Resisting the 'Machine'
BRODSKY, JOSEPH
Resisting the 'Machine' Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag By Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson Knopf. 370 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Joseph Brodsky Author, "Selected...
...Continuous starvation, enforced sleeplessness and beatings reduced the victim's body to a skin-covered skeleton...
...He was neither a Leftist nor a Rightist, neither an intellectual nor, certainly, an American spy...
...Indeed, the entire second half of the book is a Requiem to his Fridays, who could not go with him when he unexpectedly left the camps...
...he did not worship democracy, nor did he hate communism...
...This diminished the surface to which force could be applied and thereby lessened the susceptibility to pain, as well as the brain activity associated with it...
...I would even recommend that they be included in the curriculum of American high schools as an ABC of survival...
...In this new epic the old pattern of conflict between Good and Evil has been wholly eliminated, and there are no Homeric heroes...
...At the outset, I believe, the Machine outdid itself...
...But the book has a vital added dimension...
...He was simply an ordinary human being, and this book tells of the struggle waged by that ordinary human being for his life and for his dignity...
...Alexander Dolgun's story is most of all about staying alive...
...Here Dolgun had to defend himself against cruel work assignments, against the cold, against the knives of ordinary criminals who were mixed in with the political prisoners to continue the process of destroying or humiliating them...
...It was the beginning of a journey from which he returned only after 24 years...
...This latter-day Robinson Crusoe realized that a "big thing" was happening, and that there was no one he could count on as he confronted the most monstrous bone-grinding Machine in the history of mankind, one that already had to its credit tens of millions of dead people and at least 200 million morally castrated live ones...
...Instead, it deals with supermagnitudes and Machines that devour masses, and there is no use looking to either Theseus or St...
...During his solitary confinement he had been forced to invent ways of occupying himself every day, to keep from losing his mind...
...If Dolgun did have any ideals, they were the ideals of "fair play," and these had been gleaned more from Hollywood movies than from philosophical speculation...
...If his flesh suffers, a man says "I'm suffering...
...Then he realized the Machine was losing interest in him...
...He was rather naive, and as far as one can judge, the only thing that interested him was "good living...
...Of the book's 29 chapters, 14 are devoted to Dolgun's stay on the desert islands, and I believe every literate person should read them...
...The first problem someone in his circumstances faces is obviously "How...
...He did not walk away...
...Then came the amnesties, rehabilitations and reviews of cases...
...Or rather it was not he who returned, it was the person this journey produced...
...This universe of super-magnitudes has its own esthetic principles...
...My impression is that he did not understand the issue particularly well...
...He made his decision lying in his blood on the floor of the "psychological" cell...
...For what usually destroys a man in these circumstances is a kind of eschatological guilt, totally unrelated to the investigation...
...It is quite possible that with all his genius for survival Dolgun would have met the same end, if not for the death of a man who many say was a paranoid but in reality was simply a murderer who had stopped counting his victims-Joseph Stalin...
...It is here that the modernization of Robinson Crusoe begins, for in contrast to Defoe's hero, Dolgun had to contend with this ethical question...
...Everybody identifies himself more or less with his flesh...
...But ultimately it was the self that remained within the body that had to answer, and initially the answer was always the same: "Resist...
...Embassy were all the American government proved capable of...
...There was only one way out-into heaven...
...It was Dolgun's good fortune that he lacked the prerequisites for such guilt...
...Sukhanovka is reputed to be a place people do not walk away from...
...These were months of uninterrupted torture-of starvation and beatings and deprivation of sleep...
...They had to be, since his own country had virtually abandoned him: Two pitiful protests from the U.S...
...his youth, and the consequent absence of any sense of guilt...
...the second, "In the name of what...
...A 22-year-old clerk at the U.S...
...How else does a person become a citizen of a country if not by sharing the suffering of the people who inhabit it...
...But he found his "Fridays" who helped him to survive...
...Dolgun, describing an almost mystical sensation, tells how on several occasions, his self left his tortured body and observed what was happening like a bystander...
...It causes one to look upon everything that happens as a crude, inadequate, but material manifestation of the will of Providence...
...Embassy in Moscow in 1948, an American citizen soon to be married, Dolgun was arrested in broad daylight and accused of espionage...
...Their victims, when they eventually give in and sign whatever their executioners put in front of them, are proceeding from the same premise...
...It is impossible to read the closing pages of this book without becoming enraged, and I would hope that its publication will stimulate the Congress to investigate the circumstances that caused it to be written in the first place...
...The second half of Alexander Dolgun's Story focuses on his life in the concentration camps of Northern Kazakhstan...
...But the irony of his becoming a citizen in this way contains an element of logic...
...Having spent five years in a strict regime camp, Dolgun was freed...
...Yet in thinking about the attitude of U.S...
...But it is an epic that cannot be "hexametered...
...An individual living in contemporary society has no right to engage in any kind of discussion, especially a political one, if he isn't familiar with them...
...And the investigator from the Ministry of State Security tore them up right in front of him...
...for 20 years the U.S...
...authorities never so much as thought of undertaking a search...
...officials toward Dolgun's case, one gets the very unpleasant feeling that for other Americans similar horrors may still lie ahead...
...And while he survived, his mother did go mad and finally died in a mental institution...
...In this respect, Alexander Dolgun will always be more Russian than American, no matter how long he lives in the United States...
...Dolgun had the choice of killing himself, simply allowing himself to expire, going mad, or giving false testimony...
...it was continuing to mash his bones out of a purely bureaucratic need to "close the case...
...He would make a sewing needle out of a fishbone, for example, or catch a fly and hold it by a thread tied to its wing to have someone to say some words to...
...He returned to Moscow with Soviet citizenship, conferred upon him against his will...
...Now, in the concentration camp, everything was exactly the opposite...
...A prison is a shortage of space made more oppressive by a surplus of time...
...All torturers, when applying their art, proceed from this premise...
...Dolgun confirms this reputation...
...he was carried away, together with his sentence: 25 years at forced labor...
...It turned out happily, however, only because of the efforts of Dolgun's sister, who refused to be discouraged during almost a decade and a half of trying to convince official circles in the U.S...
...After a year the Machine's behavior became somewhat more rational and refined: The torture was combined with the amount of food necessary to give the prisoner just enough strength to make him responsive...
...She had been arrested somewhat after Alex together with his father, an American engineer who had come to the USSR to work during the Depression...
...So Alex Dolgun fabricated a rather raving account of espionage activities, received a 25-year sentence, and moved on to a forced labor camp...
...That is how the guards made sure that someone was dead after being shot and not just pretending, waiting to climb out of the common grave and run away...
...In fact, this kind of literary endeavor transcends existing categories and belongs to a new one, not yet fully established and not within the jurisdiction of literary criticism...
...Although this book is of course a memoir, in terms of content it is an epic...
...Thus Alexander Dolgun, with his generally limited interests, physical vulnerability, sentimentality, and will to survive at all costs is the true hero of our time: He didn't allow the Machine to devour him...
...Why were they shot...
...In the sentence that was read to him his name was changed to Dovgun-Dolzhin, the object being, as I see it, to prevent the American authorities from tracing their missing citizen...
...But they were enough...
...Had he not done this, his book would not exist...
...I repeat: He had no defined ideas...
...In my opinion, his Story is a ready-made scenario, quite suitable for Hollywood, including the happy ending...
...Dolgun simply began to lose consciousness during the interrogations, and whenever consciousness was restored with the help of a bucket of cold water or injections, he said No...
...to concern themselves with the suffering of their citizen...
...Reviewed by Joseph Brodsky Author, "Selected Poems" The story of Alexander Dolgun is a contemporary and hence more nightmarish version of the story of Alexander Selkirk, better known as Robinson Crusoe...
...Actually, he was much more afraid of going mad than of dying...
...The Machine is aware of this human quality and tries to exploit it or, if you don't have it, to instill it...
...George for deliverance...
...But this was an unnecessary precaution...
...Dolgun speaks of these with only slight bitterness, natural enough for a man who has so much horror behind him...
...That much is suggested by the jacket copy...
...Dolgun was probably saved by two things...
...Because "a step either to the right or the left, and the guards open fire without warning...
...Most of them had to stay behind forever, beneath the ground -with a skull fractured by an axe in the summer, or with a stomach pierced by a red-hot steel rod in the winter...
...As someone under suspicion, Dolgun spent a total of 18 months in solitary confinement, in cells (desert islands in an ocean of pain) within the most terrible Soviet jails for prisoners being investigated, Lefortovo and Sukhanovka...
Vol. 58 • May 1975 • No. 11
