Voices on Birchbark: Everyday Communication in Medieval Russia

story “Kozlova.” The reader of Dobyčin’s work feels the ideological winds that blew through the new Soviet society a century ago, and this is part of their continued relevance. Although the ideological underpinnings of that particular society have been relegated to history, new ideological winds can arise at any place and time, bending language to its own ends. Now as then, humanity can reveal itself in the kind of spontaneous, unexpected meetings captured in Dobyčin’s fiction. Andersson’s study resists reductive interpretations, inviting instead new ones: “I have opened up the author’s work but not solved its riddle” (305). This original contribution to Dobyčin scholarship sheds light on the potential of human encounters to open up a space beyond words.