“The Village on the Oredezh River” by Anait Grigoryan: Childhood amid Russia’s social collapse “4 min read
“Katya, you are capable, but you do not make an effort.”
This teacher’s remark sounds almost ordinary, yet it contains one of the central injustices of Anait Grigoryan’s novel The Village on the Oredezh River (Поселок на реке Оредеж, 2019). The adults see a girl who performs poorly at school and misses classes. The reader, however, knows that Katya is growing up in a large family, caring for younger children and living amid alcoholism, poverty and domestic violence. Simply demanding that she “make an effort” means ignoring nearly everything that shapes her life.
This is a book about the Russian provinces at the end of the 1990s, but above all it is about children who are forced to grow up too quickly. Grigoryan writes without sentimentality, yet she does not deprive her characters of dignity or the ability to dream. The village appears to be a closed world from which escape is impossible, but even there love, imagination and a faint hope for another life remain.
Two sisters and an entire village
At the centre of the novel are Katya and Lena Komarovi, the eldest daughters of a poor family with many children. Their parents drink, quarrel and are barely capable of caring for them. The girls are therefore forced to think not only about themselves but also about their younger brothers and sisters: finding food, looking after the household, enduring humiliation and solving problems that should never have been placed on children’s shoulders.
The story unfolds around the time of the 1998 financial crisis. Yet the economic crisis is not presented as a separate event that suddenly destroys an otherwise normal life. The characters had hardly known normality before it. Poverty, alcoholism, violence and the absence of prospects had long formed part of everyday existence. The crisis merely makes an already unstable life even harder.
Katya is the more serious and responsible of the two. She tries to work, help her family and understand whether she has any chance of changing her fate. Lena is sharper, more unpredictable and free. She wanders around the village, breaks rules and resists the world in the only ways available to her. Both dream of the city, even though Saint Petersburg is not far away. Geographical proximity changes nothing: without money, support or confidence, the city remains almost as unreachable as another country.
The title may suggest a story about one particular settlement. Gradually, however, the village becomes a broader image of provincial Russia. The reader encounters the shop assistant Olesya Ivanovna, the local priest, his wife Tatyana, neighbours, summer residents, elderly people and children. Each carries a wound, an unfulfilled hope or an inability to express love.
This makes the novel more complex than a conventional story about poverty. Its characters are not divided into innocent victims and unambiguous villains. People hurt one another, but many of them were themselves raised amid violence and humiliation. They may care tenderly for animals while treating their relatives cruelly. They may love someone but know no way of expressing that love except through aggression, jealousy or an attempt to keep the other person close.
An international journey: From the Oredezh to Japan
Anait Grigoryan was born in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in 1983. She is known as a fiction writer and a translator from Japanese. Her short stories, novellas and literary criticism have appeared in journals including Znamya, Novy Mir, Oktyabr and Ural. Her first book, the short-prose collection The Mechanical Cat (Механическая кошка), was published in 2011 and her novel Made of Clay and Sand (Из глины и песка) was published in 2012. The Village on the Oredezh River was released in Russia in 2019 and in 2021, it was published in Japanese. Unfortunately, there is still no Armenian, English or other translation.
The novel’s international life remains limited, but its Japanese edition is still a noteworthy achievement. A text deeply rooted in Russian colloquial speech, local realities and memories of the 1990s was carried into a very different linguistic and cultural environment. International publishers often find it easier to promote works about Moscow, Soviet history, war or major political events. The Village on the Oredezh River offers something different: the life of a small settlement, everyday labour, domestic violence, children’s dreams and the social distance separating the provinces from a major city.
The Japanese translation presents Russia not through the state, ideology or international politics, but through local life and human relationships. In that sense, even this single foreign edition matters: it demonstrates that the story of several girls from a village can speak to readers far beyond the Leningrad region.
Russia seen from below
The Village on the Oredezh River is worth reading first and foremost as an honest and artistically powerful novel about childhood in provincial Russia during the 1990s. It portrays Russia not through presidents, reformers or oligarchs, but through girls who must feed younger children, survive another family quarrel and decide whether leaving is possible at all.
The book offers no ready-made political explanation of the period. It does something rarer: it shows what poverty and social disintegration feel like from within. For a child, a crisis is not a statistic or a television report. It is an empty refrigerator, a drunken father, a missed day of school and a city that appears unreachable.
For those seeking to understand Russian life beyond the capitals, the novel is essential.
