The apocalyptic story of a (fictional) post-epidemic Russia in Yana Vagner’s To the Lake had found an enormous international audience by way of a 2020 adaptation, directed by Pavel Kostomarov and Dmitriy Tyurin and released on Netflix. This positive reception of what audiences called an exceptionally prescient tale perhaps encouraged another English edition of the award-winning text, which is now out by way of Deep Vellum. In this following essay, Heloisa Selles discusses To the Lake in view of its on-screen reproduction.
When I first saw the publication announcement for To the Lake from Deep Vellum, I almost missed it. It was mid-July, and social media feeds were rife with pictures of a New York city ablaze with smoke from Canadian wildfires—scrolls of tiny red suns paired with tips on how to cope with poor air quality. Through the apocalyptic scenes, the outline of a hazy pine forest on a white, inconspicuous cover caught my eye, and within a few minutes I discovered that the book was, in fact, the book—that gave origin to the lauded Netflix series of the same name.
When To the Lake (Эпидемия in Russian, or “Epidemic”) came to screens in October 2020, we were all stuck at home, journeying around our rooms, trying to find ways to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and two months away from the first vaccines being administered. The show seemed to be an addition to an ever-growing collection of media that depicted viruses, contagious diseases, and varying levels of societal panic—as though watching chaos unfold before our eyes made the palpable reality a bit easier to endure. But this story, an action-packed drama directed by Pavel Kostomarov about a group of people struggling to survive an epidemic ravaging Moscow, had a distinct texture.
In the show, Sergey is the protagonist—the point of convergence between a motley cast of characters—who stands out with his more modern, politically correct discourse, along with his wife Anna, a psychologist, and her son Misha, who is on the autism spectrum. Other individuals making up this group embody a perspective that feels older, rougher around the edges (such as Lyonya, his uncouth neighbor, and Marina, his pregnant partner). Together, the repeated trials they go through are immense, and so is the constant clash between their morals. The effect of this contrast, crowned on the last episode by scenes of heightened violence and even a hopeful orthodox marriage, underscore the very human challenge of finding common ground and forbearance in the face of multiple differences. It was gripping to see how attuned the characters were to the duality of their experience: the cognitive dissonance between their humanity and the necessary, unthinkable things they had to do to survive in a freezing, unforgivable land. They felt well-drawn, with their singular complexities and troubles unfolding along eight fast-paced episodes.
Some weaknesses in the narrative, such as the repetitive nature of the problems the group faces, feel better ironed-out on the show due to the cinematic, third person point of view. Even when characters face individual, internal troubles, the format privileges action, resulting in some really moving performances from the cast. Aside from this, another immediately discernible difference of pacing also derives from the change in speaker/narrator between film and text. Anya is the narrator in the book; like Sergey, she covers bouts of emotion with a thick layer of pragmatism to deal with urgent issues. However, this artificial mask erodes as she slips into churlish descriptions of her companions, who seem more vicious and ill-spirited than the ones portrayed on the show (an understandable consequence of the lack of on-screen flashbacks). But who wouldn’t write a diary with a frustrated, grumpy voice, if they were trying to survive a literal calamity? Through a flowy, British-flavored translation crafted by Maria Wiltshire, Anya’s inner perceptions color the scenes with a reserved voice, an internal exile of sorts:
How many burdens do you have to put up with, how many missed heartbeats, how many shocks do you have to bear until you finally become numb and perceive everything that happens as senseless and unreal, background noise? . . . So we were a company of eleven people who would soon have to live together in a two-room hunting lodge with no bathroom or toilet, people who would have never chosen to do this, who wouldn’t even have gone on holiday together.
The ruthless, wintery backdrop functions as both a mirror to the narrative’s human pathos and an authoritative element in itself. To escape from the sprawling urban chaos of infection and despair, intensified by governmental attempts to quarantine Moscow, the characters are forced to make alliances with strangers they happen to cross paths with as they journey north toward Vong Lake (Вонгозеро in Russian, which is also the book’s original title). The map provided in the book indicates the immensity of the journey and the remoteness of their promised retreat, while keeping some other interesting attributes tucked in.
In A Dictionary of Symbols, by Juan Eduardo Circlot, a lake is understood to be a symbol of the occult and the mysterious. In one way, it is a contained body of water on which celestial bodies reflect their trajectories across the sky, thus holding the “significance of a mirror, presenting an image of self-contemplation, consciousness and revelation”. On the other hand, lakes are also seen as symbolic of levels and realms. It is the place where the sun is observed to set over, and by analogy, it is thus connected with the netherworld, considering the way in which water “alludes to the ‘connection between the superficial and the profound’”. The escapist journey to a remote area, a compelling aspect of the narrative, led me to look into the province of Karelia and its historical significance, where the fictional lake (and the real one, with a slight difference in spelling) is situated. This vast territory of boreal forest was tussled over centuries between Russia, Finland, and Sweden, and as such presents itself as a point of coagulation at the border of countries and their national identities. In light of this, the contingent nature of alliances portrayed in the book and the show seem to gain a more resonant significance with real-life timelines.
In his Dictionary, Circlot also quotes Jung’s understanding of traveling as a continuous, unsatisfied aspiration “that never finds its goal, seek where it may”. This frenzied pursuit reminded me of a famous passage of Dead Souls, a novel written by Nikolai Gogol and published in 1842:
And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get into a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: ‘Devil take it all!’—how can his soul not love it? . . . Ah, troika! bird troika, who invented you? Rus, where are you racing to? Give answer! She gives no answer.
This excerpt, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, mixes the perspective of the departing speaker with a lyrical analogy of Russia’s limitless energy toward progress. This passionate determination, however, seems unfulfilled and strangely distorted in its abstract direction—not dissimilar to the questions we have at the end of To the Lake. What happens next? Where do they go from there?
Yara Vagner began writing this novel as a weekly blog, and the large readership it gained led her to publishing the book in 2011. It became a bestseller, and was translated into eleven languages over the past decade. More than having presciently depicted a world crisis, it seems that its speculative nature was distinctly connected to one of the core functions of literature: that of reflecting on the vast changes of society. It is an exercise in defamiliarization (oстранение), a literary device coined over a hundred years ago by Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, which estranges reality in order to push it aside, with the goal of creating a heightened sense of perception. By outlining the struggles people endure in a societal collapse, Vagner’s work cast light on a stream of historical collapses that happened in Russia over the twentieth century. Through fiction, she re-enacts and elaborates on the absurdity of older, more essential catastrophes that shaped a continental land: the bloody end of the tsarist autocracy, the Soviet persecution of everyone that was considered a threat, the tentative democratic regime, its abounding contradictions. Russia has a long history of endings.
In the process of writing this piece, I found a link for the second season of To the Lake. Possibly cancelled on streaming platforms due to the Ukrainian invasion, its image and subtitle quality were faulty at best—but one scene stuck with me: an injured soldier, sheltered and nursed back to health by a group of young people, asks to be released from the handcuffs installed on him as a precaution. The men in the group retort, “We’ll release you when you prove that you’re adequate.” The soldier thinks for a bit and asks, “You want me to sing Tsoi?” They all smirk. The scene cuts, then they are all jamming to the soldier who sings, in a rough translation:
We drink tea, sitting in old flats,
Wait for the summer, sitting in old flats,
Flats with electric supply, lights,
Gas, telephone, and hot city water,
Hardwired radio, hardwood floors,
And separate bathrooms, brick construction,
One family, maybe two, three will fit . . .
Everyone says: we’re together
Everybody says but very few know where we have to gather
While I was familiar with Viktor Tsoi, singer and songwriter of Kino, a Soviet rock band of the early 80s, this particular song, called “Boshetunmay” (Бошетунмай), felt like the final argument for the show’s political self-consciousness. By quoting one of the icons of the Perestroika era, this pixelated, unreleased continuation of Vagner’s epidemic tale aligns with a symbol of dissent and opposition to the government.
Perhaps events of such catastrophic size and importance—fictional or imagined epidemics—can never be fully understood or assimilated, only accepted, over and over again, through continuous effort. The effect of this defamiliarization exercise in To the Lake creates a hyperreality of sorts, where the journey, as Circlot defends, “is neither acquiescence nor escape—it is evolution”. If such strangeness is what might help us elaborate critical reflections with a fresh perspective, then we need it more than ever.
Heloisa Selles (she/her) is a writer, copy editor, and translator working from and into Portuguese. Originally from Brazil, she worked as a journalist before moving to Canada to pursue her studies in English literature. She lives in Northern Ontario.
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