Disappearing Earth

Anxiety about the Other is one of the novel’s main themes. Several of the Russian characters, for instance, assume the worst of Kamchatka’s indigenous and migrant populations. In Chapter 4, the reader learns that Valentina demanded that her husband and daughter spend every weekend since the disappearance of the Golosovskaya sisters at their family dacha. It is the changing demographics of Petropavlovsk that spurs Valentina’s retreat to the countryside: “Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals” (24). Valentina, like several other characters, assumes that the man who took Alyona and Sophia is not white, despite the eyewitness account of Oksana: “A foreigner could have easily taken them” (52) she says to Lieutenant Ryakhovsky, “My husband thinks a Tajik or an Uzbek” (52).

A similar racist and xenophobic thread runs through the conversation between Zoya and her neighbor, Tatyana: “Did those men say something to you?” (178), Tatyana asks when Zoya returns from her outing. When Zoya asks who Tatyana is talking about, her neighbor replies, “[t]he migrants. It’s dangerous. Nobody keeps an eye on them” (178). Zoya takes her friend to task, saying that the men are “just construction workers […] Not child molesters” (178).