Sorry for the sudden and unexplained absence, and that’s what I’ll actually be talking about today.
That Sophia Loren movie Sunflower that I reviewed last month inspired me to write fiction again, which is a first for me in years. It’s a work in progress and I’d say I’m about 40-50% done with the manuscript. Later on I’ll give a better explanation of what the hell I was thinking about and why I wrote this so please stand by for updates. For now, I’ll share four things: the title, the cover description, the opening page, and the character names.
The title: Miritsya.
The working title on my first file is actually Salvation, but that was from when I had no idea what the title was, or even exactly what was going to happen in the story. I decided on Miritsya and am 99.9999% sure that won’t change.
The cover blurb:
Belarus, January 1944 – A German officer on the brink of death is rescued by someone he never could have expected… a Belarussian peasant girl!
The hardened, wicked heart of the German aristocrat is no match for the humble purity and strength of the Russian peasant. In the end, even he must face the truth. In all of human history, there was never a people with a deeper connection to nature and the soil of their motherland than the peasants of Russia.
Dates are subject to change because weather and historical events are important. Most of the story’s key events happen throughout the year of 1944. Unfortunately the way I write fiction, or actually anything, is I type up scenes completely out of order as I come up with them. Then I have to gradually figure out what order these scenes happen in, then rewrite or throw away entire sections along the way. About 60-70% of the text (so far) I wrote for Miritsya I have ended up throwing away.
I might keep this blurb for the cover, re-write it, or throw it away and make a completely different one. Too early to say.
Here’s the first page:
Мириться – Miritsya is a Russian word that’s difficult to translate and requires some explanation. Miritsya is derived from the Russian word mir, which means world and peace. Both meanings can and are intended to be used in conjunction. Мир во всем мире – peace throughout the world. So the reflexive verb miritsya literally translates as “to make peace.” But that’s not what miritsya means and no one uses it that way.
Miritsya means to tolerate, to put up with, to accept, to endure. That is why miritsya does not mean to make peace, and why it is difficult to translate.
This is a story about Belarus. Belorossiya. White Russia. Land of the White Russians.
And finally, who are the characters?
Herbert and Lyudmilla❤️
Ian Kummer
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Good look with your book mate.
Good luck with your book but I’m disappointed it’s not the sequel to Ultraviolence. I don’t read much fiction but if I do, it’s science fiction.
That’s great to hear, that your blog writing helped you find a spark for more literary work. Don’t mind it at all if you have to pause or post less to focus on it, the literary side comes first.
Your idea concept reminded me of something which, as per the stories of my grandmother, happened with her family. Though, in their case, there was no love story and their circumstances were quite different. Their village near Smolensk was occupied by different Nazi units and those of their auxiliary allies, such as Banderites (yes, those), throughout which time her family would hide her from the occupying troops, as she was a cutie in full bloom in her early twenties at the time and Nazi types (let alone Banderites) would’ve been upon her in a heartbeat had they known a pretty girl is around. They’d hide her up in the house’s rafters when the enemy troops would try to rob their household for food and valuables and camouflage her in old rags and dirt to help her pretend to be an old crone when she had to go outside.
When the Nazis were being routed from the Smolensk region and Red Army troops were already just a few kilometers away, their local command ordered the entire village to be abducted for forced labor in Germany. Under gunpoint, they had to load up their carts with their remaining valuables and get dragooned away back into Nazi-held territory to be collected by rail and sent onwards. At the time, if I remember the story correctly, it was Banderite types that were occupying the village, but the officer overseeing this particular operation was a ranking German Nazi, looking straight out of stereotypes with shiny gloves and a meticulously maintained uniform and aristocratic attributes.
Grandmother’s family managed to get themselves to be at the rear of that caravan of carts, trying desperately to hatch some half-baked plan – they’d sabotaged one of their cart wheels to make it fall off its axle and strand the cart, hoping to stall the departure and maybe do something to avoid being sent to the slave factories. The German overseer then personally came to see what the holdup was, at which point it was all hanging by a thread – grandmother was sure that he suspected they’d deliberately sabotaged their cart, and he spent some time looking her entire family over. And for some unknown reason, the man then waved on the rest of the caravan to get moving, and commanded them to get the cart fixed and follow, and went back up the line again to order a departure.
Yeah, right. They’d dashed off from the cart as soon as no-one was close enough to notice where they went, and ran for their lives into the swampy woods that surrounded the village. There they hid a fair distance away for several days, subsisting off foraging for whatever edibles they could find (helps that they were lifelong residents used to woodcraft) – until the Red Army found them and subsequently officially liberated their now-empty village.
It’s quite the situation they got into, and, of course, I have no way of verifying it now, since all the participants are now almost certainly deceased; I don’t even know what exactly befell the less fortunate rest of the village who had no chance ot escape (most likely some or even most of them managed to return after Germany fell, but it’s inevitable some were worked to death and others died to British and American bombing of German factories). Nor can we really know what motivated the German commander to effectively spare my grandmother’s family. Grandmother’s best guess she proposed when telling the story was that he realized they broke their own cart, but they also looked particularly frail and miserable, including her being in her “wizened crone” camouflage to the max, and he saw no value in such useless labourers and left them behind knowingly – that is certainly a likely possibility. An optimistic take would, of course, propose that he graciously allowed them to escape out of mercy (but only them alone, somehow); a pessimistic one would be that he had a brainfart and didn’t realize he’s handing these slaves-to-be a golden opportunity to vanish into the woods and keep their freedom, and honestly believed they’d obey his orders. In any case, if that story I remember her telling is all true, then if it were not for this decision by that one Nazi officer, my mother and thus me would likely never have been born, or at the very least grandmother’s family would have fared much worse.
Not quite the kind of story you’re writing, naturally. But since you’re going into the topic of wartime interactions between German officers and Russian civilians they’d been holding under occupation, I thought it would be interesting to share.
This is very similar in nature to the stories Maria shared with me, and they are actually very relevant to what I’m talking about, so I greatly appreciate you telling me.
Glad to hear that you are inspired again! I was quite impressed with your “Ballad of the Unknown Pilot”, so I know that you have the stuff of greatness within you.
Hi Ian,
Interesting story. I’d like to make some comments. At one level this is the same story as beauty and the beast. You may not agree, but the parallel is there. The beast = Nazi; the beaty is Belle who encounters the Beast and knows he will die unless he is somehow redeemed. Her love for him leads him to live. While you may think this is irrelevant, such stories contain universal truths and resonate with readers. If you can harness the power of such stories (in your own version), it will greatly strengthen the whole.
Another aspect is that the German at the start believes a lie–that Russian are inferior, and to be despised. He finds the truth he seeks through the love and kindness of his saviour, a Russian.
The theme of your book, have you thought about it? It might be “everyone is human”, “we are all the same”, or something like that. By knowing your theme, you will write a better book.
And the characters’ arcs? I guess the German guy arcs from hating Slavs to loving them. But what of the woman? Does she change in any way. I wonder if her changing in some way would add to the story’s dynamics? Does she love him at first? Or is she only helping him because he’s a person and you don’t let someone die or suffer even if you hate them/ they are your country’s enemy? This dynamic IMO might add depth to the story. While the German/Nazi needs to learn the truth; equally, the Good Samaritan here also has a truth to learn. It could increase the dynamics between the two as the story unfurls. Outside events could help these developments. Does she shield him from the authorities? Does she work to give him a new identity? (I like this one, she could steal the identity of a Russian so as to legitimise him.
You have wonderful potential in your story!