The Volga by Janet Hartley

The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River
By Janet M. Hartley
Yale University Press, 2021

There are obvious ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ components to the ubiquity of rivers in human history, of course. The ‘hard components are predictably visible: rivers provide a supply of food and power, a measure of protection against enemies, and an easy means of travel and transportation. Humans have been building hamlets, towns, and cities beside rivers for the entire history of the species, even though constructing farms and buildings on floodplains is self-evidently dangerous. 

The ‘soft’ components are less predictable and, among other things, tend to give rise to books. People don’t just use rivers; they fall in love with them. Perhaps more than any other geographical feature, rivers tend to bind affections and root memories, and it doesn’t always have to be the river you’re born with. Rivers form contours in personal stories, and those accumulate into history in ways that lend themselves omnium gatherum narratives.

There have been countless such narratives even in the last two centuries, and it’s remarkable how many of them make for terrific reading. Think of Sudipta Sen’s Ganges or Peter Ackroyd’s heartfelt Thames. Think of Paul Horgan’s weirdly magisterial book about the Rio Grande, The Great River. Think about the strange resonances in Life on the Mississippi that exist in no other work by Mark Twain. 

In the 1880s, an English officer referred to the Volga as “the most wonderful river in the world,” and telling the story of that river is the task of Janet Hartley’s new book The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River. The Volga is enormous, one of the longest rivers in the world, and covers so many different kinds of territory that it might well be said to thread different worlds together on its temperamental path to the Caspian Sea. In telling the story of those worlds, Harley is faced with an impossible narrative; any riparian history can only ever be a judicious culling from an infinite trove of stories. 

The Volga tells many of the most dramatic of those stories - tales of war and disaster, famine and long marches played out against some of the most stunning landscapes anywhere on Earth. Readers meet hundreds of characters, from warlords and military commanders to explorers like Peter Simon Pallas, a German botanist commissioned by Catherine the Great to research the life and nature of the far reaches of her land. Pallas first traveled the Volga in 1770, and as Hartley notes, he commented not only on how harsh the river could be (things would be so much better, he wrote, if the river “was not [made] so very droughty by the Hills on the Westside … attracting every cloud, that hardly one year in ten the Barley comes up”) but how generous it could be, depositing rich black growing-soil in its middle region.

Readers come to appreciate that changeable nature as the book flows on and Hartley smartly narrates peace and war, exploration and exploitation. The tale necessarily ends on notes of ecological caution; like all other natural features on the planet, the Volga has been greatly despoiled by the humans it’s helped over the centuries, and the Russian Federation’s track record when it comes to rescuing and rehabilitating its natural wonders is not noticeably better than that of any other federation. Curiously, the cumulative effect of a book like The Volga is to allay these kinds of worries rather than bolster them; Janet Hartley has done a superb job writing the biography of a river that, despoiled or not, will be flowing long after its plaguing humans are gone. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.