Review: Kirje Siperiasta

ELNA’S HISTORY

There is something special about hearing people, who on the outside look strong and healthy, talk about a life full of suffering. I have heard survivors of concentration camps, war, torture and poverty. People who have been deprived of their loved ones, their pain threshold and their dignity. Everything except his physical body. A body that, despite everything, can stand, can walk, can talk and can live on.

I’ve thought about it many times, the contradiction in the fact that a body that surrounds a person who has experienced so much suffering can even radiate strength. But then it is also almost impossible to fully understand the meaning of suffering. But it is not impossible to learn to pay attention to it, to the causes and to the consequences. And to listen.


The letter from Siberia recounts Elna Sundgren Schdanoff’sfate in Russia from 1937 until the years after Stalin’sdeath in 1953. The text is written by Elna’s nephew, Christian Sundgren , and dramatized by director Milja Sarkola.

It is a monologue performance with and about a woman. The aged Elna has made an active choice to tell her story and carefully selects the bits and memories she wants to share. A simple room with brick walls, a chair, a cup of tea with sugar, a radio and a few immortalized dates give room for the performance to focus entirely on the story being told and how it is told.
With no greater guilt than being married to a right-wing engineer, Elna was imprisoned in 1939 and sentenced to five years of forced labor camp followed by another five years of exile. Elna tells a story about life in prison, on eternally long and painful journeys to and from the labor camps in Siberia, about her stay in the camp and in the exile afterwards.


Lilga Kovanko’sElna tells the story with a pleasant Russian intonation and is mostly collected and quiet. In contrast to the past she talks about, here on stage she has full control over what happens. The cool control makes her distant and I therefore experience her more strongly by listening than by looking at her. I’m listening to a story about a world where it’s minus fifty degrees Celsius, where babies are snatched away from their mothers and where loneliness is immense even when it’s so cramped on the floor where you’re lying that you can’t turn around. But above all, I listen to a story of uncertainty.

Uncertainty about her own fate and that of her closest family members has characterized Elna’s life ever since the day her husband was imprisoned. The uncertainty has given rise to the resignation that is created by not having control over one’s own life, but at the same time it has also been the prerequisite for a life-giving hope. What you don’t know has happened, you can’t yet fully grieve.


Elna Sundgren Schdanoff’sstory was published in book form in 1997 and takes on another dimension in Kovanko’s and Sarkola’s interpretation. The letter from Siberia becomes a performance about telling, but also a performance about silence. In parallel with Elna’s story, there is always the certainty of how long after Stalin’s time people turned a deaf ear to her and others’ similar testimonies.
“We didn’t listen to her,” Christian Sundgren writes in the program leaflet. And he has not been alone in not wanting to tarnish his ideals with horror stories from the Soviet Union. There were so many other more beautiful stories to listen to. The narration and silence in the Letter from Siberia remind us that we must constantly ask ourselves: Who are we listening to? And who do we not listen to?