Could he not change this plot–and liberate Klara from her captivity? Could this be a form of tribute to his beloved? Could he not in this way atone for even a small part of his guilt?
(Yakhina, 209)

I thought of who it is whose story gets remembered in the end /
And through how many careful tellings does once practice their defense.
Some nuances the narrator selectively omits /
A once collective memory is destined to forget.
(Nana Grizol, "Explained Away")

This post will speak at length about the plot of Guzel Yakhina's A Volga Tale, so proceed with that knowledge, read the novel first (affiliate link), and/or listen to our podcasts on it.

Powered by RedCircle

Our stories become us. 

It always happens after we die, of course. No longer able to make new memories, my late grandparents now only breathe life when someone says, “remember when grandpa started pickling an entire barrel of…” and so on and so forth. 

Sometimes those stories are real, sometimes they’re embellished, and sometimes they’re fabricated misrememberings. I find the latter two tend to overtake the former with time. Et voila: a new person is born. 

That’s just how I remember my own grandfather, Anthony, a thin-haired, deep-voiced man who could always be found in his office recliner. 

By the time I was old enough to wonder about him, he was already senile. 

So I learned his stories indirectly. From my grandmother, from my mom, from his four other children. They often contradicted each other, gave differing accounts of his temperament or inconsistent reports of what he was doing in such-and-such year. 

So the version of my grandfather who lived in my mind was entirely made up of the stories told about him. 

Then he died. The stories are all that remain.

But our stories become us in our living absences, too. Friends we don’t see that often — if ever — anymore. Old coworkers you’ll never talk to again. Teachers, mentors, even the people who happened to take the same bus as you for a couple months. We live in them as the stories they recall about us.

My girlfriend doesn’t know most of my friends from college. But even without having ever laid eyes on them, she knows their stories — told over dinner tables with wildly gesticulating utensils, with our housemate shouting me down and saying, “no, that’s wrong! It happened like this…,” and with usually more than a little beer involved. 

And through their stories, she does know them in a fashion. 

But, really, when we talk about “Noah” or “Angie,” we’re talking about that person through a particular era. Who they are today, I mostly can’t say. But their stories grow into a life of their own. Et encore voila: a new person is born. 

And finally, our stories about ourselves become us. 

You probably recognize this instinctively on some level. The versions of you that you post on social media — yes, even including your finsta and private X accounts — are cultivated to one end or another. You might modify your experiences slightly to better answer a question in a job interview. 

But we cultivate ourselves much more intimately than that, too. Here’s a story I used to tell about myself:

In college, I worked in the news department of a student-run radio station, heading up the International News Division. Among our other divisions, I’ll highlight business news — a peer of mine organized the original team, but dropped the station not long after that. One of his reporters (we’ll call her Isabelle) took over, eventually leading the team for thrice the time he had. 

I should also note that the news director and I didn’t see eye-to-eye, often butting heads over policy or standards of coverage. It came to a head when the business team’s founder wanted to come back, and the director tried to unilaterally demote Isabelle to give him the job again. 

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of my anger almost levitating me off the ground that night he called to tell me she was okay with his decision — only minutes after I’d gotten off the phone with Isabelle, bawling her eyes out over losing her team 

So I helped her fight him on it. And we won. She kept her job. A nice, neat story.

It’s all true, by the way; I’m not about to tell you I lie wholesale about myself. But let me add a detail: I also had feelings for her, later asked her out, and we dated through the end of college. 

My motives seem a little more questionable with that context, huh? But it’s not integral to the story — which is already basically true — so I didn’t include that element when I used to tell it. 

These kinds of stories aren’t the big ones that define our lives to those who barely know us. They’re the million little intimate stories our friends and family know us by, cultivated for one reason or another. Maybe you’re trying to make it a little more funny, or buffing out a little “dent” in the tale, or even just shortening it up because you only have a few minutes to talk. 

But all the same, we create ourselves through these tiny fibs. Et enfin voila: a new person is born. Not exactly the person who really lived, but close enough, right? 

Guzel Yakhina’s sophomore novel A Volga Tale tackles the life of one Jacob Ivanovich Bach, a Volga German school teacher in the little colony of Gnadenthal. 

Jacob is a man who takes little pleasure in life except in the refuge of great German writers and poets — a life which is upended when he’s contracted to teach Klara, the daughter of a colonist beyond Gnadenthal’s boundaries. 

The events that follow eventually led Klara to flee her father to join Jacob, with the pair eventually being driven out of town and taking up a solitary life in Klara’s father’s now-abandoned farmstead. 

They live there for years, until Klara bleeds out and dies during childbirth. Jacob, dazed and mute, wanders into the forest where he’s greeted by a joyous procession: Gnadenthal has become part of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic!  

Needing a way to provide milk for his new daughter, Jacob takes up working for Hoffman, the new Soviet representative. Drawing on his classical education and local knowledge, he begins to write fairy tales. Those tales, with the appropriate Soviet modifications, are then published as a way to raise class consciousness among these peasant Volga people. 

But something wondrous begins to happen: Jacob’s fairy tales start to come true. While the representative merely builds with concrete and wood, he’s saving the world itself. 

He envisioned and set down an image that had been blasted out of the memories of the other inhabitants, thereby raising the once beautiful Gnadenthal from the ruins, at least on paper. Bach wasn’t writing—he was building.
(Yakhina, 185)

He writes on. And he writes one story in particular, a variant of the Rapunzel fairytale where a girl frees herself from the tower and wanders the lands. The very sort of adventure Klara’s father denied her and Jacob could not give her. 

He also does the work for his daughter, Antje: “This world was created by his own efforts — fruitful, good — he was ready to leave to her as his legacy, after his own demise” (Yakhina, 488).

These stories that create us, they become literal in Jacob’s case. His own self, his own past fuels a need to rewrite the future. One day he will no longer be Jacob the schoolteacher, driven out of town for trying to marry a 17-year-old suspected to be his daughter; but that day he will be Jacob who built a good world for his daughter to live in. 

But as always happens midway through a fairytale, problems arise. Jacob loses control of the narrative. Crops fail, innovation goes awry, the Soviets don’t bring what they promise. The people of Gnadenthal trample over their own children in pursuit of driving the Hoffman into the Volga to drown. 

And so Jacob flees back to his farmstead, to his daughter. He puts down his pen forever. And he denies her the very building blocks needed to create stories at all: language. 

Jacob does not teach Antje how to read, write, or even speak. And so she grows up into his silence, absent any tales of self or history. 

Except one last story governs her life: Jacob’s Rapunzel. This Rapunzel who travels the lands and who becomes a legendary apple farmer; and this Rapunzel who, in a far away land, finally finds her true love: a teacher from her youth. 

Her father is there, too, the one who trapped her. He begs for her forgiveness. But she denies him and he dies on the spot. 

One more misfortunate also accompanies this tale. Jacob has not re-written Klara’s life into a great adventure, where he will one day enter as a welcomed beloved. He has instead predicted Antje’s journey. His story also creates his own fate. 

Enter the teacher. 

Except the age of fairytales has passed. The Volga German ASSR is decidedly not the place for it. 

So he’s not a teacher. In fact, he’s not even an adult. He’s Vaska. No, actually, that’s not even his name. That’s just the most recent one he’s adopted. 

This Kirghiz boy, less than ten years of age, has adopted many names in his life. He left each moniker behind with each life he fled from. But he took a number of languages with him. 

“And the most dangerous and the most perfidious of all was language.”  (Yakhina, 347)

He enters Jacob and Antje’s life as a thief who becomes an unwelcome guest who becomes a dangerous son. 

Along the way, he teaches Antje to talk. Russian — which is neither his native tongue nor Antje’s. But they learn to communicate. Jacob, who speaks maybe a few dozen words of the language, is locked out of the stories they tell each other. 

And then one day they leave the homestead, going to Gnadenthal proper to live in a sort-of boarding school. When Jacob finally goes to see them, he sees they’re performing his version of Rapunzel. Finally free of Jacob, they live the story. 

Our stories grow larger than us. 

We cultivate. We tell them about the people we no longer talk to, about those who’ve left us. But once spoken or written or signed or even drawn, they plant seeds in the minds of all who understand and value them. 

Such is the thread weaved throughout Yakhina’s A Volga Tale. Our stories create us. But our stories are also more than us. Our stories make others think of us a certain way. They may also make others live a certain way. 

And if you’re telling such a cultivated tale — they may even live it more truly than you did.

Of course, Jacob’s story (and Antje and Vaska’s, too) doesn’t end there. It would be a little too neat, a little too cultivated. Much as we may edit our experiences to fit a need, I too am telling this story in such a way as to serve my point. 

A Volga Tale takes our stories more seriously than we do. Jacob tells years not by dates but by names for the stories they contain. In that, I think we can find a central truth of our world: none of us experience it entirely. 

Much of the world around us is told to us in stories. We know not, for example, the faceless companies governing our lives, but we certainly know the tales of their employees in the corner store down the street or in the random person you speak to in a bar or in a friend’s friend and so on.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a research scientist, or a programmer, or a fisher, or an engineer — but I have friends who tell me their stories. And through them I understand the world. 

Yet we should still keep in mind that these stories, like every other, are constructed. They necessarily focus on some details and leave others out. That’s simply the way stories go. 

At the very end of the novel, Jacob — now old and alone — slips and falls into the Volga. In it, he finds lost things and missing people. He finds the history of the land, bloody and long. 

What is this place? What is the life around this area known as the Volga? What is the truth? 

Is it, he wonders “[t]hat this river was deception? A sham beauty, concealing unfathomable ugliness? Or, on the contrary—that it was only truth? Pure, carefully preserved truth—awaiting for centuries those who would walk along its bottom fearlessly, with open eyes?” (Yakhina, 488)

Jacob decides such questions are too large for him to answer. So instead of trying, he lets the river — and all its deceptions and truths and realities in between — take him. 

Are our stories which create ourselves and our world good? Are they bad? Should we instead seek a perfectly 1:1 understanding of the world around us? 

I submit to you that A Volga Tale merely shrugs on this point. Stories simply are. They create us, they become us, and they will outlive us. Perhaps the best we can do is not become the villains we warn others of.

Post-script. 

My grandfather died when I was 14. When I was 26, my mother found a letter she’d asked him to write a long time ago. Her request: your life as you remember it. 

He was a funny guy, it turns out. Not “ha ha” funny.  In the 1930s, he started working in a factory as a tool-and-die maker not much older than a pre-teen — and by the time he made it to college in his mid-20s, he knew enough that they hired him to teach instead. 

When World War 2 broke out, he tried to enlist. As a trade specialist, he was barred from entering service until after the war had ended. Finally, he made it in. And then, only weeks later, he was injured while loading crates. The army discharged him after he recovered because they simply no longer needed so many soldiers. 

Later, when he started dating my grandmother, he got along well with her engineer father and they would speak at such length that he’d sometimes almost miss dates with her. 

I could tell a lot more of his stories. I’m aware that they, too, are simplifications probably to the point of being fabrications. But all the same, it’s his own narrative. 

And his stories create himself anew in my own mind. So he lives on in a fashion. 

Et voila.