Authors

Discussion

Soviet Coal Mining (Non-)Fiction on Svalbard: The Case of Sergei Kharchenko

Svalbard (aka Spitsbergen) is a Norwegian archipelago in the extreme North where – owing to the 1920 Svalbard Treaty permitting unhindered business activity to the Treaty’s signatories – Norwegian and Soviet miners coexisted amicably, irrespective of the Cold War, even though Norway was a member of NATO, and the USSR, of the Warsaw Pact.

In the Soviet mining settlements, in the 1930s-90s, a newspaper was published, known at first as Poliarnaia kochegarka and later renamed Shakhter Arktiki. In it, in the late 1950s – early to mid-1960s (for six years in total) worked Sergei Kharchenko, a journalist from Donbas, who also published Tsvety i l’dy / Flowers on Ice (1971; 2^nd ed. 1974), one of the few works of Soviet fiction devoted to coal mining on Svalbard.

Little is known about Kharchenko. By recourse to archival sources, his biography is partially reconstructed. Also, his mining fiction (treated as an example of “commodity fiction”, to use Michael Niblett’s term) is compared to his non-fictional output from Poliarnaia kochegarka, within the context of Norwegian novels about Svalbard (as analysed by Kristin Mork 2008), as well as the rich tradition of Russo-Ukrainian mining literature.