The late Ukrainian-Canadian writer Theodore Odrach has given us a powerful story and one that has been hidden so long from so many readers. It first appeared in a Ukrainian edition in 1972, and it is now available in English. This is due in considerable measure to the skill and dedication of his daughter Erma, his translator.
Page after page of beautiful prose testifies to the depth of that skill and to a remarkable sensitivity.
Wave of Terror opens in 1939 with the Soviet occupation of Belarus. Odrach, who died in Toronto in 1964, was a witness to those days, and it is clear that his own life ran parallel to that of the novel's central character, Ivan Kulik.
Kulik is a Ukrainian schoolmaster in the small town of Hlaby near Pinsk. Hlaby is in Belarus, but the inhabitants are for the most part Ukrainian. Until 1939, the village had been part of Poland. The villagers must now come to terms with the new realities of Stalin's power.
For in Odrach's characters, nightmare does not completely triumph. We see ordinary people keeping their lives on course against the backdrop of a monstrous oppression. It is a world where the sun still shines sometimes and where hope still contends with fear.
We meet with decency at every turn, with characters who embody a human spirit that is abiding and unassailable. Odrach gives us humour and irony, too, both in situation and in character. And so it is this juxtaposition of the everyday with the monstrous that sets the book apart from much of the writing on Stalin's tyranny.
Still, the scene in the winter of 1939-1940 is very dark. There is a pervasive mistrust. It eats into friendship and love, ruins creativity and finally undermines sanity.
As Odrach tells us: "There was no logic left anywhere: the real world did not exist any more... The sane were becoming insane, the insane, sane. Everything was in a jumble."
Fear and mistrust are constructed in the character of Sobakin, a Russian NKVD officer who, in his malignity, is the closest thing to pure evil that the novel has to offer. Just as vividly Odrach shows us the consequences of evil in the grim stories of the victims.
A bleak dread hangs over the winter of 1939-1940 from which there is little hope of escape. Odrach creates an atmosphere that nourishes oppression.
His interiors offer little solace. They are dark and close, filled with foreboding and bad dreams. While outside "a dead silence hung in the air broken only by the sound of the wind."
For Kulik, oppression takes two forms, one that is personal and intimate, another that is more abstract and indirect. The first promises loss of freedom and physical annihilation, the second loss of identity and self respect.
For Kulik (and for Odrach) identity centres on language, and the pages of Wave of Terror turn again and again to the politics of language and culture.
As the Russians move in there is a pathetic scramble on the part of many to speak Russian and to ape the tastes of their new masters. To this spectacle is added a deliberate official campaign of "Russification."
None of this is for Kulik. For him language is the centre of political life. His cultured Ukrainian is both a defiant weapon and a shield for his self-respect.
There is no happy ending for Kulik. He loses everything: romantic love, his friends, his career. He must flee from the NKVD and manage alone. Yet he is a survivor and we know somehow that his hope and his determination will keep him safe.
Davis Daycock is a senior scholar and lecturer in political studies at the University of Manitoba.