Deathless

In this hybrid of fantasy and history, Catherynne Valente restages Russian folklore against the rise of the Soviet Union. As the human world of Russia is radically restructured, so too is its faerie counterpart. Every magical creature—save Baba Yaga—dutifully greets its companion with “comrade.” A council of elves debates whether their house mates are living up to Stalinist standards. And an ancient dragon in the guise of an old files keeper sends hundreds to their death. In Valente’s telling, myths repeat themselves in an endless loop, sweeping up the same figures and depositing them at the same fate. There’s a kind of weary acceptance to all of Valente’s characters. Everyone is a hard drinker.

Into this world of magic struggling to understand the new Soviet regime enters Marya. Her role in the mythic cycle is as the girl who marries Koschei the Deathless, one the oldest creatures and rulers in Russia. The Tsar of Life, Koschei is locked in endless combat with his brother, the Tsar of Death. Like the rest of their country’s supernatural inhabitants, the two brothers live out the same story over and over. Koschei takes a bride, the bride betrays her husband, Koschei is killed and reborn.

Even as these figures of myth feel trapped by their fates, for Marya, the confines of inescapable destiny prove oddly liberating. Deathless tracks Marya’s progression from naïve girl awaiting a husband to the Tsar of Life’s powerful queen. As someone who’s fallen for many a girl only to have her stab him in the back, Koschei approaches Marya as a potential rebel who must be cowed into total obedience. Their early courtship sees Koschei ordering the young girl into a vow of silence, and he lays out great banquets before the poverty-stricken Marya and feeds her like a baby. Despite Koschei’s efforts, Marya possesses within her a fierce desire for autonomy, and soon she pushes back against her husband, refusing to become his pawn even as, in doing so, she becomes the pawn of fate.

Valente depicts Marya and Koschei as genuinely in love but racked with the simultaneous knowledge that their marriage will end in betrayal. Each spouse pushes against this fate, trying to bend the other into submission in a game of seduction that charges Deathless with erotic tension. One scene has Marya literally chaining her husband to the wall in a bid for sexual and relational dominance. As Marya and Koschei unwillingly plod toward their ruin, so too does Russia. The Great Famine kills not only human beings but magical ones too, and as Russia collapses into starvation and death, it seems that for the first time the mythic stories will not see another telling. At stake in Deathless is the question of Russian identity. Did the Soviet Union so fundamentally rewrite the country that the older world and its myths no longer exist?

Not if Valente has anything to say about it anyways. Deathless breathes new life not only into the world and characters of Russian folklore but into the structure those stories were passed down in. In lean, cool prose, Valente recycles folk narrative and its penchant for repetition and cycles into novel form. Individual chapters of Deathless often function as fairy tales in miniature, animated by Valente with striking imagery and a novelist’s attention to psychological detail. Ultimately, Valente finds that some myths really are deathless.