43 pages • 1 hour read
Disappearing Earth
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Chapter 1 Summary: “August”
Chapter 1 opens on a warm summer day with two sisters, Alyona and Sophia, playing at the edge of the bay in the city of Petropavlovsk while their mother, Marina, writes propaganda for a post-Soviet state newspaper. Alyona, the older of the two girls, keeps an eye on her younger sibling and entertains her with a story about a tsunami washing a village out to sea. On their way home, they encounter a stranger (Yegor), who complains of an injured ankle. He asks for their help getting back to his car and then offers them a ride home to Gorizont. Alyona contemplates taking the bus but decides that going by car will be faster. As she climbs into the passenger seat, she spies a woman (Oksana) with a white dog getting out of a van.
The girls remark that the man missed the turn to their house. He tells them he’s taking them to his place for more help with his ankle. Alyona wants to call her mother, but the stranger takes her phone away. A struggle ensues. The man drives north beyond the villages and settlements to a remote area. Alyona realize that she and her sister are in grave danger, but rather than give in to her fear, she puts on a brave face and offers to tell Sophia another story.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The novel begins with a warning. Alyona tells Sophia not to stray too far into the bay, foreshadowing the danger the sisters face later in the chapter. “You better not” (3), Alyona says. These words resonate with the moment that sets the action in motion, when Alyona is deciding whether or not to get in the stranger’s car: “Alyona, as the older sister, took her time: she spent a few seconds weighing the city bus […] against his offer” (11). Alyona knows it is better not to accept a ride from a stranger, but she is hungry and wants to get home. The temptation proves too great.
Other passages also foreshadow the kidnapping. The description of the water in the bay where the girls are playing, for instance, alludes to their disappearance from a place of familiarity and safety to an unknown place: “The current got stronger as it pulled into the Pacific, leaving Russia behind for open ocean” (3). The rock formations serve a similar function, appearing and disappearing under the opaque water.
The story Alyona tells Sophia is a pivotal moment in the chapter. She recounts how a tsunami washed away an entire town without anyone in the neighboring area realizing what had happened: “Everyone in the city was too distracted by the quake. Even in Zavoyko, they didn’t notice how the sky had gotten darker” (7). Only after the electricity was restored did people notice the town’s absence. One moment, the townspeople were there, the next, they were gone, just like the girls. Alyona’s statement that “no-one ever saw a sign of them again” (7) could describe her and her sister’s plight just as easily as that of the missing villagers. In addition to foreshadowing the girls’ disappearance, the tsunami story also gestures to the broad impact the kidnapping has on the community. Everyone in the area felt the quake that led to the wave, just as the kidnapping reverberated through the diverse populations of Kamchatka.
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