The Orchard, by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

A magnificent story about the desperate times of Generation Perestroika.

Two teenagers in 1980s Russia share a cigarette. The reckless one, Milka, has just jumped from a high flying swing but sustains only a minor cut, saying from her seated position in the snow, “Wouldn’t that be cool to die on the same day as our Communist Leader?” The cautious one, Anya, tells her she’s nuts, that “Death is nothingness.” These two attitudes accompany the friends throughout the story. Milka is a dreamer of far away and exotic places. Anya is too practical for that, and her friend’s dreams only invoke her insecurities. Anya’s family has a modest dacha in the countryside, on which is an apple orchard. Milka’s mother has nothing but an incorrigible second husband, but Milka accompanies Anya to the dacha as if she is Anya’s sister. The apple orchard is a bit of a nod to Chekov’s cherry orchard, but it’s a loose connection. Gorcheva-Newberry’s apple orchard doesn’t so much represent materialism as Chekhov’s did. It is instead a symbol of the fragility of life during Russia’s transformation between Stalin and Gorbachev.

Like many Russian novels, The Orchard is rich with imagery. After an argument between Milka and her mother, Anya observes Milka’s face: “Winter lived there, with its ferocious winds and dead ossified earth and hard frozen snow.” Gorcheva-Newberry brilliantly weaves these images into the personalities of the novel’s characters. As seasons change, so do the characters, who often interact with each other with as much drama as a storm accompanying a passing cold front. In the end, a reader cannot know one character without the other three. Anya may be the narrator of the story, but the story is nothing without the others. It is reminiscent of Dostoevsky.

Can The Orchard be categorized as a coming-of-age novel? There are many elements that suggest it can be. At one point Milka states that she doesn’t want to grow up, “Because then you can’t blame anyone else for the shit that’s happening. It’s your own responsibility.” The cynicism appearing in many of Milka’s observations is also expressed by the girls’ two boyfriends, Lopatin and Trifonov. The author cleverly uses the personalities of the four characters to make pictures of angst and happiness, defeatism and hopefulness, and, finally, at the end of the novel, long after two of them have come of age, a mournful loss of resilience. Of course, there is a political backdrop to the story, much as there was in 1960s America for stories about those years. In Russia the times were much more sinister, where “We knew we had a fate, a destiny, designated by the Communist Party, and it was as irrevocable as the stars or the moon, as life itself.” There was some optimism, nevertheless, for a new Generation Perestroika when Anya and her friends were seventeen. But the optimism is fleeting for three of them.

Part Two of the novel begins in 1988, not in Russia but in America, where Anya marries while she is a foreign exchange student. Decades pass without her returning to Russia, and the reader sees her cautious personality bloom in her marriage. She says about her husband, “We rarely argued or disagreed or had long passionate conversations, and sometimes I thought of us as two pet fish in our aquarium, navigating through tall wavering weeds or hibernating inside a plastic castle, or hiding under a rock, ostracized by the glass.” But like so many Russian novels, trouble creeps into Anya’s life when she learns that a developer in Russia is badgering her parents to sell the dacha and its apple orchard. She must make a trip home. The weather imagery returns in a fashion similar to that used in Russia during Part One of the book. While driving her to the airport, her husband’s “face was a fall day—eyes clouded with thoughts, lips curled, folded at the corners like dry leaves.” Clearly, Anya’s life in America hasn’t been as harsh as it was in her coming of age years. Does the toned down imagery mean that the reader can expect a more optimistic end to Anya’s story than the endings in Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, or Chekhov? That’s for the reader to decide. For Anya’s family and friends, who’d not gone to America, the bleakness remains. Anya looks at her mother and notes that the “joy had been washed from her eyes; they were no longer blue but a dark, morose gray.”

Anya looks for closure during her visit to Russia, going to Milka’s house to confront her stepfather and visiting old places. The imagery returns to that of her teenage years, “a sunless frostbitten dawn, the air so white, as though sewn from snowflakes.” Worse, there was no snow, “the landscape grim, barren. It seemed as though nature wasn’t hibernating but dying.” And, of course, Lopatin shows up as the developer who wants the dacha and the orchard. He describes himself as an “old Russian with new money,” as well as bad news, of course. Anya and Lopatin go to the dacha, where they drunkenly try to make sense of life and then, with a nod to Chekov, chop down an apple tree, after which there is an orgy of self-reconciliation of a sort involving a chainsaw, a visit to cemeteries, a reckoning for Milka’s stepfather, and, sometime later, the planting of apple trees in Virginia. The timing of the action as well as the prose associated with all of these events is well done.

It is difficult to make sense of the ending of The Orchard, except perhaps by a tortured interpretation that the novel’s character’s lives served a purpose. But that wouldn’t be in line with Russian fatalism, certainly, and it would be out of line with the novel’s predominant imagery, which suggests that life “is just weather, wind and rain, spurts of blinding snow.” If there is closure in the novel, it occurs for Anya in Virginia, not in Russia. Gorcheva-Newberry’s novel is a tour de force regarding the indelible marks written on young lives during desperate social and political times. And it is hard to say that the novel’s characters ever come of age. There is no profound passage into adulthood, only a capitulation to the reality that nothing better is on the horizon.

For more about Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, visit her website at https://www.kgnewberry.com/about