Fragments from the gulag

By Raviel Netz
When Russian intellectuals get to talking about books written about the horrors of Stalinism, the discussion generally begins by tearing apart Aleksander Solzhenitsyn: "Highly overrated ..." "Not a great writer ..." "Very superficial ..." That will get some people jumping up to defend him, and everyone will agree: "Of course you have to hand it to him for his courage in writing `The Gulag Archipelago.'" A minute later, someone will exclaim, and the crowd will parrot after him: "Now Shalamov is a real writer. Maybe one of the greatest writers of the 20th century!"
Shalamov was a "one-subject author." He wrote about the gulag, and more specifically, the gulag of Kolyma. He was there himself, and the truth radiates from his stories. But Shalamov is a spinner of tales, not just an eyewitness. From an artistic standpoint, he keeps company with Russia's finest literary lights. Hence the importance of reading him twice: once to learn the truth about Kolyma (a truth than only fiction can convey) and again, to expose oneself to another pinnacle of Russian writing. Apart from the masterpieces of the 19th century, the 20th century has also produced some gems.
The publication of this Hebrew edition of Shalamov is thus an important and welcome literary event, for which the publisher deserves kudos. Likewise, we owe the translator, Roi Chen, a special note of thanks and appreciation. In the past, Chen has translated Daniel Kharms, another brilliant 20th century Russian author.
Varlam Shalamov, born in 1907, was sent to the gulag in 1929 and only gained his full release in 1953. Over the next 20 years, when he was old enough to have been reaping the benefits of a flourishing literary career, he lived the impoverished life of an ex-prisoner on the margins of Soviet society. During that time, he wrote more than 100 short stories, enough to fill two thick volumes. The stories are organized in sections, and Part I is the section that has been translated into Hebrew.
Shalamov's tales are essentially self-contained: One can read them in any order almost without losing anything. For example, the story "Berries," which begins with the narrator sprawled on the snow, refusing to continue the night march back to the camp dragging a heavy log for firewood. Accused of feigning illness, he is beaten. He curses the guards, and one of them promises to shoot him dead one day. The next day, the narrator is with a fellow inmate, Rybakov, gathering berries for the camp. This was a particularly desirable job - not very taxing physically, and one could gather a bit "on the side," for those willing to take a risk. The nature descriptions here are typical Shalamov - brief and sparing but also lyrical.
As always in the gulag, any place where the prisoners happened to be was immediately divided into "permissible" and "forbidden" zones. In this case, the guard - the same man who threatened the narrator the night before - has used bundles of grass to mark the boundaries. A tempting bunch of berries lies just beyond. Rybakov steps over the line and is shot to death by the guard. On the way back to the camp, he snarls at the narrator: "It's you I wanted. But you didn't give me the chance, you piece of filth!" That is how the story ends.
Is this a "happy end"? It's hard to see it any other way. Reading "Kolyma Tales," the will to survive comes across very strongly. Every tale is measured by the narrator's success in staying alive. Only later the irony seeps in. Does the narrator bear any kind of moral responsibility? Did he foresee what was about to happen and in some sense allow Rybakov to die? At the end, he adds a comment about how he got his hands on Rybakov's crate of berries, hoping it might earn him an extra crust of bread. But what kind of morality exists in this world that Shalamov describes? It is a world where people are executed on a whim, where a guard sets a trap, and when the wrong person falls into it, he goes ahead and pulls the trigger anyway. The story does not supply an answer to any of these dilemmas.
Arbitrary world
In tales like "Berries," Shalamov avoids the "heroic" genre, in which the protagonist is portrayed as a hero who overcomes terrifying ordeals. But neither does he fall into the trap of pathos, depicting the narrator as an innocent victim. Invoking heroism or pathos, with their conventional literary and ethical codes, would be an affirmation of normalcy amid the horror. To describe the hellishness of Kolyma without compromise, Shalamov invents a literary form free of all convention, and therein lies his greatness.
It is tempting to compare Shalamov to the Polish-Jewish writer Ida Fink. The short story is essential to the oeuvre of both authors, and the question is why. We are touching on something very fundamental here. The essence of a short story lies not so much in its length but in its not being a novel. Novels are based on a logical plot in which the protagonist achieves - or more often, fails to achieve - his heart's desire while engaged in a battle with those around him. The outcome of the story is a product of cause and effect: The protagonist has chosen to do such and such, and therefore such and such happens. The novel is teleological. It belongs to an ordered universe. The short story, at its best, frees the author from teleology.
To put it simply, Shalamov, like Ida Fink, describes a world where there are no causal relationships, where one thing does not lead to another. The core event in Western literature - the death of God - becomes the product of arbitrary, unpredictable circumstances that have no collective significance. That is precisely where Solzhenitsyn went wrong. He chose to write novels about the gulag, i.e., he tried to create protagonists whose experience was coherent and causal. The outcome was a kind of socialist realism behind barbed wire. Shalamov's use of the short story, the fragment, fits so much more for the fragmentary, arbitrary world of the gulag.
Comparing Shalamov and Fink presupposes a comparison between the gulag and Auschwitz - one that begs to be made, but is also a source of discomfort for Israelis who have been raised on the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, and for adherents of the same politically enlightened views shared by the leftist intellectuals of Western Europe, who justified the atrocities in Stalinist and Soviet Russia. Kolyma, the setting of Shalamov's stories, is the perfect place for probing these issues - a remote province that was beyond the reach of any railway, deep in northern Siberia, one of the coldest and most godforsaken places on the planet.
Kolyma was cursed with large gold mines. The Soviet regime sent out millions of human beings to extract the gold, even if they had to die for it. In Kolyma, more than anywhere else, the gulag camps were death camps. The brutal slave labor in subfreezing temperatures was a source of torment no less horrible than any other saga of human suffering. Some people like to pounce on slight differences. They will see a veneer of economic rationality in the exploitation at Kolyma (although Nazi slave labor made even more economic sense), or argue that Kolyma laborers were not selected by race (although Stalinist reality was such that being a member of the middle class - defined by who your relatives were - was often a death sentence in itself). Morally, though, there was no real difference.
At the same time, the experience of the gulag victims was distinctive in a certain respect. As Soviet citizens, they never believed for a moment that they were looking at a rational, predictable system. They were familiar with the corruption and the chaos that characterized Soviet life as a whole. They assumed that luck, and finding someone with influence, might offer protection and some chance of survival, however slight. In this sense, there was something "Russian" about the gulag, which helped to mitigate some of the horror.
Card games and duels
The renowned cultural theorist Yuri Lotman has written about the importance of arbitrariness in the Russian imagination - the way that wealth and poverty, as well as violent death, tend to be a product of unforeseen circumstances. Think of how symbolic card games and duels are in Russian culture. In Shalamov's stories, the characters do play cards, but in some respect, every one of them features a duel in which the bullet misses the narrator by a hair's breadth. In their arbitrariness, Shalamov's "fragments" are thus Russian to the core. His writing may go against the literary principle of the novel, but it is still a continuation - gloomy and chaotic - of a tradition that goes back to Mikhail Lermontov's "The Fatalist" and Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades."
Shalamov's style is lean and devoid of frills, but it approaches the sublime. He succeeds in capturing the crude and dissonant language of life in the gulag without losing the clarity of artistic, Tolstoyian prose. Roi Chen manages to preserve all this in his translation, for which he deserves the highest praise.

The author teaches history of science at Stanford University. He is also a poet.
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