Surviving the Gulag
GIBIAN, GEORGE
Surviving the Gulag Kolyma Tales By Varlam Shalamov Norton. 222 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by George Gibian Professor of Russian Literature, Cornell University Western reception of Russian authors...
...His narration is laconic, understated, like the reports of a camera or microphone-with occasional ethnographic explanations of camp life, and death, added for the benefit of the uninitiated reader-And he has a fine eye for gestures...
...The translator, John Glad, has not only been faithful to the original, but has enhanced the power of the stories by grouping them according to theme: Survival, The Criminal World, The Jailors' World, Release...
...Typed copies of Shalamov's stories about Kolyma circulated unofficially for years in the Soviet Union, and a few were published in emigre Russian newspapers and journals in the West...
...Inevitably, comparisons will be made between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: "I almost exclude Kolyma from the scope of this book . . . Kolyma was fortunate: Varlam Shalamov survived it and has written a lot about it already...
...He observes that the prisoners who served in the Armed Forces were best equipped mentally to defy the authorities...
...In the flickering light of the gasoline lamp, Garkunov's face became gray...
...An account of the brutal "shock therapy" used by the medical personnel to crack prisoners pretending to be crippled is particularly effective in its understatement...
...Taken as a whole-And they are far more powerful read together in a collection than individually????these stories give a picture of the Kolyma horrors as broad as the Siberian waste itself: the mass graves, the endless roads trudged by the laborers, millions of dehumanized men and women kept in bestial conditions...
...Yet the prisoners use the same desperate ingenuity to lengthen their lives, if perhaps for just a day or two...
...Now I had to find a new partner to cut wood with...
...The last sentence expired in 1953 -by coincidence, around the time of Stalin's death????but Shalamov was not allowed to return to Moscow for a few more years...
...on the contrary, self-preservation and self-interest predominate...
...after 1945, Soviet military personnel who had been prisoners of the Germans...
...We see how the free inhabitants of Kolyma smuggle basketfuls of sunflower seeds by train to Moscow, and return with new galoshes...
...Gratuitous kindness is rare and only once, when a father and his infant son are allowed to return to Russia from the camps, do we glimpse happiness...
...He is more self-restrained as well, exhibiting artistic concentration and intensity...
...One of them, Naumov in "On Tick," loses at cards and orders Garkunov, a political prisoner who happens to be in the barracks at the moment, to give up his sweater to make good the debt...
...Couldn't we get along without that?' shouted Seva...
...At that time, a five-year sentence did not require the prosecutor to specify a charge...
...Kolyma Tales are a unified cycle of sketches and stories...
...But his stories have still not been published in the Soviet Union...
...Shalamov has far less faith than Solzhenitsyn in the survival of human decencies under camp conditions...
...Shalamov combines the qualities of Ernest Hemingway with those of Isaac Babel...
...Shalamov also destroys the widespread belief that the "criminal element" (blatnye) are Robin Hood-like, romantic, basically kind-hearted Russian outlaws...
...We learn how prisoners fashioned lamps (kolymka) for their barracks out of the top of a can, bits of tin, and a piece of coal...
...Immediately Sasha, Naumov's orderly, the same Sasha who had just poured us soup for sawing wood, stooped down and jerked something from the top of his boot...
...He does not analyze the states of mind, or render the thoughts, of his characters...
...When Garkunov refuses, the thief s underlings first maul and then kill him...
...Finally, in 1978, a Russian volume containing 103 of his stories was published in London...
...Now 24 of his best tales are available in English...
...We discover that horses break under hard labor in the North before men...
...in the later '30s, victims of Stalin's purge trials and denunciations...
...Several slim volumes of Shalamov's reflective, lyrical poems have been published in the USSR...
...I went back to my barracks...
...He set about recording his experiences...
...In 1931 the Soviet government decided to turn the province into a huge labor camp and placed it under secret police administration...
...in 1943 he received 10 more years for having described Ivan Bunin, the bitterly anti-Soviet emigre writer who later won the Nobel Prize, as "a classic of Russian literature...
...The game was over...
...In 1929 Varlam Shalamov, then a 22-year-old student of law at Moscow University, was arrested, for reasons that remain mysterious, and sentenced to five years at the labor camp in the former monastery of Solovki...
...Sasha stretched out the dead man's arms, tore off his undershirt, and pulled the sweater over his head...
...At the same time, he gives us striking concrete details of life in a Soviet concentration camp...
...Over two decades, hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished in this arctic wilderness...
...He's biting,' someone shouted...
...In 1927 it had a population of only 7,500...
...how criminal prisoners chewed bread, squeezed it through cloth, and thus made a starch good for gluing together sheets of paper to make playing cards...
...Shalamov punctures one sentimental illusion after another...
...The following year, the first tens of thousands of prisoners were shipped to the edges of the permafrost area, where they were put to work operating the gold mines and building crude roads, camps, depots, and the town of Magadan...
...Very few escape Shalamov's general rule and remain noble and human...
...Kolyma is an area in Northeastern Siberia about five times the size of France, with great mineral resources, especially gold, and the coldest winter weather in all of the Soviet Union...
...Flaunting art-lessness, Shalamov may indeed possess the greater art...
...Gulag, of course, is an encyclopedic conglomerate of facts, reports and incidents...
...One hopes he will soon be able to bring us more of Shalamov's still largely unrecognized work from the Russian...
...Reviewed by George Gibian Professor of Russian Literature, Cornell University Western reception of Russian authors has been a notably capricious affair, so we have had to wait too long for an English translation of the short stories of Varlam Shalamov...
...Some mutilate themselves by cutting off their fingers with an axe, or by placing a foot in a bag with a mine explosive cap and blowing it off...
...so has Evgenia Ginzburg [author of Journey into the Whirlwind, and mother of the writer Vasily Aksyonov] and others...
...The prisoners arrived in waves: in the early '30s, "Trotskyists" and other "Old Bolsheviks...
...Then he stretched out his hand to Garkunov, and Garkunov sobbed and started to lean over on his side...
...Favored by camp authorities, they exercise their ruthless power over all political prisoners...
...Shalamov's tiny sketches (some are only a few pages long) evoke vast spaces and long years...
...It is not true, he shows, that friendship flourishes under extreme adversity...
...The vast majority of prisoners are utterly degraded and will do anything, to anybody, for a little advantage to themselves...
...Prisoners make persistent attempts at "braking" (delaying being transported or reassigned to the hardest labor...
...Garkunov slowly got up from the floor, wiping the blood from his face with his sleeve...
...The minutest particle of food is savored and cherished, for even a prisoner who wants to commit suicide must eat to gain the strength to walk deliberately away from an armed guard...
...His view of Russians in prison is more pessimistic than Dosto-evsky's in the House of the Dead...
...After a brief interval of liberty, he was arrested a second time in 1937 and sentenced to five years at Kolyma...
...Smaller collections of German and French translations have also appeared...
...Helplessness is a recurrent theme, with hunger the all-powerful master of the camps...
...Shalamov is a relentlessly honest observer who resorts only occasionally to a muted irony...
...In 1942 Shalamov's sentence was extended "to the end of the War...
...Seva folded the sweater into the plywood suitcase-carefully, so as as not to get the blood on his fingers...
...By then he was 50 and had spent half his life in labor camps, including 17 years in Kolyma...
...The description of the incident exemplifies Shalamov's bareboned narrative style: "They rushed at him, knocking him down...
...The sweater was red, and the blood on it was hardly noticeable...
...Now John Glad has carried out this task, and the result is a significant literary event: Not only is Shalamov a master of the short story, but his work is a major document about a quarter-century of human suffering in the Soviet labor camps of the Kolyma-Magadan region...
...In 1975 The Shorter Literary Encyclopedia even acknowledged his existence as a writer in a brief entry written by a fellow labor camp inmate, now emigre, Leonid Chertkov...
...after 1939, Poles from newly occupied Poland...
...He shows them to be monstrously cruel and selfish...
Vol. 63 • April 1980 • No. 7
