Nora Ikstena, a prose writer and essayist, is one of the most influential and widely translated writers in Latvia. After obtaining a degree in philology from the University of Latvia, she studied English literature at Columbia University in New York. Her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories under the title Nieki un izpriecas (Trifles and Joys), appeared in 1995. Ikstena has published a novel almost every year since. In her prose, which is marked by an elaborate style and detailed approach to language, she often reflects on life, death, love, and faith. Her latest novel, Soviet Milk (Mātes piens), has now been published in English.
Soviet Milk depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in Soviet-ruled Latvia between 1944 and 1989, the mother’s life span and also the beginning and ending of the Soviet period. It is also the story of three generations of women – each trying to cope with the Soviet regime in their own way.
Soviet Milk is narrated in alternating sections by the mother and her daughter, both of whom are unnamed. The mother is born in 1944, towards the end of World War II, and shortly before occupied Latvia is liberated from the Nazis. On the eve of Christmas that year, Soviet soldiers, the new occupying force, plunder her parents’ yard, ransack the house, and take the father away. In response, the newborn is quickly whisked away to Riga, Latvia’s capital, in a suitcase.
The daughter, born in 1969, the same year as the author, grows up in Riga, where her grandmother and stepfather have an apartment. With her mother – her father is not in the picture – focused on her medical career, the daughter is mostly left to herself and grows up cared for and supported by her loving grandmother and stepfather. “Throughout my childhood the smell of medicine and disinfectant replaced the fragrances of mother’s milk. These chemicals would hang like a cloud around my mother: there when she returned from exhausting night duty at the maternity hospital; still there when, after long hours of wakefulness, she caught up on sleep at home,” the daughter recalls.
The mother is clearly damaged psychologically by the political repression under Soviet rule. As the title suggests, milk emerges as an underpinning theme. “My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it,” the mother says. This rejection of one of the few commodities that is widely available, and impulse to self-harm, is a symptom of the internalization of political oppression.
While her daughter is in secondary school, the mother, a gynaecologist and fertility specialist, is awarded a prestigious research fellowship in Leningrad. Already known for her critical attitude towards the Soviet rulers, her medical career is destroyed after she molests the abusive husband of one of her patients who has sought her help to get pregnant. She is banned from doing research by the Soviet authorities and returns to Latvia where she is forced to work in a clinic in the country side. There she becomes more and more reclusive, and occasionally suicidal, not being able to copy with life in a totalitarian state – leaving her teenage daughter ever more in the care of her mother and stepfather in the capital Riga, who tell her stories about what life was like in Latvia before the Soviet occupation. The grandmother gives her granddaughter the love that her daughter is unable to provide. The mother subsequently flees in drugs and reading Moby Dick and samizdat literature. The daughter tries to take care of her mother and has a zest for life her mother lacks. She graduates high school and goes on to study medicine. As a student she actively engages in political organizing against the Soviet authorities, which eventually leads to Soviet troops withdrawing in 1990.
Soviet Milk is a beautifully written but also disturbing novel. It reminds us of the tragic reality of life under totalitarian rule and how hard it is to survive in such circumstances for uncompromising souls like the mother in this story. A century has passed since Latvia became an independent nation in 1918. For half of that time it was part of the Soviet Union. In Ikstena’s novel, the longing for freedom finally prevails, as it did in Latvia, which celebrated its centenary and liberation from Soviet occupation last month.
Nora Ikstena. Soviet Milk. London: Peirene Press, 2018. Translated by Margita Gailitis.
