Sergeĭ Lebedev (1981–)

Dark, grim and hopelessly bleak, Sergei Lebedev's The Lady of the Mine, set in Ukraine, is heavy with fear, hatred, death and corruption. The moral center of this novel is Marianna, a laundress endowed with an “enchanted” power and a compulsive need for purity and cleanliness. Marianna had stood guard over the terrible truths that have been hidden away in the sealed mine shaft 3/4. Her daughter Zhanna, trapped in the town by invading Russian troops must care for her dying mother. The death is as grim as any other part of this novel.

Lebedev alternates perspectives between Zhanna, Valet, a vengeful neighbor who has returned after spending six years in Moscow, a Russian general, and the ghost of the mine’s engineer. Lebedev, provides an unflinching examination of history's evils, from Nazism to Soviet communism and the cynical fascism of today's Russia.… (more)

In The Lady of the Mine, Sergei Lebedev shows how important it is to bear witness to war atrocities and genocide, how silence allows the violence to continue, no matter who is in power. No one, Nazi or Communist has the moral high ground here.
At the center of the novel is Shaft 3/4, a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coal mine. The shaft is the tomb of Jews killed by the Nazis. Everyone knows what lies in the shaft, yet no one speaks about it.
Lebedev uses four viewpoints to give us the story of a border town that has witnessed violence from both the east and the west, and in the five days covered in the novel, the cycle of violence continues. The various viewpoints work well to maintain tension in the novel.
However, people are not left without hope. Marianna, the mine's laundress, and woman of the title, is the mystical center of resistance. Perhaps the women will be able to keep the violence away? As the General considers: "The mothers had really gotten to him...just a bunch of women, nothing simpler than that. But they had a nameless force...An unyielding strength. Obdurate. Where could that have come from in a slavish, obedient country"?
Although the novel is set in Ukraine, it could be anywhere. The message is clear: it is important to speak up, to resist.

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Marianna, the laundress of a small Ukrainian mining village, has not only been keeping the laundry pristinely clean, her powers have also helped keep the miners and the villagers safe for decades. But now Marianna has died, leaving behind her daughter Zhanna, and the Russians have invaded Ukraine. Arriving with the Russian soldiers and heavy artillery are Valet, a former neighbor who has become a Russian police agent after Marianna forced him to leave the village, and the General, who started his career as a KGB agent in the area but is now returning as a powerful Russian officer. He knows about the town's secrets -- the mineshaft where the bodies of Jewish victims of the German occupation are hidden, and the secret sisterhood of laundresses who are somehow protecting the people from the violence that has afflicted the town in the past. But with Marianna dead, suddenly Ukraine is vulnerable to the Russian invaders, and Zhanna is vulnerable to Valet's violent impulses.
Sergey Lebedev spent several years working on geological sites in Russia, and he knows about the scars that the 20th century has left on the area -- abandoned gulags and shuttered industrial sites, and the unmarked graves of the forgotten victims. In his book the Russian invasion is not only provoking more violence, it is raising the ghosts of the past. Parts of the book are narrated by the Engineer, one of the Jews who was killed and thrown into the mineshaft on top of other layers of corpses from the waves of violence that accompanied the Revolution and then the mass killings of the Soviet years. It seems that without Marianna and her sister laundresses more bodies will come, and soon.
This book was a very well-written account of the effect of war and its chaotic aftermath on a region of the world that has been very much in the news lately. The Engineer retains the history of a country that suffered greatly during the political turmoil of the Soviet era, while the General and Valet both demonstrate the opportunism the post-Soviet era offered to those more enamored with power than with morals. Zhanna, meanwhile, is the future. Will she be able to make a path for herself? I found the premise of the book intriguing and was very impressed with the writing and the excellent translation by Antonia W. Bouis. Despite the somewhat abrupt ending, I appreciated this look at Ukraine's past and possible way forward in its battle with Russia.… (more)