Review: "White Moss" by Anna

White Moss by Anna Nerkagi, translated by Irina Sadovina
English translation published 2026 via Pushkin Press
★★★

In the isolated Siberian tundra, things are changing: For generations, life was reindeers and fire and tents. Everyone had a place, and everyone knew their place. But for the characters of White Moss—first published in the 90s—things are changing.

I went down a Sámi reading hole a while back, and this stirred a spark of the same interest. The Nenets people are of course not Sámi, but some of the themes are the same: the isolation, the all-encompassing importance of their animals, the cold, the place on the outskirts of society. And: the precariousness of their way of life. By the time White Moss takes place, the children (like the author) are being sent off to boarding school during the year; the Soviet version of Big Brother casts a shadow across the land; the young adults are leaving for the city and not looking back.

It's an odd, quiet book. Not too much happens—Alyoshka, young and newly married, ignores his wife; the men make proclamations and tend to reindeer; the women, who are almost all unnamed, tend to the fire and the house. I'm not sure I can really say that the book is character-driven; we follow a few of the characters throughout the book (Alyoshka; the father of the woman he wishes he'd married; his mother; etc.), but they change little, and nor are they meant to. Rather, this is something of a portrait of a community and a way of life in a time of transition.

Nerkagi, like her characters, was born in Siberia; unlike her characters, she was not able to stay. I'd love to read more about her—as I understand it, her first novel is autobiographical, but I don't think it's been translated into English. White Moss focuses more on the men of the story (again: most of the women do not have so much as names; they are "the woman" or "his mother" or "his woman"), in a way that I think must have been intentional, but the fact is that Nerkagi was torn away from her community and then chose to go back, at a time when I'm guessing that more people were leaving than returning; the story is not altogether kind to those living away, but then, neither is it always kind to those who remain.

It's a short book, and probably not one I'll return to, but it made for an intriguing look into a place I'm not likely to ever visit and a culture I'll probably only ever understand on a surface level.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.