36 pages • 1 hour read
Anthony MarraThe Tsar of Love and Techno
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Side B, Story 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Side B, Story 1 Summary: “Wolf of White Forest”
The story opens with the revelation that wolves have returned to the White Forest, where most of this story takes place. The protagonist is a woman named Vera, who as a child accidentally turned her own mother in to the Communist authorities, which resulted in her mother’s ruthless execution in the wilderness after her imprisonment. Vera is struggling financially, barely making ends meet and must do something to survive. Desperate, she allows the drug dealing Kolya to set up shop at her house, packaging drugs on her table.
Meanwhile, Vera receives a visit from her daughter, Lydia, who comes home from Glendale, California, where she lives with an American piano tuner named Gilbert. After Lydia witnesses Kolya’s drug activities at her mother’s house, she confronts her mother and drunkenly tells her friends about the operation. Kolya murders Lydia to keep her quiet, and Vera has once again indirectly caused the death of a family member.
The story ends with a visit from Kolya to Vera’s house after Lydia’s murder. He tells her that he is taking a job as a contract soldier, presumably to escape criminal investigation, and she doesn’t have to worry about him taking any violent action against her. He hands her an envelope, and for a moment she hopes it contains a final message from her daughter. Instead, the envelope is full of money, which she considers turning away. When she sees the amount, however, she justifies keeping it. The winter is long, and bills need to be paid.
Side B, Story 1 Analysis
“Wolf of White Forest” is a story about the inevitable ironies that infiltrate a person’s life. As Vera’s own daughter dies, Vera relives the trauma of having accidentally convicted her own mother. She therefore serves as the inadvertent catalyst for the death of the two women she has most loved in life. Vera, like so many of the other female characters in these stories, is trapped in a world run by men who are often cruel and senselessly violent. Even in her attempts to provide for her own basic needs, she quickly justifies Kolya’s drug dealing at her own home, as evidenced most directly by this passage: “Sure, Kolya was involved in some unsavory business, but it showed ambition, didn’t it?” (242.) Vera is still unable to confront the demons of her past, the sins from her childhood, and her lack of judgment or even caution with Kolya is just an extension of her own unresolved issues.
This story is perhaps the greatest example in the collection of the depths that human depravity can sink to, not only through Kolya’s cold-blooded murder but through Vera’s justification of her own actions, motivated by fear and instigated by a lack of ethical conviction. For instance, before Lydia dies, she confronts Vera about Kolya’s dealings, asking her mother, “You do know what they’re doing in there, don’t you?” (246). Vera quickly becomes defensive, her own maternal love turning to judgment: “Be quiet. She wouldn’t be lectured on self-respect by a mail-order bride. You must be quiet” (247). Vera’s companionship with Kolya speaks louder than her own love as a mother, a hierarchy that eventually contributes to Lydia’s death. “Wolf of White Forest” is titled symbolically, and it suggests that, in Marra’s world it is hard to tell who the wolf is: perhaps Kolya, perhaps Vera.
Related Titles
By Anthony Marra
