Uladzimir Karatkevich’s King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, translated by Mary Mintz, is an ambiguously-speculative gothic mystery drawing on elements of Belarusian (and, indeed, wider European) folklore — curses, ghosts, and the wild hunt. the story follows the young ethnographer Andrey Belaretsky, who finds himself lost in a rural district of Belarus (in ca. the 1880s) and becomes a guest of Nadzeya Yanofvsky, the last scion of her family, and the last bearer of a curse extending back several hundred years. over the course of the novel, Belaretsky becomes a gothic detective, carefully unraveling the mystery of King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, the Yanovsky curse, and the ghosts that haunt the castle of Marsh Firs.
while the blurb speaks of Belaretsky “uncover[ing] the truth”, I didn’t expect the extent to which this is truly a detective novel: Belaretsky interviews suspects, consults (rather confrontationally) with the local legal authorities, goes on stakeouts, and generally does most of the things one expects a detective to do. I say the novel is ambiguously-speculative because it does end by — ostensibly — demystifying all of the speculative elements. nonetheless, it leaves the reader with an unsettling sense that there is more afoot than the mysteries Belaretsky has “solved”, and it ends by linking the Wild Hunt to the Belaretsky’s undated present-of-writing (perhaps the Second World War?):
But even now I sometimes see in a dream the grey heather and the stunted grass of the waste land, and King Stakh’s Wild Hunt leaping, dashing through the marshes. The horses’ bits do not tinkle; the silent horsemen are sitting up straight in their saddles. Their hair, their capes, their horses’ manes are waving in the wind, and a lonely star is burning overhead.
King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is racing madly across the Earth in terrifying silence.
I awaken and think that its time is not yet over. Not as long as gloom, cold and darkness, injustice and inequality, cold and darkness, injustice and inequality, and this dark horror that had created the legend of King Stakh, exists on Earth. Across the land, half drowned in fog, still rovers [sic] the Wild Hunt.
as the [sic] suggests, the translation is often a bit clunky, sometimes in ways that are a product of copyediting issues (I suspect “rovers” there is a typo) and sometimes in ways that are clearly overly literal translation — strange and/or ungrammatical syntax, improperly placed commas and quotation marks that I assume are taken directly from the Belarusian text, and similar. in spite of this, it’s a compelling book: I found the mystery and the ominous landscape of Marsh Firs both narratively and aesthetically gripping. it manages to be pensive without sacrificing its forward motion, and I would definitely read another Karatkevich novel if one were translated.
perhaps the most striking feature of the novel, though, is its intensely anti-aristocratic politics. Belaretsky is of somewhat distant aristocratic lineage, but identifies strongly with the muzhyk (мужык, which the translation treats as a collective plural), the peasantry (ex-serfs who are still viewed as serfs by the aristocracy, whom the local authorities legally shield from the consequences of, say, murdering a village full of them in order to expropriate their land). the aristocrats are obsessed with status and wealth and willing to kill anyone who gets in the way of them getting it, and to use and abuse even their own family members to accomplish their goals. one of the villains is found to have been using is developmentally disabled brother as an “apparition” to scare people. (Belaretsky of course “liberates” him...by having him institutionalized in the district asylum.)
meanwhile, the plot revolves around Nadzeya’s inheritance, a decrepit entailed estate that she cannot legally get rid of even though she desperately wants to, tied to a number of dubiously-legal promissory notes and liens, a nearly innavigable peat-bog, and a bit of poor-quality farmland. against this backdrop, the muzhyk are chafing at the other local aristocrats’ violence and abuse, as well as the continuing constraints of still de facto feudal post-serfdom. Belaretsky finds himself drawn into a world that he perceives as both long out-of-date and also a microcosm of all-too-contemporary class resentment and ultimate class warfare. spoiler alert, but they do very much kill most of the local gentry with pitchforks.
the book is also very much a kind of national allegory — but it is a deeply ambivalent one. Marsh Firs comes to serve as a microcosm of Belarus: oppressed by ossified power structures that must be overthrown, trapped in and haunted by the legacy of its history, but also, crucially, holding itself back. the aristocrats are not outsiders, for all that their legal status is guaranteed by the Russian state, and while the entailment that traps Nadzeya in Marsh Firs is enforced by imperial law, the landscape itself — the quagmires of the peat-bog that swallowed Nadzeya’s father and so many others whole — serves to trap them. Belarus is consuming itself, slowly but surely. the only way forward is to leave Marsh Firs behind forever, but even then, King Stakh follows. this is a fascinating angle for an author who seems to have been pretty unabashedly proud of his Belarusianness, and this ambivalence is part of what made the novel so compelling for me.
there’s a lot more going on here — I haven’t even touched on Svetsilovich, Belaretsky’s Best Boy Friend whose beauty he can’t stop talking about. in spite of a rather clunky translation, the more I’ve thought about this book as I’ve been writing this review, the more I’ve found to think about and with. if any of this sounds of interest to you, I would definitely recommend it.
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