Reading and Writing Against Destruction

Home , Eduard Kuznetsov, Varlam Shalamov

Transcultural Studies, 4 (2008), 107-117.

EKATERINA NEKLYUDOVA

READING AND WRITING AGAINST DESTRUCTION

This article deals with the tactics of survival that the inmates of Gulag (the penitentiary system of prisons and labor camps in the Soviet Union)1 practiced while imprisoned. In particular, I focus on the theme of reading and writing in the conditions of the Soviet prisons and labor camps, where writing was mostly prohibited, and reading was limited and highly regulated and censored. However, the inmates of Soviet prisons managed to create, read, write and even publish their notes while incarcerated. I show how three survivors of the Soviet camps – Varlam Shalamov, Evgenia Ginzburg, and Eduard Kuznetsov used the acts of reading and writing to preserve their identities from complete corruption and disintegration. I argue that word as a grammatical unit of text initiates the process of the recovery and deliverance of prisoners’ morale. Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982), a writer and a journalist, was born in Rus- sian city of Vologda. He spent seventeen years in total in prisons and labor camps of Kolyma (1929-1931, 1937-1943, 1943-1951). When Shalamov was released and returned from the camps to the Western part of Russia (Kalinin- grad), he started recording his camp experience in the form of the semi- fictional, semi-documentary Kolymskie rasskazy [Kolyma Tales].2 Even though his camp prose was never published in the Soviet Union in his lifetime, it received worldwide publicity: Kolyma Tales was distributed by the under- ground movement of Samizdat and published abroad. The impact of these short stories was immense: they were considered as the most authentic and merciless descriptions of prisoners’ sufferings in the Soviet camps of the Sta- linist regime. Shalamov himself attributed his style as a new prose, which must be deprived of any “therapeutic effect that writing may have on the author in order to write well . . . one has to allow one’s wounds to open.”3 Most of his prose is as dark as the whole subject of Gulag; however, the stories that I analyze in this article (Sententious and Handwriting) stand out for their open-endedness and sense of hope.

1. Gulag serves as an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitel’no-Trudovykh Lagerei i kolonii, in English: “The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies.” (Wikipedia contributors, “Gulag,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed on Feburary 1, 2008; available at: en.wikipedia.org/w/ index.php?title=Gulag&oldid=188328394. 2. V. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, J. Clad, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1994). 3. L. Toker, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose – From the Perspective of Gulag Tes- timonies,” Poetics Today, 18, no. 2 (1997), pp. 187-222. 108 Transcultural Studies

Shalamov’s prose is often compared to Krutoi Marshrut [The Harsh Route],4 the memoirs by Evgenia (Zhenia) Ginzburg (1906-1977). Formerly a professor of literature and the wife of a prominent Communist party member, she was arrested and imprisoned in 1937. She spent two years in solitary con- finement and another eight years in camps of Kolyma. After Ginzburg’s sentence ended (1947), she continued working as a teacher at a local school in Magadan (the capital city of Kolyma). In 1949 she was arrested again, however, soon released and prohibited to leave Kolyma. Ginzburg returned to Moscow only in 1955 and immediately started writing her memoirs. Similarly to Shalamov’s short stories, The Harsh Route was never published in the So- viet Union during her life. While writing the first part of her memoirs, Gin- zburg still hoped to publish her book in the Soviet Union. However, this text never passed the censure even in the relatively liberal times of Khrushchev’s thaw. For this reason, the second part of The Harsh Route is written in a more straightforward and bitter tone. Parts of her book were published abroad, in It- aly; parts of the text were circulating in the Samizdat. The whole edition of the book was published only in 1990, long after Ginzburg’s death. The Harsh Route immediately became a bestseller and was even staged by one of the prominent Russian theaters. Eduard Kuznetsov (born 1939) was a prisoner in the Soviet penitentiary system, who survived two sentences: first, in the 1960s, and later in the 1970s (1961-1968 and 1970-1979). In 1970, Kuznetsov and a group of Soviet Zion- ists were arrested for their attempt to hijack a passenger aircraft and flee to Is- rael. Although Kuznetsov was first condemned to death, his sentence was later commuted to twenty years in a labor camp. In 1979, he was deported from the Soviet Union to exile. While in prison, Kuznetsov kept a diary (1970-1971) and managed to transfer his notes to friends. Later his texts were published in the West, first in Italian translation, then in Russian, and many other lan- guages (1973). Kuznetsov is a journalist and currently lives in Israel. Al- though he belongs to a different generation of political prisoners, his diary re- veals the same tendencies that we see in the prose of Ginzburg and Shalamov. As the survivors of Soviet camps and prisons testify, the penitentiary system achieved the highest control over the everyday life of prisoners by de- priving them of all remnants of the past free life. In her memoirs Ginzburg de- scribes how the camp authorities confiscated photos of children; how women were stripped of their clothes and dressed in prisoner’s uniforms; and how she and her fellow inmate Yulia hid their personal belongings from the search, such as their bras and underwear. All these regulations were enforced to make sure that the prisoner realizes that he or she is no longer a master of his/her

4. The Harsh Route came out in English translation under the titles A Journey into the Whirl- wind (the first part) and Within the Whirlwind (the second part). I use my own translations in the current article.