Yasha Klots

From Avvakum to Dostoevsky: Varlam Shalamov and Russian Narratives of Political Imprisonment

Despite the relatively young age of Russian literature, its tradition of prison-camp writing is one of the world’s richest. Its genealogy goes back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when Archpriest Avvakum (1620-82), an Old Believer burned at the stake for his schismatic views on the Orthodox Church, wrote what scholars believe to be the first autobiographical account of political imprisonment in the Russian language. As Andrew Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky put it, “written in a spectacularly expressive jumble of colloquial Russian and biblically inflected Church Slavonic from Avvakum’s place of confinement north of the Arctic Circle and poised uncomfortably between a medieval saint’s life and a modern autobiography, it is the first in what would become a long line of Russian prison narratives[1]”. Remarkably, Avvakum’s Life not only became the first Russian text on the subject, but also paved the way for the paradigmatic transition from the ecclesiastical genre of hagiography to that of a genuine autobiography and, by extension, secular literature on the whole. In his first-hand account, Avvakum breaks with traditional hagiographic formulas by focusing on the routine details of imprisonment and replaces outdated stylistic conventions with a more idiomatic, unpolished and simple language. His literary style, according to Nicholas Rzhevsky, “came out of a particularly forceful reaction to the pressing issues of the day,” arguably proclaiming for the first time in the Russian literary tradition “an individual author’s role in society as iconoclast and dissenter[2]”.

I love my natural Russian language, am not accustomed to embellishing speech with philosophical verses, because God does listen not to beautiful words, but wants our deeds. <…> not in the Latin language, nor in Greek or Hebrew, nor in any other language does God want our words, but what He wants from us is love and other virtues; for this reason, I am not concerned with eloquence and do not demean my Russian language…[3]

Since Avvakum, Russian autobiographical writing has gone through several formative stages, each usually associated with this or that social upheaval in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian history. Among them is the Decembrist Uprising of 1825 and its defeat by Nicholas I, resulting in five executions and exile to Siberia for many rebels. Much like Avvakum’s seventeenth-century autobiography, the first-hand accounts of the Decembrists and their wives who followed them into exile would serve as a major point of reference for a countless number of authors imprisoned or exiled not only during the Soviet era, but also before them, most notably, for Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was arrested in 1849 for his participation in the liberal Petrashevsky circle and sentenced to death before his verdict was commuted to hard labor and exile[4]. However, by contrast with Avvakum, whose Life introduced the genre of autobiography into Russian literature, Dostoevsky’s account, The House of the Dead, added fictional elements to this master narrative: although it registers the author’s own experiences as a political prisoner in Siberia, and despite its original title (“Notes”), the genre of Dostoevsky’s text is not “notes,” nor autobiography or a memoir, but a novel.

Dostoevsky seems to be the first Russian writer who realized that factual evidence and even plain reportage do not necessarily exclude fictional and allegorical orchestration — a discovery that resonated on an unprecedented scale a century later, in the post-Stalin years. As Leona Toker suggests, “the narrative act,” in the case of Gulag narratives, “seems to be an extension of the author’s life, and that life acquires an aesthetic dimension of its own[5]”. For Dostoevsky, as for Gulag authors a century later, the experience of imprisonment became a narrative technique, or even a metaphor. This metaphor is epitomized in Varlam Shalamov’s short sketch “Through the Snow” (1956), which serves as an “epigraph” to his Kolyma Tales and reflects not only the composition of Shalamov’s cycle and, by extension, the rest of his oeuvre, but also the entire tradition of Russian prison-camp writing as a whole: each step of a prisoner marching in a file through the deep snow leaves a new trace as long as it does not completely overlap with the step of another prisoner marching ahead:

If the others were to follow directly behind the first man, in his footsteps, they would create a narrow path, a trail that is visible but barely walkable, a string of holes more impassable than virgin snow. <…> Every one of them, even the smallest, even the weakest, must tread on a little virgin snow — not in someone else’s footsteps. The people on the tractors and horses, however, will be not writers but readers[6].

In the context of the last phrase, this ordinary scene of camp life “is thus turned into an allegory: the snow becomes a blank page[7]”, suggesting a line of literary inheritance between individual authors, whereby each text is destined to leave a new trace in the readers’ vision of the reality described, as long as it adds something new. Thus, in an extended sense, the entire tradition of Russian prison-camp writing since Avvakum is likened to a file of prisoners beating a path through the snow. Every author in this literary procession is also bound to play the role of a reader — of those who came before him, of times and places where s/he has not been.

Throughout his own works, Shalamov consistently invokes his literary precursors and refers not only to Dostoevsky, as well as tsarist-time revolutionaries such as Vera Figner and Nikolai Morozov[8], but also to Avvakum, whose trace he follows in one of his most memorable poems, “Avvakum in Pustozersk” (1955)[9]. Referring to this poem as “one of his most important” and “especially dear” ones because it “combines the historical figure with the landscape and the specifics of the author’s biography” (III, 458), Shalamov — who died in 1982, exactly three hundred years after Avvakum — speaks through the words of the seventeenth-century Russian religious martyr, but at the same time translates them into the language of his own secular reality three centuries later. In the following stanzas, he addresses the reader in the first person plural and thus, grammatically, blurs the line between his own and Avvakum’s fates[10]:

Наш спор — не духовный
О возрасте книг.
Наш спор — не церковный
О пользе вериг.

We don’t mind about doctrine,
about books and their age;
we don’t debate virtues
of fetters and chains.

Наш спор — о свободе,
О праве дышать,
О воле Господней
Вязать и решать.

Our dispute is of freedom,
and the right to breathe —
about our Lord’s free will
to bind as he please.

(III, 184) Translated by Robert Chandler[11]

Ironically, a revival of interest in Avvakum and his Life took place in the 1920s, the years that shaped Soviet atheism (and, conversely, the anti-Soviet religious identity of Russian émigrés in Europe[12]). It was also then that Shalamov, the son of a priest from Vologda and at the time a law student at Moscow State University, found himself immersed in the ardent debates over literature and politics, philosophy and religion. Rejecting his father’s faith[13], Shalamov became involved with the left anti-Stalinist opposition and was arrested in 1929 for disseminating what’s known as “Lenin’s Testament.” But his formation as a writer was influenced by the formalists, particularly by the OPOYAZ and the New LEF groups, who, one may argue, were interested in Avvakum’s text as part of their advocacy for “literature of the fact” [literatura fakta], a movement that Shalamov would rediscover years later in his genre of “new prose,” as he insisted on referring to Kolyma Tales[14]. This is why, according to Yuri Rozanov, “Shalamov’s version of Avvakum is that of the 1920s, an Avvakum in the Marxist historiographic understanding <…>. Shalamov realized the conventionality of the image, but he needed precisely this type of an archpriest; it was this kind of Avvakum that Shalamov’s own fate could be ideally projected on[15].”

While incarceration has consistently been one of the central themes of modern Russian literature, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that political imprisonment became so firmly engraved onto these dark pages of Russian history that it nearly formed a separate genre: Gulag memoirs[16]. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, however, can hardly be ascribed to the memoir genre, in spite of the fact that, just like the memoirs, his stories also register the author’s firsthand experience in the Gulag and share many other features with documentary prose. The rest of this study will deal with the intricate synthesis of fictional and documentary techniques in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales as seen through the prism of Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century novel The House of the Dead. While Shalamov’s self-identification with Avvakum over three centuries may be described as biographical rather than strictly literary (after all, “Avvakum in Pustozersk” is a poem, which makes it hard to compare its formal characteristics with those of Avvakum’s Life), Shalamov’s treatment of Dostoevsky reveals, by contrast, a greater literary rather than biographical tension — not only because The House of the Dead is less remote from Shalamov in time, but, more importantly, because it is closer to him on the level of genre. It was Dostoevsky’s oscillation between fiction and reportage, rather than the subject matter of his novel as such, that defines the complexity of Shalamov’s relationships with the classic. In what follows, after briefly discussing various strategies of reading Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead in the Gulag, I will conclude by outlining the role of Dostoevsky’s novel in the literary polemics between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, two writers who went far beyond the confines of the memoir genre, albeit in opposite directions and along different paths.

The House of the Dead as a Palimpsest

Writing his Siberian novel in the early 1860s, soon after his release from katorga and exile in Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky could have hardly imagined that a century later The House of the Dead would become such a major point of reference — and, in fact, a point of departure — for many Gulag survivors, who struggled to find an explanation for the Soviet catastrophe and a literary means to record it in their narratives. Hardly any scholar of Gulag narratives has failed to bring up Dostoevsky and his Siberian novel in this regard: Sarah Young observes that “it is Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of imprisonment and hard labor which established the tradition of labor-camp writing in Russia and overwhelmingly acted as the major source and point of comparison for twentieth-century Gulag writers[17].” Leona Toker has traced the roots of this tradition to the fact that “since Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, narratives of imprisonment have tended to combine stories of individual experience with accounts of the ‘shared suffering and common share,’ that is, of the representative experience of the prisoners[18]”. The House of the Dead is thus a rare, if not entirely unprecedented, example of a prison narrative charged with a strong potential for literary continuity but undermined by a striking historical discrepancy: its quasi-autobiographical form, in which the author relates the experiences similar to his own through the words of his fictional first-person narrator/protagonist, whose notes he comes across and rescues from oblivion, is often taken on as a model by Gulag authors, but the experiences of Dostoevsky’s autobiographical character, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, are almost exclusively deemed inadequate to the new historical reality and, therefore, call to be rewritten. The House of the Dead, along these lines, can be viewed as a palimpsest for Gulag texts that came a century later — a “page” from which the original writing has repeatedly been washed off, without ever disappearing completely, to make room for a new historical narrative.

There is little disagreement among Gulag survivors about the wide breach that lay between Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century katorga and their own experiences in the Gulag: “Kolyma,” writes Shalamov in his notes on Dostoevsky, “was not a house of the dead; it was an extermination camp” (V, 208). Yet there is also quite a wide variety of approaches to Dostoevsky’s text in Gulag narratives that derives from the authors’ literary perspectives and is rooted in their individual experiences, which are, of course, also far from being uniform. The strategies of reading The House of the Dead in the Gulag range from unconditional acceptance and affirmation of the novel’s seamless applicability to the new reality to a radical questioning of both the reality described and the artistic method of its description. The latter case is exemplified by Shalamov, whose polemic with Dostoevsky is both literary and historical. Shalamov’s knowledge of the Gulag, perhaps the most merciless of all ever committed to paper, was such that he saw the camps as a “negative experience for a human being from the first to the last hour,” an experience that gave him license to proclaim the death of the novel as a genre: “People who have gone through revolutions, wars and concentration camps do not care about the novel” (V, 148; 144). At the same time, as has already been mentioned, Shalamov’s aesthetic was heavily influenced by the formalists, and his rejection of the novel has to do not only with the experience of concentration camps but also with the literary debates of the 1920s, which I will come back to at the end of this article.

A rare case that affirms the unconditional validity of The House of the Dead in the Gulag is Gustav Herling’s memoir, A World Apart (1951), whose title directly refers to Dostoevsky’s definition of nineteenth-century katorga: “a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own dress, its own manners and customs[19]”. A Polish writer, journalist, and dissident, Herling spent less than two years in the Yertsevo labor camp near Arkhangelsk and was released in 1942 under the Sikorski Amnesty, when Stalin, who now sought support from the Polish government in his war against Nazi Germany, released many Polish prisoners[20]. During his time in Yertsevo, Herling read The House of the Dead twice in the 1894 edition[21]. In the chapter called “The House of the Dead,” he tells the story of how the book was lent to him in secret by a fellow prisoner from the women’s barracks, Natalia L’vovna, who was exempt from the general works because of heart disease and worked in the camp’s accounting office. They first meet in the camp’s club, where prisoners are brought for a screening of the American musical The Great Waltz (1938), a film about Johann Strauss II set in Vienna in 1845. For the prisoner audience, “these images of the past became the forbidden fruit of the present,” and the elevated atmosphere of the event “pushed us back into the past and released the long-frozen sources of emotion[22]”. The effect that the American film had on the prisoners, eager to escape into the distant world on the screen if only in their imaginations, foreshadows and almost rhymes with the effect that Dostoevsky’s novel produces on Herling soon afterwards. The book literally materializes from the words he hears from Natalia L’vovna after the film: “I still can’t control myself whenever I think that it has all happened before, years ago… that for centuries we have been living in the same house of the dead[23]”. The next moment, she brings him the book.

Over the course of the next two months, Herling reads The House of the Dead twice and, having grown attached to the book “as a victim can become attached to the instrument of his torture,” comes to the same conclusion:

[F]rom the moment when I read the first few pages <…> until I closed it for the second and last time at the final paragraph: “Yes, with God’s blessing! Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead…” I lived in a state of trance, as if I had woken from long mortal sleep. The thing about the book was not Dostoevsky’s ability to describe inhuman suffering as if it were a natural part of human destiny, but that aspect of it which had also struck Natalia L’vovna: that there was not the slightest break between his fate and ours. <…> The greatest torment <…> was the inexplicable fact that the laws of time ceased to apply to it — between the engulfment of our predecessors and our own struggles there was no pause, the stream was continuous. <…> The most trivial details repeated themselves with nightmarish accuracy: the prisoners of the House of the Dead, at the end of a free day, also whispered with terror: “Back to work tomorrow[24]”.

Arguably, it was the shock of realizing this uninterrupted continuity between different eras, this inescapable containment of history, a prison in itself, that lead Herling to find solace in the idea of escape by suicide. But he is “saved” by Natalia L’vovna, who comes to retrieve the book and thus relieves him of the physical and psychological burden. She walks away, “pressing her precious book, old and yellow like her own prematurely aged face, to her diseased heart,” and after “the snow covered her footsteps[25]”, her trace disappears. (At this point Herling abruptly switches to a historical narrative about the fate of Polish Jews in the Gulag and describes yet another event at the same camp club — a theatrical show that brings to mind Dostoevsky’s account of “The Feast of Christmas” in The House of the Dead.) It is not until the very end of the chapter that Natalia L’vovna reappears, at which point the narrator discovers that she had since attempted suicide but had been saved by her neighbor. What empowered her to carry out this act of free will, which not even the camp could take away, was the power of Dostoevsky’s novel, the paradoxical hope in hopelessness it instills. As she had told Herling earlier, “there is always room for hope when life becomes so utterly hopeless <…> — at least so far that one can choose the method and the time of one’s own death… That is what Dostoevsky has taught me[26]”. What used to unite two fellow prisoners has now irrevocably set them apart, and although they see each other many more times in the camp, they do not talk to each other ever again: “There are secrets,” Herling writes, “which unite people, but there are also secrets which, in case of failure, separate them[27]”. The word “failure” here appears to carry a special meaning as it may denote not only Natalia L’vovna’s failure to commit suicide but also the impossibility of reading The House of the Dead in the Gulag and finding the same answers to questions posed by Dostoevsky a century ago.

What prompted Herling to so seamlessly identify with Dostoevsky (that there was never a pause in the flow of time between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that “the stream was continuous”) is precisely what caused most Gulag authors to proclaim Dostoevsky’s novel entirely irrelevant to their fates. To illustrate this point, Elena Mikhailik cites Shalamov’s short story “The Funeral Oration” (1960), in which two prisoners working in a Kolyma gold mine compare their work norms to those assigned to the Decembrists more than a century ago: as Shalamov’s narrator learns from the memoirs of Maria Volkonskaya, who followed her husband Sergei Volkonsky into exile, the difference between their work norms proves to be 800 vs. only 3 puds of ore per prisoner[28]. “If I were to choose a single quotation that defines Shalamov’s manifold relationship with Dostoevsky,” Mikhailik writes,

it would be <…> a passage where Dostoevsky’s name is not even mentioned. And yet it neatly captures the nature of the distance between The House of the Dead <…> and Kolyma Tales. The production quotas have been increased 266.66666666666(6) times. This radical change in the limits of human experience sets the framework within which Shalamov sees Dostoevsky’s philosophical ideas and creative devices[29].

It is important to keep in mind that Herling’s example is a rare exception, but all the same, the length of his term and the conditions in Yertsevo in his memoir would have probably seemed like a vacation to Shalamov. Indeed, the radical increase in work norms, among other things, served as the most common ground for Gulag authors’ polemic with Dostoevsky. But the fact that in “The Funeral Oration” Dostoevsky is not even mentioned, being replaced instead by the collective image of the Decembrists, points to a deeper relationships with the classic than may seem evident on the surface. In his notes on Dostoevsky, Shalamov confesses that the fact that their fates (and even dates) overlapped was of a great importance to him, and that in 1949, while working as a medical attendant in Kolyma, he even contemplated writing a commentary to The House of the Dead: “I carelessly promised myself to expose <…> the naïveté of The House of the Dead, all of its literariness [literaturnost’] and ‘obsoleteness’. But there is also something eternal in The House of the Dead. How little Russia [Raseia] has changed” (V, 208). Elsewhere, however, Shalamov refrains from commenting on the drastic deterioration of living conditions in the Gulag compared to those in nineteenth-century katorga. “There is no need to argue with Dostoevsky,” he explains in “The Tatar Mullah and Fresh Air. “Dostoevsky’s times were a different era, and the katorga that he knew had not yet reached the heights described here [in Shalamov’s short story]. It is difficult to form a right opinion about such things in advance” (I, 129).

This text, written in 1955, is part of the first cycle of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, a book with a carefully thought-through composition, as the author makes clear not only in the opening sketch, “Through the Snow,” but also in his programmatic essay “On Prose,” where he states that “each story” in Kolyma Tales “stands in its proper place” (V, 153). It is instructive, therefore, to look at “The Snake Charmer,” the text that comes immediately before “The Tatar Mullah.” Written one year earlier, in 1954, it sheds light on Shalamov’s complex relationship with Dostoevsky by translating it into a literary polemic.

Much like Dostoevsky’s novel, “The Snake Charmer” has an inverted composition and two narrators, one telling the story of the other, who is no longer alive to tell it firsthand. The narrator in “The Snake Charmer” hears about the experiences of his fellow prisoner Andrei Fedorovich Platonov — a film script writer in his previous life — about his experiences in the fictional camp Dzhankhara, which is modeled on the historical Dzhelgala that Shalamov remembered as “the lock-up of the whole Kolyma” (IV, 498)[30]. In Dzhankhara, Platonov used to “pull novels” (tiskal rómany) for the entertainment of the local thieves[31]. Platonov says that should he survive, he will some day write a story about his experiences in Dzhankhara, and that he already has a title, “The Snake Charmer.” “Do you like it?” he asks the narrator. “Yes, I do,” the narrator replies. “You just have to stay alive. That’s the most important thing[32]”. Three weeks later, Platonov dies in a gold mine, but his unwritten story outlives its author: “I loved Platonov,” Shalamov’s narrator says, “and I shall try now to write down his story: ‘The Snake Charmer’[33]”. What follows is a third-person account of what Platonov had managed to tell the narrator about his life in the deadly camp.

Clearly, the name Andrei Fedorovich Platonov is a reference to Andrei Platonovich Platonov (Klimentov; 1899-1951), the author of famous Russian dystopias, whose earlier works Shalamov may have known by the time he wrote “The Snake Charmer.” As Robert Chandler points out, the fictional toponym Dzhankhara may even be an allusion to Platonov’s novella Dzhan, which was written in the mid-1930s but remained unpublished until much later[34]. However, the name of Shalamov’s character may also be a reference to Dostoevsky, whose first name, Fedor, he inherits as his patronymic[35]. Moreover, the compositional schemes of Shalamov’s and Dostoevsky’s texts are too close to ignore the message behind the patronymic of Shalamov’s character.

Dostoevsky’s narrator learns that Goryanchikov died “in solitude, without even once calling a doctor to his side” three months after he first met him in the town of K., where he lived as a settler after his release from katorga[36]; Shalamov’s Platonov, meanwhile, dies as a prisoner in the gold mine three weeks after he shares his story with the narrator. So in addition to the increase of work norms by 266.6(6) times, as we find out from “The Funeral Oration,” there is also a marked acceleration of time itself, let alone the fact that while Goryanchikov dies in freedom, Shalamov’s character dies while still a prisoner.

In the town of K., Dostoevsky’s Goryanchikov earns his living by giving private lessons to local children, and spends the rest of his time feverishly writing down his prison notes. After he dies, the narrator discovers

one rather thick volume [tetrad’] of finely written manuscript unfinished, perhaps thrown aside and forgotten by the writer. It was a disconnected description of the ten years spent by Aleksandr Petrovich in penal servitude. In parts this account broke off and was interspersed by passages from another story, some strange and terrible reminiscences, jotted down irregularly, spasmodically, as though by some overpowering impulse. I read these fragments over several times, and was almost convinced that they were written in a state of insanity[37].

Like Goryanchikov, Shalamov, too, had the habit of writing his short stories and poetry (which he called Kolyma Notebooks) in blue schoolchildren’s notebooks. After his return from Kolyma and before he was allowed to move back to Moscow in 1956, Shalamov lived in Turkmen, a workers’ settlement miles away from the capital, where he had a day job at a local peat factory and where he embarked on writing Kolyma Tales. Dostoevsky’s description of the town of K., as well as Goryanchikov and his manuscript must have seemed at least recognizable to Shalamov when he wrote “The Snake Charmer,” one of the earliest stories in the cycle.

Yet while both Shalamov and Dostoevsky survive the protagonists of their respective texts and deliver their stories to the reader, they deal with a priori different “originals” and are bound to carry out their “publishing projects” accordingly: while Dostoevsky’s frame narrator discovers Goryanchikov’s notes after they have already been written down, Shalamov has no manuscript to work with and can rely only on what his narrator remembers from Platonov’s tale communicated to him orally back in the camp. Shalamov’s narrator, therefore, is facing a double mnemonic and artistic task: he first needs to revive his fellow prisoner’s story in his memory and then juxtapose it to what he himself remembers of that time and place; only then can he convert their conversation into a written text and symbolically give it the same title, “The Snake Charmer.” It also should be added that while Shalamov preserves the exact title of Platonov’s story, Dostoevsky slightly alters the original title of Goryanchikov’s manuscript: “Scenes from the House of the Dead” become “Notes” (and in most English translations, even “Notes” is gone).

If we look at this process as an act of translation, one may argue that because of its in-built oral component, “The Snake Charmer” is fraught with a greater potential for distorting the initial author’s “original” (compared to simply “publishing” the notes that have already been written down, as is the case in The House of the Dead). But at the same time, this oral, almost folkloric transmission of someone else’s tale is driven by Shalamov’s intense ethical involvement with his protagonist, if only because he, the “initial author” of the firsthand account, is deprived of the opportunity to tell his story himself, let alone to ever see freedom again. Multiplied by Gulag statistics compared to nineteenth-century katorga, this difference in the intensity of Dostoevsky’s and Shalamov’s involvement with their respective characters contributes to the difference in their artistic methods. What comes to the foreground in “The Snake Charmer” is not the reality described, which has so unrecognizably changed in the course of a century, but the method of coming to terms with and translating this reality into a literary form. Hence Shalamov’s definition of “new prose” as neither a memoir, nor a traditional short story, nor even literature as such, but “prose lived through like a document” [проза, выстраданная как документ] (V, 157).

Finally, both Platonov in “The Snake Charmer” and Goryanchikov in The House of the Dead are outsiders in the predominantly criminal and peasant populations of their respective camps: Goryanchikov is a member of the gentry, Platonov — a political prisoner[38]. But while Dostoevsky’s character has a peasant servant (Sushilov), Shalamov’s Platonov is himself a slave to the local thief, to whom he recounts popular nineteenth-century French novels (and whose name, incidentally, also happens to be Fedya, or Fedechka, a common nickname of high-ranking professional criminals in the Gulag). Over the course of a century, the social hierarchy in the camps and, by extension, in the Soviet world as a whole, appears to have been inverted. This reversal of social and ethical values in “The Snake Charmer” gives Shalamov a moral license to articulate the impossibility of any historical continuity between Dostoevsky’s times and his own. In his essay “On One Mistake of Fictional Literature” (1959), in which he blames writers of the humanistic tradition, including Hugo, Chekhov, Gorky, and even Babel, for their romanticized image of the underworld, Shalamov speaks of Dostoevsky’s hopeless “villains” as being actually rather innocent and even infantile compared to the professional thieves of the twentieth century:

Dostoevsky in his Notes from the House of the Dead avoids giving a direct and uncompromising answer to this question. All these Petrovs, Luchkis, Sushilovs, Gazins — from the perspective of the real criminal world populated by true thieves [blatari], these are all <…> people who are despised, robbed and stepped upon by the real criminal world. <…> Dostoevsky never met them in his katorga, and had he done so, we would have probably never seen the best pages of his book — the affirmation of faith in a human being, the affirmation of virtue inherent in humankind (II, 7-8).

The question, of course, is not about who was tougher — Dostoevsky’s Gazins or the new cast of professional criminals in the Gulag, some of whom sided with the camp administration against political prisoners and were referred to as “friends of the people” (by contrast with “enemies”). Rather, “The Snake Charmer” raises the question about the fate of the intelligentsia and its role in the Russian society — a question that deeply preoccupied both Dostoevsky and Shalamov in their own historical times. But while Goryanchikov, excluded from the community of his fellow peasant convicts for being a gentleman, still enjoys his privileged social status, Shalamov’s Platonov, who deludes himself with the thought that “pulling novels” may actually be a noble mission that promises him not only physical but also moral survival, can never surmount the fateful gap between his social background and that of his criminal audience. Unlike Goryanchikov, who never trades in his identity, Platonov faces a moral dilemma: should he, a former script writer, live longer, if only for a short while, and sacrifice his human and professional dignity in return? Not that he is given much choice or even time to think, but he briefly imagines himself in the role of “a snake charmer,” hoping to bring light into this dark world. “A light gleamed in Platonov’s dull eyes” the moment he is asked if he can “pull novels.”

He could — and how! In the investigation prison, his whole cell had been spellbound while he told the story of Count Dracula. But they had been people. Whereas this lot? Should he become court jester to the Duke of Milan — a jester who was fed for a good jest and beaten for a bad one? But there was another way of looking at it all. He would teach them about real literature. He would enlighten them. He would awaken in them an interest in art, in the word; even here, in the lower depths, he would do his duty, fulfill his calling. As had long been his way, Platonov did not want to admit to himself that it was simply a matter of being fed, of receiving an extra bowl of soup not for carrying out a slop bucket, but for other, more dignified work. More dignified? No, he wouldn’t really be an enlightener — he would be more like someone scratching a criminal’s dirty heels. But the cold, the beatings, the hunger…[39]

Distancing himself from Platonov through the figure of the narrator, who says that he, personally, “never told novels for soup” and always considered it as “the ultimate humiliation” but refrains from blaming Platonov[40], Shalamov projects this moral dilemma onto his own role as a writer and witness. The distance between Platonov and the narrator in “The Snake Charmer” is thus marked both ethically and formally. It distinguishes Shalamov’s third-person narrative from The House of the Dead, where Goryanchikov’s tale is narrated in the first person and thus partly merges with Dostoevsky’s own.

There is yet another text from Shalamov’s later cycle, “The Glove, or Kolyma Tales — 2,” in which Dostoevsky’s novel is once again invoked to illustrate how drastically the conflict between the intelligentsia and the people evolved over the course of a century. This text, “Lesha Chekanov, or the Accomplices in Kolyma” (1970-1971), written in the first person, covers a span of eight years, starting in 1937, the year of Shalamov’s second arrest. While on trial in the Butyrki Prison, Shalamov, by then an experienced prisoner, helps his peasant cellmate Lesha Chekanov withstand the ordeal of investigation, initiating him into the prison world. They happen to be sentenced on the same day and to the same number of years, and are even sent in the same train car to Kolyma, where they meet again eight years later. Shalamov, by now on the verge of death, catches a glimpse of new hope as his former cellmate arrives in the camp as a newly appointed foreman. However, Chekanov not only refuses to help but also insists on sending Shalamov off to an even deadlier camp. As he announces his will to Shalamov, he says: “It is you, the bitches, who have driven us to death. All eight years here I have suffered because of these educated bastards” (II, 330; emphasis added). As it happens, Chekanov only paraphrases the words that Dostoevsky’s nobleman Goryanchikov heard many times from his fellow prisoners a century ago:

The dislike with which as a “gentleman” I was continually regarded by the convicts during my first few years, became intolerable, poisoning my whole life. <…> “You have beaks of iron, you’ve pecked us to death,” the convicts used to say to us, and how I used to envy the peasants who were brought to the prison[41]!

The age-old conflict between the intelligentsia and the people inherent in the Russian society was critical for Shalamov after Kolyma — both in the mid-1950s, when he read Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, as we could see from “The Tatar Mullah” (1955) and especially “The Snake Charmer” (1954)[42], and a decade later, when he was briefly involved with the Moscow dissident movement and became friends with Nadezhda Mandelshtam. On May 13, 1965, at a memorial evening devoted to Osip Mandelshtam at Moscow State University, he read his short story “Sherry Brandy” about the poet’s last days in the same transit camp near Vladivostok that Shalamov himself had passed through on his way to Kolyma a year or so earlier. That same year he read Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s memoirs and in late June he wrote to tell her that her manuscript “answers the question — what is the greatest sin? It is hatred toward the intelligentsia, hatred toward its superiority” (VI, 410). Also in 1965, Shalamov wrote his essay “On Prose,” a draft version of which (“On New Prose”) contains a discussion of Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech” and an even more radical claim: “Today Dostoevsky would not have repeated his phrase about the God-chosen people [narod-bogonosets]. <…> The people [narod] are greatly indebted to its intelligentsia” (V, 159-160). This question also frames Shalamov’s difficult relationships with Solzhenitsyn, whose novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he read and praised as soon as it came out in Novyi mir in 1962, but then became gradually disillusioned with. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov never saw Kolyma Tales published in the official Soviet press during his lifetime. The reasons are many and too complex to address here in detail. But one of the key motifs behind Shalamov’s polemics with Solzhenitsyn seems to continue his dialogue with Dostoevsky over the role of the intelligentsia and has to do with the two writers’ choices of characters, as well as the genres they worked with.

Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov and the End of the Novel

Clearly, in order to have his novel published and made available to the general reader, Solzhenitsyn had to accept a difficult compromise: his protagonist Ivan Denisovich Shukhov had to be portrayed not only as a resourceful enthusiast of physical labor who never loses heart, but also as a peasant[43]. One may even go as far as to suggest that in his novel Solzhenitsyn, who knew the rules of the game, deftly tried on the mask of Socialist Realism, with its mandate for a “positive character,” in order to ensure the publication of his novel. However, underneath this mask more truth could be read about the camps than there seemed to be on the surface. It was this Aesopian combination of what was true and what was allowed that constituted the great achievement of Solzhenitsyn, who managed to reach out to the general reader but did not have the chance to communicate the whole truth. Arguably, in order to tell more the author not only had to survive a longer and more severe camp experience, such as Shalamov’s, but also, and more importantly, had to find an entirely different literary method, one not so tightly bound by the conventions of Socialist Realism.

In his first letter to Solzhenitsyn, which he wrote the night after he first read the novel, Shalamov passionately admits that everything in it is “perfect, everything makes sense,” and that its special success lies in Solzhenitsyn’s “deep and subtle depiction of Shukhov’s peasant psychology”:

The novel is very clever, very talented. The camp is seen from the perspective of a “worker” <…>. This is not an educated prisoner on the verge of dying [doplyvaiushchii intelligent], but a peasant who has gone through a great ordeal, withstood that ordeal and is now telling about the past with humor (VI, 277).

Two years later, however, Shalamov confronts Solzhenitsyn with a broader question on the same topic that seems to revoke his comment on Shukhov’s peasant psychology. By now, Solzhenitsyn had published a number of other works, including Matrena’s Courtyard (1963), which also uses a peasant protagonist to personify the tragic fate of Russia and its people in the twentieth century and belongs to the canon of Village Prose. In this letter to Solzhenitsyn written on November 15, 1964, Shalamov avoids referring directly to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (or, for that matter, to Matrena’s Courtyard). “So who is the true hero?” he asks Solzhenitsyn. “I believe that the duty of every honest reader is to heroicize specifically the humanistic intelligentsia [gumanitarnaia intelligentsiia], which has always and everywhere <…> accepted the hardest blow. This happened not only in the camps, but in the entire history of mankind” (VI, 297)[44].

Could Shalamov draw a parallel between Solzhenitsyn’s compromise with the Soviet press, including his decision to underplay the role of the intelligentsia in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and the moral dilemma that Platonov was faced with in “The Snake Charmer”? After all, the fate of the intelligentsia, as Shalamov implies, is essentially the same on either side of the barbed wire[45]. Like Platonov, who has no chance at surviving other than by imagining himself as an enlightener of the criminals, could Solzhenitsyn, too, have succumbed to the temptation of becoming “a snake charmer” to the authorities who would decide whether or not his novel would “live” on the pages of a Soviet journal? But the actual stakes of Platonov in “The Snake Charmer” and Solzhenitsyn at Novyi mir’s editorial office are, of course, more difficult to compare: by agreeing to “pull novels” for the entertainment of the thieves, Platonov saves his own life, though not for long, while Solzhenitsyn, by yielding to official demands and making Ivan Denisovich “publishable,” saves both his life as a writer and that of the entire Gulag topic, which, needless to say, was previously strictly silenced[46]. The difference, of course, was more than obvious to Shalamov, who, in his first letter to Solzhenitsyn, praises not only the literary aspects of his novel — “You managed to find an exceptionally powerful form” (VI, 279) — but also its social value: “For a meticulous reader, this novella is a revelation in every phrase. In our literature, it is the first <…> word on the topic that everyone talks yet no one has ever written anything about. Your work is the long-awaited truth, without which our literature cannot move forward” (VI, 283, 287-288).

Yet apart from Solzhenitsyn’s choice of a peasant to speak on behalf of Gulag survivors, Shalamov grew increasingly frustrated with the novelistic genre as such as well as the technical aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s work on Ivan Denisovich. According to Shalamov’s principles of “new prose,” which he had fully formulated by the mid-1960s, it is vital that a writer who also bears witness to the Gulag and its victims remain faithful to the first draft and rule out the very idea of editing, allowing even the most random slips of the tongue into the text and never considering them an error (“On Prose”). In his memoirs The Oak and the Calf (1975), Solzhenitsyn himself speaks at length about the various concessions he had to make while working on Ivan Denisovich[47]. Moreover, Kolyma Tales, according to Shalamov, is about martyrs without biographies who never become heroes, which is rather hard to say about Shukhov, who is portrayed as a “positive character” and lists the strokes of luck that he had in the course of one “unclouded day. Almost a happy one[48]”. The cyclical composition of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, and even the round pieces of sausage that Shukhov receives as a reward at the end of his “lucky” day, is equally hard to imagine in Kolyma Tales, where characters usually seem to be moving from point A to B even when there is no concrete destination — for how concrete can death be[49]? As for the author of “new prose,” he is “neither a tourist nor an observer,” but “an actual participant in the drama of life,” or, as Shalamov puts it in the same essay, “Pluto rising from Hell, not Orpheus who descends into it” (V, 151).

Clearly, this new literary method that Shalamov spelled out in his essay “On Prose” and sustained throughout Kolyma Tales does not sit well with the traditional conventions of fiction in general and the novel in particular — much like in the seventeenth century, it was no longer possible for Avvakum to write about prison in the traditional language of hagiography. In 1922, long before Kolyma Tales, the death of the novel as a genre was predicted by Osip Mandelshtam in his eponymous essay, where he claimed that a contemporary prose writer is reduced to a chronicler, while the novel goes back to its origins, such as The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Mandelshtam believed that the novel is inextricably linked with the role of the individual in history, which means that “people without biographies,” as Shalamov described his characters, cannot ensure the life of the novelistic genre in the age of historical cataclysms that split the biography of an individual into pieces[50]. Several decades after Mandelshtam, Shalamov proclaims the novel to have died together with the millions of prisoners in Kolyma. Perhaps the novel, according to Shalamov, is even buried in the same grave. But his disillusionment with the novel and humanistic literature on the whole takes root not only in Kolyma, but also in Shalamov’s familiarity with the neo-formalist ideas on literature and society that were in the air during the late 1920s, when he began his career as a young writer and journalist in Moscow[51]. Shalamov’s “new prose,” thus, equals the author’s experience in the deadliest camps multiplied by his literary background, which was to a large extent informed by the revolutionary principles of prose writing and journalism of the New LEF group (Sergei Tretiakov, Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Brik, Nikolai Chuzhak and others) unified under the umbrella of literatura fakta. Since the late 1920s, these principles had been “frozen,” or conserved, in Shalamov’s imagination for more than two decades he spent in the camps, and in the second half of the 1950s they floated to the surface, were adjusted to the new era, and took shape as Kolyma Tales.

A radical attack on the novel as a genre that had exhausted itself in the face of the new historical reality was undertaken in 1929 by members of the New LEF, who announced a crusade against the “creative deadmen” of classical literature of the past, against the belles lettres as “opium for the people” and the “shamanism of literary priests[52]”. Although their manifestos, brought together in one volume, may have come out already after Shalamov’s first arrest on February 19, 1929, throughout the previous year he frequented Tretiakov’s literary workshops on Malaia Bronnaia and was well familiar with the teachings of the so-called “factists” [faktoviki]. Their agenda was to disavow the fictional element (vymysel), the very idea of plot (siuzhetnost’) and the emphasis on the psychology of the main hero set forth in a traditional novel and to focus instead on the social sphere and daily life — “to shift the focus from human feelings and emotions to the organization of the society[53]”. Chuzhak’s claim that “new literature” (cf. Shalamov’s “new prose”) does not tolerate “a writer divorced from the subject s/he writes about[54]” motivates Shalamov’s rejection of the “touristic” approach to prose writing and informs his view of a writer as “a participant in the drama of life” (V, 151). In their attempt to undermine the plot, the advocates for literatura fakta faced the inevitable question of what should be used instead to connect the seemingly disjointed pieces of writing: “Without a plot, a work of prose falls apart like a poem without rhymes. So what should replace the plot?” The solution was to look for “natural plots” (natural’naia siuzhetnost’) abundant in life itself, which is proclaimed “not such a bad inventor” (neplokhaia vydumshchitsa)[55]. And when the so-called natural plots are either absent or scarce, or simply not so obvious, the author’s ability to find and use them in his or her writing is what art is actually about: it is “the art of seeing, on the one hand, and rendering it, on the other[56]”. However cynical it may sound, the monotonous, gray, and uneventful reality of the camps, where the only “natural plot” was to survive till at least the next day, became, for Shalamov, a rich opportunity to test and manifest this highly ambitious principle of the new aesthetics. It is another matter that the doctrine of literatura fakta was driven not only by a purely aesthetic but also by a profoundly political agenda, which was formulated just around the time when the new revolutionary reality, despite the formalists’ best intentions, had evolved into one of the cruelest and most elaborate systems of annihilating the human body and spirit. The deaths of millions in the Gulag, already in its early stages, thus overlapped with the proclaimed extinction of the novel as a genre.

Sergei Tretiakov’s manifesto “The Biography of a Thing” compares the composition of a work of new literature to a production line, along which units of raw material move forth to be turned into “useful products.” The figure of a protagonist, whose psychology and emotions are the part and parcel of a traditional novel, is reduced to a “thing” devoid, as it were, of any feelings, but “animated” by society:

People’s individual and specific features <…> fade away, their personal hunches and epilepsies are invisible, but the professional diseases and social neuroses of a given group become highly prominent instead. <…> Thus, it is not a loner walking through a file of things, but a thing that passes through a file of people — here is the methodological literary device that we consider to be more progressive than the devices of classical belles lettres[57].

It may be argued that this radical postulate of literatura fakta informs the compositional idea of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales in general and its opening sketch, “Through the Snow,” in particular. Instead of describing a single character with a clear-cut biographical past and overpowering emotions at the present, “Through the Snow,” essentially, is such a “production line,” where the “units of raw material” are portrayed as human beings but, in fact, are reduced to “things” (or tools in the hands of the dehumanizing regime). It is their “biography” that Shalamov resolves to record in his Kolyma Tales. Tretiakov considered the newspaper “the bible of our days,” which made the novel redundant and obsolete: reading a newspaper, “we, basically, turn a new page of that wonderful novel that our contemporaneity represents. The characters of this novel, its writers and readers, are ourselves[58]”. Shalamov, however, unlike Tretiakov (or Solzhenitsyn, for that matter, who focuses on one central character, Ivan Denisovich), does not equate the writers and readers, but redistributes their roles in his chilling portrayal of a file of nameless prisoners marching through the snow, as if their footsteps were “covering” a page of the same “newspaper”: “The people on the tractors and horses, however, will be not writers but readers[59]”.

But why, one may ask, does Shalamov reject the genre of Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich while so consistently going back to Dostoevsky’s Siberian novel? Because Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead is exactly what a conventional nineteenth-century novel is not. This is why, as we see overtly in Herling’s memoir and more implicitly in Shalamov’s “The Snake Charmer,” Dostoevsky’s fictionalized autobiography invites Gulag authors not only to read it while still in the camps, but also, more importantly, to carry on its quasi-documentary pattern in their own narratives of an entirely different historical climate. In “The Snake Charmer,” Shalamov clearly shows what is left of a traditional novel in the criminal camps: it is reduced from román to róman, and it exists in a distorted and unrecognizable form only as cheap entertainment for the thieves. To the best of our knowledge, there are no accounts of Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead being “pulled” like a róman in the Gulag, while even Shakespeare’s Hamlet has not avoided this fate[60]. But, paradoxically, the wider the gap between the reality described in The House of the Dead and the experiences that Soviet prisoners faced a hundred or so years later, the greater seems to be the literary traction between Gulag narratives and Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century palimpsest.

Of course, Solzhenitsyn read The House of the Dead too. Like Shalamov a decade before him, he even passed through Omsk on a prison transfer in 1950, but while Shalamov describes the Siberian town and its transit prison associated with Dostoevsky as a chronotope and an intersection of history, geography and literary tradition — “When was Omsk?” he asks in his notes on Dostoevsky. “After Omsk the wheels began rolling faster” (V, 206, 208) — Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago only reminds the reader of how little help Dostoevsky’s experience was for prisoners in the Gulag: “As for Dostoevsky’s hard labor in Omsk, it is clear that in general they simply loafed about, as any reader can establish. <…> And what can you say if geese went wandering (!!) in their prison yard <…> and the prisoners didn’t wring their necks[61]?”. This zoological detail of camp life brings to mind Shalamov’s own bewilderment over the cat that walks around free and uneaten in the medical barracks in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich[62]. In Kolyma, as Shalamov remembered it, a live cat could not walk around safe and sound even as an optical illusion. Nor could the genre of a novel exist as a román, but only as a róman.

The Russian Review (January 2016): 7-25

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