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

An Aging Stoner’s Advice: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

To have something by Thomas Pynchon recommended in any kind of studenty or similar context will likely elicit a groan from anyone who has already encountered him. What is the point, it’s well worth asking, in reading an author who fills his works with arcane knowledge, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on, when we are already steeping ourselves in such information at almost every moment of our waking lives, and at least for all that we might get a few positive words from a teacher at the end of it? Pynchon is known for his big stuff, monsters of novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, often set in a meticulously crafted version of the past but dealing with the concerns of the present in ways both direct and more subtle. More than anyone else this side of 1900, Pynchon’s novels are novels of ideas.

So then, it is something of a surprise to come across Inherent Vice, a book which at 369 pages seems positively anaemic from Pynchon. The setting, California in 1970, is no grand historical gesture but rather straight out his own youth too – Tom was born in 1937. Regular Pynchon tomes aren’t devoid of drugs and danger, but here the cloud of weed smoke and cop-show crime-fighting violence that accompanies private eye hero Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello fits right in as just a sign of the times. The plot – and there is, more or less, a plot – is not too complicated either, at least compared with Gravity’s Rainbow’s. Doc is visited by an old girlfriend, Shasta Fey Hepworth, who tells him her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, may be about to be kidnapped and brainwashed by his wife and her boyfriend on account of his, Mickey’s, decision that it was time to start giving back to the poor, instead of buying their houses for development. Only, Wolfmann gets kidnapped by someone else early on, dead men turn up alive, Shasta disappears, and Doc goes on a chase that may or may not be of the wild-goose variety, all while discovering clues about a shadowy group/business/drug cartel/boat called the Golden Fang. It is confusing, and I know I could have understood it more, but with Pynchon you know you’ve gone wrong when things start making sense, so it’s best just to focus on the ride.

And what a ride it is. Pynchon mashes genres – this is no stuffy academic prose you’ve got here. Cop shows, Raymond Chandler’s crime novels, the movies and books of the sixties are all at times parodied or played straight, giving the book an easy accessibility and light tone. “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to” – the book’s opening sentence – drops it in a crime novel mood you just can’t tell whether to take seriously or not right from the get-go. “She” instead of a name suggests a femme fatale, adds mystery; “alley” and “back steps” are all standard locales for your crime scenes; and “always used to” adds history, flavour and colour to a relationship that means our detective won’t only have difficulties on the job. While the book is occasionally serious, at other times it’s more than happy to satirise its own world: one of my favourite descriptions was of a street looking “like a crime scene waiting on its next crime.”

Parody of genres isn’t the only way this book is funny. Pynchon’s humour is refreshingly moronic. One conversation between a black gangster and Doc ends with the former saying: “Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherfucker.” Doc: “How can you tell?” Him: “I counted”. The characters all have idiotic names, packed with puns and other meanings. Even the pretentious presumption on the part of novels to tell us what to think is mocked by such advice as “Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life” from Doc’s friend Sortilège. After one person is encased in concrete underneath a bridge a character says that it brings new meaning to the phrase “pillar of the community.” Pynchon’s humour is one of the main ways in which the novel consciously tries to avoid being a stuffy highbrow tome, and instead be a part of a relaxed cultural environment where the pleasure of the text doesn’t have to be mingled with the pain of trying to understand.

There is some meaning and thematic heaviness here, though, if that’s your cup of tea. Dealing with California at the beginning of the 70s is to deal with a community that is breaking up, a paradise that is rapidly being lost. The trials of Charles Manson and his followers are constantly referenced with fear and trepidation. Here was someone who had turned the hippie lifestyle and dreams of world peace on their head, with catastrophic results. Inherent Vice follows the music makers and dopers whose community Manson was just on the edge of. Growing police corruption is hinted at, and though Pynchon is more than happy to complain about his usual bogeyman – capitalism and its effect on humankind – he doesn’t just blame money and Henry Kissinger for destroying the dream of weed and wacky hair-dos. At one point Doc walks past a new music shop and sees a bunch of children listening to music, all using different headphones. “Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence.” Technology and our relationship to it is as much to blame for the destruction of our community as is money. An “inherent vice”, a fault inside this seeming perfection, is the root of its eventual collapse. At another point, Doc watches a whole load of people sitting and watching TV, and all he feels for it is loneliness. That is the feeling that pervades the book, once the veneer of light humour and mad antics is brushed aside. The fear that the good days are ending, and things are only going to get worse if we’re not careful.

And all of these fears and worries, once we scrape away the satire and the humour, are delivered in a prose that is without a doubt among the most lyrical and beautiful being produced today. Because jokes aren’t serious enough for the honest concern that underlies the work. Listen to this sentence about Shasta, looking out to sea: “It wasn’t headlights – before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety”. The connections between people are what Doc, as a private eye, is all about. And it is these connections that are under threat by forces and human error, dragging people away from each other. In another moment of beauty and poignancy Pynchon writes of Doc and Shasta again: “Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned, from times when back-turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the points of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who – what was he working for anymore?” The book doesn’t just tell us about the problems that face society, or rail against their causes. For perhaps the first time, Pynchon truly shows the human side of things, the effect of all this chaos and isolation on you and me.

The power of the work lies in the way that its themes – and there are far more than the ones I just mentioned – creep up on us when we least expect it. But that’s not to say the work is perfect – far from it: in fact, it’s one of the weaker novels Pynchon has produced. The jokes do occasionally fall flat, the whole thing is still confusing as ever; but more than anything else the smaller scale of the work means that these little foibles are not coated in the grandeur that a hefty tome rightly or wrongly usually manages to inspire. The writing is beautiful, but it’s hard here to forgive Pynchon’s reluctance to clarify what is going on – not in the sense of explaining the conspiracy, but rather just in reminding us, every so often who is doing what, and why. What makes this book accessible, and a good introduction to his work – its short length; its fewer, relatively well-made characters; and comparative closure at the end – are also the things that hurt it. The short length brings with it a different set of expectations on the part of the reader, and these it struggles to meet.

With all that said, Pynchon and Inherent Vice are still important for us as students and others who have to deal with swathes of knowledge on a day to day basis, and not only because even in Inherent Vice we find a book that is complex and filled with interesting and thought-provoking questions and themes. No, the importance is not in the themes, but in Pynchon’s attitude towards them. Most of the things we are forced to read at Cambridge or other universities are thematically dense by design, and when we write essays we go off with magnifying glasses, searching for key ideas and perfect little quoticles. In a world where every moment has to be useful and every article has to have import upon our next piece of work, Pynchon’s stoner’s voice telling us just to chill out and enjoy the ride could never be more timely. Of course there are things to be found, hidden themes and connections, but the book teaches us that they don’t need to matter, that our own enjoyment, and our own choices, always come first. Enjoy yourselves, smoke some weed if that’s your thing, and relax.