When Isaac Babel, the Soviet writer renowned for his tales of Jewish gangsters in Odessa and Cossack cavalrymen in the Russian civil war, was arrested in 1939, piles of unpublished manuscripts were confiscated, including drafts of stories and essays, notes for a book about Gorky, a movie screenplay and a half-written play.
None of this writing has ever been recovered, even though Babel, executed for treason in 1940, was posthumously rehabilitated, the charges against him having been found to be completely false.
The same fate might well have befallen the works of Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982), a writer and poet who survived the notorious Kolyma prison camp, if it hadn’t been for a sympathetic Soviet archivist.
Irina Sirotinskaya, was determined, after reading Shalamov’s stories about Kolyma in samizdat, to acquire his works for the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. “I went to him as a new prophet, in order to ask, ‘How should one live?’ But my motivation was official and respectable: I intended to propose that he transfer his manuscripts to the RSALA, to be preserved in perpetuity.”
Now New York Review Books has published the first of two volumes of Shalamov’s Kolyma stories, translated by Donald Rayfield, emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. (The second volume will be published next year.) In the introduction, Rayfield makes Shalamov’s debt to Sirotinskaya clear.
“Certainly, Shalamov’s work might have met the same fate of destruction as that of other dissident writers had it not been for Sirotinskaya’s intervention,” he writes.
Kolyma Stories is the first complete edition of Shalamov’s work to be published in English. A 1980 translation by the late John Glad of the University of Maryland consisted of a selection of the stories, which had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
The stories are based on Shalamov’s experiences in Kolyma, where prisoners forced to mine gold in the Siberian taiga endured some of the harshest conditions in the Soviet prison system. Poorly fed and clothed, they worked in temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero. Vilified as enemies of the state, they were beaten by foremen, criminal gang masters and guards.
The stories are unique in their approach to the horrors of the Gulag. The first-person narrator doesn’t express outrage or pity about the brutal way he and his fellow prisoners are treated. He describes prison life in a way that provokes those feelings in the reader. The result is a collection of stories that combines the distance of literary fiction with the immediacy of an eyewitness account.
In “The Tatar Mullah and Clean Air,” Shalamov matter-of-factly states how long a prisoner could be expected to work before dying or becoming disabled: 20 to 30 days of 16 hours of work per day. “Brigades that start the gold-mining season … have, by the end of the season, not a single man left from the start of the season, except for the foreman and one or two of the foreman’s personal friends…. A gold mine constantly discards its production refuse into the hospitals, the so-called convalescent teams, invalid settlements, and mass graves.”
In “On Lend Lease,” he depicts the aplomb with which a prisoner sentenced for the murder of his father uses a brand-new made-in-the-USA bulldozer to cover dead bodies in a mass grave: “Grinka Lebedev the parricide was a good tractor driver and was managing the well-lubricated overseas tractor well. Grinka Lebedev was doing his job very thoroughly. He was scraping corpses toward the grave with his shiny bulldozer blade, pushing them into the pit, and them coming back to do some skidding.”
Shalamov, a political prisoner swept up in the Stalinist purges, survived Kolyma thanks to a prison doctor, who rescued him from the gold mines by training him as a paramedic.
He began writing the Kolyma stories only after his return from prison, relying on memory to recount what he had experienced during his 17-year term.
The stories went unpublished inside Russia despite Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization and the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov didn’t believe in the redemptive power of manual labor.
Reading his stories, Sirotinskaya was struck by the power of their refusal to compromise. “It seemed like something had to be done immediately – something that couldn’t be put off – to live differently, think differently,” she wrote in her memoirs. “Foundations were crumbling, as were the underpinnings of the soul, accustomed to believing in justice, the certain justice of the world: that good would triumph and evil would be punished.”
The Kolyma stories are now widely read in Russia. Sirotinskaya, whom Shalamov named his literary executor, arranged for their publication following perestroika.
– John Castellucci
One of Russians’ most beloved works of literature in the nineteenth century was a travelogue by Ivan Goncharov, he of Oblomov fame. Called The Frigate Pallada, it recounts the amazing Asian expedition of the Pallada, in which Goncharov took part as something of an embedded scribe.
Bojanowska takes a close look at the journey and Goncharov’s account, which is all but a manifesto of Russia’s self-image as a positive, civilizing source on the world stage (comparing, say, the colonization of Siberia to the record of Netherlands or Britain in Asia). It is a surprisingly timely rumination, because the parallels between the 1850s and now are rather striking: in both cases the world is seeing a newly-assertive Russia, seeking recognition among the Great Powers as an equal. And Goncharov’s court-sanctioned ideas, on how Russia should exert itself into the world and how the world would benefit from this, makes for fascinating reading. On top of that, Goncharov had the novelist’s eye and was a very astute observer of other cultures and the dynamics of imperial-colonial interaction.
– Paul E. Richardson
The cause is never the cause. While we know it was a turbine test gone wrong that was the immediate cause of the horrific meltdown at Chernobyl, the roots of the accident burrow to the dark heart of the Soviet state.
The flaws in the Soviet nuclear industry, the warped incentives created by central planning, the banal authoritarianism of the Soviet state, and a laissez-faire attitude toward the environment all laid down the conditions for the worst nuclear accident in history. And, as we now know, it could actually have been far worse – threatening all life on Earth.
Plokhy was a young professor living in Ukraine at the time of the accident, and he brings personal experience to bear alongside the fruits of opened KGB archives, painting the most complete picture yet of Chernobyl and its aftermath, profiling everyone from the plant director to the first responders who sacrificed everything to save the rest of us.
This is a story that needed telling and that needs to be read. Particularly since, amid a decline in favor for multilateralism and a resurgence of nationalism, particularly in the developing world, there is increased risk that states seeking to build stature by joining “the nuclear club” will do so without proper consideration of all the costs and risks.
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