Where Land Ends

ISBN: 9781998579105

Pages: 250; 6 x 9, Paperback

This is the only book written by Lithuanian author Ricardas Vaicekauskas (1926-2011), now translated for the first time in English. It is a collection of 15 interconnected stories, based on the author’s experiences in the Soviet prison camp system (the GULAG) and in political exile in Siberia and in the delta of the Lena River.
Like tens of thousands of other Lithuanians, Vaicekauskas was deported to Siberia in 1941, when the Soviet Union invaded his country. He spent his teens in a labor camp on the shores of
the Arctic Ocean. He was allowed to return home in 1960.
His stories first appeared in a magazine in Vilnius in the early 1990s and were published in book form in 1999.

Vaicekauskas was arrested and deported to Siberia with his family (the parents and two children) when he was fifteen years old. Within a year he had lost both his parents and his brother. He was left all alone, thousands of kilometres from home, up in the Arctic Circle at the Lena River Delta. From his “tales,” the reader learns very little about the author’s own hardships. The short stories are not so much his story, but rather the stories of people and places of those exiled to the Arctic Circle. A picture is painted, not with a brush, but with words.

The reader is pulled into a labyrinth of horrors. Often, the same characters reappear throughout different stories. Many of the events are grotesque and absurd, but the author is not seeking to frighten us in the traditional sense of horror. Throughout it all, the author maintains a writer’s distance. The macabre is mixed with irony. The author has an eye for detail and seeks to delve into the psychology of human cruelty but also, of human resilience. If a comparison could be drawn between Where Land Ends and other literary works, one could think of the works of Alexander Solzhenytsin, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the Gulag Archipelago which were written in the 1960s as a denouncement of the gulag system. Another author who writes with a distance and irony about the gulag is Varlam Shalamov, in his Kolyma Tales, although much ‘colder,’ in a certain sense than our present author.

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