Review: Kirje Siperiasta

Hufvudstadsbladet 19.10.2007

Lilga Kovanko
in glory

For a long time, I thought that Lilga Kovanko was Edith Södergran. To that extent, she was imprinted in my memory by the role of the young, hectic, flourishing, prematurely deceased poetess in Stina Katchadourian’s play Hallonbacken.

Now I’ve changed my mind. Lilga Kovanko is Elna Schdanoff, an ageing, graying woman who has been forced to go through hell on earth – while maintaining her dignity.

Elna Sundgren Schdanoff’s account of her years in prison, labour camps and exile in Stalin’s Soviet Union formed the backbone of her nephew Christian Sundgren’s book The Letter from Siberia, which was published in 1997, twenty years after her aunt’s death. It would have been possible for the previously Finlandized Finland and for him personally to acknowledge what his aunt and millions of others had experienced in the Gulag. It became a touching and attention-grabbing book.

In dramatised form, Elna Schdanoff’s life story becomes even more tangible and touching. Lilga Kovanko masters the scene superbly in a two-hour monologue on the spartanly beautiful sixth floor of the Amos Anderson Museum. She portrays a woman who at first gives the impression of being obliterated and annihilated, sitting slumped on a chair in the prison-like stage space, but who gradually comes to life, furnishes and fills the room with her feelings and experiences.

The little Russian accent gradually loses its exoticism and becomes a natural part of her while we listen to the terribly absurd story of how first the man, then she herself was abducted and accused of imaginary crimes. Her ravaged face lights up as she proudly talks about her husband’s meritorious work in the service of the Soviet state. It lights up with happiness when she talks about the miracle when her letter to her son, thrown into a matchbox from the prison train to Siberia, actually arrived. The emaciated figure in the grey paletoe becomes like a symbol of the 20th century’s deportees and camp prisoners, the victims of an entire century of ideological madness.

In Milja Sarkola’s perceptive dramatisation and direction and Lilga Kovanko’s brilliant interpretation, Elna Schdanoff’s life story becomes an analysis of how memory works, of its storages, of its richness of detail and concreteness. Elna/Lilga physically remembers what the first minutes in a prison cell feel like. In her memory, she searches for the everyday life of the women’s prison during the time when the wives of the “enemies of the people” filled the Soviet prisons: the crowding, the lice, the inedible food, the divorce from the children. But also the cohesion, the shared storytelling moments when the Russian classics came to life. She remembers the inferno of the prisoner transports, the icy piles of feces on the train floor, the watchtowers of the prison camps and life in earthen balls in fifty degrees cold.

Once, the camp prisoner is allowed to throw off his dark paleta toe and appear dressed in a small-flowered dress and surrounded by warm lighting. Paradoxically, this happens after she has had one of her few open outbursts of protest and despair – when the five-year sentence ends not with release but with “free residence in a specified place”. Elna Schdanoff is relegated to a sunlit village on the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There she awaits the end of her incomprehensible sentence, still unaware of her husband’s fate and in constant worry about her heart-sick son in Moscow. There she also receives the distant rumours of the outbreak of the Second World War.

When she is finally released in 1948, she stands alone. Her son is dead and the man’s fate is unknown, and it is not until several years later that she receives a brief message that he has died at an early stage of captivity.

At Stalin’s death, Elna Schdanoff feels an “unbearable joy”. “What was the meaning of all this, what has it served, all this oppression of millions, carried out by one man,” she asks.

On the theatre stage, the reverent obituary of Stalin is read by Atos Wirtanen’s radio voice, a reminder that even one of Finland’s greatest humanists wore the blinders of his time. The Letter from Siberia is strong and gripping theatre. But the play is also a memento mori for anyone who has experienced the ideological polarization of the Cold War and a history lesson for those who have escaped it.