Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

40 Years of Solitude

In 1936, Karp Lykov, a member of the Old Believer sect of Russian Orthodoxy living in a remote Siberian village, was working in the fields with his brother when a group of communists (who had little tolerance for the ultra-observant religious group) shot his brother. Lykov decided it was time to flee the Soviet authorities, and so he packed up his wife and two children (a nine year old son and two year old daughter) and moved off with them into the forested Siberian wilderness. Over the years they moved deeper and deeper into the forest, clearing small fields and building log cabins. Two more children were born, a son in 1940 and a daughter in 1943. The family so successfully isolated itself that they never saw another person until Soviet geologists stumbled upon them (having seen their fields when surveying by helicopter) in 1978.

The story is fascinating. One thing that particularly struck me was what the family didn't know versus what they did. They had, of course, no knowledge of world history over the last forty years. They knew nothing of World War Two and the utter cataclysm it had released upon Russia. But they did, in a way, know about the space program. They had seen satellites looking like swift moving stars as far back as the 1950s and had correctly deduced that they were the result of human effort.
The children in particular spoke Russian somewhat strangely, having never spoken to anyone other than in the family, but they could all read (the family had a bible and several prayer books) and successfully identified pictures of animals such as horses that they had never seen, having learned about them from the bible and their parents.

The other thing that struck me is how incredibly difficult this obviously able family found it to live in total isolation.



Swiss Family Robinson this ain't.


Jenny said...

I read this piece yesterday and it really is fascinating. To lose your pots to rust and have to replace them with birch bark! How did they not despair? How frightened must they have been of the authorities to live in that level of poverty and still not make their way back to civilization when the very means of their existence were withering away.

How sad that we, with the hindsight of the atrocities of Soviet Russia, know they probably were not much worse off than those living in the village.

JP said...

Saw this on another site last night; saved it to my writing ideas list. NaNoWriMo 2013 perchance?

It'd be interesting to take the same general idea and go SciFi with it.

Anonymous said...

Wow! That was so interesting! Thanks for posting.

Banshee said...

I don't understand why they didn't make pottery. I can understand not being able to make a kiln per se, but you can fire better pots or make better adobe pots than you can make out of birchbark.

Permafrost and arctic soils aren't conducive to making clays, maybe?