Image credit: Nikolai Sverchkov Into the Snowstorm (V Metel’), 1800s
A light snow was falling, which suddenly changed to thick, heavy flakes. The wind began to howl; it was a snowstorm. Within a moment the dark sky had merged with the ocean of snow. Everything disappeared. ‘Looks bad, sir,’ shouted the coachman. ‘A blizzard!’
—Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter; translated by Michael Glenny
A good book always features a bad storm. For literature, it has become a recurring topic, a crucial symbol that allows the very story to be placed under the hardest conditions possible. Such a simple thing as weather may build the very epos of the story. Odysseus has to make a detour on his route because the Aeolus winds were opened by his allies, Hugo’s Napoleon is defeated by a fog rather than Wellington or his army…
The storm is enrooted so deeply in the literary intertext that we can notice at times surprising connections. The epigraph of this article is taken from Bulgakov’s White Guard, a dramatic portrayal of the Civil War in Russia. There, a blizzard signifies Petlyura’s army entering Kyiv and the tragedy that is brought upon the City. Without a doubt, Bulgakov, a huge Pushkin fan, compared Petlyura to Pugachev, a brutal revolutionary depicted in The Captain’s Daughter, in a way, also a doombringer in Russian history.
Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and his family, too, face challenges as history itself unwinds right in front of them, but, strangely, the storm symbolises not aggression nor fighting but rather an external unifying force that has to bring people together. Imagine a night on the train, it’s quite warm and cosy, yet the wind howls and the snowflakes fly against the window like knives—this is how the Nobel-winning novel by Pasternak has always felt. The history itself flies, striking people down, but the Zhivago family endures and continues to ride the train…
This image keeps reviving in numerous scenes: on the train to Siberia, all people work in an attempt to clear the railroad of the snow. While being with partisans, the Doctor imagines his wife with two children conquering the snowy plains on foot somewhere far, far away.
And the family topic emerges once again in one of the most romantic poems in Russian literature which Pasternak attributes to his hero—Winter Night. It uses the blizzard as a symbol, leaving only two forces in the world: a snowstorm and a candlelight.
It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.
…
—Boris Pasternak, Winter Night, Doctor Zhivago; translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney
Why is the Man Pitted Against Nature?
The same weather-related motifs are true for a multitude of works, but often emerge not just to move the plot, the epic part of the story, but rather on a personal level—to portray the hero battling forces that are not in his control. Pushkin’s classic short story The Blizzard shows the uncertainty brought by unpredictable and treacherous weather in a wedding predicament, Tolstoy’s own The Snowstorm explores how men act in a life-and-death situation, virtually a Karl Jaspers’ Grenzsituation set under extreme cold.
The topic ‘man versus nature’ is one of the leading motifs in the literature of the North. To sum up Susi K. Frank’s work City of the Sun on Ice: The Soviet (Counter-) Discourse of the Arctic in the 1930s, these topoi became the pillars to build the image of a conquerable North, either by means of technology or ‘social warmth.’ A collective needs to conquer the brutal cold of the North by either building a ‘City of the Sun’ or directly confronting nature.
These dreams of taking over the North, by the way, also appeared in the architecture of the era. Soviet architects proposed various cities that virtually could fit under one roof, even placing botanical gardens inside. A resident of such a hi-tech city could do everything without ever enduring the cold.
But why is the Man pitted against nature so often? The answer, actually, is quite simple. Nature, in such cold landscapes, is a perfect enemy: there are not many people around, and the story demands an enemy.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is a great example of how cold appears under different masks: it’s a friend, an enemy, a deity. Thomas Mann, of course, builds a vision of the ‘lost generation’ just before it was lost, a Europe that is ready to collapse under new times, so, in the most common sense, the main enemy in the philosophical novel would be the mountain itself or the people inhabiting the Alpine resort. The cold, however, plays an important role in shaping the main hero along with many others.
At first, nature seems slow just like everything else surrounding the sanatorium. It also seems the mountain climate is just there to make the main character, Hans Castorp, adapt to the strange understanding of time and the infinite regimen of the resort. The air both heals and reveals sickness… There is one scene, however. It is certainly distinct as it looks like a climax (but a very uncommon one at that, as it brings practically no action to the following plot) and is one of the most dynamic scenes in the book—it portrays Hans Castorp, who has recently taken up skiing, riding away from the village and getting lost in the mountains in a pointless challenge against nature.
He almost freezes to death in the mountains and experiences a sort of revelation while he is attacked by the perfect geometry of snowflakes and frost. But what does his revelation bring? In this episode, the hero opposes everyone and everything, and he understands something hidden from the reader. Yet he still chooses to return to the same stagnant way of living in the sanatorium. We feel as though something has changed with the hero, but he remains almost the same in every point of his life.
Although Mann doesn’t say it directly, it seems that Hans just accepts the bizarre flows of time and the world as it is. The lad is still being educated by his various ‘teachers’ like Settembrini or Naphta, yet at times it seems he’s the wisest of all, a golden mean. He doesn’t even try to influence the order of things, just goes along with the flow, and this is what he’s awarded with for a near-death experience with the cold—wisdom.
A similar motif can be found in Jack London’s To Build a Fire, but the realisation of the main character is more mundane—he just starts to believe the old man from Sulphur Creek who had shared his experience and given advice.
There are two versions of the short story. One version of the story’s finale (1902) lets the character live and brings the man to become wiser, the second (1908)—leaves him to die out in the cold:
“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek. Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire.
—Jack London, To Build a Fire
What London does in this story, among many other things, is demonstrate how arrogant humans may be. Nature is both a friend here (a dog) and an enemy (the cold). The experience is also quite natural; the old-timer shared how one should behave on the Trail, but the character fails to trust his gut, to go with the instinct. What is interesting is that unconsciously he gets all those signs by looking at the dog, analysing how it behaves in the cold burst, but fails to process this knowledge to act. The man, too, fails to conquer nature, and London tries to say, one had better learn from it…
Conclusion
Though it may seem sometimes that analysing weather in literature should stay somewhere in the romantic era of writing, this is not entirely correct. As a symbol, it reappears and plays its tricky role everywhere, in adventures, historical fiction, and even philosophical novels, connects different texts, and brings forth the same motifs along with something one might call the essential truth in writing.
In a sense, the cold in literature is twofold. It portrays both the adverse storm that separates people, brings doom into the house, shows stagnance and slowness, yet it plays the role of an ultimate unifier and something that can bring revelation, point in the right direction. In some cases, it can reveal the actual nature of people, bring out the best or the worst in them, and show the answer. In some works, it just reiterates—there’s not much we can do on this earth, just move along, and don’t hesitate much…
AUTHORDmitry Tarasov
Junior Research Fellow
Petrozavodsk State University