained under its iron fist until declaring independence in 1991, following the dissolution of Soviet Union.
Soviet Milk takes place during those years. It is told in alternating narratives, switching between an unnamed mother and her daughter. The mother is sent to Leningrad (St Petersburg) as part of her medical training, but an incident there leaves her medical career in ruins. She is sent into exile to run a clinic in the Latvian countryside. Her daughter remains with her grandmother in Riga, visiting her mother at weekends and during the holidays.
The title refers to the daily milk all children were given in Soviet run schools (although the original Latvian title, Mātes piens, translates as Mother’s Milk). The mother disappears for five days after giving birth. When she returns, her milk has dried out. The daughter develops an aversion to milk as a child. The metaphor is there for all to see. The daughter rejecting the symbol of her mother as her mother has rejected the daughter. The mother in turn has rejected her own mother after her father was taken away and died in a Soviet prison. Daughter and grandmother form a bond, skipping the middle generation in a familiar trope of fiction and real life.
As the daughter studies hard at school, enduring the propaganda she is forced to learn and memorise, her mother’s mental state slowly unravels as her exile continues without end. The daughter is almost a metaphor for Latvia itself as she secretly becomes more militant towards the communists. Her schooling progresses through the 80s and into university as the end of Russian communism on the horizon for all who know how this era of history ends.
Ikstena, like the daughter, was born in 1969 and in fact much of Soviet Milk is autobiographical. Which make the denouement all the more affecting, reflected as it is by real life events. The book ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall. All of us who were alive that night in 1989 can never forget it. Like the fall of the Soviet Union itself, it all seemed to happen so remarkably quickly. For some, though, it came too late.
Nora Ikstena has written more than 20 books, novels, short stories, essays and biographies, and although much of this work is not as yet available in English translation, she is another writer to whom I will return long after I have finished this reading project. Soviet Milk is considered the final part of a trilogy of novels that began with 1998’s Celebration of Life and continued with 2012’s Besa. So there’s two more books, if translations can be found.
Latvia is one of the countries for which this sort of literary journey is made to discover. It is perhaps a little reductive to resort to a book which focuses on the Soviet era, but with so many former Soviet states, the Russian occupation is a large part of recent European history, in the same way it is impossible to consider many African nations without recourse to the impact of English, French and German colonialism. Or turning to Latin America without thinking about the Spanish and Portuguese impact on those countries (in many of those countries I am literally reading those books in Spanish).
So many smaller, or less powerful nations are impacted by the incursion of larger powers and these ‘interactions’ (to use a decidedly Orwellian phrase) influence how a country develops in its language, its culture, its self-image and its self-belief. Much of Latvian culture and folk tradition was suppressed under the Soviet regime. The reemergence of those traditions served as a symbol and a bellwether for the end of Russian dominance in the region. In the case of Soviet Milk, reflected by the real life events that inspired the novel, the familial is a microcosm of the global. The passing of one era. The emergence of another.
Besides, Russia’s invasion and bombardment of the Ukraine reminds us that former satellite states like Latvia are not out of the woods yet. If Ukraine falls, who will be next on Vladimir Putin’s radar? The era of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev is not ancient history. It is as much part of living memory as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like the man said, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed forever to repeat them. Soviet Milk is part of the canon that informs that remembrance.
Nora Ikstena
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