I'm always a bit excited about anything
that gives me a larger perspective on things but, strangely enough,
it's often a small, particular event which does that for me.
The latest was my reading of Vi Plotnikoff's stories about a young Doukhobor girl's life in Canada in
the 1950's.
Each story has these spiritual
wrestlings that recall their originally disparaging name, Doukhobors,
as “the spirit wrestlers,” and which engage me directly in the
present. Sometimes I had to put the book down, do something else for
a half-hour, before I could go on to finish a particular story.
The Doukhobors emigrated from Russia to
Canada in the late 1890's, largely funded and assisted by Leo
Tolstoy, but their questions are apparently still alive in Russia. I
first heard of them as a young student in Montreal in 1959, and what
I heard was derisory about the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors' nude
protests, but with that hidden respect that you often see in such
situations. I knew absolutely nothing of Tolstoy's part in their
lives.
There is another side of the history of these "spirit wrestlers", which Vi and many other contemporary authors would rather like to hush down and whitewash: more than 1200 terrorist acts, mostly property bombing and arsons, but also a few murders, hundreds of nude marches and religious communism including sharing women on a nightly basis. Nasty stuff, which everyone wants to sweep under the carpet now.
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