Review: Kirje Siperiasta

THE WOMAN WHO SAW HELL IN CLOSE-UP

Five years in penal servitude in Siberia and another five years in exile meant that Elna Sundgren Schdanoff was one of the millions of unfortunate people who saw the innermost courtyards of hell in Stalin’s infamous Gulag Archipelago.
Her nephew Christian Sundgren wrote about her personal depictions of a hardship that surpasses all understanding in the book The Letter from Siberia in 1997. Now the story is compressed down to an hour-long performance in Lilla Teatern’s monologue of the same name and with a superb Lilga Kovanko on stage with the spartan brick walls of the Amos Anderson Art Museum’s sixth floor.
If the book creates its own images in the reader’s head in the manner of books, The Letter from Siberia in monologue form is a prime example of the verbal and visual impact of theatre. We see what the director and the actor want us to see, and that is the unimaginable suffering Elna Sundgren Schdanoff went through and survived.


Professional work

Director Milja Sarkola has not only trusted in the strength of the story itself, but at the same time avoided any hint of melodrama by allowing Lilga Kovanko to take over the stage in a low-key but at the same time maximally intense way. The story rolls on stubbornly, like the long train of innocently imprisoned people on their way to Siberia.
The alternative, to make the stage an arena for big and bombastic emotions, would most likely have meant focusing on the wrong places.
Now, instead, Lilga Kovanko – finally – gets to show what she, as a stage professional, makes of a role that is cut and dried for her. With her innate Russian accent, with her touching little gestures and with her sadly melancholy, gentle and at the same time indecisive character, Lilga Kovanko sucks the viewer into the blackest of black holes in a way that makes time stop around us.


How to survive?

Anyone who has read stories about the Gulag Archipelago probably also knows the survival mechanisms. For some prisoners, religious faith became the lifeline, but for Elna Sundgren it was the hope of seeing her husband and son again in Moscow that carried her through hardship. The man was imprisoned before her in 1937 and she also managed to get some signs of life from him – before she herself as the wife of a prisoner – ended up in penal servitude and in internal exile.
The fact that reality – without Elna’s knowledge – did not meet her expectations was probably also her salvation, as she herself says towards the end of the play. She survived and was given the right to travel to Finland. But the love for Russian remained forever and with a strange power that Elna barely understood herself.

The Letter from Siberia is a unique performance that Lilga Kovanko with her low-key intensity makes rise above most things I’ve seen on our Finland-Swedish stages.