Home » Russia » Sergei Lebedev » Белая дама (Lady of the Mine)
Sergei Lebedev: Белая дама (Lady of the Mine)
The Russian title of this book is White Lady which, as we shall see, is apposite. I wonder if the title was changed to avoid confusion with Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White.
The eponymous lady (white/of the mine) is Marianna. She dies during the course of the book but her influence is very much felt.
The setting is Donbas in the Ukraine but which by the time this book opens – July 2014 – is essentially under the control of pro-Russian separatists. There had been a mine there but it has closed down, though many of the locals illegally scavenge for coal. Marianna was in charge of the the mine laundry and not only could she clean anything she was tough. A large local thug pestered the laundresses. She whacked him and sent him on his way. He meekly complied. But then the mine closed.
Marianna had run the laundry for thirty years and when the mine closed she begged the authorities to allow her to run the laundry as a commercial laundry. They refused. For some reason the locals linked the closure of the mine and the closure of the laundry and blamed Marianna.
Marianna has a daughter Zhanna. Marianna had never been sick. Zhanna had gone away to study but returns when her mother gets cancer. Marianna’s husband had died in a mine accident. Zhanna looks after her dying mother. She refuses to go to hospital. Somehow Zhanna cannot get the sheets as clean as her mother could. Coal dust still blows off the slag heaps, leaving a dirty layer everywhere. When they finally took her off to hospital, one of the medics commented Right out of a concentration camp. This is particularly relevant because of Shaft 3/4 which is permanently sealed up. It is an open secret that the shaft contains the bodies of the many Jews murdered by the Nazis.
Marianna/Zhanna had a next door neighbour. The boy was called Valentin and known as Valet. He used to spy on them and was attracted to Zhanna. However he was very scared of Marianna do much so that when his uncle Georgy offered him the chance of training to brcome a police officer elsewhere. he grabbed the chance . The two brothers had gone their own ways, with Georgy remaining in what became Russia while his brother became a Ukrainian national and ended up a cripple after a mining accident.
Valet however is sent back by his uncle to spy on what is going on and cannot really refuse. He arrives home just before Marianna dies and now resumes his interest in Zhanna. However when he sees a giant rocket launcher arrive, he has an idea of what is going to happen. Valet is ambitious. He sees how well his uncle has done and he wants to do well. Firstly he has to be on the other side. He had been a policeman beating up demonstrators in Moscow but here he has to stir up the crowd against the Ukrainian police. He is not impressed with the Ukrainian police nor, indeed, with the Russian authorities here.
Another key character is Korol, now a major-general. Like Valet he had been here when it was part of the Soviet Union. They cleared out many of the files when the Soviet Union collapsed . Apparently the Ukrainians have barely touched them so he has to get the remainder. We follow his previous career in Chechnya. He has past form with Marianna, having suspected her and some of her fellow laundresses of being spies and somehow connected to what is buried in Shaft3/4. He plans to resume his investigations of her. Suddenly it seemed to him that the undeclared war, the seizure of Crimea, the invasion here, in the Donbas, had also happened so that he could return and finish what he had started. he also wonders why the Soviets want to conceal the murder of the Jews. Why not use it to attack the current Germans?
There is also the Engineer who is long since dead but a major commentator nevertheless. We know that he is of German origin, that his father was a palaeontologist and he was mining engineer. His knowledge of both subjects and, of course, Shaft 3.4 lead him to a quasi-mystical concern for not just the murdered Jews but also all those people murdered by the Soviets and even the pre-Soviet Russians. Man disconnected himself from the animals, invented a detached death, walled off by rituals of grief And suddenly he returned to his animal forebears, died like them, cumulatively, impersonally, and was imprinted only in matter.
He was well aware of what happened both to the Jews – he was one of then- but also to the victims of the Russians of various eras. For him what mattered, however, was the mine to which he was devoted and was more important than all the victims buries there, himself included.
Valet is only interested in making a career in the police and, finally, getting Zhanna into bed. Korol (Russian король, which means King) is interested in uncovering plots and is convinced that Marianna and her fellow white ladies are up to something.
And then we have the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shot down, which we had anticipated, which affects the main characters in different ways.
For the author, however, there is more going on and that something can be simplistically described as good vs evil. There is no doubt thst Shaft 3/4 is a symbol of evil, with evil deeds committed and concealed by both Nazis and the various Russians. The White Ladies are symbolic of the cleansing powers of good who, ultimately fail. Evil wins with the MH17 flight shot down, Russia disrupting and as we now know invading Ukraine. While some of the evildoers pay a price, good does not triumph.
Lebedev excels himself in this superb portrait of good vs evil in Nazi-occupied, pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, both in the day-to-day activities but also on a higher mystical plane.
Publishing history
First published in 2024 by Medusa
First published in English in 2025 by New Vessel Press
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis