Soviet Literature Archives - Page 3 of 3

Red Army Cavalry by Isaac Babel – The Birth of a Revolutionary Culture

Introduction: Isaac Babel and his World

War is a time and space of rapid change, of unrivalled destruction but also of the creation and recreation that comes in its aftermath. In 1920 a young Russian Jew of Odessa accompanied the newly formed armies of the Soviet Union in their war against Poland. Isaac Babel, friend of Maxim Gorky, had been given the role of war correspondent through his connections to the other writer. Gorky saw Babel as needing first-hand experience to improve the quality of his writing. What came out of this time was a cycle of short stories, Red Army Cavalry (Konarmiia), a work of both beauty and brutality. Babel’s stories, published separately in the 1920s before being collected together, showed a new revolutionary world being born, and all the ambiguity it brought.

Picture of Isaac Babel — Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was one of the greatest writers of the early Soviet period. But like so many, he fell foul of the state and was murdered by the secret police.

Babel’s work in these stories is of vital importance to understanding Soviet culture because it contains within itself the two trends that were later to become dominant in it. The first, in works lying outside of state approval and published only clandestinely if at all, criticised the state for claiming to have made a utopia reality when in practice they had made a lie leading only to suffering; the second view, however, which developed into Socialist Realism, was one that promoted the Russian Revolution as creating a new and better world, which saw bright hopes and the chances to put them into action, and a new type of heroism, accessible to all.

Babel expressed both views with equal care, and for this his collection is important in a world where views of the Soviet Union tend to be particularly black-or-white. But these stories are also intellectually challenging, extremely well-written, and even at times entertaining. And that doesn’t hurt them either.

War and its Representation: The Structure of Red Army Cavalry

The great Russian war novel is the aptly titled War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. At well over a thousand pages it conveys the totality of war by describing everything Tolstoy can think of that is connected with it. Red Army Cavalry is, by contrast, tiny. The stories themselves are only ever a few pages long, and the whole book in my edition is just over 150 pages. But Babel was a huge admirer of Tolstoy’s, and his influence is felt here, albeit in a sublimated form. Whereas Tolstoy aimed to write about everything, Babel felt that such an option was no longer open to him.

Faced with the horrors of war, and aware of his own limits as a witness, he wrote what comes together to be a fragmented novel rather than a short story collection. Characters recur, and each story chronologically follows on from the previous one, as the cheerful optimism of the Soviets is replaced by concern as they begin to suffer losses, and then fear as they are routed. The narrator is a man called Liutov, which was Babel’s own name while he was working as the war correspondent, and the two men share other similarities that blur together fact and fiction. Babel made liberal use of his diary for creating these stories, so that it is hard to tell where Babel ends and Liutov begins.

Picture of Red Army soldiers during the Polish War — Kalinin and Trotsky survey Red Army troops. The Polish War was an early failure of the new state, but at least it led to *Red Army Cavalry*.

By showing an individual’s challenges during war, Babel can focus on the reality of suffering rather than the abstractions that are inevitable when trying to paint a bigger picture. Liutov encounters many of those affected by the warring armies, from Catholic priests in Poland to smaller Jewish communities in modern-day Belarus, to simple peasant men and women. Even as an individual there is enough material to bear witness to. And whenever Babel wants to expand beyond this, he uses the Russian technique known as skaz, similar to free indirect speech it is where characters speak in language and styles clearly distinct from those of the author. For example, in the story “The Letter”, a young boy, Kurdyukov, dictates a letter for his mother to Liutov. In this letter he reveals the extent of his own, personal suffering in the war in a way that Liutov himself cannot express on his own, except by recording it.

The Prose of Sympathy and Absent Judgements

What Babel takes from Tolstoy is not a grandiose scale so much as a sense of sympathy towards the world and its inhabitants, and a lack of direct judgement on them. He takes time to focus on the specific and concrete casualties of the fighting in ways that challenge the simplistic metanarratives of war being merely a tug-of-war between opponents.

The first story, “Crossing the River Zbruch”, is representative of this. It begins “The leader of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn” (translations mine unless otherwise noted) – the tone here is formal and military. But by the second paragraph there is a shift from the objective towards a more subjective and poetic appraisal of the landscape: “Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the buckwheat rises like the wall of a far-off monastery”. Death, hidden in official reports under mere statistics, breaks through in images like that of the orange sun that “rides across the sky like a decapitated head”.

After these lyrical moments the bulk of the narrative takes place. Liutov enters Novograd and is billeted in a flat with a pregnant woman and three Jewish men, one of whom lies on the floor and sleeps. The descriptions of the poverty within the flat indicate more than the narrator’s frustration ever could what suffering the war has caused. The floors are covered with human faeces, while the pregnant woman’s very existence demands the question – by whom is she pregnant? The lack of judgement by Liutov encourages the reader to search the text carefully to determine for themselves what it might indicate.

Picture of Anton Chekhov — Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) wrote stories which, like Babel’s in *Red Army Cavalry*, often end without conclusions. Through a lack of judgement both writers encourage their readers to come to their own conclusions about the meaning of a story.

This lack of narratorial judgement, analogous to the conclusions of Chekhov’s stories, is made even more glaring by the often horrific contents of the stories. At the end of “Crossing the River Zbruch” Liutov discovers that the pregnant woman’s father, who he’d thought was sleeping, is actually dead. “His throat was torn, his face was chopped in half, and dark blue blood lay in his beard, like a piece of lead.” This description of death is so different to numb cliché that we are forced to pay attention to it, to face the terrifying reality of war. Its presence invites judgement but does not make it. The pregnant woman has the final words of the story, explaining how the Poles killed him because it was “necessary”. Through his sacrifice she finds “a terrible strength” and pride in spite of her surroundings. Only in “terrible” is there hinted Liutov’s own reaction.

Culture Wars: Introduction

The world after the Russian Revolution was changing culturally just as much as it was technologically and politically. In some sense the change was a positive one, bringing art and artistic production down to the masses from being almost exclusively the domain of Russian elites in the capitals. Religion was dismissed as mere delusion, “the opium of the people” in Marx’s eyes, and science and rational thought were promoted as the alternative. Social progress on a grand scale, by the most forward thinking (in its own eyes) states ever to have existed, was the order of the day. A new type of hope was born, one that saw agency transferred from a mysterious God above into the hands of individual men and women.

But with all that there comes a question – what have we lost? Red Army Cavalry presents the two sides of progress’s coin through the times of the day, contrasting in daytime stories those who represent the new world with the characters of stories set at night, who represent an old world that, however irrevocably tainted it is, still retains something intangible and important for human life.

Culture Wars: Night and the Old Culture

Who are the people who lose out in the face of the Revolution and its consequences? Primarily it is the Jewish characters and the Catholics. Liutov himself is like Babel, Jewish, and thus as vulnerable as these others to the cataclysmic changes taking place. Within the stories the great representative of the old culture is the Jew, Gedali, from the story of the same name. In his story Liutov, late on the evening of the Sabbath goes out among the Jews of his current village, looking at the little stalls where they sell items like chalk to survive. The destitution makes him think of Dickens, and it is such appeals to an established literary tradition that reveal how culturally bound up in it he is.

Eventually he comes across the bench of an old man, Gedali, and sits down for a chat. At Gedali’s bench there are dead butterflies and other objects of fragile beauty. Yet with these symbols of culture there is a sense of its own negation, when Liutov smells “decay” underneath it all. Gedali is an educated man, and the two discuss the Revolution together. Gedali says he loves music and the Sabbath, but the Revolution tells him he doesn’t know what he loves. He talks of the violence the Revolution has led to and comments “The Revolution is the good act of good people. But good people don’t kill. That means that the Revolution makes people bad”. For all the idealism motivating the Soviets in this period, Gedali is concerned with its failed reality of it. In pain he famously asks Liutov “Which is the revolution and which the counterrevolution?”

Liutov has no real answers. His responses are pithy, thoughtless, as though plucked from a handbook on propaganda. “The Revolution has to shoot, Gedali… for it is the Revolution”, he says, obviously playing a different role to the one he plays in other stories. Soon enough he gets tired of his self-deception and asks where he can get some Jewish food and tea. Then he sets off to take part in the culture he was born into and cannot, though he tries to pretend otherwise with Gedali, escape. Meanwhile, Gedali goes to pray.

Closed indoor spaces, filled with decay and dust – these are the domains of the old culture. It is dying, certainly. There is a distinct sense of infertility in them, an absence of women and children. But for Liutov, and for other intellectual characters, it is absolutely necessary. It is a part of themselves that they cannot afford to lose.

Culture Wars: Sunshine and Cossacks in Red Army Cavalry

Loud and proud and colourful, the Cossacks stand out among the characters encountered during the day. They do not think beyond the present – neither past regrets nor the future hopes hold sway with them. They embody upheaval and joyous chaos. One of them is Dyakov, who was formerly a circus manager, and now is a soldier. He is described as “red-faced, silver-whiskered, in a black cloak”, as though he had never abandoned his roots as a performer. Colour is one way that the day-people stand out compared to the dull souls of the night. In their huge, larger-than-life poses and actions they are more than a little reminiscent of epic heroes.

Picture of a Cossack — Cossacks like this one pictured here were traditionally free of some of the administrative burden of the Russian state in exchange for aiding it militarily. They played key roles in the subjugation of the Caucasus, for example.

They have no culture of the sort comprehensible to Liutov. Instead, they sing and one of them, Afonka Bida, at one point tries drunkenly playing a church organ in an act clearly symbolic of the usurpation of old culture’s place by the new. Their vitality is overpowering, and is usually marked by connecting them to their horses. They are often shown having sex or seducing women, demonstrating the sheer magnetic attractiveness of their love of life. They do not care whether they live or die, so long as in every moment they are living to the full. In this sense, it is hard not to wish to be like them and similarly free from restraint and concern.

But their freedom and joy is only one side of them. They come at a cost – their violence and unpredictability sets them outside of society and civilization, and for all their heroism, such as squadron commander Trunov valiantly facing down a biplane on his own like a modern day Don Quixote, under its surface Red Army Cavalry questions what good these people will be able to do once the war has ended and it is time to settle down. These are people who, thinking back to Gedali’s words, have made the Revolution and made it in their own image. The violence with which they carry out the Revolution also shapes it, and hardly in a good way.

Liutov’s Among his Comrades

Liutov, of course, fits in uneasily among his comrades. Two stories illustrate this. “My First Goose” is one of Babel’s most famous ones. In it Liutov is first mocked by the Cossacks for his appearance – like Babel he wears glasses – and for his education. Savitskii, one of them, suggests he defile a woman in order to be respected by the rest of them. Instead, he goes and kills a chicken with a sword in a mockery of his own hopes of being heroic before giving it to its owner, an old woman, to cook. The woman repeatedly says that she wants to kill herself, but Liutov ignores her, returning to his comrades. Now that he has killed he is accepted by them and addressed as “mate”. But the act leaves him feeling guilty, and during the night he dreams of the blood he has spilled.

The second story, “The Death of Dolgushov”, further demonstrates his failure to fit in. Dolgushov, a Cossack, is injured and dying from his wounds, which are described just as horribly as they are in “Crossing the River Zburch”. He asks Liutov to kill him, so that the Poles don’t find him alive to torture him further. But Liutov, filled with compassion and the humanist values common among the night characters, is unable to do it – his care paralyses him. Instead Afonka Bida has to finish the other Cossack’s life. As he does so, he says to Liutov: “Get away or I’ll kill you! You, four eyes, pity our brother like a cat does a mouse”. Values that seem so effective in books fail Liutov the moment he has to put them into practice. By the end of the story he has lost the little all the respect he had gained.

Pan Apolek and the New Culture

Pan Apolek is not a Cossack, but rather a Polish Catholic. Yet where the Cossacks fail to create a new culture out of the ruins of the old, Pan Apolek in his own story shows one way in which a potential synthesis of the old culture and the new is possible. Liutov first meets him at night, while he is having tea with his hostess, and then learns about his work. Apolek is a church painter, but with a difference. Traditionally such a person would go around trying to paint according to the strict rules of icon paintings, deviating as little as possible from an original image. Yet though Apolek paints Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and other Biblical figures, they are not modelled on originals but rather on local people. In this way he mixes high, religious culture with the low culture of normal people.

Picture of an icon — Icons like the one pictured here generally were painted according to strict rules. Pan Apolek instead democratises the whole concept of an icon, bringing poor peasants into a religious culture that otherwise would seem distant and cold to them.

Though he is branded a heretic, he continues painting. His subjects include such blasphemous pairings as having Mary Magdalene be Yelka, a local woman who has given birth to many illegitimate children. What Apolek does is bring the high culture of religion down into the world, and in doing so make it more accessible. More than the revolutionaries themselves, he brings their ideals into practice.

Conclusion: Writing and Synthesis

Liutov is not the only writer here. In the story “Evening” several other war correspondents are depicted, each of them marked by illnesses, with Liutov’s being his poor sight. In vain one of them tries to convince a girl in the camp to sleep with him, but she instead joins one of the Cossack soldiers, unattracted by statistics and historical figures. But the very existence of Red Army Cavalry is itself an argument about writing and its use. As much as the Cossacks see little need for fancy metaphors and complex structures, Babel still gives them to us. He gives us stories of night and day, evening and the dawn. By writing about so many people, those who suffer from the Revolution and those who are made great by it, he encourages us to consider it not as good or evil, but as a mixture of the two.

A great deal of culture was lost, a strain of humanism of value seemingly disappeared, but in its place was a new world, filled with hopes and vitality. Liutov may be scrawny and bespectacled, but in writing this book Babel has made him, too, a kind of hero, because through these stories their emerges an attempt to shape the direction of cultural production within the Soviet Union, and with it an entire society, for the better. Like Pan Apolek, in the stories of Red Army Cavalry Babel syntheses two worlds, instead of letting one or the other get the better of him. If only his work had found more success instead of repression, perhaps the Soviet Union could have been a different place.

For more early Soviet literature filled with ambiguity, have a look at my piece on Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories. Alternatively, if you’d rather look at the dark side of the Soviet system directly, Varlam Shalamov writes wonderfully and grimly about the Gulag here.

picture of Babel, picture of Kalinin and Trotsky surveying the Red Army, picture of Chekhov, picture of a Cossack, and picture of an icon are all in the public domain

Soul and other stories by Andrei Platonov – A True Soviet Believer?

Andrei Platonov is not well known in either his home country or the West, but he is perhaps the most interesting of the Soviet writers I’ve encountered over the course of this academic year. He was recommended by my favourite Russian professor in the context of a lamentation that so few people read him or wrote on him, for to her mind he was certainly worth the trouble. Since my exam this term is flexible enough to let me write on anybody, so long as I can answer the question, I went and sought Platonov out in the library, to see what I could find.

The Perfect Soviet Writer?

Andrei Platonov was born the son of a railway worker in 1899 near Voronezh. He started work aged 13 as a clerk at an insurance company, and throughout his life he tried many different jobs. When the Russian Revolutions started he began studying electrical engineering at university, then once the Civil War broke out he helped deliver supplies to the troops. As he was a young man there was little reason for him not to support Russia’s new Bolshevik leaders, who claimed to be bringing the recently-created Soviet Union into a new age of technological and cultural vitality. Until 1922 Platonov worked as a journalist as part of the Union of Communist Journalists and wrote some fiction and poems, but he abandoned all this in the wake of the drought and famine of 1921 to work on land reclamation and electrification projects so that such catastrophes could not happen again.

A photograph of Andrei Platonov — Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) had all the makings of a perfect Soviet state writer. But he couldn’t betray the reality he saw before him for a lie.

All this is to say that Platonov was a serious Communist, someone who acted for his beliefs as well as just writing about them. With his humble origins and history of hard work in the service of the state he was on paper the perfect writer for those Soviet authorities who wanted to create a new literature to go alongside their new country. But Platonov’s experience, which made him so acceptable to the Soviets, was a double-edged sword. He saw first hand the results of the New Economic Policy, and the hypocrisy of local Communists, and it left deep marks upon his fiction. For what he presents, time and again in these stories, is the collapse of the idea in the face of reality.

Socialist Realism and the Realistic Soviet Writer

At the time “Soul” and the other seven stories of this collection were written the Soviet Union had, after a period of limited censorship in the 1920s, decided upon the values which every book aiming to be published within the country ought to reflect. These were, broadly put, Pravdivost’, Narodnost’, Klassovost’, Ideinost’ – or, translated, Truthfulness; Accessibility to the common people; Free from class influences and belonging to a classless society; and in accordance with the Party line. Each of these terms is heavily loaded – for one, Truthfulness doesn’t simply mean showing what you see, but rather showing how what you see is in accordance with the development of Communism before our eyes. That is, it is contradictory – if you don’t see reality to be in accordance with this, you must distort reality so that it is. Soviet fiction became, then, as much about shaping reality than displaying it.

In practice, what this meant was optimism, forced or unforced, and settings that focused on the common worker to elevate his or her standing into something akin to heroism. From the ballrooms of 19^th century we enter the city streets, farms, and remote railway villages. Flowers, youth and sunlight were celebrated, as were the new technologies of aviation, electrification, and trains. Heroes became those who, as in a Bildungsroman, moved from unenlightenment into knowledge, but here that knowledge was of a particular sort – it was acceptance and understanding of the fact that the Soviet system was the greatest such system to ever exist. All of this places a great demand on the writer to believe in what he or she was writing – the optimism could not be tempered, if one wished to be published. Support for the Soviets counted for little if it wasn’t matched with purity of optimism.

Platonov and friends

Platonov doesn’t fit well into the categories that a cursory look at Soviet literature tends to result in. Those people who we praise and rank so highly in the West, rightly or wrongly, are those who stood outside of the system and wrote against it. Mikhail Bulgakov, Varlam Shalamov (whose stories I look at here), and Anna Akhmatova are names that immediately come to mind. Or else people who died for their writing, like Osip Mandel’shtam, Daniil Kharms, or Isaac Babel’. We read them, at least in part, because they confirm the simplistic notion that the Soviet Union was a terrible place and gosh darn aren’t we lucky that we didn’t live there, eh? They give us a smug satisfaction, besides their entertainment value.

Those writers who truly gave themselves over to Socialist Realism, and its dream, are mostly forgotten. In Russia, a few of them are still struggling on in school syllabi. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, or Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, are pretty much the only ones I can think of people I know having read. Vladimir Mayakovsky is remembered more for his poetry before the Revolution than after it. And Maxim Gorky is perhaps better known for what he did as a political activist than for what he wrote. The good writers, we like to say, died, left, or wrote in secret.

But then there is Andrei Platonov. Though he was friends with Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, the centre of the web of writers and intellectuals who were not in support of the state, Platonov never abandoned the beliefs that the Revolutions in his youth had brought to life in him. But what his fiction displays is the divided impulse between the belief in Communism, and the belief in the importance of Truth, of showing what actually was taking place in the countryside, and how there was suffering yet in the utopia-come-early the Soviets had created. He tried to publish, again and again, and unlike the first group of writers above, he succeeded from time to time. Yes, he was usually forced to make amendments, and yes, it did happen that a few of his works were simply too radical to see the light of day, but the very fact of publication shows that he was unique among the Soviet writers. He had his own Truth, and it was not as far from the Soviet dream as we might want to say.

Soul and other stories

“Soul”and the other stories of this collection were written in the late 1930s, with the exception of the final story, “The Return”, which was written in 1946. Though they vary in setting and theme, they are all tied together by Platonov’s concern with the idea of the Revolution. That is, the hope of a new and better world.

“Soul”

“Soul”, the title story, is the longest, taking up almost half of the book. Set in the deserts and drylands of Soviet Central Asia, it follows the return of Nazar Chagataev to his homeland. He belongs to the Dzhan nation, whose name means “soul”. They are an itinerant, nomadic group who he had been sent away from by his mother so that he might receive an education in Moscow. His task as he comes home is to bring Communism to this people, but the simplicity of the statement distorts the nebulous nature of the job itself. The people are scattered, and it is only through constant searching that Chagataev is able to locate a few of them, including his own mother. The nation is spiritually broken, after hundreds of years of cruelty and starvation, and no longer wishes to live. Platonov painfully describes the way that men and women had to keep reminding themselves to breathe, lest they drift away by accident.

Chagataev’s goal is only on the surface to bring Communism to his people – more crucially it is to return a sense of life’s purpose and happiness to them. Thus begins a journey to gather together his old acquaintances and teach them to move on from scavenging into living full lives, eating well and living in houses. Platonov describes in detail the starvation of the characters, the constant recourse to the barest of grass soups, and the way they are forced to suck the blood out of each and every animal they meet. Platonov’s world, much like Varlam Shalamov’s, is one of survival at all costs. Animals are given a special place in it, but it seems not to be because they are human-like, but more because the humans have entered such a fallen state that the differences between them are scarcely marked. Chagataev’s own mother scarcely remembers him, and many of the people are struggling with deformities, or have gone mute.

Photo of the desert in Central Asia around the Aral Sea. — The desert of Central Asia where Chagataev finds himself is far less bountiful in “Soul” than in the photograph here.

At one level Platonov’s story is about Chagataev’s struggle to recreate civilization, but Platonov’s stories always work beyond their surface level as well. Soul is no different. Chagataev becomes over the course of the work a father to his nation, just as Stalin was styled in the Soviet Union. His successes – and his failures – become implicitly a critique of the man himself, and his own nation-building process. There is another Communist in the story, a man sent to the Dzhan people a few months before Chagataev was. This man is dangerous and cruel, and the relationship between the two educated men in their remote wilderness reminds me more than a little of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, another work that asks whether the civilizing mission is ultimately worthwhile.

The Other Stories

“Among Animals and Plants” is another story where the layering is important. On one level it is about a railway worker in the remote forests of the north who is hoping to go and work in a nearby village, and listen to music and educate himself. On another, familiar to any reader at the time but now revealed (at least to me) only by the lengthy introduction and notes to the edition, the work is about the slave labour existent under the Gulag system. The village where the worker wants to be is so cultured precisely because it is full of educated prisoners. But there are plenty of other hints in the work that all is not as it seems. The sounds of whimpering in the forest, or considerations about punishment as the worker’s mind wanders off, all take on a bleaker tone once the reader is aware of the second level of meaning. This was a story Platonov struggled to get published.

Perhaps the two most well-known stories here are “The River Potudan” and “The Return.” Both of them deal with a homecoming – the first, after the Civil War, and the second, after the Second World War. The act of returning home is hugely significant. Through going back to our homes after time away we always encounter that sudden jolt of disassociation as we find that our memory and the reality are not entirely in line with one another. In “The River Potudan” Platonov shows how Nikita Firsov, after time spent fighting in the war, deals with the difficulty of reconstruction at home. Though he finds himself a wife, a hard working young lady, their marriage is unhappy and unconsummated. It is also marked by the death of her young friend, a girl who was studying hard for a new life in the Soviet world. As is the case elsewhere, it seems that the people who suffer most are those believe in the Soviet ideals the most.

Eventually, Firsov flees his home out of shame and starts to live in another village, doing menial tasks to support himself. It is only when he meets his father unexpectedly at the market that he considers going home, all the more so when the man tells him that his wife has attempted suicide by drowning herself in the river of the title. Firsov does return home, and together with his wife they succeed in forming a more successful, consummated, marriage than there had been before. But the conclusion is hopeful, optimistic more because of Firsov lowers his utopian expectations of the world than because these revolutionary hopes were met. The new world will take a long time to make.

“The Return” is similar to “The River Potudan”. Here, a soldier returns to his wife after a long absence. After spending time flirting with a girl from a nearby village he leaves the train they were both on to walk home. There he finds wife and his two children much as before. But the children reveal, unintentionally, that their mother has sought the comfort and protection of other men while their father was away. Caring little for hypocrisy, the father brutally insults his wife, before being reprimanded by his own son, a boy who has totally absorbed the teachings of the CPSU. Angry at his reception at home, the father leaves the next morning, hoping to find the girl from before. But as the train is departing his town he sees his two children running after him and his conscience takes control of him, making him jump from his carriage down to them.

In both stories Communism, and belief more broadly, are revealed to be of little use. In “The River Potudan” it is guilt that makes Firsov return to his wife, not ideals, just as in “The Return” the man’s son’s Communist ideas are worthless in convincing him to stay. If anything, the son is shown as a ridiculous figure, unable to understand his parents’ quarrel even as he thinks he understands the statutes of the CPSU. No, what makes the man return home for the second time in “The Return” is the realization that he must move beyond his own pride. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Judgements and Conclusions

Platonov writes in a simple way, but his concerns are serious. Ultimately, they are about the spiritual future of humankind under the Soviet system, indeed about whether spirituality will survive at all. Using clever allusions and vast learning he is able to keep the reader on their toes and constantly challenged. But that’s not to say these stories are perfect. In fact, there were a lot of times when I found myself struggling to keep going. Like his contemporary, Isaac Babel, Platonov is an intellectual writer at heart, and just as with Babel I found myself unsatisfied by the stories themselves, once their animating ideas had been scraped out of them. Platonov doesn’t really write with urgency, leaving many moments of action or climax a little unconvincing. In a sense he’s, disappointly, more enjoyable as someone to write essays on, or to think about, than to actually read.

Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is another writer who, like Platonov, deals with the complex cultural and spiritual consequences of the Revolution. But that doesn’t always make for compelling stories. My review of Babel’s Red Army Cavalry is here.

But he is worth reading. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s important to read him. Platonov is a key representative of the middle ground between writers who were against the state, and those who functioned as part of it by following closely the demands of Socialist Realism. He widens our awareness of Soviet literary culture from the stereotypes we’re so used to in the West. But there again, I’m almost recommending him as education rather than pleasure. There is pleasure to be had, and most of these stories do work as stories, and some of them are even good as stories. But I can only recommend the collection with these warnings, lest a reader expect to be gripped by the stories in any way other than an intellectual one.

Isaac Babel is another challenging, ambiguous, and highly intellectual chronicler and interpreter of the Soviet Union’s early days – my review of his Red Army Cavalry is here. Alternatively, compliment Platonov’s ambiguous portrayal of Soviet life with Varlam Shalamov’s bleaker tales of the Gulag here.

Photo of Platonov comes from Maria Andreevna Platonova; Photo of Maxim Gorky is in the public domain; Photo of the desert by Dmitriy A. Pitirimov is also in the public domain; Photo of Isaac Babel is also in the public domain

Varlam Shalamov and the Secrets of the Gulag

There are as many different attitudes towards the author as there are readers, or at the very least, as there are critics. Some people can’t stand it when a writer intervenes to let us know that a given act was moral or immoral, or to preach a little bit upon a topic close to their heart. But others can’t wait for the author to materialise, as though reading is more about having a self-help guru and guide than a place to go to get away. Intervention usually takes us out of the story, because even if the ‘wise’ words come from a character, often it’s easy to see the way they seem to stand up straighter, possessed as they suddenly are by the ghost of their writer’s convictions. In many cases, our attitude towards this all depends as much on the author in question as on everything else. When it comes to the Russians many of us are happy to sit through one of Dostoevsky’s sermons to get to the action on the other side, whereas when Tolstoy starts telling us what’s what in the study of history in the epilogue of War and Peace, most people throw the book across the room.

The more serious the subject matter, the more we expect authorial intervention, as though experience and suffering and the thematic ambition of a work has somehow entitled the writer to preach upon the topic with authority. It makes sense – the more serious the questions that the work is raising or attempting to solve – the more important the opinion of the author will be to them, and the greater will be their desire to share it with us. It is precisely the lack of all this in the Kolyma Tales that comes as such a relief. Here, the seriousness of the subject matter – life in the Gulag at the height of Stalinism – is accompanied instead by a seriousness of authorial silence. Brutality, cruelty, fear, and death pass with nary a comment, so that the silence of the work becomes as much a statement as any tract, and the reader is left to decide for themselves what, if anything, there is to take away from all this.

Kmusser [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons — The Kolyma Basin. The camps were scattered around the region and the evidence for them was in many cases destroyed, making it hard to know where Shalamov himself was imprisoned.

Here is my review of Kolymskie Rasskazi, or the Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov. I have to say I am absolutely in awe of these little stories, most of which are only a few pages long. Though I have been to the Gulag Museum in Moscow, (and thoroughly recommend it), Shalamov himself was imprisoned in the zone for fifteen whole years! Some of his sentences were for crimes as petty as suggesting that the first Russian Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Bunin, was actually pretty good – as a noble who departed after the Revolution, Bunin was very much unacceptable within the USSR in either spirit or person. For much of this time Shalamov was made to work at the Gulag camps in Kolyma, a region in the far North East of Russia to the north of the sea of Okhotsk. Apart from gold and other metals, the area is a sparsely populated wasteland, where nature is as much of an enemy as one’s fellow man. And it was to here, in the height of Stalin’s power and paranoia, that many prisoners were sent, their duty being the harvesting of resources, whatever the cost. In such a place, a life loses its value. Yet Shalamov survived all this, managing to return home when his sentence was done and pass away, aged 74, in 1982. He published some poetry while alive, but as for his prose none of these tales were published within the USSR during his lifetime – they went too far, their implied criticism of the regime’s actions went too deep. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who ultimately had contacts who could help him in getting his works out, Shalamov shunned acquaintances who could be of use to him, including Solzhenitsyn himself. After the camps he wasn’t exactly one for trusting.

These stories, both fiction and non-fiction and almost impossible to tell between the two, are his record of that life. They are written in a style reminiscent of Chekhov. The narrator describes the build up to an event, its climax, and then the story ends without any kind of moral tying together of its strands. The reader is left entirely to come to their own conclusions. The style is matter-of-fact, unadorned with much by way of metaphor. The only colour comes from the occasional descriptions of the barren but simultaneously strikingly beautiful nature, and the “fenia”, or prison slang, of the convicts. I’ve been reading the translation by Donald Rayfield for the moment, but I will be going back and rereading in the original in the coming weeks, and not only because I’ll be writing essays on it.

The first story, “Trampling the snow” in Rayfield’s translation, “Po Snegu” in the original, describes the process of creating a road through the snow by the prisoners. It is barely more than a page long, and describes a process rather than a single event as do most of the other stories, but there is much here that prefigures the rest of the work. The warfare between man – and here it is a man’s world only – and nature, is indicated first by the sentence: “Roads are always made on calm days, so that human labor is not swept away by wind”. But here also are hints of the state that humanity is reduced to – in both the original and the translation, the word “human” is a mere adjective describing their work. It hints, I think, subtly at the fact that human lives are secondary here to their productivity, at least in the eyes of the camp organisers. At the end of the first paragraph there is also a description of a man who “steers his body through the snow like a helmsman steering a boat along a river, from one bend to the next”. It is a striking image because of the sheer dislocation between mind and body that it implies – all the result of the degrading conditions of the camp.

Throughout the stories there are attempts to show how it is that people survive so far away from comfort and safety. Solzhenitsyn liked to stress the redemptive power of manual work, but Shalamov had no such convictions. At the end of “trampling the snow” we find that every member of a group must bear responsibility for setting down part of the trail, no matter their physical state – the implications of this only becomes fully clear once the descriptions of starvation and suffering pile up as the stories run on. There is little kindness or communal spirit, no sense of lightening the load for others if it is within our power. In “Condensed Milk” the narrator receives two whole tins filled with condensed milk and eats them with a large audience, but doesn’t think of sharing. In “Field rations” the he comments that nobody can have friends out here. Instead, prisoners are shown to be extremely resourceful as individuals. “On the Slate” describes the skills by which they assemble a pack of cards from paper, bread reduced to starch, and indelible pencil.

In the introduction to Rayfield’s translation there is added a small note by Shalamov, not intended for publication, called “What I Saw and Understood in the Camps.”. It contains in essence all of his “truths” that he dramatizes and demonstrates over the course of the collection. Here are a number of examples from it: “I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions”. “The main means for depraving the soul is the cold”. “I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal”. “I understood why people do not live on hope – there isn’t any hope… They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal”. By some accounts, the number killed in Kolyma alone was close to 3 million. Simply from the tone of his words, you can tell, I think, just how hard it was to live there. Food and warmth are the only things that seem to have any value at all – after all, they are all one needs to keep going.

This is the sort of wasteland that “Field Rations” takes place in.

“Field Rations” is probably among the heaviest stories that I’ve read in the book, and my favourite. The narrator and three other men are sent to create a clearing in the forest at a place called Duskania spring. They were expected to be there for ten days, and had been given, as a result, some rations. For them, after being in a constant state of starvation, the amount of food they suddenly had is breath-taking. “Rations meant to last ten days looked intimidating”, the narrator says. There is responsibility in food. And the men are starving. The narrator writes that “any human feelings – love, friendship, envy, charity, mercy, ambition, decency – had vanished along with the flesh we had lost during our prolonged starvation”, so that all that remains is “resentful anger, the most lasting of human feelings”. This fact, that anger trumps all else, is another one of Shalamov’s key ideas. The narrator continues describing the state of mind that people in the camps find themselves in, with death never far off. “We realized that death was no worse than life and we were afraid of neither. We were in thrall to total indifference.” Dehumanization comes not through insults and beatings, but simply through starvation and an atmosphere which says life doesn’t matter. Suicide, a word not spoken directly, but rather in a round-about way, is said to be stopped merely by “some trivial thing that was part of life”, like a slightly bigger portion in the mess hall. Here in the wilderness nature and its continued struggling to carry on becomes an example to the men. They are in awe of the trees, which manage to survive in the far north. Trees that die lying down, just like them. The narrator then describes his fellow workers in the clearing, as they get ready to eat their evening meal – who they are, and why they are here. One person was in the camps on the basis simply of letters to their fiancée – but Shalamov doesn’t dwell on questions of whether this is valid justification. That is the reader’s job. In much the same way, Stalin is only mentioned once in the whole collection – in a description of his portrait.

After a few days a guard arrives with additional supplies for them, but he warns them that their work is insufficient for them to be able to stay in the clearing, a heavy blow because here the work is easier than back at the camp. He says that they have only done ten per cent of the norm. A few days later a sergeant comes and confirms that they should return to the camp the next morning. Perhaps as a result of that during the night one of the men hangs themselves. The narrator and one of the others strip him of what they can get, but the third remaining man grabs an axe and uses it to hack his own fingers off in delirium, to save himself from working. The story ends with the narrator back at the camp, where he mentions simply that the third man is now being prosecuted for malicious self-harm.

This kind of ending is pretty typical of Shalamov. Death happens in a matter of fact way that is startling and leaves you feeling uneasy, and nothing seems to end well. A good ending here is simply an ending where nothing changes. But this story is enjoyable, and probably the best introduction to Shalamov’s writing that I’ve yet read. It has his ideas of human nature, it has a build up and climax, it has some characters and their interactions, and finally it has a sense of adventure and nature. It sounds bad, but these stories are a sort of escapism, a sort of fodder for the imagination, of the sort that science fiction is to many others. Shalamov’s world is so far removed from our own, but it is beautiful at times too – we are made to acknowledge the beauty of survival – and because Shalamov is writing from experience, everything seems to acquire an extra layer of clarity. Images seem sharper in my own head. It is exciting. But there are problems inherent in this too. Shalamov doesn’t just write about his own experience. “Cherry Brandy”, describing the death of the poet Osip Mandel’shtam, feels immediately less engaging by contrast to the majority of the other stories precisely because we are aware that Shalamov is describing something neither he nor anyone else knows the truth of. A commitment to an autobiographical style is also, accidentally even, a concomitant devaluation of non autobiographical descriptions within the confines of the same work. At least, it seemed so to me.

With their short lengths, these stories seem consciously designed to be snapshots of a world, instead of its encompassing it, as is the case with Solzhenitsyn’s gigantic tomes. They are, in a sense, humble, and aware of their own limitations. But I cannot stress enough how exciting they are too – in Shalamov’s writings we are thrown into a world where we do not know what could possibly happen next because the experience of the GULAG is so far away from our own lives, not just geographically, but also morally and socially. And though they are depressing and leaden with pessimism, at the same time these stories showcase the human will to survive, whatever the conditions, and whatever the cost. They set our imagination alight with just what we are capable of. So have a read – they’re short so there’s scarcely a commitment – and see what you think yourselves.

Another interesting Soviet writer is Andrei Platonov. Unlike Shalamov he was never imprisoned, but his writings demonstrate a man very much on the edge where official approval becomes hostility. Check out my review of his Soul and Other Stories here

Picture of the Kolyma Basin by Kmusser [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons

Picture of Landscape in Kolyma byAnatoly V. Lozhkin (Northeast Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Branch) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons