Arctic Urban Space and Corporeality in Yuliya Nikitina’s Graphic Novel Polunochnaia zemlia

By Anni Lappela

Abstract

This article focuses on Arctic urban spatiality and corporeality in Yuliya Nikitina’s graphic novel Polunochnaia zemlia (2017, “Northern Land”). Bodily experiences and the female body permeate Nikitina’s whole oeuvre, and my reading aims to show how bodily spatial experience constructs Arctic urban space in her works.

I approach spatiality in Nikitina’s novel through two wider questions. First, I discuss how the portrayal of Arctic cities brings up questions concerning Arctic urbanization during the Soviet and post-Soviet era. In relation to that, I investigate how the city of Salekhard’s provinciality is thematized in Nikitina’s novel and how this can be analyzed from the perspective of the role of the provinces in the Russian cultural imagination. Second, I explore how we can approach depictions of Arctic space from the point of view of corporeality. Nikitina’s novel is an autobiographic Bildungsroman of a female artist, and the story of growing up is conveyed through a corporeal imaginary that is related to the spatiality of the novel. Analyzing corporeality in a spatial context, this article discusses the novel’s intimate Arctic experiences in parallel with the historical context of the Russian Arctic. Another important theme in Nikitina’s novel, the relationship between the city and non-built nature, is also related to corporeality.

To contextualize my approach within Nikitina’s oeuvre, I also refer to Nikitina’s other works, particularly the graphic novel Dnevnik shtormov (2019, “A Storm Diary”) and Kniga tela (2015, “Book of Body”), as well as some of her other shorter comic stories.

Keywords: Salekhard, Arctic space, urban space, provincial city, corporeality, Russian comics

Introduction

This article analyses the Arctic urban spatiality and corporeality in Yuliya Nikitina’s graphic novel Polunochnaia zemlia (2017, “Northern Land”), which tells the story of her childhood in the Arctic city of Salekhard and her move to Tyumen and then to Saint Petersburg to study. The article focuses on bodily urban experiences from the perspective of her autobiographical narration. By representing a female body in Arctic surroundings, Nikitina’s graphic memoirs raise questions about the protagonist’s Arctic hometown as a product of Soviet colonialism and challenges historical narratives about the “conquest of the North.” Above all, Polunochnaia zemlia positions the Arctic as an intimate place that the protagonist carries with her everywhere. As Ewa Stańczyk proposes in her research that analyzes debates around Polish comics, comics might help us “to rethink the role of popular culture in nation building, legitimation of power, and citizenship formation, among other processes” (4). In a Russian context, comics can help us contemplate and re-evaluate the role of popular culture in these same processes. In the context of this research, comics are seen as a tool to rethink Soviet Arctic history. Nikitina’s portrayal of Arctic cities offers us one viewpoint of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the early post-Soviet decade from the perspective of an Arctic “periphery”.

Nikitina is an acclaimed artist (Resurrection 203), and her depiction of the Arctic resonates among readers. She received the Kazimir Malevich Award for the best Russian comics in 2018. ¹  Besides Polunochnaia zemlia and Dnevnik Shtormov (2019, “A Storm Diary”), discussed in this article, Nikitina has published several other works. For example, Znaki techeniia (2020, “Flow signs”) includes four comic stories, published originally between 2014–2019. ²  Her latest work is Vremia zhdat (2022, “Time to wait”). In one of his interviews, Dmitrii Iakovlev (the director of the Boomkniga publishing house) offers Yuliya Nikitina and Olga Lavrentieva as examples of talented new comic artistswho can create “big works”, meaning long graphic novels. ³  Nikitina’s works have received abundant positive feedback from readers, and some of them recognize something about their own life in her works. An example is one reviewer on the LiveLib website (where readers can write their reviews under usernames) who writes in her review on Polunochnaia zemlia: “(…) this is the only book that made me cry this year. And it is about me. About a girl, who was born in the Far North (…) The author has a special gift of expressing herself in short, soul-searching sentences. And even without them…” ⁴

The Russian Arctic is a central setting in Nikitina’s work. Salekhard, the setting in Polunochnaia zemlia, is a city where the comic artist Yuliya Nikitina was born in 1988. The city of Salekhard is the administrative center of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, located on the Yamal Peninsula. Salekhard has branded itself as the only city in the world that is located precisely on the Arctic Circle. Currently, there are approximately 47,900 inhabitants in the city (Federal State Statistics Service). According to the Russian 2021 census, almost 36,000 Nenets, the indigenous people of the peninsula, live in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. However, only 3,900 of them live in the cities, while over 32,000 live in the rural areas, which means that only less than 11% of them live in the urban areas.

There are glimpses of the historical “conquest of the North” (osvoenie severa) of the Soviet period in Nikitina’s work. The urbanization of the Russian Arctic is related to and a result of colonial Arctic politics of the Soviet era. Arctic areas have long had a special role in Russia’s geopolitics and cultural imagination, and this role became emphasized in the Soviet period. The Soviet Union started to extensively exploit natural resources in the Arctic and several Arctic cities were founded around mining areas. Prisoners of the Gulag prison camp system have a central role in the Arctic’s colonialism. In the 1930s, prisoners of the Gulag prison camp system built the coalmines and settlement in Vorkuta, and by 1939, there were over 16 000 prisoners in the Vorkuta camp complex (Barenberg 29). During the turn of the 1940s-1950s, Salekhard became the center of the railway mega-project “Transpolar Mainline”, which was constructed by tens of thousands of prisoners whom died in its harsh conditions (Barenberg 15; Suter 2019).

The Arctic was widely represented in Soviet media and culture at this time. In these representations, man’s victory over nature played a central role. As John McCannon argues, the Arctic “became a vital part of Stalinist Russia’s mythic landscape” in the 1930s (241). By the concept of “Arctic myth,” McCannon refers to the extensive cultural production associated with Arctic heroics (241). For the USSR, the Arctic was the country’s last “blank space on the map” (McCannon 242). Osvoenie, the conquest or mastery of space, is a term used to define both pre- and post-revolutionary era attitudes toward the vastness of space (Widdis 221). ⁵  Even though Nikitina starts her story from the late Soviet era, the 1970s, conquest/mastery of the North and the Arctic myth of the Soviet Union are part of the background for her story and reflected in its narration. The relationship between non-built nature and built urban environments transforms in the novel: in some places, they are juxtaposed, in others they are inseparably intertwined. In previous research, Polunochnaia zemlia has been analyzed from the perspectives of memory (Iakovleva 2018) and the image of the province (Saduov, “Oblik rossiiskoi provintsii”). This article instead addresses the multifaceted nature–city relationship as its represented through Nikitina’s Polunochnaia zemlia.

Polunochnaia zemlia tells the story of the protagonist and her mother’s life in Salekhard and the protagonist’s growth as an artist. The first-person narrative is an autobiographical work and can be read as a female artist’s Bildungsroman. The narrator-protagonist begins the story by explicitly defining the novel’s themes: “This book is about my and my mother’s common past and about the North” (PZ 11). ⁶  Here, the mother–daughter relationship, the past, memory, and the North are defined as the main themes of the novel. Furthermore, the body and bodily experiences are foregrounded in the novel’s narration. ⁷  The following analysis discusses these themes with an emphasis on Northern space, approached from an urban angle. Before my urban analysis of Nikitina’s novel, I will briefly discuss the autobiographical genre of Nikitina’s graphic novels in the context of the history of Russian comics.

In the late 1980s, “the Soviet press and book market was increasingly liberalized” (Komiks 79). This affected both text literature and the Russian comics industry. As a leading researcher of Russian comics, José Alaniz proposes that the policies of Perestroika and Glasnost led to the birth of the Russian comics industry (Komiks 80). Still, most of Russia’s comic publishing houses were established in the 2000s (Alaniz, Resurrection 35). In the 2010s, domestic comic culture in Russia was growing rapidly, and the role of comics increased in the nation’s publishing industry (Saduov, “The pursuit of freedom” 122). ⁸  Alaniz proposes that in the 2000s, the autobiographical genre was slowly developing in Russian comics (Komiks 124, 180). He suggests that in Russian comics, a “non-fiction turn” only took place in the 2010s, and, toward the end of the decade, it exploded (Alaniz, Resurrection 113, 202). Autobiographical comics were part and parcel of this so-called “non-fiction turn”. Kseniia Iakovleva observes that since 2019, more Russian comic artists, many of them women, have published autofictional (avtovymysel) comics (163). ⁹  This included Yuliya Nikitina, whose works, published in the 2010s, can be understood as part of this recent “explosion” of non-fiction and autobiographical comics. ¹⁰  Women’s role in the development of the graphic memoir parallels the trends seen in American and Western European comics, where this development happened already earlier. ¹¹  Ewa Stańczyk analyses graphic memoirs written by women in the 2000s in Poland, and proposes that “Polish female graphic novelists do not only focus on intimate themes. They also tackle other important experiences that have wider generational and social resonance” (148). This Eastern European context is especially interesting for this article, and even though my research examines a completely different context and society, the “wider generational and social resonance” Stańczyk observes in Polish graphic memoirs also applies to Nikitina’s comics, which combine intimate experiences with wider themes. Besides that, even though this needs more extensive analysis and data collection, my hypothesis is that Russian female artists have had a significant role in the development of graphic memoirs. Iakovleva’s above referred comment can also be read in this way (164).

Nikitina brings her own spin to the genre of graphic memoirs. Her autobiographical comics concentrate on her early life and its spatial context. Furthermore, the body, illness, and social anxiety have important roles in both Polunochnaia zemlia and Dnevnik shtormov. As El Refaie notes, the body has been a central theme of graphic memoirs from the very beginning of the genre (51). Furthermore, “the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one’s self necessarily involves an intense engagement with embodied aspects of identity, as well as with sociocultural models underpinning body image” (El Refaie 4). In Nikitina’s narration, her concentration on the embodied aspects of identity is intertwined with the spatial aspects of identity, as I show later in my analysis.

The representation of a vulnerable body, or at least the complex and controversial experience of one’s own body, is linked to the protagonist’s ambiguous and difficult experience of the stifling provincial urban space of a post-Soviet city. “The bodily aspect of the self” in autobiographical comics is especially obvious “[i]n the works that deal with adolescence, illness, and/or disability” (El Refaie 8). Nikitina’s coming of age story represents the body of the protagonist in different ages, from a little baby to an adult woman. In Nikitina’s novels, there are several references to health problems. Nikitina’s anxiety disorder is described in Dnevnik shtormov, and she has openly spoken about it in an interview (Alekseeva). In Polunochnaia zemlia, she depicts the protagonists as fearful of a crowd, and an image of doctor-like figures surrounds her, saying: “We do not know what is wrong with you. We can relieve the symptoms, but we need more tests, and…” (PZ 85, 87). In his scholarship, Alaniz analyzes Nikitina’s early comic story Razdelenie (“Schism”), which was published in 2013 and portrays the “ill, disabled and beautiful body” (Resurrection 167, italics in original). Alaniz proposes that this story “affirms that what needs ‘overcoming’ is not disability, illness, or even pain—they are all manifestations of the organic self—but the restrictive, reductive frameworks in which bodies (in particular women’s bodies) are often cast” (Resurrection 169). Such an approach to the body seems to permeate Nikitina’s oeuvre. ¹²

My discussion of the bodily experiences in Polunochnaia zemlia and in Dnevnik shtormov draws on Eszter Szép’s Comics and the Body, particularly the concept of “vulnerability.” The concept of “vulnerability” offers important viewpoints of the body and bodily spatial experiences in Nikitina’s work. Szép states, that “[v]ulnerability is a shared quality based on the simple fact that we all have bodies …” (8-9). ¹³  Szép mainly analyzes trauma narratives, and while Nikitina’s novel is not a trauma narrative, her complicated and often uncomfortable relationship with her past and with her body offers the possibility of reading it through the concept of vulnerability (8). ¹⁴

Different time layers of the city from the 1970s onwards

Nikitina combines, in her portrayal of Salekhard, multifaceted associations with the provinces in a nuanced way. In my analysis of provincial discourse in Nikitina’s works, I draw on Anne Lounsbery and Lyudmila Parts’s scholarship on the role of the provinces and provincial myth in Russian culture. The provinces, or a provincial town, to which “the province” in Russian literature most often refers, became significant settings and originators of tropes in 1830s and 1840s Russian literature and symbolically central to Russian identity. ¹⁵  The provinces in contemporary Russian literature, cinema, and media are represented “as an imagined locale of authentic Russianness” on the one hand, and, on the other, as a stifling and backward periphery (Parts 4).

Nikitina’s province is narrated and seen from a female perspective in Polunochnaia zemlia. The focus is on the mother and the female protagonist herself, and the protagonist’s grandmother also appears early in the novel. Men play only a minor role in the novel (e.g. there is an art teacher in the city of Tyumen and one picture of the father leaving the family when the protagonist is eight years old). In this way, it is possible to read the provincial city of Salekhard as a female, maternal space for the protagonist. According to Franco Moretti, European novels portray villages as places where mothers are always present and “every important relationship takes the form of a family tie” (65). ¹⁶  Even though Moretti does not relate this to the provinces (his focus is on villages), I see Nikitina’s provincial city as a maternal space. We can find connections between provincial location and material spaces in earlier Russian literature. As Tintti Klapuri argues regarding Anton Chekhov’s Betrothed, the provincial space is related to the maternal space, the space where female generations, one after another, repeat the same lifecycles (106-107). ¹⁷  We can also find this kind of maternal association of provincial space elsewhere in Russian literature. ¹⁸

Spanning from the 1970s to the 2010s, Polunochnaia zemlia continuously returns us to the importance of relationships between women. The protagonist’s mother moved to Salekhard in 1977. The protagonist’s relationship with her mother is inseparable from her relationship with her place of birth, Salekhard. Her mother shares her memories with her daughter, helping her remember what she’s forgotten and relate to her cultural roots and traditions (Iakovleva 173). Iakovleva suggests that in Polunochnaia zemlia, the mother consequently acts as “a memory keeper” (177).

In relation to this, that there are several drawn versions not only of the protagonist, but also of her mother. As noted earlier, autobiographical comics often produce several drawn versions of the self, to which El Refaie terms “pictorial embodiment” (8). Besides representation of the mother, there are also images of mother’s mother (PZ 19). All these images represent “signposts” for the artist’s construction of transgenerational memories, an interpretation which I draw from Dana Mihăilescu, who analyses the multiple portraits of the protagonist’s grandmother in Amy Kurzweil’s work (100). ¹⁹  In Nikitina’s graphic memoir, there is an image of the protagonist’s mother as a young woman (from the era before the protagonist was born) moving to Salekhard with her first husband (PZ 18), followed by images of her as a late, middle-aged woman, when the protagonist is already an adult (PZ 55-56), as well as several other images showcasing her in different periods of her life. The only panels in which the mother’s mother appears are the ones where she comments to the mother, who is moving to Salekhard, that “[e]arlier they expelled people there, but you are going by yourself” (PZ 19). As Saduov points out, during the Soviet era, many young people moved to the North to build their lives, like the protagonist’s parents, while the younger, post-Soviet generations wished to leave the North to build their lives elsewhere (“Oblik rossiiskoi provintsii” 355). The experiences of the North are different for these three generations of women: the grandmother sees it as a place of exile, where no one goes voluntarily; and the mother sees it is a place where she arrived at, like several others from her generation, to make a home—even though she confesses that, for her, home still means Ural (PZ 16-17). For the protagonist, it really is her hometown and a place with which she should build a balanced relationship. Furthermore, it is important to notice that Nikitina visually represents bodily origin of the mother–daughter relationship; Nikitina pictures the protagonist as a child and a teenager in her mother’s womb (PZ 9). Here, the visually portrayed bodily connection between female generations guides the reader to understand the transgenerational memory they share and the sense of belonging they have through their bodily experiences.

In Polunochnaia zemlia, the changes in the city space and reality around the city are reflected through the narrator’s memories and her mother’s memories from times before her daughter was born. The story begins with the narrator telling the reader how her mother had worked in the port of Salekhard since the 1970s. This decade was a busy one in the history of the port and the city because it was the time when the settlements at Nadym and Urengoy were growing and construction materials and other products were transported to them from the port of Salekhard (PZ 21). The growth of both settlements is related to the discovery of oil and gas on the Yamal Peninsula at that time. The chapter, entitled “The River,” includes five pages consisting of 16 panels that are dedicated to the river port. The protagonist describes her mother’s work in the port and says that her mother “gave forty years of her life to the river” (PZ 25). The narrator continues to describe how things have changed in the town of Salekhard and notes that the passenger port has been relocated (25). Saduov relates this “giving forty years to the river” to some episodes of the novel in which the narrator reflects on the abandoned villages of the North and the people who lived and worked there (“Oblik rossiiskoi provintsii” 354). In Saduov’s view, these thoughts about earlier generations and their work in places that do not exist anymore emphasizes the sense that these places are forgotten (“Oblik rossiiskoi provintsii” 354).

Besides the port, the most visible reminders of the Soviet past of the city of Salekhard are the wooden houses, which are visually represented in the first three chapters and also feature later in the novel. Today, only some of these houses are left in the city center; many new, colorful multistory buildings were built during the 2000s. The protagonist seems to be commenting on this newly built city center at the beginning of the novel when she says: “For me, Salekhard always seemed to be a colorful stage setting of a city. The real city turned out to be grey and difficult” (PZ 14). One can read this statement as a reflection on the contrast between the “real”, referential city space, which is rather colorful nowadays, and the narrator’s urban experience, which is multi-layered and depressing. In this way, the novel emphasises the complexity of urban space: the referential space, people’s experience of the space, and representations of the space all together produce urban space. ²⁰

The protagonist’s attempt to understand how her life and her development as an artist are affected by the place she was born in is a central theme in the novel. Analysing her thoughts about her hometown in the context of provincialism can help us to understand how the northern city is experienced as a provincial location. Wooden houses and the city skyline appear in the graphic novel’s panels when the protagonist wanders alone in the outskirts of the city and asks: “Would it be easier if I was someone else?” (PZ 82, see Figure 1). In the last panel on that page, she concludes: “I would like to be someone else” (82). Before that, the narrator discussed with an experienced artist where to search for the tools for artistic work. The narrator contemplates if it is necessary to search for the tools for artistic work in one’s childhood experiences—in one’s roots (proiskhozhdenie) (PZ 81). She wishes to be someone else, and her previous thought about the significance of her place of birth guides the reader to understand the sentence “I would like to be someone else” as “I would like to be somewhere else” (my italics). Her provincial, northern hometown seems, in her opinion, a limiting place. This somehow narrows down her life and possibilities.

The spatial limitedness and narrowness of provincial life are already familiar from the 1830s and 1840s, when the trope of provinces formed in Russian literature. ²¹)  The storyline of female protagonists leaving their provincial hometown to study is familiar to us in 19th century literature. ²²  While in 19th-century Russian literature the female protagonist leaving the provinces to study is often related to the “woman question” of the 1860s, female liberation, Nikitina’s novel frames her departure as indicative of an individual’s need for freedom. ²³  Furthermore, the provinces had a mainly negative connotation in 19th-century literature, which often “depicted provinciality as the tastelessness or philistinism or backwardness of provincial Others.” (Lounsbery 31). The echoes of these connotations can be read in Nikitina’s protagonist’s perceptions.

The protagonist does not want to accept her past in a snowy little city as a meaningful part of her past and her growth as an artist, and the graphic novel depicts her journey of negotiating her relationship with her hometown and the North. Iakovleva, in her article about the role of memory in Nikitina’s Polunochnaia zemlia, relates the problems of memory to the novel’ssetting: she proposes that, for Nikitina, memory has a significant role, but the problem for her protagonist is that she has so few good memories of her childhood, remembering mostly coldness, snow and poverty (165). Iakovleva argues that for the protagonist, her past is, in some sense, “empty”: filled with poverty, illness, and life in a small city (165). Relating the little town to emptiness recalls the image of a provincial city in the Russian cultural imagination, often characterized by a feeling of stagnation, an absence of real life, and symbolic emptiness (see Lounsbery 233-5). ²⁴  Still, in the novel, the protagonist eventually accepts her provincial hometown as an important part of her life story, as I argue later in this article, and it ends up not being so “empty” for her. Thus, the provincial northern town acquires new meanings during the novel as the protagonist further explores her relationship with it.

The changing city from the 1990s to the 2000s

When portraying the childhood and adolescence of the protagonist in Salekhard in the 1990s and early 2000s, the narration brings up the economic disaster and political turmoil of 1990s Russia. Many of the protagonist’s memories about the near past are very physical and depicted visually as bodily experiences. Iakovleva pays attention to this bodily memory in her analysis, arguing that memory or its absence is understood “as a physical feeling” in Nikitina’s novel (166). ²⁵

In understanding the protagonist’s spatial experience, the concept of scale is important. At the beginning of Polunochnaia zemlia’s second chapter, the narrator explains why she sees Salekhard as different from other cities: “It seems that life in the city resembles life in other cities, but… Harsh nature surrounds us from every side, and it does not allow us to forget it.” (PZ 29, see Figure 2.) The city and the nature ²⁶  around it are both verbally and visually juxtaposed in this one-page panel. The embodied experience of northern coldness is hence tightly linked to the representation of life in the city and to the nature around it. Furthermore, in this panel, the map of the city is portrayed behind the protagonist’s body (see Figure 2). Here, the scale of the human body and scale of the city are depicted within the same picture while the context of the Arctic tundra (“harsh nature surrounds us”) is verbally present. Different levels of scale are visualized in a single image, and zooming out from the scale of the human body to the scale of Arctic wilderness happens in both the words and the images on the page. ²⁷  Jason Finch’s scholarship applies the concept of scale to clarify the relationship between different aspects of location. Through his framework, we can see pairings such as the center and the periphery, or big and small, not dichotomized but rather seen as related through scale (Finch 214). In Nikitina’s graphic memoirs, the scales of the human body, the provincial city, and the whole country all contribute to the protagonist’s understanding of the Arctic and how she feels it as part of her.

As mentioned earlier, this article examines the relationship between space and the body from a point of view of vulnerability. I understand vulnerability here, drawing loosely from Szép (8-9), as a state of having a body, and, more precisely, as having a body which suffers from anxiety, insecurity, discomfort, and cold. Vulnerability can also refer to the protagonist’s feelings of sensitivity and uncertainty. Szép argues, that “… vulnerability can be more than a central topic of nonfiction comics—it can also be seen as a central experience expressed by drawing” (50). I propose that this is what happens in Nikitina’s comics, which often represent (visually and/or verbally) feelings related to living in a body.

The experience of the cold is part of 1990s city life. In the graphic novel’s narration, the coldness of the North is linked to the protagonist’s experience of vulnerability and her struggle to understand the meaning of her hometown for her art and her development in various ways. Similarly to Szép, who analyzes Linda Barry’s comic What It Is and argues that the “comic shows that being able to accept one’s vulnerable state is a necessary step on the way to creation,” I propose that Nikitina’s work portrays a similar situation, in which the acceptance of one’s own vulnerability is key to creating comics (71).

The narrator explains that in the 1990s, lighting and heating were often switched off (PZ30). This serves as one more example of the relationship between coldness and vulnerability. Her mother tells her that the cold then was nothing compared to the times when the three-year-old protagonist walked on the iced-over kitchen floor (PZ 31). ²⁸  According to the mother, back then, the protagonist was often ill. They experienced the cold weather conditions even inside the home, which could not protect the vulnerable, human body from the elements. Later on, Nikitina connects both coldness as a bodily experience and the city space: the narrator is lying on her bed as the snow falls on her, forming a blanket, and blocks of flats rise from the snowy ground in the background (PZ 80). The protagonist is not interested in examining her memories, where there are, according to her, only snow and coldness—which she would rather forget (PZ 78,79). These texts and images together reflect the way the protagonist wants to deny her past. Later, when she accepts the snow and the North as a significant part of her past, she also accepts her vulnerability. Here, vulnerability is understood as the protagonist’s physical way of remembering and her difficulty of accepting herself as she is.

Corporeal spatiality and coldness also feature in Dnevnik shtormov. The protagonist is having period cramps on the Vorkuta–Labytnangi train and believes that her period is two weeks early because of the stress and cold (DSh 130). Besides this experience of physical pain, there are also references to the protagonist’s anxiety disorder in both novels, as mentioned earlier. In Dnevnik shtormov, the protagonist says, “Only at the age of 27 I learned that constant feeling of anxiety is an illness, and it can and should be cured” (DSh 13). In both novels, the narrator suggests that perhaps she had an easier time in the small town of Salekhard than in bigger cities. In Dnevnik shtormov, when thinking about her anxiety disorder after moving to the city of Tyumen, the protagonist suggests that perhaps it would be better if she had stayed in her birthplace, “[a] small town. Rhythm, schedule, routines” (DSh 13). In these reflections, the motif of disorder (anxiety) is related to the experience of the city space. The bodily experience of urban surroundings thus appears highly significant for Nikitina’s narration: it is related to the physical experience of memories, the physical experience of coldness in the North, and to the theme of illness/disorder. Furthermore, the small town represents a safe, maternal, provincial place, a kind of comfort zone, which the protagonist leaves for the wider world. However, for her protagonist, leaving the province is the only way to understand herself better, and, as part of the process, a return to the provincial city is also necessary or inescapable. This is partly similar to Anton Chekhov’s Betrothed, in which the provincial space is a location that the protagonist should escape, as well as somewhere she comes back to after some time; it seems that she “has not been able to completely break free from the grasp of the town …” (see Klapuri 118-9). Still, in Nikitina’s story, coming back to the provincial hometown carries a different meaning since the protagonist needs to accept the town as a part of her life story, and thus it is not portrayed in a negative light.

The poverty of the 1990s is further portrayed through memories of food that have a spatial dimension in the narration, since they are linked to urban space. The narrator remembers how her mother bought reindeer meat, which they ate with bread (PZ 34). In the panels, the protagonist is portrayed taking rubbish, including reindeer bones left from the food, to the trashcans on the street (PZ 34). In six panels, (presumably) homeless dogs are looking for food from these trashcans and eating the reindeer bones they find (PZ 34-35). These hungry stray dogs seem to emphasize the economic problems of the 1990s. ²⁹

Polunochnaia zemlia’s last chapter focuses on the protagonist’s reminiscences of the 1990s. The little hometown of Salekhard is contrasted with other parts of Russia and represented as remote from the mainland, where, as the narrator says, “there was always something bad happening” (PZ 131). In one image, the protagonist and her mother are watching TV, and some words in speech balloons from the TV appear. These words are “murder,” “Chechnya,” “death,” “explosion,” “crisis,” and “no money” (PZ 130). These key words, characterizing 1990s Russia in the protagonist’s memories, paint the collapse of the Soviet Union, assorted crises in the 1990s, and the war in Chechnya as the story’s backdrop. Here, the city of Salekhard is depicted as a safe place admist the chaos of the 1990s, far away from the problems on the “mainland.” Hence, the provincial town is depicted as temporally separate from the “mainland.” It also seems to be a maternal, safe place for the protagonist as a child. This representation of Salekhard in Nikitina’s narration allows for a representation of provincial space, familiar in 19th century literature, in which the provinces are not even seen as part of the same timeline as the capital cities (see Lounsbery 26). ³⁰  Still, at the same time, as Nikitina shows, the problems of the 1990s also touch Salekhard, which makes this relationship with the “mainland” ambiguous.

Nikitina also portrays later changes in the Arctic territories during the early 2000s in Polunochnaia zemlia. The narrator says: “People often think that Yamal means cities: Salekhard, Nadym, Urengoi… But actually Yamal is full of waste lands and villages. Many of them are abandoned nowadays” (PZ 136). She explains how the strategy of encouraging migration to the North no longer worked when it was too expensive to maintain schools, hospitals, and other services there (PZ 138). Her example is the village of Poliarnyi, abandoned in 2004. Here, Nikitina seems to refer to the worsening economic situation of the new Russia in the 1990s, when the federation could no longer direct resources to support the northern territories (Helanterä and Tynkkynen 40). Consequently, the economic situation in these regions developed in diverse ways depending on whether there were extractive industries in the region or not (Laruelle 3-4).

The decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union form the historical context of Nikitina’s story. This can be seen in the historical changes that makes northern provincial towns “narratable”: as it has been argued, the historical push towards modernization, “is the condition through which the province or region becomes narratable” (Duncan 323). ³¹  Even though Nikitina’s focus is on intimate memories and experiences, this context of modernization frames the story. This historical period marked by rapid change is the background for the episode in which the protagonist sometimes hears the voices of people who once lived in the now-abandoned villages (PZ 139). We see a panel depicting an abandoned village with some industrial-looking buildings (PZ 139). Here, Arctic spatiality gains a new layer in Nikitina’s narration: besides lively cities and the wilderness of the tundra, it is also about abandoned ghost villages, where the history of exploration and exploitation of the Arctic is visible.

Abandoned villages and industrial areas are also portrayed in Nikitina’s graphic novel Dnevnik shtormov. In this novel, Nikitina discusses, though not in a detailed way, the dark history of the Soviet Arctic in the 1930s. Dnevnik shtormov is a travel diary depicting the protagonist’s journey from Salekhard to the city of Vorkuta and the Kara Sea. While Vorkuta is not central in the story, one chapter describes how the protagonist gets to know the city and the mining villages around it. From a decolonial perspective, it is significant that the Gulag history of the urbanized North is touched on, and this brief depiction of it in Nikitina’s work contributes (or at least refers) to that topic’s discussion in contemporary Russian comics. ³²  The narrator mentions memorials to dead miners and people who lived in Gulag prison camps in Vorkuta (see Figure 3). Some of these monuments are also visually portrayed in a full-page panel (DSh 102). Monuments in the shape of a cross remind the reader how the conquest of the North was carried out using the forced labor of prisoners, costing many lives.

The narrator also describes the empty, abandoned villages around the city of Vorkuta, and the history of the coal mining industry around the city. She mentions that there were thirteen mines, with villages around them, in the 1970s, but that only four of them are still operational, and only two villages are still in existence (DSh 101). She states that travelling through these villages around Vorkuta is like travelling through time (DSh 102, see Figure 3). The protagonist sees the abandoned houses around Vorkuta and comments: “The country that constructed Vorkuta and the villages around it, and governed their development, just disappeared. But the memory remains” (DSh 106). She also notes the radical shrinking of the population in Vorkuta from the 1990s until the present day (DSh 97). ³³  The feeling of traveling through time refers to the fact that in Vorkuta, the city milieu has not been significantly modernized since the Soviet era. Mentioning that (after the collapse of the USSR) the memory of it remains brings up themes of remembering and memorizing, which are common to both Polunochnaia zemlia and Dnevnik shtormov. In the latter, the protagonist seems to try to remain merely an observer, leaving space for the reader to interpret what kind of memories remain. Dnevnik shtormov’s references to the past are more related to the observations of the protagonist about the history of the Soviet era and the historical layers of the city space and its surroundings. In Polunochnaia zemlia, memorizing is a more personal and intimate experience. What these novels share in their representation of the past is a scaled portrayal of the Soviet past: historical events and processes are narrated in parallel with personal experiences. ³⁴  These historical contexts in the background of Nikitina’s story recall the way in which Stańczyk describes Polish female graphic memoirs that portray the childhood against a backdrop of a huge historical upheaval (146). ³⁵  Drawing from these observations, I suggest that one fruitful direction for further research on Russian graphic memoirs would be analyses of wider material describing the post-socialist era childhood. Visual representations of the built environment in Nikitina’s graphic memoirs often remind the reader of these historical periods, while the textual narration either adds to this or focuses on the more personal relationship with these places (and times). Furthermore, we should keep in mind, that the intimate and, at the same time, universal experience of growing up and finding one’s own place in the world, is always more central; the story of the country changing is only in the background.

The 2000s and the developing city

Booming Oil and gas industries during the 2000s have greatly benefited the city of Salekhard, often said to be one of the richest cities in Russia per capita (Suter). Polunochnaia zemlia depicts the development of Salekhard in the 2000s in several places, the most salient being those panels depicting the bridge Fakel (“Torch”) with its panorama restaurant on top of it (PZ 56-57). The form of the bridge, opened in 2004, symbolizes a gas torch. Hence, oil and gas fields are symbolically represented as a part of the city space.

The oil and gas industry are part of Polunochnaia zemlia’s narration in a less explicit way. In addition to Salekhard, Nikitina describes Tyumen ³⁶  and Saint Petersburg, the two cities in which the narrator continues her studies. While Tyumen is not located in the Arctic, it benefited from the oil and gas discovered on the Yamal Peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s (Suter). This change in Tyumen after 2000 is portrayed verbally and visually in the graphic novel. In the text, Tyumen is described as a continuously expanding city (PZ 67). The meadows where the narrator used to wander during her studies do not exist anymore because new blocks of houses and streets have replaced them (PZ 68). It is obvious that the oil industry is behind this urban development, even though this is not explicitly discussed in the narration. ³⁷  In the Tyumen chapter, there is also a page whose layout is of significant note: the top and bottom panels show an image of a meadow, and between them there is an image of the city space (PZ 67). This “dichotomizing page design” emphasizes the contrasting juxtaposition of urban and non-urban space. ³⁸  This juxtaposition is obvious both in the visual and verbal narration.

Similar visual dichotomies can also be found elsewhere in Nikitina’s works, and they, among other things, often emphasize the tension between the city and nature. In Polunochnaia zemlia, the chapter “Reka” (“River”) includes a panel with a river, and the protagonist’s mother is standing on the bank. Below it, there is a bigger panel with an image of the port (PZ 22). In the comic Moia babushka stala zemliankoi (“My grandmother turned into strawberry”, 2019, published in the collection Znaki techeniia), the protagonist expresses her longing for nature, which is understood as something that is disappearing, taken over by urban buildings. The protagonist describes how “asphalt has swallowed the land” and “there is glass and concrete everywhere” (Nikitina, Znaki techeniia 84). Similarly to Moia babushka, in Polunochnaia zemlia the protagonist observes how cities are a destructive force against natural space. Thus, the protagonists in Nikitina’s different comics are conscious of how much man modifies nature by building cities and industrial areas. In addition, the way in which Nikitina draws attention to the abandoned villages around Vorkuta and the recent development of Salekhard directs the reader’s attention to the contrast between these two cities. Even though their economies are both based on the production of fossil fuels (coal in Vorkuta and oil and gas in Salekhard), they have different future prospects because of their different degrees of dependence on fossil fuels. ³⁹

Furthermore, their use of “dichotomizing page design” and other visual ways to juxtapose different time periods of the protagonist’s life are examples of the “spatial nature of comics medium” (El Refaie 95) and the way in which this allows Nikitina to “keep previous scenes physically before the reader after the narrative has moved on” (Witek 43; see also El Refaie 114). In Nikitina’s autobiographical work, this kind of juxtaposition alongside her use of shifts through time reflect “the workings of memory” (see El Reafaie 101) and incorporate a more chronological attempt to organize the story.

Corporeal experiences of the non-built Arctic

As we have seen, a corporeal experience of the environment, both built and non-built, is a typical feature of Nikitina’s portrayal of different places. Earlier in this article, I analyzed examples related to the built environment. In what follows, I will focus on some depictions of the corporeal experience of non-built nature. I agree with Iakovleva, who relates these corporeal experiences to the physical nature of memory and memorizing (166). As discussed earlier, autobiographical comics rely on multiple drawn versions of self; these versions of self in Nikitina’s narration are often tied with surrounding urban or non-urban, natural spaces in metaphorical and “realistic” ways. Furthermore, I argue that these bodily experiences also contribute to the scaled nature of spatial experience in the narration.

The scale of body is represented when the graphic novel includes panels in which the protagonist is depicted wearing Arctic flora and the darkness of the Arctic polar night (or the Ob River) as two different dresses (Figure 4). These elements appeared in preceding panels before being repeated on the protagonist’s clothing. In the first few panels, the protagonist is packing these two dresses into a suitcase. The second panel is partly painted in black and partly covered with the ornament-like Arctic flora from the other dress. These panels are combined with the declaration: “This is what I take with me everywhere: my childhood in Salekhard, enclosed northern world” (PZ 148-49). It is thus logical to understand these dresses as synecdoches representing northern darkness and the northern land. In other words, the dresses are narrative forms that create the spatiality of the novel, and the verbal narration relates these synecdoches specifically to the city of Salekhard.

Nikitina’s works often feature a female figure with plants or other natural elements, like water, decorating her body or growing from it. In Polunochnaia zemlia and Dnevnik shtormov, there are images in which water is depicted as an ornament on the protagonist’s body. For example, in Dnevnik shtormov, the first image in the chapter “Narrator” depicts the protagonist’s profile, filled with river-like decorations and something resembling waving plants (DSh 5). This closely resembles the image of the protagonist in Polunochnaia zemlia (Figure 4).

In Polunochnaia zemlia, in one panel, the long dark hair of the protagonist spreads behind her as the delta of the Ob River (PZ 115). There are also several panels in Polunochnaia zemlia in which the delta of the Ob and northern territories are depicted from above, from a bird’s eye perspective (Figure 5), and together these images emphasize the importance of the river and visually relate the river to the body, the large Northern territories, and the city.

In the portrayal of Salekhard, the river seems to bind nature and culture (represented through the city) together rather than making them oppositional forces. Nikitina’s river Ob is depicted as closely connected with the life of the city and its inhabitants, such as with the protagonist’s mother’s life (e.g. the depiction of the mother working in the river port all of her life), and it is also depicted as part of Arctic nature. ⁴⁰  Still, as we have seen earlier, the relationship between untouched nature and built city space is often portrayed as an opposition in some parts of the novels. Thus, I propose that the nature–city relationship in the novels is not fixed and remains open to different interpretations.

The nature-city relationship Nikitina explores within the spaces of her graphic novels is represented also through the protagonist’s body. Sometimes, when the protagonist thinks of her relationship with the North, she is visually located in the landscape as a part of it. When she thinks about her roots, she is visually growing real roots into the ground in the image (PZ 42). Nikitina’s visual narration creates spatial metaphors in which the protagonist is visually located inside a metaphorical structure. ⁴¹  And, the other way round, parts of the landscape are located in the body of the protagonist, as those water decorations mentioned above. The different spatial metaphors in Nikitina’s book create a bigger space that is the North, in which urban and non-urban spaces are two aspects of the same whole. ⁴²  Furthermore, depicting the body and the Arctic nature as one whole can be interpreted as comparing the vulnerable body and vulnerable Arctic nature with each other. The intertwining of plants and other natural elements with the body invite the reader to contemplate the protagonist’s experience of connectedness to the surrounding environment, the boundaries between the human and the non-human, and the vulnerability of both. ⁴³  In these spatial metaphors, Nikitina reflects the protagonist’s “innermost sense of self” ⁴⁴ : her journey to understand how she actually sees her place (or places) in the world.

In one of the last panels of the novel Polunochnaia zemlia, there is an image of the protagonist’s hand, decorated with Arctic plants like tattoos, reaching towards the North. The text reads: “I am the arrow of the compass, always pointing to the North,” combining Northern flora, corporeality and spatial experience, and the geographical and metaphorical North (PZ 147). This apparently synthetic image seems to contradict the protagonist’s earlier statement that one’s place of birth does not mean anything; here, the fact of being born in the North seems to give a special meaning to her whole identity. Furthermore, it again makes visible the different scales of space and spatial experience: the scale of the human body and hand and the scale of the vast North, this time remaining as an abstraction. While both scales are significant when examining Nikitina’s visual and narrative portrayal of the Arctic, the scale of the body is always the starting point.

Conclusions

In this article, I have shown that with the vulnerable body as a starting point, the city of Salekhard is represented as a provincial city that both rejects and alienates the protagonist, but also draws her towards it. She is forced to recreate and reconsider her relationship with her hometown to become herself and to grow as an artist, and this recreation happens through corporeal metaphors and memories, which are often tied to physical bodily experiences.

The protagonist’s relationship with the North and northern nature are described as very intimate, and this intimacy is emphasized by using corporeal metaphors. This corporeality and several drawn versions of the self are related to the genre of the coming-of-age story, to which Nikitina’s novel Polunochnaia zemlia belongs. Transgenerational memories about Salekhard talk about the change of the North. Nikitina’s graphic memoirs, even though focusing on intimate and personal experiences, also construct, in their background, the story of the change of the Arctic and the Arctic’s cities across periods of time.

This article shows that the city and the non-built environment are sometimes opposed in Nikitina’s graphic novel, but they are also seen as one whole, and thus these two different ways of seeing the relationship between the city and the non-built environment coexist in Nikitina’s novel. Furthermore, I examine how Nikitina uses the spatial nature of comics, juxtaposing images from different temporalities of the protagonist’s life, to imitate the act of memory. The protagonist realizes at the end of the story that she wants to travel, to be on the move, and her hometown becomes something she carries with her everywhere in her bodily memories.

Works Cited 

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Footnotes

1. Yamal Media, 28 June 2018. https://yamal-media.ru/news/32292. Last accessed 1 July 2023.↺
2. Polunochnaia zemlia has been translated into French and extracts of Dnevnik Shtormov have lately been translated into English. The French translation of Enfant de la nuit polaire, by Hélène Harry Melo, was published by La Boîte à bulles in 2023, and the English extracts from Storm diary, were also published in 2023, in the journal Shenandoah, Spring 2023 Issue 72.2, see here: https://shenandoahliterary.org/722/storm-diary-2019-english/. Accessed 2 July 2023.↺
3. “Novoe slovo: Russkii komiks kak sredstvo samovyrazheniia”, Tochka Art, 26 October 2020.  https://magazineart.art/book/novoe-slovo-russkij-komiks-kak-sredstvo-samovyrazhenija/. Accessed 2 July 2023.↺
4. LiveLib: https://www.livelib.ru/author/550661/reviews-yuliya-nikitina. Accessed 2 July 2023. Here and later translations from Russian are mine.↺
5. According to Widdis, the term osvoenie is used to define “the transformation of unknown and untamed into the known and enlightened” (221).↺
6. This and all other translations from Russian (and from Finnish) originals are by the present author, unless otherwise specified.↺
7. In her interviews, Nikitina herself discusses the importance of the body in her works. In an interview with Alekseeva in Regnum, she says: “For me the theme of living in the body is one of the most important.”↺
8. It is important to note that while Russian scholars began to take an interest in comics in the late 1990s, the proper rise of comic studies in Russia only took place in the 2010s (Alaniz, Komiks 80, 105; Alaniz, Resurrection 113).↺
9. Besides Nikitina, Iakovleva lists Ol’ga Lavrent’eva (see later in this article), Daria Petushok, Tamri and others as examples of female Russian comic artists, who have lately produced autobiographical comics (164).↺
10. Both Alaniz and Iakovleva see autobiographical and autofictional Russian comics as a recent phenomenon. There are, of course, some early predecessors, such as Viktor Maslov’s autobiographic graphic novel, Une Jeunesse Sovietique, published in French in 2004. It tells the story of a poor, provincial, self-taught comic artist, and it caused a scandal at the time of publishing (Alaniz, Komiks 182-85). Many Russian comic artists did not appreciate the way Maslov portrayed Russia as a backward Siberian province, offering Western readers old stereotypes about Russia (Alaniz, Komiks 184).↺
11. Elizabeth El Refaie argues, that “[f]emale comics creators also had a big influence on the early development of the graphic memoir” (38).↺
12. Besides issues concerning the body, health problems are also present in most of Nikitina’s works. As we can see already in the story’s title, the body is also very much present in Nikitina’s comics Kniga tela (“The book of body”, 2014) and in the story Betrothed (“Quiet voices”, 2018). Kniga tela represents the—often suffering—female body, by using silent narration, and there are also images of the body in hospital, with no explanation of why she is there. Betrothed describes the beginning of the healing process of a protagonist who cannot tolerate the noisiness of the world.↺
13. Following Szép, I understand vulnerability not as a negative condition but as a universal feeling (113). Szép refers to Judith Butler, who insists “on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself.” (Butler 31; see also Szép 9).↺
14. Szép understands comics as encounters between two embodied agents, “a vulnerable drawer and a vulnerable reader” (8). Furthermore, Szép proposes that “[v]ulnerability is experienced in a dialogue: The nature of the interaction with me defines how the Other experiences his or her vulnerability—and the nature of the interaction with the Other defines how I experience my vulnerability” (13). ↺
15. Lounsbery argues, that “the provinces became symbolically central to Russian identity” thanks to Nikolai Gogol, and that in his works, the province “clearly serves as a way of raising questions about Russian identity more broadly” (79-80).↺
16. Moretti separates village, province, and capital from each other and identifies this maternal relationship within the village. But I think that it is possible to widen this interpretation to apply to the provinces too if we think of examples from Russian classical literature relating to the provinces.↺
17. Klapuri analyzes provincial space in Anton Chekhov’s short story Betrothed, where the protagonist is Nadia Shumina, a young provincial woman (106-107). As Klapuri proposes: “Shumin family house would evoke connotations of maternal shelter: since it is inhabited exclusively by women (…)” (106). Still, it is important to keep in mind, as Klapuri argues, the family consisting of three women, like Nadia’s, is a rather rare combination for Chekhov (106). Nadia wants to escape the life aspirations set out for her, which, in the provinces, are similar to those of previous female generations (Klapuri 107).↺
18. Klapuri also discusses how, in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Boarding-School Girl, Veretitsyn helps the protagonist Lelenka see the narrow-mindedness of her provincial hometown, and that of her mother, too (120).↺
19. Nikitina’s story from Arctic Russia and Kurzweil’s story of a third-generation Holocaust survivor are obviously different, but the theme of remembrance of the past and transgenerational female memory allows one to draw some theoretical parallels. ↺
20. Here I apply Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space (33).↺
21. E.N. Stroganova states that the concept of the provinces formed in Russian literature in the 1830s and 1840s, and that “[t]he spatial distance of provincialism from the center, its isolation from the main circle of life, leads to an idea of the spatial limitedness, the narrowness of provincial life and – as a consequence – to a metonymic transfer of these attributes to its spiritual state.” (203↺
22. Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Boarding-School Girl and Anton Chekhov’s Betrothed are the most well-known examples.↺
23. See Rosenholm on the woman question. Rosenholm sees Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Pansionerka (The Bording-School Girl) as a Bildungsroman, and her analysis focuses on the female liberation, education, and desire (447). The protagonist Lelenka, is a female provincial, making herself a career in Saint Petersburg, and “[s]he is a representative of the cultural type of ’learned woman‘, whose voice echoes the thrilling promises of education and independent labour for the New Woman (…)” (Rosenholm 447).↺
24. Anne Lounsbery discusses the symbolic emptiness of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Gogol’s provinces in her research, but she sees that there is an emphasis on the trivial material things that fill this emptiness of provincial life (233-5).↺
25. Iakovleva, who compares Nikitina’s graphic novel with Elodie Durand’s graphic novel La Parenthèse, proposes that “[b]oth authors understand the memory (or absence of it) as a physical feeling” (166).↺
26. “Nature” is a term that has different meanings in different contexts. My aim is not to set city or culture in opposition to “nature,” as these are, in contemporary ecocritical research, seen as parts of the same whole. Still, I analyze how Nikitina’s narration sometimes sets them in opposition. I use the term “nature” here as Alla Bolotova uses it in her anthropological study: “nature” means, in the usage of local northern inhabitants, the area outside of the city and is experienced as the opposite of urban life (657).↺
27. Jason Finch takes as his example of the poetics of scale George Perec’s text Species of Spaces. He argues that Perec “sweeps through different levels of size in an effort to grasp the totality – which is also multiplicity – of the human experience of place” (Finch 37).↺
28. Saduov also pays attention to the episode in which the protagonist walks on the kitchen floor that is covered in ice (“Oblik rossiiskoi provintsii” 354). He states that “the difficult climatic conditions reflect also on the daily conditions of life of the inhabitants of the North, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Saduov, “Oblik rossiiskoi provintsii” 354). Thus, he argues that life in the North became more difficult after the collapse of the Soviet Union.↺
29. It is useful to remember that there is still a problem with stray dogs in Russia, so this is not just a problem of the past but also an ongoing one.↺
30. According to Lounsbery, in the 19th century literary imagination, the provinces “… are stuck in a kind of jumbled-up a-chronology, not even located along the same timeline as the capitals and the West” (26).↺
31. Ian Duncan speaks about this in the context of the European provincial novel.↺
32. In Russian comic art, the most significant example of discussing Gulag history is Olga Lavrentyeva’s autobiographical graphic novel Survilo (2019), which describes the author’s grandmother’s memories. The grandmother’s father was deported to a gulag prison camp and shot there. The grandmother and mother were considered family members of an “enemy of the people.” There are also other examples (see Alaniz, Resurrection 202-3).↺
33. The population of Vorkuta has shrunk from 117,000 inhabitants in 1991 to 60,000 at the time of writing the book, and it continues to shrink.↺
34. Finch proposes that scale “includes both zooming in and zooming out, both intimate experiences of location lasting decades or even generations, and hastily-grabbed impressions, without prioritizing the former” (30-1). Even though Nikitina’s narrator’s experiences of the Soviet past are not a “hastily-grabbed impression,” the narrator’s position is different in Polunochnaia zemlia and Dnevnik Shtormov: in the first, she tells the story of familiar generations in Salekhard; in the second, she visits and describes Vorkuta from the point of view of a tourist. These experiences form a scaled view of the socialist past.↺
35. Stańczyk describes the protagonist of a Polish graphic memoir Marzi (written by Sowa) as the author’s attempt to revisit her childhood “lived against of the backdrop of momentous historical changes” (146).↺
36. Administratively, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District (capital city Salekhard), has been part of the Tyumen Oblast (capital city Tyumen) since 1944.↺
37. In Nikitina’s narration, oil does not have a central role, but it is in the background. Still, oil is worth mentioning, since in Russian contemporary literature, oil has an important role. Ilia Kalinin writes about the “petropoetics” of contemporary Russian culture and lists several novels from the 1990s to the 2000s in which oil has a central or significant role. In Nikitina’s novel, while oil is more in the background, it still has a role in the life of the city.↺
38. I borrow this concept of “dichotomizing page design” from Alaniz, who uses it to analyze Viktor Maslov’s comic memoirs. Alaniz compares Maslov’s provincial theme with Anton Chekhov’s and Maxim Gorky’s provincial themes (Komiks 189-92).↺
39. Vorkuta is dependent on the production of coal, but Salekhard has a “more diverse economy, which grew organically out of its historic role as a trading post, transport hub, and administrative center” (Suter 2019). ↺
40. I draw here from Mika Perkiömäki and his analysis about rivers binding nature and culture together. Perkiömäki argues that the river Yenisei connects nature and culture in Viktor Astafiev’s Queen Fish, and he proposes in his ecocritical reading that the river’s “direct connection with the village life makes it part of the human culture,” but that “it is also part of nature” and “lives its own life with its own creatures” (156).↺
41. As Leena Romu proposes in her dissertation: “as a visual art form, comics are able to consider spatiality, relate it to cognitive metaphors, and locate the protagonists literally inside the metaphorical structure. A spatial metaphor can expand into a space in which the person acts and moves in a whole bigger than one picture or one comic book.” (203).↺
42. In their research into picture books, Nikolajeva and Scott make the same kind of observation about the visual representation of metaphorical or figurative language as Romu: “[i]n picturebooks, images can enhance the verbal figurative language. […] ‘[F]resh as a rose’ or ‘green with envy’ can be treated literally in a picture” (211). Furthermore, they discuss the relationship between the visual depiction of milieu and the protagonist from multiple points of view and give an example of a narration in which “the character is literally integrated into the setting as he is transformed into a rock” (Nikolajeva and Scott 105). One cannot perhaps read Nikitina’s protagonist’s dresses with decorations of Arctic flora as transforming her into the Arctic tundra, but this image is not that far from such ideas.↺
43. I draw here from Romu, who proposes that “merging the features of an animal, a plant or a mythical creature into a human body does not break only classical ideals, it stretches the boundaries between representatives from different categories. It invites one to contemplate the differences and relations between humanity and animality, subject and object, rationality and instinct, the conscious and the unconscious” (122). This kind of intermeshing of the human and the non-human can also be understood as “trans-corporeal” with a term by Stacy Alaimo (2).↺
44. El Refaie proposes that “[t]he autobiographical comics genre offers artists the opportunity to represent their physical identities in ways that reflect their own innermost sense of self,” and she uses the term “pictorial embodiment” to describe this process of “engaging with one’s own identity through multiple self-images” (51).↺