The Writer

Georgiy Georgievich Demidov (1908–1987) was a physicist and writer. Born in Saint Petersburg. Until 1938 he worked in Kharkiv in Landau’s laboratory. He was repressed and ended up in GULAG camps for 16 years. He spent 14 years in Kolyma. Author of novellas and stories about mass repressions.

His surname sounds unusual in Russian. And yet Vladimir Evgenievich Genе was not only a real Russian—he also came from an old Russian noble family. The distant founder of this family likely came from foreigners. But many aristocratic families in Russia, bearing German, French, or Dutch surnames, often turned out to be more Russian in spirit than those descended from pre-Petrine boyars.

His not-too-long life ended for Vladimir Gene in a small half-Nenets settlement lost in the expanses of the Bolshesemelskaya tundra. Here, after long years of hard labor in a polar camp, Gene worked as a collector at one of the geological expeditions that surveyed the coast of the Kara Sea. That is the job title of a collector of rock samples.

The collector was completely alone, and in all of Russia he had not a single relative—or even just a close person. The only exception was a woman living somewhere in Vorkuta with her husband and children. When an opportunity arose, Gene sent her rather bulky packages by mail, always “to be claimed,” not for direct delivery to the addressee. The settlement where the expedition was based was almost on the seventieth parallel and was remote from the comparatively settled areas of the North by nearly three hundred kilometers of bad roads—most of the year these distances could be crossed only by tracked tractors. In those days, in the mid-fifties, not only helicopters, but even all-terrain vehicles had not yet entered widespread use…