All of the plots in Irina Zhorov’s affecting novel, Lost Believers, tell stories of faith and disillusionment. Faith demands a lot of us. For Agafia, faith means shunning the outside world and keeping the traditions of the Old Believers on her family’s homestead in a remote pocket of Siberia. For Galina, it means following the dictates of the Soviet Union by locating metal deposits for mining. Over the course of the novel, Agafia, Galina, and others will face crises that require them to confront the costs of their actions and question whether that cost is worth the consequences.
In the early 1970s, Galina and Agafia meet by pure happenstance. Galina is doing fieldwork in Siberia, mapping the borders of an iron deposit, when her helicopter flies over a ramshackle cabin deep in the forest. Curiosity drives her to make contact. We already know Agafia and her family, as well as how they came to be in the Siberian taiga. (We don’t learn the family’s surname but I strongly suspect that the Old Believer family is based on the Lykovs.) Sometime in the 1930s, Agafia’s parents and older siblings fled Soviet repression by traveling east into the taiga with the vague hope of finding other Old Believers to take refuge with. They never did. Instead, they eke out a living on what they can grow or catch. It’s a collision of worlds when Agafia and Galina meet. It’s almost as if they traveled through time to meet each other: Agafia from the past and Galina from the future (as far as Agafia is concerned).
Over the course of a short Siberian summer, the women learn more about each other and establish a kind of friendship. Agafia and her family sometimes reject gifts from Galina as “worldly” (forbidden) and absolutely refuse to leave their homestead. Agafia’s steadfastness contrasts with Galina’s growing unease with the environmental damage caused by Soviet mining and industry. Before long, Galina starts to question everything about her life as a cog in the Communist system. A visit to a city only called M. (which I suspect is Magnitogorsk, one of the most polluted places on the planet) cements Galina’s total disillusionment. The world’s impact on Agafia is less earth-shattering. After visits from Galina and a trapper who overwinters with Agafia’s family, Agafia finds the courage to travel down the river in search of other Old Believers.
As Galina and Agafia’s stories build to their crescendos, we witness the struggles of other characters to find their way after loss or betrayal. Galina’s lover, the pilot who flew her team’s helicopter, fights to stay out of the clutches of the Soviet State after he was bullied in the army and had to desert. The fur trapper who visited the family is running from the loss of his wife and child. An American in M. rails against the stubborn inaction of the Soviet Union in the face of devastating environmental damage. Not all of these stories have happy endings but all of them are nuanced portraits of soul-deep struggle.
Lost Believers is an unsettling book. Many of us (hopefully) will never be caught between these kinds of rocks and hard places. That said, I found it the be a powerful call to question our own unexamined beliefs. What is truly important to us? Why is it important? What are the costs of our actions, however justified we think they are? What have we been blind to? Can we admit that we might have been wrong? Do we have the strength to change if we decide to go a different way? Lost Believers is a quiet, profound journey of reflection.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
Pair with Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl.
