Russia

Introduction

Relevance. I live in Irkutsk, on the Angara, and I think almost every family in our region has a story about a village that is now under water. Valentin Rasputin was born in 1937 in Ust-Uda, in our oblast, and grew up in Atalanka, a village that had to be moved to higher ground when the Bratsk reservoir was filled in the 1960s. He is buried in Irkutsk, at the Znamensky Monastery. His novel Farewell to Matyora (1976) is about the last summer of an island village on the Angara that is to be flooded for a hydroelectric station. In 2026 a new English-language novel, Songs of Dust and Water by M.J. Hydara, was published. It is set in two fictional countries of West Africa, but its centre is also an old woman, a village, water and the question of who decides a place’s future. The topic is relevant because both books ask something that does not grow old: what does a community owe to its dead and its grandchildren when a decision about its water is being made?

Aim: to compare how the two novels show the end or the survival of a community whose life depends on water, and to explain why Hydara, unlike Rasputin, lets the community survive.

Objectives: 1. to outline Farewell to Matyora and the circumstances in which it was written; 2. to compare the two old women at the centre of the books, Darya Pinigina and Kadiatou; 3. to compare how each novel treats the graves and the dead; 4. to compare the “spirit of the place” in each book: Rasputin’s Master of the island and the snake of Wagadu in Hydara; 5. to analyse what survival costs Hydara’s community.

Object of study: the two novels. Subject of study: the figure of the keeper of a place and the theme of a community’s continuity.

Hypothesis: the difference between Rasputin’s farewell and Hydara’s survival lies less in the strength of the old women than in where the decision about the water is made.

Methods: close reading, comparative analysis, the biographical and historical method, and work with reference sources. Quotations from Hydara are given with the page of the paperback edition in square brackets, for example [1, p. 87]. Rasputin I read in Russian, so I paraphrase him rather than translate, checking names against the English translation [3].

Chapter 1. Two villages and one more

1.1. Matyora. Rasputin’s Matyora [2] is a village on an island in the Angara that has stood for some three hundred years. A hydroelectric station is being built downstream, the water will rise, and the islanders must move to a new settlement on the bank. The old stay to the end, above all Darya Pinigina, the oldest woman on the island. Her grandson Andrei is going to work on the dam itself. A “sanitary brigade” arrives to clear the island before the flooding: they burn the houses and begin to cut down the crosses in the cemetery, and the old women drive them away. Darya whitewashes her hut and decorates it before it is burned, as one prepares a dead person. The Master of the island, a small animal-like creature that nobody ever sees, knows everything that will happen. In the last chapter a few old people wait in a hut while fog covers the island, and the boat sent to fetch them cannot find its way.

Kathleen Parthé, in her study of Russian “village prose”, describes how these writers turned to the village as a lost world remembered with love [4]. The book was filmed by Elem Klimov as Farewell (1981) [5]. When I visited Ust-Uda with my grandfather he showed me roughly where the old village had been, and there was only water. For me the book has always been less about the past than about the moment when people realise that nobody is going to ask them.

1.2. Nafawol and Madina. Hydara’s novel has two parts and, I would say, two villages that answer each other. In Part One, in Madina in the dry north of the Republic of Awdagha, a foreign engineer, Adam Sterling, builds a solar and water plant, “the Glass House”. A minister takes over the plant’s money, the plant burns, and the engineer is blamed. By the fifth year after the fire, “the concrete pad had cracked wide enough for thorn scrub to take root in it” [1, p. 81]. Madina is close to being Hydara’s Matyora: something from outside arrives, decides, and leaves a wound in the ground.

Part Two moves six hundred kilometres south to Nafawol in the Republic of Tekuru, a village on a floodplain “the river had long since abandoned” [1, p. 81]. Its well is turning salty, and “the well had been going bitter for six years before anyone from outside acted” [1, p. 81]. Dr Arramata, an engineer born in the village, brings a water harvester and the money of the Proxima Fund, with Adam now only carrying the money. Over fifteen years the village restores its soil, refuses a huge offer from a company in a vote with stones, and finally sees water return to an old channel. The old water-keeper, Kadiatou, is at the centre of it.

Chapter 2. Comparative analysis

2.1. Darya and Kadiatou. Both women are the oldest and most respected in their villages, and neither can stop by herself what is coming. Darya’s authority is moral. She speaks for the dead and for conscience, and she argues with her grandson Andrei, who believes that people are now masters of nature and do not need to look back. Darya can be right, but she cannot vote.

Kadiatou’s authority is an office with duties. She is the Yaara-Jaxo, the Water-Keeper, and the title has passed through the women of her line, “an inheritance no one boasted of and no one refused” [1, p. 85]. The women of the line married within the village “so that the well would never be kept by a stranger” [1, p. 85]. This is close to Darya’s feeling that the family’s land and graves must not be handed to strangers. But Hydara gives Kadiatou a much harder position. Darya suffers a wrong that is done to her. Kadiatou does a wrong herself every morning: “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” [1, p. 87]. I found this sentence the most frightening in the book, because Darya’s tragedy is that she must leave the water, and Kadiatou’s is that she cannot.

So they meet the people from outside differently. Darya asks the officials by what right they destroy. Kadiatou meets Adam and Dr Arramata with a demand for proof: “Words are wind, Tubab,” and then, “Show us what it does now” [1, p. 91]. When taps come, she thinks of the rope her grandmother gave her: “Now there are taps. I do not know whose hands will want it” [1, p. 103]. After that she draws a bucket every morning and pours it on her okra, “where bitter water would do least harm” [1, p. 103]. This reminded me at once of Darya whitewashing her hut before the fire. Both women perform a ritual of care for something that seems to have lost its use. The difference is in the result. Darya’s ritual is a funeral. Kadiatou’s turns out to be a measurement: after the water returns to the channel, “the rope had come up a little heavier every season” [1, p. 232], and her hands know it before any instrument.

Both women also think about grandchildren. In Rasputin, the chain between the generations breaks, because Andrei chooses the dam and the city. In Hydara, the chain bends without breaking. When Kadiatou argues against the company’s offer, her strongest image is the cup: “I will not have our grandchildren’s cup in another man’s hand” [1, p. 193]. Her other image is from her own childhood: “When I was too small to draw a full bucket, my grandmother let me draw half of one” [1, p. 187]. Her granddaughter Mariam wants to study further, and Kadiatou lets her go, and only thinks to herself: “Then the rope is not for you” [1, p. 174]. The rope passes instead to her young great-granddaughter Halima, without any ceremony: “The well was kept now by a girl who did not yet know it was hers” [1, p. 232]. Nobody boasts and nobody refuses, just as on page 85. This quiet inheritance is exactly what Matyora loses.

2.2. The graves. For many readers the most famous scene of Rasputin’s novel is the cemetery. The brigade saws the crosses and burns them, and the old women come running with sticks. Darya is afraid that when she dies her own dead will ask her how she could let their graves go under water. For her the dead are the judges of the living.

In Songs of Dust and Water the graves are never threatened. Dr Arramata mentions her mother almost in passing: “She’s buried by the east wall” [1, p. 95]. When the water returns, it fills the oldest dead channel, “the one that curved past the east wall of Nafawol towards nowhere” [1, p. 210]. The returning river passes the same wall as the dead. When Adam leaves, Arramata goes to pray there, and the trees planted in the first years of the project now cover the place: “The first neem trees of the green belt had grown tall enough to shade them” [1, p. 213]. What she says to Adam about her mother is surprising: “My mother liked people who had been wrong about something important” [1, p. 213]. The dead here do not judge the living, as Darya fears; they forgive mistakes and almost seem to approve of the people who correct them.

Arramata is in a way the opposite of Andrei. Andrei leaves to build the dam that will drown his home. Arramata leaves, studies, and comes back with the plan: “I carried water from the Nafawol well before I could read” [1, p. 84]. Rasputin sets the old against the young; in Hydara a daughter of the village carries its water out into the world and brings it back.

Hydara also shows the dead as builders. The old men laying stone lines across the dry channels say their grandfathers built the same and “the grandfathers had never lived to see it pay either”. When a boy asks why they did it, the answer is two words, “For us”, and then the old man simply “set another stone” [1, p. 126]. In Matyora the ancestors are what must be left behind. In Nafawol they are partners whose work is finished by their grandchildren.

2.3. The Master of the island and the snake in the well. Rasputin’s Master of the island sees everything, knows that the island will end, and can do nothing; at the very end his cry is heard through the fog. He is the spirit of a place that knows it is going to die.

Hydara also has a spirit of the place. Kadiatou’s grandmother told her that Wagadu, the old empire, kept a covenant with a snake in the well, and that when the covenant broke, the wells went bitter and the people scattered. But Kadiatou herself says: “I have never decided whether I believe the part about the snake. I decided long ago that I believe the part about the water” [1, p. 87]. This sentence takes the supernatural witness out of the book. What remains is the covenant itself, a promise about water that people can keep or break.

The legend in Hydara also has a different shape. In Part One the griot Balla says that Wagadu was lost through vanity, falsehood, greed and quarrelling, but “Four times lost, and four times found again” [1, p. 66]. And: “They never say how it was found. Only that it was always found by the people who had lost it” [1, pp. 66–67]. Later Dr Arramata tells the committee: “Everyone in this room is what Wagadu turned into” [1, p. 148]. Rasputin’s spirit knows one ending. Hydara’s legend knows many endings, each followed by a finding. This, I think, is why the novel can let a community survive without seeming naive.

The coda of the novel, however, is close to Rasputin: “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” [1, p. 233]. On Matyora the old women are single pairs of hands, made to let go one by one. The last scene before the coda answers it. At the well, Kadiatou can no longer draw the bucket alone, Halima puts her hands on the rope below hers, and the water comes up “heavy, cold and clear” [1, p. 232].

2.4. Why Nafawol survives, and what survival costs. My hypothesis was that the decision is what separates the two books. On Matyora nobody asks the islanders anything; the decision was taken somewhere far away, and the officials only carry it out. Hydara shows this situation first, in Madina. When the official signatory claims that his signature is enough for disputed land, an old farmer, Samba, says: “A signature tells you who held the pen,” and adds, “It does not tell you who agreed” [1, p. 18]. The griot calls the foreign plant “a system with no roots” that “is a house built for the wind” [1, p. 7]. Madina, like Matyora, is a place decided about by others.

In Nafawol the decision is moved into the village. The agreement is read aloud, the key is given to the committee, the accounts are posted on a wall, and the great offer is decided by twenty-four stones in a clay pot: “Fourteen to ten” [1, p. 200]. Kadiatou is not stronger than Darya. She is simply in a village where people’s voices can be counted, even though, as a founder, she does not drop a stone herself.

But I do not want to make Hydara’s book into an idyll, because the novel itself refuses. The vote has consequences. In the following years prices fall, a family of nine, the Teranu, leaves for the coast, and Mariam loses a year of study. When she asks her grandmother to say the vote was wrong, Kadiatou answers: “It cost you a year … I will not tell you it was wrong either” [1, p. 204]. Old Jankero of Kumbawol, who had asked how far the hospital would be, dies of heart failure. At his funeral his son reminds her of the question and says: “It is as far as it was” [1, p. 206]. Then a girl carrying water to the guests is told to pass Kadiatou by, and “Nobody spoke to Kadiatou about the water” [1, p. 207]. Here, for one moment, Kadiatou is in Darya’s place: a grave accuses her.

There is one more honest point, and it is my own criticism. Nafawol is saved partly by luck that Matyora never had. The businesswoman Evelyn Reed says it directly to Adam: Madina “didn’t have a hundred million dollars, or an engineer born in the village, either” [1, p. 194], and neither will the next thirsty village. Rasputin’s islanders had neither. I think Hydara knows this, and that is why Madina stays in the book. Madina is not saved by any fund. It simply goes on: the looms keep working, a woman engineer cleans the well, and the weaver’s son mends pumps. After the fire the narrator says that “The looms were still, and the children did not cry” [1, p. 54], yet the same looms are clacking again ten years later. Matyora, under the water of the Angara, cannot do even this.

Conclusions

1. Darya and Kadiatou are both keepers, but Darya keeps the memory of a place condemned to disappear, while Kadiatou keeps a living well and must serve its poison until something changes.
2. The graves in Matyora are destroyed and the dead are imagined as judges; in Nafawol the graves are shaded by new trees, the returning water passes the same wall, and the dead appear as builders and as people who forgive mistakes.
3. Rasputin’s Master of the island knows a single ending; Hydara’s legend of Wagadu, “four times lost, and four times found again”, allows a community to fall and rise without the book becoming sentimental.
4. The hypothesis is mostly confirmed: the key difference lies in where the decision is made. However, the novel also admits that Nafawol had money and an engineer of its own, which Matyora did not have, so the decision explains much, but not everything.

Working on this project I understood Rasputin better too. I used to think Darya grieved for the island. Now I think she grieves just as much because nobody counted her voice.

Introduction

Relevance. Astrakhan stands in the Volga delta, and in our city it is hard to forget that water is managed. The size of the spring flood in the Volga–Akhtuba floodplain and in the delta depends largely on how much water is released through the Volgograd hydroelectric dam upstream, so fishermen, farmers and the ilmen lakes of the western delta all depend on a decision taken far from them. In geography lessons the classic example of water management going wrong is the Aral Sea. My grandfather’s brother lived for many years in the Kyzylorda region of Kazakhstan, and he used to describe the sea going away from Aralsk. In 2026 a novel, Songs of Dust and Water by M.J. Hydara, was published, in which a fictional village on a dried floodplain in West Africa tries to restore its water by its own work. The novel contains surprisingly exact details about water budgets, salt and monitoring. I decided to use it as a “model case” of local stewardship and to compare it with the real Aral Sea, where central planning caused the disaster and a central project, the Kok-Aral dam, partly repaired it.

Aim: to compare a real case of centrally planned water use (the Aral Sea basin) with a fictional case of local water stewardship (Nafawol) and to determine which conditions make a water system recover.

Objectives: 1. to describe the causes and results of the shrinking of the Aral Sea and the effect of the Kok-Aral dam; 2. to analyse the water budget of Nafawol as the novel describes it; 3. to compare the treatment of cotton and salt in both cases; 4. to compare the time scale and methods of recovery; 5. to draw up a comparative table and conclusions.

Object of study: water management in dry regions. Subject of study: the relation between who decides about water and whether a water system recovers.

Hypothesis: the opposition “central or local” is too simple; a water system recovers when the people who depend on the water measure it, accept its limits, and are able to stop its overuse, whatever the level at which decisions are formally made.

Methods: analysis of scientific and journalistic sources; comparative-geographical method; simple calculation; analysis of a literary text as a source of a model. I am aware that a novel is not data. I use it to compare ideas and methods, not numbers. Page references to the novel are given as [1, p. N].

Chapter 1. The Aral Sea: a planned disaster and a partial repair

1.1. How the sea shrank. In 1960 the Aral Sea, on the border of today’s Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the fourth-largest lake in the world, with an area of about 68,000 square kilometres [2]. It had no outflow. It was kept at its level by two rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and lost water only by evaporation. From the 1960s the Soviet Union greatly expanded irrigated farming in Central Asia, above all for cotton, and the water was taken from the two rivers by a system of canals, among them the Karakum Canal in Turkmenistan. The inflow to the sea fell sharply. According to Micklin, Soviet planners expected the sea to shrink and regarded this as an acceptable price for the cotton [2]. By the late 1980s the sea had divided into two parts, the Small (North) Aral in Kazakhstan and the Large (South) Aral [2].

The results are well known. As the water fell, salinity rose and the fishery collapsed. Former ports such as Aralsk in Kazakhstan and Moynaq in Uzbekistan were left far from the shore. The exposed seabed became a new desert from which winds carry salt and dust. A great deal of the irrigated land itself became salinised, because water was applied in large amounts with poor drainage [2]. NASA’s satellite series on the Aral Sea shows the eastern basin of the southern sea almost completely dry in 2014 [6].

The important point for my project is that the shrinking was measured and predicted, and the measurements did not change the plan for decades. The people of Aralsk could see the sea leaving but had no power to stop the water being taken upstream.

1.2. The Kok-Aral dam. After independence, Kazakhstan, with a loan from the World Bank, built the Kok-Aral dam (Kokaral dike), about 13 kilometres long, across the strait between the Small Aral and the southern part. It was completed in 2005 and cost about 86 million dollars [3; 5]. The dam keeps the water of the Syr Darya in the northern sea. The level rose faster than expected [4]. According to a report by Stephen M. Bland, the shore, which had been about 100 kilometres from Aralsk, was about 12 kilometres away by 2015, and the fish catch of the Small Aral rose from 695 tonnes in 2005 to 5,595 tonnes in 2014, though this is still far below the 34,160 tonnes caught in the whole Aral in 1961 [3]. Salinity fell and economically valuable fish returned [3].

So the repair was partial, and it had a cost: the southern sea now receives almost nothing from the north. But it is interesting that this repair, too, was a large engineering project paid for by a state and an international bank. In that sense it was “central”. The difference from the Soviet scheme is its scale and its target: one limited body of water, with a clear and measurable aim, and local fishermen who gained directly.

Chapter 2. Nafawol: local stewardship in a novel

2.1. The water budget. Nafawol has “two hundred households, about eighteen hundred people” [1, p. 89]. Its well is salty because the river left the floodplain long ago. The engineer Dr Arramata has measured the aquifer for eleven years: “I published the figures twice”. Nobody acted, because, as she says, “Nobody funds a study of a place nobody intends to visit” [1, p. 89]. This sounds like Aralsk: the problem was known and recorded, and the knowledge alone changed nothing.

The novel’s water system has three parts. A harvester condenses water from the night air. A borehole reaches the deep water. And the floodplain itself is slowly to be restored. Dr Arramata states the budget openly: “Twenty thousand litres on a good night, and the borehole gives the rest. Drinking and cooking for every compound, and not a litre for the fields” [1, p. 103]. If I divide 20,000 litres by 1,800 people, I get about 11 litres per person on a good night. This is only my rough estimate, but it shows how modest the harvester is. Its purpose is to protect the deep water: “The harvester is there so that we take as little of it as we can” [1, p. 90]. Dr Arramata also refuses desalination. “They pour the salt back into the sea,” she says of the coast, and then: “We have no sea” [1, p. 89]. In an inland basin the salt has nowhere to go. The Aral Sea shows what that means in reality.

The most realistic detail in the book, for me, is that the machine does not work as planned. By the second dry season the harvester had settled “a little under seventy per cent of its design yield” [1, p. 125], because “The salt in the dust wore down its coils, trays and filters” [1, p. 125]. That is a fictional version of the salt dust of the Aral region. The response of the community is the opposite of a plan figure that must be reported as fulfilled. Dr Arramata puts the curve on a public wall and says: “It will not get better … We stop asking it to. We plan around it” [1, p. 125]. The borehole makes up the difference, and so “every Friday Dr Arramata lowered a tape into the borehole and wrote the depth beside the curve” [1, p. 125].

This weekly measurement is the centre of my comparison. In a bad year, Year 8, the depth keeps falling: “Every Friday the figure was lower” [1, p. 205]. Dr Arramata warns that the water will rise again after the rains, “Not all the way” [1, p. 205]. And the village immediately cuts its use: “They opened the taps for two hours after dawn and two before dark” [1, p. 205], with each compound’s buckets ticked off in an exercise book. In the Aral basin the measurement and the decision were separated by thousands of kilometres. In Nafawol they are separated by the width of a square.

2.2. Cotton and salt. Cotton connects the two cases directly. In the Aral basin cotton was the main reason for the water diversion. In the novel, too, cotton has a history of being grown for others: the elder Ousman says “his father had grown cotton for the government’s buyers and eaten none of it” [1, p. 107].

But the novel’s cotton is watered differently. On the trial field it is irrigated by drip lines “fed from a second borehole sunk into the salt band beneath the wells, short of the deep water she kept for drinking” [1, p. 105]. The narrator explains: “Its water was too salty to drink but not too salty for cotton” [1, p. 105]. Drinking water and irrigation water are kept apart. In the Aral basin the same rivers had to serve drinking, farming and the sea, and farming took almost all of it.

The novel also faces salinisation honestly. When the drip lines run, salt builds up. Dr Arramata explains: “The salt gathers at the edge of the wet” [1, p. 105], and she runs the water another hour to push it below the roots. Kadiatou, the old water-keeper, adds her own observation from the bitter water she pours on her okra: “the ground goes white at the edge” [1, p. 105]. Here local knowledge and science agree. I must note, however, that in Central Asia leaching salt with extra water on a huge scale was part of the problem, because the drained water carried the salt back into the rivers [2]. On one hectare with drip lines this works; on millions of hectares with open canals it did not. The novel’s method is believable precisely because it is small.

There is also a rule about who controls what. After the test field is harvested, Ousman tells the engineer: “The water is yours. The soil is ours. Do not confuse them” [1, p. 107]. From then on the drip lines follow the engineering plans but are “then adjusted where the elders knew the floodplain’s old moods” [1, p. 107]. The Soviet plan, as far as I can judge from Micklin, had no such adjustment.

2.3. Stone lines and the channel in Year 10. The long-term restoration in Nafawol is very cheap and very slow. In every dry season crews build low stone lines across the dry river beds, “knee-high, curved against the slope, so that when the rains came the water would slow and sit and sink” [1, p. 126]. On higher ground they dig half-moon pits filled with manure. Before the first line, an elder walks to the herders’ camp three times, because “nobody had asked them about stones” [1, p. 126], and the lines have to leave crossings for the cattle. Even the first step involves people who use the land differently from the village.

Nobody expects quick results: “Nobody expected the channels to run again for years” [1, p. 126]. The old men say their grandfathers built the same lines and never saw them pay. In Year 7 Dr Arramata’s figures say “The channels were six years off if the rains were kind” [1, p. 192]. In Year 10 heavy rain comes, and water appears in the oldest channel, held because “the stone lines had held it and slowed it and passed it on” [1, p. 210]. “Nobody under thirty had ever seen water in that channel” [1, p. 210]. Dr Arramata says it must stand eleven days to soak into the ground, and notes that it has come “three years sooner than I said” [1, p. 210]. “It stood for twelve” [1, p. 211]. The old well is still bitter that winter. By Year 15, five years later, the rope comes up heavier and the water tastes of almost nothing, the harvester runs “only in the hot months now”, and “the borehole’s line on the wall had stopped going down” [1, p. 225].

The time scale is important. Kok-Aral raised the Small Aral within a few years. Nafawol’s channel ran only in Year 10, after seven dry seasons of building stone lines, and the well needed five more years. The novel does not hide that the slowness has costs: in Year 8 a family leaves, a student loses a year, and the village rations water.

Chapter 3. Comparison

The table shows that the two cases are not simple opposites. Nafawol was not purely local: it depended on a large foreign fund and on an engineer who had left the village and come back. And the Kok-Aral repair was not purely central: it succeeded because it was aimed at one local sea whose people gained directly. The novel even shows that the state can harm a local project: in a neighbouring village an inspector seals a mill under a rule that “had never been enforced north of the river” [1, p. 160], and the village has to sell its cotton raw. Kadiatou’s comment is short: “He has taken the year” [1, p. 160]. The novel never says who was behind the inspection, but it does give the minister’s reason for distrusting the village fund: money outside his office “was a pool of money that bought him nothing” [1, p. 134], and “if one village could do it, others would try” [1, p. 134].

Conclusions

1. The Aral Sea shrank because central planning took the water of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for cotton, and the measurements of the sea’s decline did not change the decisions for decades.
2. The Kok-Aral dam (2005) shows that a large engineering project can partly repair the damage when it is limited to a clear local target; the North Aral recovered noticeably, but far from its 1960 state, and at the cost of the southern sea.
3. In Hydara’s novel, the floodplain of Nafawol recovers through slow local work: stone lines, separate water for cotton, and a harvester that is accepted at seventy per cent of its design yield instead of being forced.
4. The most important factor in the novel is the weekly measurement of the borehole depth and the community’s power to reduce use as soon as the figure falls. This corresponds to my hypothesis.
5. The hypothesis is confirmed with one correction: success requires measurement, acceptance of limits and the power to stop overuse, but in both cases outside money and engineering also played a part. The real question is whether the people who live with the water can see the figures and act on them; the level at which the plan is made matters less.

For Astrakhan this has a practical meaning. Our floodplain also depends on a dam upstream. I think the delta would benefit from the “Friday wall”: figures on water that everyone who depends on it can read.