A Dream in Polar Fog

Yuri Rytkheu was the first great writer to emerge from the Chukchi, the Arctic peoples of the Russian North-East. Born in 1930 in a village by the Arctic Sea, his grandfather a shaman, he was inspired equally by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gorki and the oral storytelling of his childhood, and fought hard to move to St Petersburg and begin his long writing career. His earliest works stuck faithfully to the USSR's approved style of socialist realism, and in the decades of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn he kept his head down and wrote as he was told to; but later his books became open and expansive, drawing on the rich traditions of his people to tell stories of universal appeal.

A Dream in Polar Fog is one of these stories: a gorgeous symphony in arctic colours that's by turns tender, funny, tragic and grim.  It portrays the world of the Chukchi through the eyes of a young Canadian seaman, an adventurer and something of an innocent, who finds himself stranded in a remote settlement after suffering injury on an impetuous Arctic voyage. Trapped among alien people, John MacLennan must adapt to the cruel simplicities of Chukchi life, or die. As he makes his new life - a fuller and more satisfying life than anyone might have anticipated - the culture, environment and lifeways of this most reticent and marginal of communities are opened out for him, as for us, with astonishing vividness.