43 pages • 1 hour read
Julia PhillipsDisappearing Earth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Racism, Xenophobia, and Homophobia in Kamchatka
Anxiety about the Other is one of the novel’s main themes. Several of the Russian characters, for instance, assume the worst of Kamchatka’s indigenous and migrant populations. In Chapter 4, the reader learns that Valentina demanded that her husband and daughter spend every weekend since the disappearance of the Golosovskaya sisters at their family dacha. It is the changing demographics of Petropavlovsk that spurs Valentina’s retreat to the countryside: “Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals” (24). Valentina, like several other characters, assumes that the man who took Alyona and Sophia is not white, despite the eyewitness account of Oksana: “A foreigner could have easily taken them” (52) she says to Lieutenant Ryakhovsky, “My husband thinks a Tajik or an Uzbek” (52).
A similar racist and xenophobic thread runs through the conversation between Zoya and her neighbor, Tatyana: “Did those men say something to you?” (178), Tatyana asks when Zoya returns from her outing. When Zoya asks who Tatyana is talking about, her neighbor replies, “[t]he migrants. It’s dangerous. Nobody keeps an eye on them” (178). Zoya takes her friend to task, saying that the men are “just construction workers […] Not child molesters” (178). The police and media treatment of the missing girls further underscores the theme of racism. Lilia, an Even girl, gets virtually no attention, while the Golosovskaya sisters dominate the time and energy of the authorities.
Homophobia comes to the fore in Chapter 6. At a New Year’s celebration, Masha tells Lada she recently broke up with her girlfriend in St. Petersburg. Masha’s openness about her sexual orientation draws a reprimand from Lada: “You can’t say that here […] You could get killed” (105). Lada speaks out of concern for Masha, believing the men at the party will harm her friend if they find out she is a lesbian. Her fears are well-grounded. In Kamchatka, neighbors “will report a girl, even a smart girl, with a girlfriend. The police will hurt you, if they get the chance” (105). Lada recalls how a gay person was burned to death in Okhotsk a few years earlier. When Masha declines the advances of Kristina’s cousin, he calls her a “[f]ucking lesbian” (103) and claims homosexuals make him sick.
Nostalgia for an Idealized Past
A strong nostalgic current idealizing the Soviet past runs through the novel. This nostalgia cannot be divorced from the topography of Kamchatka and the shifting geopolitical landscape. The peninsula, located at Russia’s eastern extremity, is walled off from the mainland by “hundreds of kilometers of mountains and tundra” (40). Roads on the peninsula are disjointed. Some are impassible in the winter. Kamchatka’s unique position and topography, alongside military constraints, isolated it until post-Soviet times. Katya describes the impact of opening the peninsula:
After the USSR collapsed, there were no longer any restrictions on travel, no stop to movement; the Soviet military bases that had constrained the entire peninsula were shuttered, so Kamchatka’s residents could finally explore their own land (39).
The area, however, was not just open for ethnically Russian locals, indigenous populations also started moving beyond the confines of their villages. Moreover, Kamchatka began to attract tourists, as well as migrants from Central Asia looking for work.
Several of Phillips’s characters lament the changes to Kamchatka, while simultaneously idealizing the past. In Chapter 2, for example, Valentina compares the dangerous present to the safety of early times, when there were “no foreigners. No outsiders” (24). According to Valentina, “opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake [the] authorities ever made” (24). She later expresses sorrow that her daughter and other children will grow up “without the love of a motherland” (52). In Chapter 8, Revmira is also nostalgic for the Soviet past, not just for patriotic reasons, but also because of the impact opening the peninsula has had on indigenous communities:
Revmira’s parents had raised her in a strong home, an idyllic village, a principled people, a living Even culture, a socialist nation of great achievement. The nation collapsed. Nothing was left in the place it had occupied (140).
For Revmira, then, nostalgia for the great Soviet past is inextricably linked to the disappearing way of life of the Even people.
Hope in the Face of Loss and Grief
Phillips uses her vast network of characters to explore the ways in which hope persists in spite of loss and profound sorrow. Both Marina and Alla cling to hope in the wake of their daughters’ disappearances. Marina is grief-stricken by the loss of Alyona and Sophia, but she maintains hope that they are still alive. When her ex-husband says he doesn’t know if the girls are dead, Marina replies, “I think we would know. I think we would feel it. A more permanent absence” (216). Alla is also hopeful, not that her daughter is alive, but about learning the truth about what happened to her. She, too, is overcome with sadness, but she expresses hope for the future at a New Year’s celebration near Esso: “During these long summer days […] the old sun dies, and the new one is created. The gates of the spirit world open. This is a time when the dead walk among us. Those who are living can be reborn” (250).
Hope and grief take a different form in Chapter 9, which focuses on Nadia. The reader sees Nadia’s failed relationships, the first with Slav, who is possibly her child’s father, and the second with Chegga, who she recently walked out on. The former broke her heart by abandoning her while she was pregnant, the latter is a constant source of disappointment, failing to provide her with the life she wants. Nadia is desperate to move ahead, but she cannot find a way out of poverty and away from Kamchatka. She is not in love with Chegga, yet she returns to him at the end of the chapter for the sake of Mila. Nadia’s young daughter epitomizes hope for the future: “Mila could grow up to be anyone […] attend university, become a scientist, find a husband, buy a home, maybe even live in London. Or in the real Switzerland” (171).
The final chapter, which returns to the plight of Alyona and Sophia, also addresses the entwined themes of grief, loss, and hope. The Golosovskaya sisters have been trapped in Yegor’s house for almost a year. Their freedom and family have been taken away from them, and they have experienced devastating abuse, yet the sisters maintain hope. Indeed, the novel ends on a hopeful note, with Alyona uplifting her sister: “We have each other. No matter who opens the door. Remember that Mama’s out there. She still loves us […] We’ll stay together. We have each other. We are not alone” (256).
