A Dream in Polar Fog

Yuri Rytkheu

ago 2011 · Archipelago

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Nursed back to health by Arctic aborigines, a Canadian sailor finds his loyalties torn between his new people and the life he left behind—a novel full of “passion, strength, and beauty of a world we . . . have never understood” (Farley Mowat)

John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. Having had his hands amputated, crippled with little hope of returning home, the Chukchi community decides to adopt this wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. 

From thinking of Chukchi as savages, John comes to know his new companions as real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. He begins to understand ehri community, respects them, and makes an effort to be accepted as one of them. Though crippled, John rises to the Chukchi view of a person. But how much longer will John commit to this newfound perspective when presented with the opportunity to return to his own past and family?

Rytkheu’s empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world. A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic chronicle of the people of Chukotka, and a politically and emotionally charged adventure story.

Acerca del autor

Yuri Rytkheu was born in Uelen, a village in the Chukotka region of Siberia. He sailed the Bering Sea, worked on Arctic geological expeditions, and hunted in Arctic waters, in addition to writing over a dozen novels and collections of stories. A Dream in Polar Fog was a Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize Notable Book in 2006. In the late 1950s, Rytkheu emerged not only as a great literary talent, but as the unique voice of a small national minority – the Chukchi people, a shrinking community residing in one of the most majestic and inhospitable environments on earth.

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse translated Rytkheu’s novel The Chukchi Bible. Born in the former Soviet Union, she now lives in London with her husband and daughter.