Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family's Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness - Hardcover

Vasily Peskov

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385472099 ISBN 13: 9780385472098

Publisher: Doubleday, 1994

Synopsis

In the late 1970s, a Russian pilot flying over a remote, mountainous stretch of the Siberian taiga, the vast subarctic forest, spotted a tilled field hundreds of miles from any known settlement. He could not believe his eyes; in this forbidding part of the world, human habitation was a statistical impossibility. A team of scientists parachuted in and were stunned by what they found: a primitive wood cabin, and a family dressed in rags that spoke, thought, and lived in the manner of seventeenth-century Russian peasants during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great. How they come here, how they survived, and how they ultimately prevailed in a climate of unimaginable adversity make for one of the most extraordinary human adventures of this century.
Acclaimed Pravda journalist Vasily Peskov has visited this family once a year for the past twelve years, gaining their trust and learning their story. It begins in the late seventeenth century, when a community of Russian Orthodox fundamentalists made a two-thousand-mile odyssey from the Ukraine to the depths of the Siberian taiga to escape religious persecution at the hands of Peter the Great, who sought to reform the Russian Orthodox Church. For nearly 250 years, this band of "Old Believers" kept the outside world at bay, but in the 1930s Stalin's brutal collectivization program swept East and threw them from their land. But the young family of Karp Osipovich Lykov refused to abandon the only way of life they knew, and fled even deeper into the desolate Siberian hinterland. By the time Peskov came to know them, they had been alone for more than fifty years, surviving solely on what they could harvest, hunt, and build by their own means. The sole surviving family member, the daughter Agafia, lives by herself in the Lykov family cabin to this day.
In Lost in the Taiga, Peskov brings to life the Lykovs' faith, their doubt, and their epic struggle against an unyielding wilderness, even as he pays homage to a natural habitat that is being despoiled so rapidly it may soon no longer exist. Peskov's account has captured the imagination of the world: published in ten countries on three continents, it is being made into a movie by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud. Lost in the Taiga is a lyrical celebration of the Siberian taiga's savage beauty, and a moving testament to the power of the human will.

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Reviews

Communicants of the Old Believers persuasion--a Russian Orthodox sect dating from the mid-l7th century--the Lykov family lived so removed from the world in the Siberian taiga that only in 1978, when a party of geologists happened upon them, was their self-imposed isolation, going back to the early days of Stalinism, shattered. By the time Peskov, a Moscow journalist, made their acquaintance in 1982 on the first of what would become annual visits, only 37-year-old Agafia and her 81-year-old father Karp were still alive. Karp's sons, 54-year-old Savin and 38-year-old Dmitry, and his 44-year-old daughter Natalia all died in 1981, his wife in 1961. The story of how the Lykovs had provided for themselves, then accommodated to the incursions of the modern age is an amazing, poignant drama that Peskov reconstructs with delicacy and respect. The gift-bearing world that knocked on their door was welcome company, even as Karp and Agafia resisted efforts to return them to materialistic society. They gratefully accepted presents that eased their taxing self-sufficiency, like goats, chickens and proper footwear, but rejected such products as canned food: "We are not allowed that." The Lykovs expressed their thanks by reciprocating with gifts of pine nuts and potatoes. When Agafia journeys to newfound relatives for a month's visit, readers are perplexed with mixed emotions, at once hoping and fearing that she'll be enticed by the conveniences she's introduced to, like train travel, shops, electricity. And we are even more torn when she determines to stay on alone in her taiga fastness after her 87-year-old father dies. Photos not seen by PW . Film rights to Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Peskov, a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, tells the story of a Russian religious dissident who, in 1932, took his wife into the remote Siberian Taiga and remained there, effectively frozen in time, until the 1990s. In 1978, while flying over the upper reaches of the Abakan River, a group of geologists spot what looks like a garden in the midst of the wilderness. On landing, they find not only a garden but paths, a house, and--looking like a vision from the previous century--an old man dressed in patched sacking, speaking a strange dialect. The man, Karp Lykov, and his family are members of a fundamentalist sect called the Old Believers, who insist that they are not permitted to ``live with the world.'' The men and women live separately in this tiny primitive colony. We see daughter Agafia climb nimbly up pine trees to knock off the nuts for her father; we see the pitch dark house with no lighting. Later, as the Lykovs become slowly acquainted with the surrounding Russian society, we see their first reactions to horses, modern buildings, trains, and a boxing match, which so horrifies Agafia that she flees from it. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this saga is the Old Believers' system of counting time, which they reckon as did people before the time of Peter the Great: by the Psalter and the lunar phases. Given the resistance to modernity among religious fanatics, and given Russia's troubled encounter with modernity and the vastness of the land, Peskov writes, ``it is not hard to imagine many similar retreats cropping up...The taiga has swallowed up many small monasteries, poor huts and grave crosses.'' At the end of his brisk and informative account, Peskov wonders if the Lykovs--who missed the purges, WW II, and all the shake-ups that followed--were happy with their life in the wilderness. ``I think so,'' he concludes. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Russian journalist Peskov here expands his Komsomolskaia Pravda reports of a family of Old Believers-members of a fundamentalist sect that seceded from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century-who moved to the remote Siberian forests in 1932 to escape the modern world. It may be difficult for readers without a background in Russian history to appreciate this book. Though a cursory explanation is given of the Great Schism in the church, additional information about the Old Believers would have been useful. The sequence is problematic, the style can be awkward and repetitive, and using footnotes to clarify the Russian words dispersed throughout the text would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the Lykovs' story is memorable and should appeal to anyone interested in wilderness survival and in lives governed by faith. Although the "discovery" of the Lykovs inspired international interest and assistance, in 1991 the surviving daughter, Agafia, was still determined to remain in the taiga rather than accept invitations to live "in the world." This book was a best seller in France, and film rights have been purchased by Jacques Arnaud. Libraries with Soviet/Russian collections should purchase, and public libraries should consider.
--Donna L. Cole, Leeds P.L., Ala.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For Russians who followed journalist Peskov's visits to the Lykov family from 1982 to 1991, and now for Americans, Lost in the Taiga illuminates both the past and the road not taken. Crowded in cities, we read about the family's decades of isolation in the Siberian wilderness. Surrounded by home appliances, we visit a household where, initially at least, matches were not allowed. Alienated and skeptical, we marvel at the strength of the family's religious faith. For the Lykovs are Old Believers whose fundamentalist Russian Orthodox ancestors left the Ukraine for Siberia's tundra in response to the seventeenth century's Great Schism; the family moved deeper into the Abakan River Valley in the 1930s and 1940s as sectarian differences and disturbing contacts with secular society convinced patriarch Karp Osipovich that salvation could only be found far from the world. Rediscovered by geologists in 1978 and brought to their countrymen's attention by Peskov's reportage, the remaining LykovsKarp, in his final years, and younger daughter Agafia, now 50build their fragile relationship with the outside world with thoughtful dignity. Schwartz offers a graceful translation of Peskov's remarkable story, which celebrates the Lykovs' threatened taiga wilderness as well as the powerful individuality of the members of this long-isolated family. Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385472099
• ISBN 13: 9780385472098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 254