In Ballast to the White Sea: The Springboard for Russian Influences on Malcolm Lowry’s Visionary Intellect

This chapter analyses the significance of Russian literary and political influences referred to in Malcolm Lowry’s major works and correspondence. In Ballast to the White Sea (1936), in particular, acts as a springboard for flashbacks to a hint of Russia in the Dairen of Ultramarine (1933) and for flashforwards to Under the Volcano (1936-47) and Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1945-49). In corroborating the appeal of Soviet Russia to many intellectuals in the UK in the 1930s, it reveals its author’s visionary intellect in providing a cogent insight into the fragility of a world teetering on the brink of war and destruction, poised between the forces of capitalism, communism, and fascism.
Weighed down by the ballast of the past and tormented by a “debacle of self,” Lowry’s protagonists are inspired by the ideas of Russian writers and thinkers - such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Peter Ouspensky - and film-directors, for example, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Following their life-instinct and striving to attain an intuitive consciousness through esotericism, they embark on a spiritual pilgrimage in search of truth and of new ideologies which will pledge a social revolution, or a revolution of the soul. Taking refuge in communism, the Sigbjørn of In Ballast to the White Sea is intent on reaching Archangel on the White Sea in Russia which, for him, represents the future, or else Norway in search of William Erikson, a shadow of his past and the fictional Nordahl Grieg.