Northern stories

Chapter 1

Northern stories depict an exceptionally bright, original world, full of action, energy, and human activity. Many people of different characters, ages, nationalities, religions perform in them. Gold diggers, hunters, dog drivers, guides, adventurers, vagabonds. The content of the stories is very diverse. Some of them are dedicated to human heroism, others to human cruelty. They talk about adventures, about the struggle with nature, about the passion for gold, about water for life, about faith in man. One of the leading themes of the northern stories of D. London is the theme of the antagonistic opposition of nature and bourgeois civilization.

The writer opposes the wild, harsh North to capitalist society with its proprietary morality, where life is more difficult, but freer, where it is easier for people to breathe.
The thought of the beneficial effects of the North sounds very persistently in the collection Smoke Bellew . Pampered, pampered Smoke Bellew arrives in Alaska and, like Bonner , is reborn. The North creates a new man out of him, courageous, bold, and the new country becomes a second home for him: “He loved this life, this harsh polar winter, wild silence, boundless snowy plains that no man has ever set foot on”²
These stories persistently emphasize that bourgeois society corrupts people, makes them greedy, selfish, and life in the bosom of nature purifies and corrects them. The writer’s north turns out to be a measure of the true value of a person, helps to find out what he is capable of and what he is good for, whether he can live in new conditions. During the test, certain requirements are imposed on a person, which serve as the norm for assessing his behavior. What are these conditions, these requirements that make up the ethics and morality of the North?
Chief among them are that a person who has got to the North must forget his former habits and acquire new ones that meet the changed conditions of life. He must part with his former ideals, renounce the former gods and renounce those moral rules that have guided his actions until now.
“He must replace the usual courtesy in himself with condescension, tolerance and readiness for self-sacrifice. In this way, and only in this way, can he earn a precious reward - true comradely devotion" [I, 91-92].
Cuthfert and Carter Weatherby (“In a Far Country”) speaks very eloquently of what the failure to comply with the norms of northern life leads to . The reason for their death lies in the fact that they lacked a sense of camaraderie, there was no real courage, no readiness to deal with difficulties. As they were, they remained to the end petty envious and selfish.
No less terrible fate befalls the traveler in the story "Bonfire". "He was a chechaco , a newcomer to this country and spent his first winter here" [I, 322]. In such a fierce cold, when all living things freeze and the only salvation is a fire, he should not have set out on the road. Ignorance of the nature of the North, oblivion of the advice given to him and his own self-confidence doom him to a painful death.