Customer Reviews

Siberia

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Nikolai Maslov's Siberia unfolds as a series of brief, telling vignettes that portray the bleak misery and utter absurdity of life behind the Iron Curtain. A man laps spilled wine from a puddle on the floor of a pig sty. Nikolai is rejected from art school because his work does not "show the advantages of the Soviet way of life". To the contrary, the grayscale pencil sketches in Siberia should be enough to dispel any lingering revolutionary nostalgia or apologism. Gray like his dystopian homeland, Maslov's desolate landscapes and characters seem equally devoid of life. Nearly all who haunt Siberia's panels have resigned themselves to a vodka-induced complacency, and even Nikolai succumbs to this prevailing dispiritedness at times throughout the account.

Siberia is created in such a way that one wonders if the author had read any other graphic novels before penning his own. It is Maslov's apparent unfamiliarity with the genre and style that makes his memoir so unique; it is unblemished by the influence and clichés of his peers.



Like many, Nikolai seeks refuge in art and its creation. Yet an artist of his time and place must be an organ of the state, or keep his work to himself. Each sketch is pregnant with meaning, as is the very style of his work. Maslov chooses to portray the world of his youth in grim charcoal, the antithesis of the heroic, colorful celebrations he was urged to create--and this time he gets to show us.

That he survived to relate his story speaks to his thirst for life, and that we are so profoundly affected by it speaks to his abilities as an author and artist. The medium by which Maslov has chosen to share his reflections may be unique, but, sadly, the tragedy of the Soviet experience was shared by far too many.