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Journalism of Courage
It’s not the most compelling of titles, and Nadezhda and Vera are the quintessential quarrelsome sisters. Nadezhda, our middle-aged narrator and the younger of the two, reveals to us that she is a woolly-headed liberal feminist academic at a British polytechnic. Vera is the Big Sis, divorced, irritable, sarcastic, capitalist, with two daughters and very clear opinions on everything. When the novel opens, the sisters have been feuding ever since their mother’s death over the matter of the will. When, suddenly, their octogenarian father Nikolai announces that he is planning to marry again, the sisters realise that they will have to combine forces to combat the enemy. And the enemy, in this case, is Valentina, a brassy blonde Ukrainian woman with a voluptuous figure and a teenage son.
And so, Marina Lewycka’s debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian begins in medias res, with the old man threatening to marry the thirtysomething blonde right away in the first page of the book. But as the story progresses, we are taken back to the old country, with Nikolai’s memories of Ukraine — “the remembered scent of mown hay and cherry blossom”; Nadezhda’s memories of her mother’s soup, made with salt and butter and halushki — raw egg, semolina and herb dumplings “that crumbled on your tongue”; and, finally, Vera’s memories of the labour camp at Drechensee — that “huge, ugly, chaotic and cruel place”, with the terrors of its Correction Block.
But if Vera and Nadezhda learn to understand and forgive the secrets of the past, they also have to learn to cope with the new challenges of the present: the problem of their father’s loneliness, his age, and his increasing inability to live alone. The wild, disorderly growth in the garden; the living out of tins and eating off folded newspapers; the interminable history of tractors and the endless dreams of his beloved Ukraina. This is the Ukraina that he dreams of bringing to himself by “rescuing” Valentina: “Such a beautiful language that anyone can be a poet. Such a landscape — it would make anyone an artist. Blue-painted wooden houses, golden wheat fields, forests of silver birch, slow wide sliding rivers. Instead of going home to Ukraina, Ukraina will come home to him.”
This, then, is the real soil in which Lewycky’s prose blooms: this story of age, loneliness, rivalries and reconciliations. Although it has its roots in histories not only of tractors but of the rise and fall of Soviet communism, as well as the personal history of the family, the story unfolds in a very British soil and landscape, in Peterborough, where their mother grew English flowers — roses, lavenders, lilacs, columbines, poppies and more — and where the sisters acquired a British reticence. Storming into this pretty English picture comes Valentina, bringing not only her buxom good looks but her mongrel English, and most of all her determination. Nadezhda is increasingly forced to question some of her most fundamental assumptions about her roots and cultural identity: “All this Ukrainian nationalism bothers me — it seems outdated and irrelevant. Peasants in the fields, folk-songs at harvest, the motherland: what has all this got to do with me? I am a post-modern woman. I know about structuralism… So why do I feel this unexpected emotional tug?” Even more interestingly, Valentina’s presence makes Nadezhda question her own feminist principle of solidarity: “I describe the mini-skirt, the hair, the make-up… And how much I am enjoying my bitch-fest! What has happened to me? I used to be a feminist. Now I seem to be turning into Mrs Daily Mail.”
But the most glorious creation in this comic novel is Valentina herself. However much the sisters would like to bitch about her, however classist their responses, Valentina will not be suppressed. “To survive is to win,” as Nikolai says — and Valentina, more then the rest of them, despite the bitching and the caricaturing, has survived. This debut novel is a funny, poignant, intelligent surprise.
