The Evil That Lies Beneath

Cory Oldweiler reviews Russian author Sergei Lebedev’s novel “The Lady of the Mine,” translated by Antonina W. Bouis.

By Cory OldweilerJanuary 7, 2025

• Fiction

• History

IN THE INTRODUCTION to his 2018 novel Grey Bees, translated into English by Boris Dralyuk in 2020, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov describes his country’s eastern region of Donbas, where the novel is set, as “a land of coalmines and metallurgical plants.” So valued were the area and its residents to the Soviet Union’s “great industrial whole,” Kurkov writes, that the communists coined “a special designation for them, ‘the people of Donbas,’ as if they were the children of mines and slag heaps, without ethnic roots.” Muddying, ignoring, or obliterating individualism and national identity is at the heart of Russia’s current belligerent attempt to “tear Ukraine away from Europe,” to borrow Kurkov’s phrase, an effort that began in earnest in early 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the surreptitious support of separatist groups in the Donbas. Initial fighting between the two sides quickly calcified along a nearly 300-mile-long “grey zone,” as Kurkov dubs it in his novel, running through the Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, a seam that remained tense and often deadly for nearly eight years, until February 2022 when Russia launched its open invasion of the country. Today, at the end of 2024, the front line has again stabilized, but much farther to the west, with Russia now in control of nearly the entirety of the Donbas.

Conflict in Eastern Ukraine is sadly familiar, with the 20th century full of examples in which its residents awoke to find themselves in a war zone, victimized by those seeking to control—or eradicate—them and thereby gain access to the byproducts of all those “coalmines and metallurgical plants.” Russian author Sergei Lebedev’s latest novel, titled The Lady of the Mine (2025) in Antonina W. Bouis’s magnificent English translation, highlights Russia’s efforts to sow division within the Donbas in 2014, delving into the region’s legacy of atrocities via an abandoned mine shaft in the fictional Donetsk village of Marat. Lebedev is a trained geologist, and his novels are full of traces of history recorded in the earth, but Marat’s Shaft 3/4 is perhaps the most literal manifestation of this theme, a vertical tomb holding fossilized remains of those killed by Russian revolutionaries, Soviets, and Nazis. As one character describes the significance of the mine shaft’s secrets: “Once you started uncovering, unscrewing, digging, the entire past would emerge. […] That’s how it was in the mine […] And not only in the mine. In life.”

Providing an almost mystical bulwark against evildoers past and present is the “secret sisterhood” of White Ladies, who appear to be ordinary washerwomen endowed with extraordinary command of their craft but are in fact somehow more powerful, though in exactly what way the novel wisely never pins down, except to say that they are “not witches, not sorceresses, not healers, not herbalists.” Chief among the White Ladies, at least for the novel’s purposes, is Marianna, who headed the Marat mine’s laundry services for three decades until the site was closed in 2012. While her profession was cleaning and washing, what Marianna really did was “not let places and people become dirty,” and if they did, she cleansed them, even the stains no one else could remove, and in so doing absolved the guilty party:

You would remember all your life how you created that stain, what you spilled, how dirty it was—unless Marianna took pity on you and washed it. It was like going to confession, because an indelible stain, occurring at the most unfortunate hour, […] always carries a hidden guilt, a hidden meaning. It seems to expose something.

The Lady of the Mine takes place over five days in July 2014, interleaving the stories of four characters, three of whom are motivated, to various degrees, by a desire for revenge against Marianna, who dies as the novel begins. Zhanna is Marianna’s 18-year-old daughter who dropped out of college to care for her mother and is now consumed with learning her secrets. Valet is Zhanna’s 23-year-old platonic childhood sweetheart who grew up next door before being exiled from Marat in 2008 on Marianna’s authority. And General Mikhail Stepanovich Korol is a Chechen war veteran who, years earlier, opened a fruitless surveillance investigation of Marianna, whom he referred to as “Snow White.” The fourth POV character, “the Engineer,” has no issues with Marianna as he has been dead for more than 70 years, his body entombed in the abandoned depths of the shuttered Shaft 3/4 that he designed at the start of the 20th century.

Despite his demise, the Engineer relates the all-important history of Shaft 3/4, where he and the other victims are fossilized: “Fossils are material: in them, as in letters, in hieroglyphs, mankind reads the book of being.” At the time of its creation, the Engineer dubbed the mine shaft Sophia, meaning wisdom, making its original incarnation a metaphor for humanity’s insatiable desire, a desire that time and again inadvertently unleashes evil, whether in the biblical tale of Adam and Eve, the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, or J. R. R. Tolkien’s dwarves in the mines of Khazad-dûm. The Engineer dreams of “ushering in an age of prosperity” when he designs his mine shaft “on a Babylonian scale,” making it “the deepest, the widest” ever conceived. But in order to build it, he makes a deal with a devil-like figure, clad entirely in black, and shortly after the mine opens, the consequences of this Faustian bargain come due with the 1905 Russian Revolution. Twenty-seven of the Engineer’s miners are shot during the uprising, their bodies dumped into Shaft 3/4.

These initial victims are retrieved and the mine resumes operation, but “blood had been spilled” and a curse set in motion. Soon more bodies will fill the mine shaft, in numbers that assure they cannot be removed: those executed in the Russian Civil War, those starved to death during the famine known as the Holodomor, those killed by the retreating Red Army during World War II, and finally the region’s Jews, including the Engineer, who in the spring of 1942 are ordered into the mine by the Nazis who have taken control over the territory. Though their “sheer number […] made the thought of killing [them] ridiculous,” they are all shot, their murders documented by a young amateur photographer named Frank Zimmerman. Lebedev likely modeled this massacre on the Nazis’ 1942 slaughter of the Jews in the Donetsk city of Artemivsk, today known as Bakhmut, when an estimated 3,000 people were killed and sealed inside the city’s alabaster mines.

When the Soviets first return to Marat after the war, the Engineer’s fossilized form muses that he and the others will be exhumed, their bodies “consigned to the earth in dignity.” But the Soviets are aware of the evil that lies beneath, and they know not to dig too deep. Instead of trumpeting the Nazis’ crimes to the world and allowing “the primacy of suffering to belong to the Jews,” they install a concrete plug at the top of the mine shaft. Instead of highlighting the evil of “their main enemy,” the Soviets become their equal, and “in the ease with which the evil of murder is multiplied by the evil of its concealment, lies the overlap, the hitch of complicity.”

By the novel’s present day, the Engineer reports that “what, or rather who, was in the shaft” has become a “shared secret.” Snooping around Shaft 3/4 in 2008—and uncovering something that should have remained buried—is what causes Valet to be exiled. He goes to Moscow and trains in his uncle Gregory’s special police regiment, learning how to break up demonstrations. When he returns to Marat on behalf of the Russians in 2014, Valet finds himself in the unaccustomed role of the civilian at rallies, antagonizing the Ukrainian police, though he is “not officially” there. While he imagines he has been elevated by his time in Moscow, Lebedev reveals the young man to be petty and venal, deriving power solely from his desire to inspire fear, the empty power of any bully. At the rallies, Valet and the other militiamen are “looked at without respect, only with apprehension, like they were raving idiots, drug addicts, tripping on bath salts.” He fantasizes about Zhanna but wants to break her will, to take her by force as punishment for the earlier actions of her mother. His father, who was injured in the same 1996 mine collapse that killed Zhanna’s father, remains “crippled,” “as immobile as a stone,” but Valet is still afraid of the man, knowing that “if his father ever recovered and realized what his son had become, he would have thrown him out the house himself.”

Valet’s true nature is revealed when a surface-to-air missile shoots down a passenger plane on the novel’s third day, an event unmistakably echoing the real-life downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, for which three pro-Russian separatists were found guilty in 2022. He even recovers convention materials from a suitcase in the wreckage that refers to the “International Magicians, Illusionists, and Jugglers Association. 17th Annual Congress, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.” Valet yearns to be credited for the successful missile strike since he suggested the SAM unit be concealed near Shaft 3/4, but he settles for the material spoils, rushing to the crash site and looting the luggage of the dead.

General Korol’s plan to confront Marianna, whose death he is unaware of, is delayed when he is tasked with crafting a cover-up for the downed passenger plane, a role similar to one he played after other public relations disasters in Russia’s past. But the general is uninspired, his days as a true believer long gone. Recalling the Korean Airlines plane the Soviets shot down in 1983, Korol observes that “the past had come back. But why did he think that this time would be better?” Maybe Korol was never a zealot, because even when he first arrived in Marat in the mid-1970s, he was confused as to why the Soviets were “covering up the fascist crime” in Shaft 3/4. When he is told what lies below the “comrade Jews,” the general sees a measure of strength in the Soviet’s willingness to hide the crimes of another, but it is the empty strength of Valet and the local militiamen. Korol never becomes comfortable with Shaft 3/4, as evidenced by the fact that it is he who first senses the presence of the Engineer there, a “witness, an impossible, afterlife witness.”

While the above is transpiring, Zhanna is processing the death of her mother, whom Valet helps her hastily bury on the novel’s second day. She had cared for her mother for nine months but had grown increasingly bitter at the circumstances of her obligation. She fell into her role accidentally, leaving university in Kharkiv halfway through her first semester in the winter of 2013 and getting trapped by the outbreak of war and her mother’s illness. In one of countless passages that Bouis renders with a deft, poetic touch, Zhanna describes the onset of her mother’s illness: “Her memory began to falter, twitching, producing clumped, crumpled, repetitive images.” Bouis’s choice to land on the twinned verbs clumped and crumpled is lovely in its lexical evocation of “repetitive images.”

Worst of all, the disease changed Marianna from someone who was known for her ability to get out even the worst stains to someone who was herself dirty—both literally, as she increasingly lost the ability to clean herself and her home, and spiritually, as she began “savoring bloodshed, violence against civilians.” Marianna’s illness is a thinly veiled stand-in for the lies promulgated by the Russian propagandists and their supporters. She rants about the Ukrainian protesters in Kyiv during the Maidan Revolution, calls her daughter a fascist, and tells pro-separatist electoral canvassers who come to the door that her family is abusing her, which makes Zhanna livid: “What had they, the creatures who had invaded from the East, who had brought their damn referendums, done to her mother, her clear, bright, amazing mother?”

On the day the passenger plane is shot down, Zhanna is let in on her mother’s secrets in a dream, gaining insight into “who she was and what she did while pretending that she simply washed other people’s clothes.” But some secrets Marianna concealed are taken to her grave, as with the mystery surrounding the one time she left Ukraine to spend six months in Austria tending to a dying man with the last name of Zimmerman. Armed with her new understanding and a €2,000- tube of lipstick gifted to her by Valet, Zhanna entrances a nightclub full of separatists and their sympathizers, ultimately helping to unleash divine justice and discover her role as her mother’s successor.

Perhaps the most thrilling example of the power of Lebedev’s story and Bouis’s skill, however, comes from the Engineer’s scathing indictment of present-day Russia’s power brokers, whom he pegs as zombies thirsting for “revenge against a world that had dared to sideline them.” The portrait Lebedev paints allows for both optimism about the future, given the moral insubstantiality of many waging the current war, and despair, given the desperation of many of those same fighters. Near the end of the novel, Valet recalls a story Uncle Gregory told him about the mettle a soldier required to win in battle: “you can rely only on men who are ready to kill the well, to kill the land itself, so that nothing else will grow on it, and no memory will remain.” Valet will never be one of those men, despite his desire to be, but every day, the real-world news is full of accounts of another Ukrainian village razed by Russian bombardment. Even if the land itself is killed, however, the fossils will remain, and along with them the memories of what has been done and who must be held to account.