Comics from Russia are a rarity in this country. “Survilo” by Olga Lavrentieva therefore comes across as a surprising visitor, a little more welcome at that: In these times when Russians are doing so much harm to Ukrainians, do you really want to read about Russian trauma?
In the case of this graphic novel, the answer can only be: Absolutely! Olga Lavrentieva creates a panorama of 20th-century Russian history, using her own family as an example to show the devastation that war and the rule of a paranoid, autocratic leader can wreak. In her comic, it is the Stalinist terror and the siege of Leningrad that traumatize her and an entire generation, but parallels to the present cannot be overlooked.
At any moment, this is the experience of this youth, a person can disappear forever
“Disaster is always very close. I know that. Ever since.” This is how the narrator, Lavrentieva’s grandmother Valentina, begins her review: of the Stalinist purge that killed her father; on the life of the family in exile, the ostracism even by their own family. Finally to the war and the blockade of Leningrad, which Valentina experiences as a nightmare of hunger, lack of sleep and exhaustion, like in a tunnel. She works as a nurse during the siege and takes care of soldiers who die like flies, with the sisters dying alongside and with them. At any moment, this is the experience of this youth, a person close to them, a loved one of their family and even themselves could disappear forever. The murderous blockade and the early loss of her father, of whose fate nobody found out for a long time, mark her for life. When, much later, her grandchildren go mushroom picking and “disappear” in the process, old Valentina is close to panic.
In war: a tunnel of hunger, cold and exhaustion.
(Photo: Olga Lavrentieva/Avant Verlag)
The pictures of “Surwilo” are black and white and so concrete that biographical and historical circumstances are recognizable. But they are abstract enough, especially in tricky moments, to approach the horror that Valentina is experiencing with the necessary distance, the necessary respect for the basically unimaginable. If, for example, the father of the then 12-year-old narrator was “fetched,” as it is said after the arrest (the family does not learn much more until perestroika) – black spikes jut out like teeth into a panel, in the white space the neighbors can be calmed down read: “Of course it’s a mistake, they’ll clear it up soon…” Lavrentieva then draws black ink lines that could be interpreted as a sea of tears if this linguistic image weren’t too banal and kitschy for the almost abstract depiction of a grief that extends into Limitless spreads. “My childhood ended at the age of 12 in November 1937,” he said laconically.
Later in Valentina’s life, during the siege of Leningrad, a character’s outlines sometimes disappear as if washed away when they die of starvation. And the nurse’s nights, alone as a woman with many wounded, emaciated and exhausted, is a black tunnel from which only details emerge: the cries of the soldiers asking for the nurse or the dim light of the only oil lamp that illuminates the night shift . It is details like this that leave an inkling of what this blockade was like, what war means to those who suffer it. And it is precisely the hint, the horror that is not fully formulated, that leaves the most lasting impression. When, for example, Valentina has to load frozen corpses stored in a shed at the end of winter onto a truck before the dead bodies thaw, the horrific details of this work emerge like moments of shock from the blackness of the drawings: Here a head, there a hand, fat hatched black lines indicate the stacked frozen bodies. Eventually, Valentina’s face darkens as she speaks like a child to her (long-dead) mother: “Mom, I don’t want to carry bodies… I want to go home!”
The book looks as if it were drawn from a single mould, while Lavrentieva keeps changing everything possible: the page structure or the degree of abstraction. Sometimes she works faces into impressive portraits, then she dabs impressionistically on a meadow or turns a decades-old bomb crater into a black time tunnel that leads grandmother Valentina from one panel to the next back to the beginning of the war, which she then tells her grandchildren about. These drawings are all great – in addition to this impressive, deeply humanistic story, another reason to discover the Russian comic author in this country.