Review: Kirje Siperiasta

Gripping Woman’s Fate


Lilla Teatern’s production of Christian Sundgren’s The Letter from Siberia, which will be performed at Amos Andersson Art Museum, is reality-based theatre at its best. The play is based on Sundgren’s book of the same name from 1997 and tells the story of the tragic fate of the author’s aunt, Elna Sundgren Schadoff.

She was an innocent victim of Stalin’s dictatorship and had to pay dearly for her love for a right-wing Russian engineer. The performance in monologue form, sensitively dramatised and directed by Milja Sarkola, is a brilliant test of Lilga Kovanko’s ability to bring characters to life and enthrall the audience. Thanks to her own Russian roots, she is able to create a natural Russian accent.

Elna’s life changed dramatically when her home was searched and her husband was arrested, in the middle of preparations for the New Year’s celebrations. For six months, she herself was sentenced to five years in prison. This was followed by further exile to the Gulag in Siberia after a long and difficult train journey, crowded with other prisoners in a cold carriage without even a latrine.

The period of exile in which one could live a fairly normal life, albeit with limited freedom of movement, was nevertheless more bearable, which is also visualised in the play by Elna’s blue floral dress, in contrast to the usual grey dress.

But Elna carried a constant worry about her missing husband and heart-sick son, whom she could not visit. The only consolation was that a letter to her son that she had thrown into a matchbox from a train carriage actually reached the addressee, even though she had put the letters in a matchbox that she threw out of the train carriage.

During their exile, they were also able to exchange letters, but when Elna was finally allowed to return to Moscow, both her husband and son were already dead. But it was the hope of seeing her loved ones again that kept Elna alive. Much later after Stalin’s death, Elna was also reunited with her relatives back home in Finland.

In 1989 , Elna’s husband was posthumously rehabilitated, and thereby indirectly also herself, 12 years after his death. Her story was included as a sequel in Allers, but thanks to her nephew Christian Sundgren, it has now been preserved in a more tangible way for posterity, partly in book form and partly as the memory the performance leaves behind.

One can only hope that Lillan could start touring with the play so that as many people as possible could take part in The Letter from Siberia.