In the footsteps of the past

Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing

Master thesis Russian and Eurasian Studies (20 ECTS)

Faculty of Humanities

Leiden University

Author: L.M. van de Mortel

Date: 30 August 2019

First supervisor: Dr. O.F. Boele

Second supervisor: Dr. E.L. Stapert

Word count: 22768 1

Table of contents

1. Introduction ...... 3 1.1 The historical background of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing ...... 4 1.2 Research objectives ...... 7 1.3 Selection of primary sources ...... 10 1.4 Importance of the research ...... 11 1.5 The structure of this thesis ...... 12 2. Retrospect, testimony and bi-functionality in the prison camp memoir ...... 13 2.1 Retrospect ...... 13 2.2 The testimonial function ...... 17 2.3 The bi-functionality of prison camp memoirs ...... 25 3. The contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the morphology of the Gulag memoir ...... 28 3.1 The Gulag memoir as a genre ...... 28 3.2 The morphology of the Gulag memoir ...... 30 3.3 The morphology of the Gulag memoirs applied to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs...... 32 3.3.1 Morphological feature no.1: A tension between the ethical drive and aesthetic impulse ...... 33 3.3.2 Morphological feature no. 1 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ...... 34 3.3.3 Morphological feature no.2: The interconnection of individual and communal concerns ...... 35 3.3.4 Morphological feature no.2 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ...... 37 3.3.5 Morphological feature no.3 The inclusion of specific topoi as morphological variables ...... 40 3.3.6 Morphological feature no.3 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ...... 43 3.3.7 Morphological no.4: A modal scheme that can be described in term of Lent 48 3.3.8 Morphological feature no.4 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs ...... 49 3.3.9 Conclusion on the analysis ...... 51 4. Looking back in time: the interconnection of Russian prison camp memoirs ...... 52 4.1 References to the Gulag past ...... 52 4.2 Gulag memoirs looking back in time ...... 55 4.3 The palimpsest of Russian prison camp memoir writing...... 60 4.4 Deploying the past in the contemporary prison camp memoirs...... 63 2

5. Conclusion ...... 66 6. Bibliography ...... 69

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1. Introduction

The first book I read in detention that came to me from outside was And the Wind Returns, by Vladimir Bukovsky.

The first book that robbed me of two days’ sleep, because I read it cover to cover, several times, was Kolyma tales, by Varlam Shalamov.

Both books were written by Russian prisoners, so-called enemies of the state. Less than a year later, I would find myself in a penal colony near the one in the books: in the Perm region, in the northern Urals.1

This fragment is from the book Riot days (2017) written by Maria Alyokhina. She was one of the members of the Russian protest-art collective Pussy Riot that performed a ‘punk prayer’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February 2012. They wore bright colored dresses and balaclavas and performed the song ‘Mother of God, banish Putin’. She was later arrested, together with two other women of Pussy Riot, and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Riot days is a memoir about her experiences, from the performance to detention and the trial, and later the penal colony. Penal colonies are in fact prison camps, and Riot days can therefore be regarded as a prison camp memoir. Russia has a long history of prison camp literature, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, to Gulag literature such as Aleksandr Solzhetitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. This history of prison camp literature is a result of Russia’s long history of prison camps: the katorga camp system since the eighteenth century in the Russian Empire, and, the Gulag camps during the Soviet Union. The term Gulag was officially the acronym of the agency that was responsible for the camp system: Glavnoe Upravlenie LAGerei (Main Administration of the Camps) that was established in 1930.

1 Maria Alyokhina, Riot days (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 74. 4

Later, it came to denote the Soviet camps in general, especially because of its use in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.2 Prison camp literature is something we in general associate with the past: in particular Holocaust literature and Gulag literature. However, Alyokhina’s memoir is a contemporary Russian prison camp memoir, and moreover, in the aforementioned fragment she refers to two Gulag memoirs. What makes this so compelling? It is not that she just refers to the Gulag history and the tradition of Gulag memoir writing, she also connects her story to the stories about the Gulag camps, and she identifies herself with Shalamov, who was in Stalin era Gulag camps, and Bukovsky, who was in a Brezhnev era prison camp. This finding was the starting point of this thesis that focusses on the memoir, and will be about contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs and the way they relate to Gulag memoirs.

1.1 The historical background of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing The number of published Gulag memoirs is relatively small, especially compared to the scale of the repression and the percentage of victims who survived it. Even if you add all the unpublished memoirs that are kept in archives, the number stays relatively small, argues Irina Shcherbakova in ‘Remembering the Gulag . Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’ (2003).3 Nevertheless, she delimits a periodization of when the memoirs were written, in the Stalin and post-Stalin era. In the period from the 1920s to the 1940s only a few testimonies appeared about the Soviet camps. These were only published in the West, since they were the stories of people who succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union. The number of people abroad who had been in the Soviet camps grew larger, also during the Second World War and hereafter. The memoirs written then in the West still did not receive great public attention and had very little resonance in the West, and were rather unknown in the Soviet Union itself. Wide interest in the theme of

2 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 249. 3 Irina Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’, in Reflections on the Gulag: With a Documentary Appendix on the Italian Victims of Repression in the USSR, ed. Elena Dundovich, Francesca Gori, and Emanuela Guercetti (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Geltrinelli, 2003),188. 5 repression, and thus the camps, both in the Soviet Union and in the West only began in the mid-1950s, thus after Stalin had died in 1953.4 In the first phase, from the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956 to the 22nd Congress in 1961, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin gave a mass stimulus to people to write about the repression. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin went hand in hand with mass rehabilitations of (former) inmates. Moreover, between 1953 and 1960, the Gulag was dramatically downsized: the prisoner population of the Gulag was 2,5 million when Stalin died, but shrank to approximately 550.000 in 1960 (only people in camps, not including those in prison).5 Memoirs that were written in this period often emphasize that the author wished not to forget the nightmares they had witnessed, but to remember them to be able to tell about them later.6 A new phase began in 1962, with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian title: Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha) in the journal Novyi Mir. This was not a memoir but a fiction story, but it’s incredible success motivated people to write about the camps, or to publish what they had already written. The camp theme appeared to be freed from the ban it was under, and also artistic work about the camps circulated among readers, such as poems by Varlam Shalamov and stories by Lidiia Chukovskaia. Unfortunately, after Khrushchev’s removal from power in 1964 the camp theme was banned again. However, the interest in the camp theme stayed and people kept writing during the 1960s. According to Shcherbakova it was even the most fruitful period in Gulag memoirs, since the early period of the repression was still well remembered.7 Another new phase began with again a work of Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago (Russian title: Arkhipelag GULAG) in 1973 in Paris. The text circulated in samizdat in Russia. It led to a strong response of other victims of repression. People compared his description of the Gulag with their own experiences, and, as Shcherbakova argues, this stimulated people

4 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag’, 189. 5 Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. Gulag returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 2. 6 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag’, 190. 7 Ibidem, 191. 6 to write about their own experiences, whether they agreed or disagreed with Solzhenitsyn. In the 1970s, all sorts of Gulag memoirs started to circulate in samizdat, for example Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (Russian title: Krutoi marshchrut), Ol’ga Adamova-Sliozberg’s The way (Russian title: Put’), and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (Russian title: Kolymskie Rasskazy). These works were often in the same period published abroad.8 A whole new phase started with the perestroika. In the period 1987- 1991 the camp subject ceased to be forbidden, so a public debate started about the Gulag. Also at this time, publication started in Russia of still unpublished Gulag memoirs and memoirs that had previously been published abroad. The euphoria about the ability to finally strive for historical truth caused a flood of material, of which the consequence was that the material was not dealt with critically, which on its turn even caused a romanticisation of former camp inmates.9 After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the interest in the subjects of the camps and repression significantly declined. The initial shock and excitement subsided and gradually gave way to indifference. This was partly caused by an absence of new talented and outstanding memoirs. Also, a sort of taboo had developed to start looking at the material in a critical way, this was regarded as disrespectful seen the background. In this period though the opening of archives related to the repression caused a revival of interest in the camp topic, but the focus therefore lay at the archives.10 Finally, Shcherbakova describes how in the late 1990s the situation stabilized. Memoirs continued to be published by organizations such as Memorial, or by provincial publishers. Attention for the topic shifted from the international and national stage to smaller stages of those with a specific interest. This also had the consequence that the former Gulag prisoner lost its romanticized image.11 From this time one, Gulag memoirs remained

8 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag’, 192. 9 Ibidem, 193. 10 Ibidem, 194. 11 Ibidem, 194. 7 valuable sources for research, but were not anymore read by the wide audiences of people that had been reading them before. It may seem as if all Gulag memoirs are about the camps as they were under Stalin’s rule. It is very important to note that this is not the case. There are also a few memoirs about post-Stalin camps. In 1967, Anatoly Marchenko’s memoir My Testimony (Russian title: Moi pokazaniia) caused a literary explosion. Circulating in samizdat, it was the first concrete narrative not about the Stalin camps, but about the camps in the Khrushchev- Brezhnev era. In contrast to what was generally believed, there were still great numbers of political prisoners in the forced-labor camps and the prison regime was still near deadly, as Leona Toker argues in Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag survivors (2000). Also Eduard Kuznetsovs’ Prison diaries (Russian title: Dnevniki), Vladimir Bukovsky’s How to build a Castle (Russian title: I vozvrashchayutia veter), and Petro G. Grigorenko’s Memoirs (Russian title: V podpolé mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys), describe the post-Stalin imprisonment. However, Kuznetsov’s memoir is focused on prison instead of the camps, and the memoirs of Bukovsky and Grigorenko are focused on the psychiatric ward. According to Toker, labor camps were less harsh for political prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s than prison, let alone the psychiatric institutions.12 These were also part of the punitive system, and therefore their memoirs also belong to the corpus of Gulag memoirs. In the end, over the time span of about seventy years, a literary tradition of prison camp memoir writing was established in which people disclosed their experiences in the Gulag. Emerging already in the early years of Stalin’s repression, this way of writing was followed by many other over the years.

1.2 Research objectives Leona Toker states in Return from the Archipelago. Gulag Survivor’s narratives (2000) that:

12 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 60. 8

Now, at the turn of the millennium, Soviet concentration camps are no longer news; political imprisonment has been abolished in the former Soviet Union; and the issue of the Gulag, including the post-glasnost revelations, has passed from the domain of journalists to that of historians.13

However, much has changed in Russia since the year 2000, the year Vladimir Putin became president of the Russian Federation. The system of labor camps has never disappeared from Russia. Russia today still holds prisoners in a network of prison camps, although a prison camp is now called a IK, short for ispravitel’naia koloniia, which can be translated as correctional colony or penal colony. Other facilities include pre-trial prisons (called SIZO), educative labor camps for juveniles, and some regular prisons (also called tyroomi), but the penal colony is the most common type.14 According to Michael P. Roth, following the implementation of new policies in the mid-1990s, much of the Soviet era leftover in the penal system has been abolished, including arbitrary punishment, bans on mail and visitors, head shaving, and physical abuse. Besides, prison officials are by law required to grant religious freedom and protect prisoners who have been threatened with harm.15 However, in practice this is by no means the case, apart maybe from the head shaving. There have been every now and then reports about the terrible conditions in the prison camps, including torture, by independent Russian media.16 During the first phase of my research, I read the following recent works of Russian prison camp literature about the contemporary Russian prison camps. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who spent ten years in prison camps, published Tyuremnye lyudi (2014), a collection of prison camp stories.17 The Pussy Riot case led to two books: Maria Alyokhina’s memoir Riot days (2017) and Nadya Tolokonnikova’s

13 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 8. 14 Michael P. Roth, Prisons and Prison Systems. A Global Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood press, 2006), 231. 15 Ibidem, 231. 16 See for example: https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/05/13/76435-lomka-omsk (14 May 2018), and https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/07/20/77222-10-minut- v-klasse-vospitatelnoy-raboty?utm_source=push (20 July 2018). 17 These prison stories were first published as blogs on the site of Novoe Vremya: https://newtimes.ru/authors/detail/64689/. 9 autobiographical work How to start a revolution (2016). They both were in prison camps for nearly two years. Ildar Dadin spent over a year in a prison camp and published the memoir Der Schrei des Schweigens. Mein Leben für die Freiheit in Russland (2018). I also came across a memoir of Oleg Navalny, the brother of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, Tri s polovinoi. S arestantskim uvazheniem i bratskim teplom (2018), about his three and a half years in a prison camp. All of these authors were convicted in what were believed to be politically motivated trials, and they can thus all be regarded as political prisoners. So, it appears that the phenomenon of prison camp literature has made a reappearance in Russia, the prison camp and political prisoner theme are again highly relevant. Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs go back to the literary tradition of Gulag memoirs and create an analogy between their texts and the narratives about the experiences in the Gulag. In my reading of the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs I will therefore make use of literary theory based on the study of Gulag memoirs. Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs connect their texts to the texts of the past, thereby creating parallels between their texts about the contemporary prison camps and the texts about the Gulag. They deploy the tradition of Gulag memoir writing for their own narratives. The question this thesis wants to answer is: How do contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs inscribe themselves into the tradition of Gulag memoir writing, and how do they deploy the Gulag history in their contemporary narratives? It is important to note that is not my intention to compare prison camps and their situations. A study like this can get the criticism that on should not treat the contemporary prison camps as equal to the Gulag camps. This thesis, though, looks at narratives about the prison camps, today and back then, and is thus not a comparative study of the Gulag and the prison camps now.

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1.3 Selection of primary sources Since the phenomenon of contemporary Russian prison camp literature is a very recent one, there is obviously not yet a big corpus of memoirs, like the corpus of Gulag memoirs. I selected the following two memoirs to be the primary sources of my research: Maria Alyokhina (2017), Riot days (London: Penguin Books). Alyokhina already had a short introduction, but additionally, she was born in 1988. For her participation in the Pussy Riot performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, she was arrested and sentenced for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ to two years penal colony. She served one year and ten months of her sentence in prison camps IK-28 near Perm and IK-2 near Nizhny Novgorod, and was then released in an amnesty. Riot days was first published in Russian. This was a self-financed small-circulation edition, and can therefore be regarded as a contemporary version of samizdat. She translated it herself, with some help, to English. The English version, except for perhaps a few lines, is identical to the Russian version and can therefore also be seen as ‘original’ but for a different audience, namely abroad. This is why for this thesis I chose to use the English version. Ildar Dadin (2018), Der Schrei des Schweigens. Mein Leben für die Freiheit in Russland (Munich: Europa Verlag GmbH). Dadin, born in 1982, is a Russian human rights activist. In 2015, he was arrested for ‘repeatingly violating the rules of organizing street events’. This was a new article in the Russian criminal code, and Dadin was the first to be convicted under it. He was sentenced to three years penal colony, of which he served one year and two months, in IK-7 (in Karelia) and IK-5 (in Altai krai). He was released a few months after he had smuggled out a letter describing how he was tortured, which was published in Russian media.18 Der Schrei des Schweigens consists of two parts: the first part is Dadin’s memoir, the second part is a more political background essay of German journalist Birgit Virnich. For this thesis, I used only the first part. Dadin’s memoir was thus published in German in Germany. There is no Russian publication. It is not

18 https://meduza.io/feature/2016/11/01/izbivali-po-10-12-chelovek-odnovremenno- nogami, accessed on 25-8-2019. 11 clear from the book whether Dadin wrote it in German himself, or if it was translated for him. The fact that it is published in Germany has to do with journalist Birgit Virnich, who followed Dadin’s case since his arrest. Der Schrei des Schweigens seeks this way clearly an audience abroad, instead of in Russia. Perhaps a Russian version will follow in the future, but it is also a possibility that it is too difficult to publish such a narrative presently in Russia. Both memoirs were thus published abroad, Alyokhina’s also in samizdat, and this evokes the image of how in the past the Gulag memoirs were published in the Soviet era. Other contemporary prison camp literature I came across were either not a memoir, or solely oriented to a Russian audience.

1.4 Importance of the research Not much attention has yet been given to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs. They are a result of the political climate that has been growing more and more repressive under Putin. A parallel development is the growing popularity of Stalin, in the shape of a glorification of his leadership in the Great Patriotic War, feeding patriotic sentiments. In 2018, a poll showed that half of Russia’s youth say they are unaware of Stalinist repressions.19 In 2019, another poll showed that seventy percent of Russians approve of Stalin’s role in Russian history.20 Hester den Boer quotes in Onderdruk door de verlosser. Een zoektocht naar Stalins erfenis in het Rusland van nu (2019) philosopher George Santayana, who formulated that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.21 Today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. However, certain mechanisms are at work that were also at work under Stalin, such as hysterical accusations in the media of espionage and sabotage, and the growing number of political prisoners, according to Gulag researcher Sergei Prudovsky, arguing that

19 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/10/05/half-russian-youth-say-theyre- unaware-of-stalinist-repressions-poll-a63104, accessed on 25-8-2019. 20 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating-among- russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245, accessed on 25-8-2019. 21 Hester den Boer, Onderdrukt door de verlosser. Een zoektocht naar Stalins erfenis in het Rusland van nu (Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2019), 258. 12

Russians should understand their past in order to recognize symptoms in the present and take action against it.22 In that regard, the aforementioned polls give little hope. The existence of contemporary ‘new’ prison camp memoirs also gives renewed relevance to the Gulag memoirs, and thus plays a role in the process of remembering. And, if the political climate in Russia stays the same, the world can probably expect more prison camp memoirs to come.

1.5 The structure of this thesis This thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter looks into the function of the prison camp memoir and which differences and similarities there are between the contemporary prison camp memoirs and the Gulag memoirs. It will discuss the aspects of retrospect, testimony, and bi-functionality. The second chapter focuses on the form of the Gulag memoir. One chapter of Leona Toker’s Return from the Archipelago. Gulag survivors narratives (2000) is devoted to a study of the morphology of Gulag memoirs, distinguishing four common morphological features of the Gulag memoir. These morphological features will be explained, followed by an analysis of whether these morphological aspects are recognizable in the contemporary prison camp memoirs. This chapter thus applies literary structural analysis about Gulag memoirs to contemporary texts, in order to compare them. The third chapter looks at the interconnection of prison camps memoirs, especially how the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs refer to the history of the Gulag and the tradition of Gulag memoir writing. It analyses how the contemporary prison camp memoir writers deploy the past in their narratives about the present.

22 Boer, Onderdrukt door de verlosser, 258. 13

2. Retrospect, testimony and bi-functionality in the prison camp memoir

This chapter will discuss the intentions and functions of prison camp memoirs. What do prison camp memoirs do? They remember, they testify, and they are also a story. This chapter will thus consecutively look at the aspects of retrospect, testimony, and bi-functionality (a combined testimonial and aesthetic function), all with regard to both the Gulag memoirs and the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs. It will thus provide a more thematic background of the prison camp memoir in the Russian context.

2.1 Retrospect The most obvious aspect of the prison camp memoir is that of retrospect, because memoirs are naturally always written in retrospect. The prison camp memoir is only one category of prison camp literature. Prison camp literature can take various forms, of which the memoir is but one. Other forms include diaries, novels, stories and even poetry. Easily assumed is that prison camp literature is written by the prisoners, but there are also examples of prison camp literature written by guards.23 There is also a distinction between texts written during the imprisonment and text written afterwards, only after being released, and thus in retrospect. The Russian term lagernaia literatura, meaning prison camp literature, is mostly used to indicate all works that deal with the Gulag camps. Scholars try to distinguish between different sorts of prison camp literature, because there are so many different forms, and ‘Gulag memoirs’ are a category often discussed and researched. Leona Toker argues in the article ‘Towards a poetics of documentary prose’ that memoirs are ‘factographic narratives’ that implies the readers understanding of that the characters are historically identifiable people and that the narratives details relate to actual

23 Examples are the novel Zona. Zapiski nadziratel’ia (1982) by Sergei Dovlatov and the diary Sibirskoi dal’nei storonoi (2014) by Ivan Chistyakov. 14 events, locations and realia.24 These factographic narratives, or ‘documentary prose’, can be divided into ‘extempore documents’ (diaries, letters, etc.) and ‘retrospect narratives’ (memoirs and autobiographies).25 Here, it seems to be that memoirs are strictly factographic, with no room for fiction. Andrea Gullotta argues that it would be better to speak of Soviet repression literature (literatura sovetskoi repressii) instead of Gulag literature (lageraia literatura). This Soviet repression literature consists, according to him, of different sub-genres, such as Gulag memoirs (lagernaia memuaristika), Gulag poetry (lagernaia poeziia), Soviet repression fiction (khudozhestvennaia proza o sovetskoi repressii), etc.26 Here also, memoirs and fiction are regarded as separate categories. Of all Gulag literature, Gulag memoirs are probably the most numerous. This can be explained from the fact that it was in general very difficult to write in the Gulag camps, although there are texts written in the camps (such as letters, diaries or poetry). However, most people were not concerned with writing while in the camps. They started writing about what they had lived through when they were released (or had successfully escaped). Then they looked back at all they had been through, and put it on paper for their own interest, and often also for the interest of society. Now, what exactly is a memoir? A strong definition is given by Chris Baldick, who defined a memoir accordingly:

A narrative recollection of the writer’s earlier experiences, especially those involving unusual people, places, or events. A memoir is commonly distinguished from an autobiography by its greater emphasis on other people or upon events such as war and travel experienced in common with others, and sometimes by its more episodic structure, which does not need to be tied to the personal development of the narrator; however, the terms are often still confounded.27

24 Leona Toker, ‘Toward a poetics of documentary prose. From the perspective of Gulag testimonies’, Poetics today 18:2 (Summer 1997), 191. 25 Ibidem, 193. 26 Andrea Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet context: Remarks on Gulag writings’, Autobiografia 1 (2012), 75. 27 Chris Baldick, The Oxford dictionary of literary terms (4 ed.) (Oxford 2008): ‘memoir’, via http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/search?source=%2F10.1093% 2Facref%2F9780198715443.001.0001%2Facref-9780198715443&q=memoir, accessed on 16 January 2019. 15

Beth Holmgren writes in The Russian memoir. History and literature (2003) that scholars tentatively agree that in a memoir the author narrates real events he or she has experienced or witnessed, usually foregrounding a subjective perspective and evaluation.28 The difference with the autobiography, another form of ´life writing´, is that the autobiography focuses more upon the self, rather than on notable people and events that the author has encountered.29 However, Holmgren also quotes Soviet literary critic and memoirist Lidiia Ginzburg, who made the important notion that memoirs are not the same as primary documents since they ‘are almost always literature presupposing readers in the future or in the present; they are a kind of plotted structuring of an image of reality and an image of human being.’30 Memoirs are thus a retrospective image of what one remembers of his or her experiences. This image should however come across as real, because of the orientation towards authenticity of documentary prose. Memoirs are, however, more complicated as just truth presenting texts. Holmgren suggests to exert a broad, literary understanding of the memoir, and not to simply see it literally as memories of a certain period. She argues that:

The memoir thus presents a remarkably fluid and affective genre, coincident with and sometimes indiscernible from fiction, autobiography, biography, history and gossip; and capacious enough to combine fictional enhancements with nonfictional authority, confession with observation, personal license with verifiable facts, subversive rumors with celebrity worship. Yet, to intone a recurring feature – the memoir necessarily presumes to record its subject’s different public performances on ‘real’ stages: among family and intimates, in various social and political milieus; in the ‘real’ space and time of history. For the term of reading, the narrator-subject assumes enormous authority as the reader’s descriptive and evaluative guide to these depicted worlds.31

28 Holmgren, Beth, The Russian memoir. History and literature (Evanston 2003), xi. 29 Baldick, Chris, The Oxford dictionary of literary terms (4 ed.) (Oxford 2008): ´autobiography´, via http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/view/10.1093/acref/9780198 715443.001.0001/acref-9780198715443-e-109?rskey=LRqk8u&result=3, accessed on 17 January 2019. 30 Holmgren, The Russian memoir, xii. 31 Ibidem, xv. 16

In the case of the prison camp memoir, especially the part of the ‘real space and time of history’ is of importance. They display that the narrator was part of something that has, or in the opinion of the narrator will have, historical importance. The prison camp memoir is very much about the narrator being a part of something bigger, a ‘collective experience’, which in the case of the Gulag memoir is the Gulag camps. Gulag memoirs often have quite strictly demarcated boundaries, and concentrate only on life in the camps, as an ‘other life’ marked by trauma sufferance and death, as Gullotta argues.32 Gulag memoirists thus decide to ignore their normal life, due to the trauma, and thus focus only on this trauma in the span from the arrest to the release in order to heal.33 In the case of the contemporary prison camp memoirs, Alyokhina and Dadin also present a retrospect image of their experiences in prison camps. However, their narratives have not such strict boundaries, and include more details about their life before prison. Alyokhina includes into her narrative a period preceding her arrest, but this period is inextricably linked to her arrest, which leads to her imprisonment. Thus the concept of the camp expands itself to everything related to the camp experience. She also includes multiple fragments of her prison diary in her memoir, thus contrasting her retrospect narrative with fragments from an ‘extempore’ text. Dadin’s memoir starts with the transport to the penal colony and ends shortly before he was released. He, in contrast to Alyokhina, includes small and larger flashbacks to his detention, his youth, his activist activities in Moscow street protests and at Euromaidan in Kiev. Thus, he gives more biographical details in-between his description of prison camp life. These biographical details add to their narrative, but they also make visible how prison camp narratives are highly constructed texts. Dadin, in order to intensify his narrative, writes his memoir in the present tense. This is supposed to emphasize the realness of his memoir, that is a retrospect text. However, it makes it appear a little as if he really wants to convince the reader that he remembers everything well.

32 Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet context’, 82 33 Ibidem, 82. 17

2.2 The testimonial function The two best-known examples of prison camp literature date from the twentieth century, and are written by people who survived either the Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet Gulag camps. The twentieth century has been characterized as follows: ‘‘imprisonment has become “the experience of the century” – or rather the recorded experience, since the “true witnesses” of the century mass murders cannot speak.34 The second aspect about the prison camp memoirs is its testimonial function: the urge of the author to testify about the circumstances in the prison camp. For the author of the memoir, the urge to testify thus overcame the urge to forget all the suffering and trauma. Varlam Shalamov wrote about forgetting:

Я испугался страшной силе человека – желанию и умению забывать. Я увидел, что готов забыть все, вычеркнуть двадцать лет из своей жизни. И каких лет! И когда я это понял, я победил сам себя. Я знал, что я не позволю моей памяти забыть все, что я видел. И я успокоился и заснул.35

Here he expresses his realization that although he may have wanted to forget, his memory will never fail to forget what he experienced in the Gulag. The memoir has been described as one of the genres (together with the autobiography) of ‘the literature of testimony’. According to Toker, this term can be used in two ways. In the narrower meaning it signifies an ethical urge on the part of the author, who testifies to crimes or atrocities. However, the term can be expanded and therefore be given the meaning of ‘eyewitness accounts, whether or not the author intended to give evidence for or against specific people or institutions.’36 Memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, notebooks, and letters can all be called genres of the literature of testimony. They are not based on historical documents, but constitute them, by ‘documenting’ or ‘testifying’ to what their authors have witnessed.37 Toker divides these genres in ‘extempore documents’ (diaries, letters, etc.) and

34 Leona Toker, Return from the archipelago. Narratives of Gulag survivors (Bloomington 2000), 6. 35 https://shalamov.ru/library/1/28.html, accessed on 27-8-2019. 36 Toker, ‘Towards a poetics of documentary prose’, 192. 37 Ibidem, 192. 18

‘retrospective narratives’ (memoirs and autobiographies). She argues that in Gulag literature, the genre of memoir dominates over that of autobiography, in part because there is the need for material concerning the public domain, so that the testimony might carry sufficient ethical weight.38 This testimonial function of prison camp memoirs can work in different ways. There is a big difference between Holocaust memoirs and Gulag memoirs. The Holocaust memoirs. written by those who survived the Nazi concentration camps, were written when the camps already belonged to the past. They looked back to a period that was closed by the defeat of the Nazi’s and the liberation of the concentration camps. Even after experiencing the most horrendous things, Holocaust survivors were, in the opinion of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, just by the fact that they were able to testify their experiences, not complete witnesses of the Holocaust:

We [the survivors] are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, [...] have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are […] the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.39

Holocaust memoirs have a strong testimonial function in showing the world what was done in the camps. According to Levi, those able to testify in their literature thus had not experienced the terrors that had left the true witnesses either dead or unable to speak (or write). Solzhenitsyn wrote something similar about Gulag testimonies in The Gulag Archipelago (quoted from Young):

All those who drank of this most deeply, who learned the meaning of it most fully, are already in the grave and will not tell us. No one will now ever tell us the most important thing about these camps.40 In contrast to Holocaust memoirs writers, writers of Gulag memoirs wrote about something that did not yet belong to the past. Their memoirs

38 Toker, ‘Towards a poetics of documentary prose’, 194. 39 Primo Levi, The drowned and the saved (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1988), 70. 40 Sarah J. Young, ‘Recalling the dead: Repetition, identity, and the witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy’, Slavic Review 70:2 (2011), 370. 19 were written about camps that still existed. Even after Stalin’s death, prison camps remained, although on a different scale than under Stalin. The main obstacle to former prisoners to write and publish freely about the camps was the continuation of the repressive Soviet regime. Most Gulag memoirs were published either abroad (tamizdat) or illegally circulated underground (samizdat). So, Gulag memoirists needed to testify to what happened in order to create a ‘counter-discourse’, as Gullotta explains, as to create a ‘real history’ to be set against the ‘ideological history’ prompted by the Party.41 Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, memoirs started to be used as historical documents, because of their testimonial function and the reader’s tendency to perceive memoirs as presenting the ‘truth’. Historians such as Anne Applebaum and Nanci Adler used, among other things, Gulag memoirs for their historical studies of the Gulag. Adler concludes her book The Gulag survivor (2002) with the statement that the chronicles of victims of the Gulag ‘can help to serve as a safeguard against any kind of return to that system under any other name.’42 The testimonial function of prison camp memoirs can play an important role in the remembrance of certain histories, although it should always be kept in mind that memoirs are always subjective and shaped narratives. A lot of Gulag memoir writers, and actually writers of all kinds of Gulag literature, did not have the certainty that their narratives would actually reach people, in order to raise awareness about the camps. Therefore, a lot of Gulag authors ‘wrote for a posthumous future.’43For many writers of Gulag memoirs the testimonial function (to reveal) has been the main urge to write, but is certainly not the only one. There are plenty of other reasons, such as processing a trauma, self-justification, or to record in order to tell ones relatives or later generations. The testimonial function is also not restricted to ‘factual’ narratives, like memoirs and autobiographies. Here, Toker’s broader definition of what a testimony is should be applied, namely in the meaning of an eyewitness

41 Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet context’, 82. 42 Nanci Adler, Beyond the Soviet system. The Gulag survivor (New Brunswick 2002), 267. 43 Robert Horvath, The legacy of Soviet dissent. Dissidents, democratization and radical nationalism in Russia, (New York 2005), 21. 20 account. This can also be expressed in (semi)fictionalized narratives, based on one’s experiences. Varlam Shalamov wrote in an essay titled ‘О прозе´ about what his intentions were with his work Kolyma tales (which consists of semi-fictional, semi-documentary short stories), and how he tried to find a new way of writing after the camp experience. He writes:

В «Колымских рассказах» дело в изображении новых психологических закономерностей, в художественном исследовании страшной темы, а не в форме интонации «информации», не в сборе фактов. Хотя, разумеется, любой факт в «Колымских рассказах» неопровержим.44

He explains how in Kolyma tales he tries to explore the terrible topic of the Gulag in an artistic way. His intention is not simply to present information, but to portray a new psychological reality. He explains that he wanted to show in his work what is new in the behavior and the psychology of a human being made into an animal. For this, it is not necessary to make a difference between a story, a document or a memoir:

Когда меня спрашивают, что я пишу, я отвечаю: я не пишу воспоминаний. Никаких воспоминаний в «Колымских рассказах» нет. Я не пишу и рассказов – вернее, стараюсь написать не рассказ, а то, что было бы не литературой.45

So, he tried to create a new kind of writing, a new sort of prose, a text that would transcend existing concepts and understanding of literature as it was. The emphasis here lies on the fact that there was ‘newness’, literary invention was needed. According to Shalamov, a new kind of prose was required, because by what happened in the Gulag camps. Humankind had exceeded existing ways of cruelty and thus literature did not have an apt form to deal with this topic anymore. For something unparalleled in the past, a new way of writing was needed. This question plays a big role in debates about Gulag and Holocaust writings and how they should artistically represent the atrocities that took place. As Toker argues:

44 https://shalamov.ru/library/21/45.html, accessed on 18 June 2019. 45 Ibidem, accessed on 18 June 2019. 21

Indeed, since the atrocities of the twentieth century are vastly different from whatever has been represented in the literature of the previous ages, the literature of the Gulag, like the literature of the Holocaust, often highlights the asymmetry of traditional cultural schemata and unprecedented new realities. […] And it is through further literary experiments that the writers who had not been imprisoned attempt to process the unwieldy heritage of labor-camp lore.46

So, Shalamov was looking for a new kind of writing that was not just documenting memories or experiences. Even though he did not want his work to be understood as a document informing readers about life in the camps, all works of prison camp literature have a testimonial measure. This is also the case in fictional of (semi-)fictionalized narratives. Fiction can be understood as historical testimony if testimony is understood in the broad sense of ‘the word of another providing a source of knowledge’.47 Toker explains that in factographic works such as a memoir, all narrative details are supposed to be referential. In the case of fictional works, referentiality is mainly restricted to the historical and cultural-semiotic aspect of the setting. This means the characters and the plot are understood to be representative rather than to refer to real people and actual events.48 For example, various Gulag narratives published during Krushchev’s thaw were fictional rather than factographic, but the bulk of the audience read them as testimony on “what it was like in the camps”.49 Shalamov’s Kolyma tales is fiction nor non-fiction, but it can be read, among other things, as presenting how life was in the camps. Even memoirs can contain a measure of fictionalization, prompted by the ‘retelling’ of one’s story, and in prison camp memoirs it is often impossible to pinpoint a clear boundary between fact and fiction.50 Consequently, the reader plays a role in how prison camp literature, whether fictional or factographic, is being read. The world of the camps is a world only knowable to the ones who have been inside it. Every reader who has not ‘been there’ will read works of prison camp literature (both fictional as

46 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 9. 47 Ibidem, 123. 48 Ibidem, 124. 49 Ibidem, 123. 50 Ibidem, 124. 22 factographic) as ‘how it was like in the camp’. This means that readers will always take into regard the personal experiences of the author in the camp, even though the work is a novel. In the case of the two contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs, both works have a strong testimonial function. This can already be explained by the fact that they are among the first to write about the Russian penal colony system that exists today. Dadin makes his testimonial urge very explicit in his prologue, titled Ich muss mich erinnern: ´Ich will das jeder im Land weiß, was ich hier im Straflager IK-7 durchmachen muss. Eigentlich müsste ich alles aufschreiben, um nichts zu vergessen, aber ich habe nicht einmal einen Stift.´51 The testimonial urge thus already emerged in the prison camp. This is also the case in Alyokhina´s narrative, when she writes: ‘I need to understand. The turn my life has taken. My life in prison. Hold on. I have to remember things in the proper order. I need order.52 Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs share with the Gulag memoirs that they are about a still existing system of prison camps. However, Gulag memoirs are in essence about survival, while the contemporary prison camp memoirs are in essence about endurance and injustice. In the Gulag camps there was a significant possibility to die (even though living and working conditions in Gulag camps varied greatly). This is different in the prison camps in Russia today. However, the contemporary memoirs still present a story about what is going on in the prison camps, a story that is largely unknown to people in Russia as well as abroad. The fact that their memoirs are published abroad and in samizdat probably indicates that it is not easy to publish such stories in Russia. Alyokhina and Dadin include in their memoirs aspects that would be expected in a prison camp memoirs, such as descriptions of the cells, the food, the cold, and daily routine. About the cold Alyokhina writes:

We wrap ourselves in green coats like sacks with name tags on our chests, tie thin shawls around our heads, crawl out of the barracks and assemble in the prison yard.

51 Ildar Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens. Mein Leben fur die Freiheit in Russland (Munich: Europa Verlag, 2018), 8. 52 Alyokhina, Riot days, 127. 23

It’s not even dawn yet. There is snow on the ground, and the wind blows up our clothes, no matter how much we wear – and we don’t get to wear much – and we wait. We wait outside for the search to end, about forty minutes.53

They also expose issues that go beyond ‘regular prison experiences’, such as abuse and torture. Alyokhina writes for example about body searches: In his reply, the head of the colony states that all the body searches carried out are legal. Outside, we’d call these searches a gynaecological exam. In January, I had four of these exams a week, with no medical instruments or an examining table. It was a blatant means of causing pain in revenge for my magazine article describing life in the prison as ‘anti-life’.54

Here, Alyokhina describes her experience a little reserved. Dadin writes in a more explicit way than Alyokhina. For example about how he was tortured:

Und so hange ich weiter an diesen mörderischen Handschelmen. Die Scherzen durchdringen nun meinen ganzen Körper. Ich kann nicht mehr richtig atmen, sämtliche Muskeln in meiner Brust haben sich mittlerweile verkrampft. Ein taubes Gefühl breitet sich von meinen Händen bis in die Unterarme aus, weil sie so angeschwollen sind; die Schultern sind bis zum Zerreisen angespannt. Unter der übergestülpten Schapka erkenne ich durch einen schmalen Schlitz meine Hose und die Unterhose auf dem Boden und versuche, sie unter meine Füße zu schieben, um etwas mehr Halt zu bekommen, aber ich spüre keine Besserung.55

The guards had also had threatened to rape him while hanging there. He also describes how physical torture is combined with psychological torture, such as sleep deprivation by leaving the lights on at all times, playing loud music, and by cold and hunger:

Man nennt N-14 auch die Folterzelle, obwohl hier eigentlich in jeder Zelle gefoltert wird. N-14 ist in einem gesonderten Trakt, sodass die andere Haftlinge nicht hören könne, was dort geschieht. Die Zelle grenzt an die Außenwand des Gebäudes, und die Warter lassen die Außentür immer auf; die Kalte zieht einem in die Knochen. […] in meiner Zelle ist es genauso kalt wie draußen in der Weite Kareliens. Und wenn ich

53 Alyokhina, Riot days, 123. 54 Ibidem, 153. 55 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 39. 24

nachts aufwache, wird mir auch nichts mehr warm. Die eisigen Temperaturen wecken immer wieder Selbstmordgedanken, und dann kommt auch noch der Hunger dazu.56

A difference between Alyokhina and Dadin is that Alyokhina leaves more room for interpretation. Although her memoir contains many descriptions of camp life, she leaves a big part to the imagination of the reader. Dadin’s narrative is more ‘closed’, because he explicitly describes his experiences, in order to make sure nothing is missed or misunderstood by the reader. Where the testimonial function in Gulag memoirs played a role in remembrance and creating a counter discourse, the testimonial function of contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs is mainly about revealing the unseen or the unknown in order to create a change. Alyokhina and Dadin are by their prison camp experience strengthened in their belief they have to actively fight to improve prison conditions in Russia. This becomes clear from their memoirs. Also beneficial for them is that they can make use of the media. Dadin revealed that he was tortured already from within the prison camp. He smuggled letter via his lawyer to his wife, who then published it in the media. Both Alyokhina’s as Dadin’s release was widely reported in the Russian and international press, meaning they immediately had a stage for their story. In the case of the Gulag memoirs, publicity followed (sometimes) after publication. In the case of Alyokhina and Dadin, their stories were in the media already immediately after their arrests. The memoirs were published after their releases, and complement to what was already known. This highlights another difference with the Gulag memoirs, concerning the audience. Given their pioneering work of writing about contemporary prison camps, Alyokhina and Dadin did have the advantage that their cases received so much publicity. This made it easier to publish a memoir about their experiences. For Gulag memoir writers, especially in the early period of Gulag memoir writing, it was difficult to reach a public.

56 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 49. 25

2.3 The bi-functionality of prison camp memoirs Prison camp memoirs do not only have a testimonial function. In the context of Gulag texts, Leona Toker has made a strong argument that Gulag memoirs are bifunctional objects, and are objects of testimony as well as of art.57 According to her, the informational and aesthetic functions of these bifunctional objects becomes ‘marked’ at different periods of reception: ‘they can be read as historical documents or publicistic statements and as works of art.’58 In prison camp memoirs, this aesthetic function is always inextricably linked to the testimonial function. Gulag memoirs have been studied for their testimonial function for a long time, also in historical research to the Gulag. By studying Gulag memoirs as literary objects, one goes beyond the topical significance of Gulag narratives. These works have a broader cultural significance, not because of an autonomous aesthetic function, but ‘owing to their residual bi-functionality: their artistic achievement is bound up with their exploration of callousness and their creation of conditions for counteracting it’.59 The contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs also have this double function. Nevertheless, the testimonial function and the aesthetic function do not occur in equal proportions in all prison camp memoirs. This is clearly visible on the basis of the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin. The way Dadin wrote his memoir is quite standard in what one would expect of a prison camp memoir. It is very descriptive. Perhaps the most striking is that he wrote it in the present tense, which gives the effect that his experiences in the prison camp are revivified. Dadin’s memoir is imbued with the testimonial function, emphasizing certain events and how he felt about them, which makes his narrative sometimes a bit repetitive. Alyokhina’s memoir is very unusual and experimental. Firstly, it is written in very short paragraphs with short titles in bold. Sentences are often very concise. An example from the text, about transportation to the prison camp:

57 She leaves Gulag prose and drama out of this study for measured reasons, see Toker p. 8. 58 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 7. 59 Ibidem, 247. 26

During the day, you are taken to the toilet twice. Prepare two plastic buckets: one for urine, one for boiling water. There is no food; only boiling water. Have instant Chinese soup with you.

Chinese soup

6 a.m. We load our bags into another autozak, then they pile us in. We ride to SIZO No.2, in the city of Kirov. This is a transfer prison, from which they will soon send us on to destinations unknown.

This is their trick – the unknown, This is their method – to frighten. Their way of showing you are just a body.

I am a body

They transport you . You’re a convict. They laugh at you and ignore your questions about your destination. We are not privy to this information. We are not supposed to know where we’re going, what time it is, or anything that affects us. If you beg, they might tell you the time. But only if you beg.60

This way of writing makes the text powerful, energetic and sharp. It somehow reminds the reader a bit of the punk songs Pussy Riot performed. Perhaps Alyokhina’s style is (partly) derived from her punk-background. The short paragraphs are alternated with all sorts of fragments, such as quotes, diary fragments, lines of poetry, and statements from the trial. This way, her narrative is almost like a ‘collage’ of her experiences. Fragments from her prison diary, which are printed in cursive, are the most numerous of these included fragments. They form a striking counterpart to ‘main text’ of the small paragraphs, since they have a more contemplating character, and are not as staccato as the main text, but more lyrical. An example of this is:

The days were like snow – they melted away. They stayed in my memory only as dates, as the sound of boots shuffling though the April slush. I was like the iron bars on the

60 Alyokhina, Riot days, 116. 27

window that trapped our world inside and the wind, damp with drops of water, that lurked in the corners.61

Alyokhina’s memoir is, because of her experimental style, very captivating. In Riot days the aesthetic function is more foregrounded compared to Dadin’s memoir, in which the testimonial function is more foregrounded. In the end, both functions are present in their memoirs.

61 Alyokhina, Riot days, 78. 28

3. The contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the morphology of the Gulag memoir

Gulag memoirs have been widely used for historical research on the Gulag. As the previous chapter made clear, they not just testimonies, but also literary objects. They are gathered under the title ‘memoir’ to separate them from other Gulag literature, such as poetry and autobiographies. The fact that they are memoirs is not the only thing that they have in common. This chapter will discuss the idea of the Gulag memoir as a genre, Leona Toker’s theory of a morphology of the Gulag memoir, and an analysis on to what extent this morphology is also applicable to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs.

3.1 The Gulag memoir as a genre Andrea Gullotta argues in ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context: Remarks on Gulag Writings’ (2012) that Gulag memoirs should be seen as a sub-genre of Soviet repression literature, as was briefly mentioned in the previous chapter.62 In his opinion, there is a need to analyze works related to the Gulag as artistic works. There are many different kinds of texts, but he starts with the memoirs. He formulates a preliminary definition of the sub- genre of the Gulag memoir, as a group texts that:

. Are written by authors directly affected by Soviet repression . Have a transitive destination towards a real and undetermined reader . Have a combined (both aesthetic and moral) function . Share the ‘aboutness’ of the experience of the Gulag . Are stylistically influenced by Soviet repression63

His definition is indeed a preliminary one. It is an idea of a definition, meant as a helping tool or incentive to stimulate the research of Gulag memoirs as

62 Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context’, 75. 63 Ibidem, 79. 29 literary works. The article does not yet specify how the above described characteristics take shape in a text. Another preliminary idea of what connects Gulag memoirs comes from Irina Shcherbakova. She writes in ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’ (2003) that many Gulag reminiscences seem to be alike, as if composed according to a model description of the fate of a man or a woman in a camp. There are exceptions, either by the uniqueness of faith described, or the author’s talent.64 She writes about this resemblance:

Essentially, with the exception of particularly talented texts, which naturally are few, many camp reminiscences are so similar to each other that, if we delete details of geography and period, they seem to merge into a single hypertext – with appendixes, amplifications, continuations and sometimes with the same set of heroes.65

Her article is about both memoirs and oral testimonies. Perhaps because of the latter, it sounds a little simplistic. However, the concept of the hypertext is very interesting. It suggests the existence of a common structure behind all the individual Gulag memoirs. Gullotta and Shcherbakova preseny ideas on how to research Gulag memoirs as literary works. The literary study of Gulag memoirs is still an undeveloped research field, but there have been people who have started on this. In most cases, however, only a few Gulag memoirs are considered, or they are treated alongside Holocaust memoirs. Or they are researched from a very broad context, such as Bernadette Morand’s Les écrits des prisonniers politiques (1976). In this work she presents a number of shared themes in the writings of a great number of political prisoners, among which she includes the Gulag writers Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The only one so far who has really taken on the idea of a genre study of the corpus of Gulag memoirs is Leona Toker. In the introduction of Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), she states:

64 Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag’, 197. 65 Ibidem, 198. 30

It is now ethically possible and, I believe, necessary to consider the writings of former prisoners as artistic works and to analyze not just the testimony that they present but also their formal features.66

She defines Gulag memoirs as ‘memoirs that are centrally concerned with camp experience’.67 Like for example slave narratives or memoirs of disillusioned communists, most of the Gulag memoirs are written by either non-professional writers or by authors whose artistic talents are revealed in these works, which is often their first literary attempt. Toker argues that even in the case of the former, high artistic merit often results from the harmony of the content and the stance: ‘the narrative act seems to be an extension of the author’s life, and that life acquires an aesthetic dimension of its own.'68 Toker uses a broad understanding of the term memoir. She includes works from the 1930s up to the 1980s, written by both men and women. Excluded are autobiographies in which the camp is only one of the components, as in for example Boris Gorbatov’s 1964 autobiography. Included are, by contrast, the memoir of Valentín González (El Campesino: Life and Death in Soviet Russia, 1952) and Yekaterina Olitskaya (Moi vospominaniia, 1971) even though the bulk of their texts is an account of the time prior to the camp experience. Toker argues that the camp does occupy a pivotal place in their narrative, since the pre-camp narrative is leading down exactly to the nadir of the camp.69 She also includes Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, although this is also not strictly a memoir. She thus works with a broad understanding of the memoir: as a retrospective firsthand account that is centrally concerned with the camp.

3.2 The morphology of the Gulag memoir

Toker devoted a whole chapter of Return from the Archipelago to her theory of a morphology of the Gulag memoir. She argues that because of similarities

66 Toker, Return from the archipelago, 8. 67 Ibidem, 73. 68 Ibidem, 73-74. 69 Ibidem, 73. 31 in their subject matter and in the writers’ motivation for the narrative act, Gulag memoirs tend to display certain morphological features.70 These morphological features are derived from a structural analysis of the corpus of Gulag memoirs, focused on morphological aspects. Although she does not mention it, this method is derived from the Soviet literary scholar Vladimir Propp. In 1928, he published Morfologija skazki, which implied the principle of Russian formalism to the study of the narrative structures of Russian folktales. After the English translation was published in 1958 it had a great influence on the study of narrative. Propp stripped the folktales of their content, and focused exclusively on the abstract form of the text, with particular attention to the events and character types in the tale.71 He could then expose the syntagm, which is the deeper construction, or what is universal to the tale. He distinguished 31 basic functions and seven character types. He concluded that all Russian folktales are created by using an amalgam of these ‘standard ingredients’.72 Toker’s reseach of the Gulag memoir is thus also focused on the structure of the narrative, but in another way, not stripping the narrative from its content. The content plays an important role in her morphology. Toker’s idea of a morphology is quite in line with Gullotta’s idea of the Gulag memoirs as a literary genre. As the serious first attempt to analyze the entire corpus of Gulag memoirs, Toker’s morphology theory is perhaps not yet completely fully completed. Yet, it offers a good starting point to study Gulag memoirs. More research can only supplement her findings. The idea of a morphology, or a structure behind the narrative, seems also to be in line with Shcherbakova’s idea about a ‘hypertext’ behind Gulag memoirs. Morphological features also form a structure that is transcending the narrative. The four morphological features Toker distinguishes in the Gulag memoirs are the following73:

70 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 73. 71 Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford 2010): ‘Vladimir Propp’’, via https://www-oxfordreference- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/view/10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref- 9780199532919-e-559, accessed on 14-8-2019/ 72 Ibidem, accessed on 14-8-2019. 73 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 74. 32

1) A tension between the ethical drive and an aesthetic impulse, closely associated with the bi-functionality of Gulag narratives as acts of witness-bearing and as works of art 2) The interconnection of individual and communal concerns 3) The inclusion of specific topoi as morphological variables 4) A modal scheme that can be described in terms of Lent

It is apparent that the morphological features Toker distinguishes are not strictly aesthetic. They form a blend of the testimonial and aesthetic function, just like in the texts these functions can overlap, coexist and complement each other.

3.3 The morphology of the Gulag memoirs applied to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs Now, there is a reappearance of the prison camp memoir in Russia with the memoirs of Maria Alyokhina and Ildar Dadin, and they create an analogy between their texts and the Gulag memoirs. It is an interesting experiment to see whether the morphological features of the Gulag memoir described by Toker can be found back in the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs. This part of the chapter will thus extrapolate the idea of a common morphological structure from the Gulag memoirs to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs of Maria Alyokhina and Dadin. In the order that Toker describes the morphological features, each time one morphological feature will first be more thoroughly explained, followed by an analysis of if (and if so, how) the morphological feature can be detected in the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin. This analysis will tell us more about how the memoirs of now are related to the memoirs of then, at least in form.

33

3.3.1 Morphological feature no.1: A tension between the ethical drive and aesthetic impulse For the first characteristic, it is important to note that the main motivation for the narrative act is ethical: the survivor’s duty to give evidence (also for the sake of the ones who are not able to do so). This sense can be reflected in titles, dedications, appeals to public opinion, comments on the survivor’s obligation to testify, or references to persons who already in the camp asked the author (as a possible survivor) to tell the story. The fact that writing about the camps could be risky enhanced the ethical significance of the testimonies.74 However, a Gulag memoir is not simply a report on abuse, it is a narrative that is shaped and constructed in order to be an appealing text for the reader. Toker states that the aesthetic merit of Gulag memoirs is associated with the congruence of the content and the stance. It is thus contributing to the aesthetic appeal if it was written soon after release. The experience was then still fresh in one’s memory. A memoirists’ sense of the basic ethical integrity of his or her conduct in prison or in the camp can ‘irradiate upon the text and become a source of aesthetic appeal on its own’.75 This also applies to the memoirists’ admission of so-called gray areas in his or her conduct in difficult circumstances, especially shortly after release when many aspects of the camp experiences are not yet processed. Additionally, there are details just for the pleasure of narration, which are not ethically oriented as the aforementioned. This can be autobiographical facts, adventure stories, etcetera.76 According to Toker, the ethics of reticence is balanced by the need for narrative freedom. Later memoirists were more cautious than early memoirists in what they wrote. Gulag memoirists could endanger others with their story. Especially later, writers withheld such information as for example (real) names of other prisoners, and ways of communication between prisoners. This brings us to the fact that Gulag memoirs, in contrast to Holocaust memoirs, were written when the Gulag as representing

74 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 74. 75 Ibidem, 75. 76 Ibidem, 75. 34 the system of camps was not yet history. The memoirs could provide the authorities with valuable information on how they could make the system more efficient. Especially the early memoirs were therefore not only read by the target audience, but also by the secret police.77 There is thus a tension in Gulag memoirs between, on the one hand, the ethical drive and, on the other hand, the aesthetic impulse. Gulag authors wanted to tell their full story, and aimed for a narrative that presented both as much of the details about their hardships and suffering Simultaneously they aimed to write a readable, appealing narrative. A good story has higher aesthetic value, and can thus also count on a bigger audience. And that is, consequently, beneficial for their testimony being heard. So, Gulag memoirs are in a way a balancing act between giving evidence and telling an impressive and gripping story. This can be counteracted exactly by giving ‘too much’ evidence, since too many details and description can undermine the readability of the story.

3.3.2 Morphological feature no. 1 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs The ethical drive can be found straight away in the title of Dadin’s memoir: Der Schrei des Schweigens. It can be interpreted as a cry for attention: for the situation in the penal colonies, of which the world is ill-informed. His memoir is dedicated to the countless prisoners that are still today tortured in Russia’s prison camps. He also explicitly comments on his obligation to remember in the introduction, which is also titled ‘Ich muss mich erinnern’. He writes there that nobody can imagine what happens behind the high walls of the prison camp, and that it is up to him to tell this. The fragment also implies that his idea to write already took shape in the prison camp.78 Alyokhina does not as explicitly comments on an obligation to testify as Dadin. She refers multiple times to her prison diary, which indicates that she recorded her experiences, but perhaps not yet with the idea to share them with the world. Only on the very last page she mentions to another

77 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 76. 78 Dadin, Der schrei des Schweigens, 8. 35 prisoner that she wants to write a book. When the girl asks if she will be in it, Alyokhina replies that she definitely will be.79 Then about the aesthetic impulse of the narratives. Both works were written quite soon after release, so they make the impression that the memories about the prison camps are still fresh. Especially Dadin’s memoir is imbued with indignation about all that happened to him. As was already discussed in the previous chapter, there is a difference in aesthetic impulse between Alyokhina’s and Dadin’s memoir. Alyokhina’s memoir is written in an experimental style, creating a ‘collage’ of experiences. It is written very captivating. Perhaps by writing Riot days she found that she has a talent for writing. The many references to poetry also indicate her interest in literature Dadin’s memoir is more straight to-the-point. He visibly had some difficulty with finding a balance between giving his full story and making it an appealing text.. His narratives is gripping for the descriptions of torture and his feelings of fear, and less for his style. One striking thing is that also Alyokhina and Dadin do not give much information about their fellow prisoners. They mostly use only their first names, or no names at all. However, many of the camp guards or their superiors’ full names are included in the contemporary memoirs, as if this exposure is a sort of punishment.

3.3.3 Morphological feature no.2: The interconnection of individual and communal concerns The second characteristic can be explained as the sense of one’s obligation to testify on behalf of the collective, which is intertwined with a specific personal motivation for telling the story.80 Communal concerns could be simply capturing what happened for the sake of recording history. It could also be the counteracting of the distortion of reality by the authorities. Personal concerns mostly had to do with getting grip on experiences that were hard to understand and to place in one’s life. Writing could be a tool for processing.

79 Alyokhina, Riot days, 195. 80 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 76. 36

Toker argues that personal aims can endow memoirs with features of literature genres, such as the Bildungsroman, the apologia or confessional literature. Communal concerns can lead to features shared with protest literature and political satire.81 The interconnections of concerns can also be reflected in the components of the material. Since Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, narratives of imprisonment have tended to combine stories of individual experience with accounts of the shared suffering. This means that the attitude of the memoirist as narrating voice is different from the attitude of the memoirist as the focal character of the text.82 In other words, the focalizer is the sharer of the common lot, but the narrating voice belongs to a concrete, historical individual. That concrete, historical individual has his or her own past before the camp, life in the camp, and consequently, private memory of the camp afterwards. The emphasis on the common lot is the strongest in the narratives of those who thought their works to be ‘pioneering’. An extreme example of this can be found in Vladimir Tchernavin’s I Speak for the Silent (1935). He escaped with his family from a Gulag camp to Finland, and moved to England. From his memoir he excluded his successful escape, because that was not part of the communal experience: he was an exception.83 Toker describes how the distinction between the individual and communal concerns is canceled when the memoirist attempts to save the images of separate individuals from oblivion. This way, each memoir produces a tension between a number of highlighted portraits and the undifferentiated mass of people that form the background.84 Additionally, there are the retrospective narrating voice and the focal character of the narrative. In the end, the interconnection of individual and communal concerns causes a tension in Gulag memoirs. This is a tension between on the one hand a focus on the author’s identity, and on the other hand a focus on

81 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 77. 82 Ibidem, 77. 83 Ibidem, 80. 84 Ibidem, 80. 37 public interest information This makes Gulag memoirs, according to Toker, as a matter of fact hybrid forms that incorporate and rework elements of a variety of traditional narrative genres.85

3.3.4 Morphological feature no.2 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs Alyokhina and Dadin testify both on behalf of themselves as on behalf of the other prisoners. They inform about life in the prison camps in general, and on personal experiences. Both memoirs also contain a storyline of personal development. Firstly, in the beginning of their sentence they both feel subjected to the prison camp regime, and bend to it. However, over time they grow a sense that they do not have to, and that as a prisoner they also have rights. They both learn that, if certain things the guards force them to do or withhold from them are illegal, they can stand up for themselves. Alyokhina writes for example:

Half a year went by before I realized I could say no when the guards said ‘Bend over.’A whole year passed before I could justify mu ‘no’ by citing Russian law and forcing a gasp from each person at a search who told me to take off my underwear or squat naked.86

They not only learn to stand up for themselves, they also gradually learn that they can use the situation they are in, and try to change it. Not only for themselves, but for all the other prisoners as well. Both Alyokhina and Dadin have connections to the media and human rights organizations. Dadin reflects on this:

Die Öffentlichkeit zwingt sie jetzt also, sich an die Gesetze zu halten, oder sie geben es nur vor, solange ich hier bin. Gleichzeitig bekommen wir noch weniger zu essen. Daraufhin insistiere ich, dass ich hierbleiben will. Ich erlebe ja, dass ich wirklich allein durch meine Anwesenheit zugunsten der Haftlinge Veränderungen bewirke.87

85 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 80. 86 Alyokhina, Riot days, 50. 87 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 148. 38

So, in the narratives, they both make a personal development. In prison they grow a strong sense of fighting for prisoner’s rights. Precisely by their prison camp experience they grow into prison rights advocates. This way, their memoirs contain some features of the Bildungsroman. Alyokhina and Dadin are political prisoners, although not officially by Russian law. This makes them different from most of the prisoners, who are not political-prisoners. This sometimes works to their disadvantage when testifying on the common lot. Both Alyokhina and Dadin spent quite some time isolated from the other prisoners in solitary confinement. Dadin comments on how his solitary confinement prevents others to see how he is abused, and how it prevents him from witnessing the abuse of others. However, he can still hear the abuses.88 Alyokhina gets lighter and individual jobs in the penal colony, while the other women prisoners all work in the sewing factory. This way she cannot report about that work. She writes about that:

Working as a cleaner, mopping the floors, is a job for prisoners who have the right connections. The majority of the prisoners work in the sewing factory. They sew uniforms for the police and the Russian army. In twelve-hour shifts. I will nto see the inner working of the factory. I won’t see how the prisoner’s fingers bleed from the work, how they get bashed over their heads with their stools for failing to fulfil their quotas. The zone's administration will do everything possible to make sure I know nothing about it.89

Later on, she still gets to work in the sewing factory for a while. However, the other women prisoners work there most of the time. Both Dadin and Alyokhina are thus aware of the fact that they experienced the prison camp differently than the other prisoners. This is most visible at the very end of Riot days. Alyokhina is, as only one from her prison camp, released as part of an amnesty. She writes about this: ‘Everyone needed this amnesty but me.’90

88 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 74. 89 Alyokhina, Riot days, 150. 90 Ibidem, 195. 39

There is a bigger focus on the shared experience of prisoners in Alyokhina’s memoir. She very often writes about ‘we’ and ‘our’, implicating she feels as part of them, and identifies with the other prisoners. She very briefly refers to a visit from her son, but does not further include it in her narrative. Perhaps because it is too personal, or too much an individual experience. Dadin is more focused on himself in his narrative, perhaps because he was more isolated than Alyokhina was. Dadin writes about a clear turning point in this thinking about himself and ‘the others’:

Als vor einigen Tagen neue Haftlinge in diesem Gefängnistrakt eintrafen, bekam ich mit, wie sie geschlagen wurden. Das was ein fürchterlicher Schock. Plötzlich hatte ich nicht mehr so viel Angst vor der Folter. Hier bekam ich nun das Schicksal anderer Menschen mit und spürte, dass es falsch war, nur an sich zu denken.91

The material of the contemporary memoirs, like Gulag memoirs, consists of both individual experience and shared suffering, although in Dadin the individual experience is much more emphasized. In the contemporary memoirs, there is sometimes also a division between the individual narrating voice and a focal character that shares in the common suffering. The latter is less present in the contemporary memoirs as in the Gulag memoirs, because Alyokhina and Dadin were in a way exceptions by being a political prisoner. An example of the focalizer as sharer of the suffering in Alyokhina’s memoir:

Scum. That’s how the prison authorities treat us. They make us line up, chase us into the barracks, stuff us on to planks that pass as bunks, lock us up in solitary, refuse to pay us for our work. Then they say, ‘You shouldn’t have committed a crime.’ This is the system; it’s the way it works.92 Alyokhina and Dadin also both include some highlighted portraits in their narratives. While most of the prisoners remain an impersonal mass, some of them do become people with a name and a personality. Alyokhina describes various prisoners, such as a cellmate, but also the girl who is

91 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 132. 92 Alyokhina, Riot days, 187-188. 40 known to be a snitch. Obviously, most of the highlighted portraits belong to people she bonded with. At other moments, for example, she only mentions she is in a general cell with forty people, or, when on transport to the penal colony: ‘There are ten of us in the Stolypin car’.93 Dadin also includes a few highlighted portraits, although very few: a couple of men on the train to the penal colony, and his cellmate when he finally moves to a shared cell.94

3.3.5 Morphological feature no.3 The inclusion of specific topoi as morphological variables From the Gulag memoirs, Toker distinguished nine topoi, with the addition that an individual narrative usually displays no less than seven of these topoi.95 They will all be briefly explained here. 1) The arrest: Most of the early Gulag memoirs begin with the arrest, or with the period shortly preceding it. Additionally, the authors´ previous experience can be sketched in flashbacks. Some authors start their memoir with a short scene from camp life. The counterpart of the arrest is the end of the narrative that mostly ends with release. Where the arrest stands for standstill and the constraint of motion (of being imprisoned), release is often related to motion (of vehicles like trains or ships). In later memoirs, the beginning of the narrative with the arrest is not so routinely present anymore.96 2) Dignity: The concept of dignity is mostly about physical shame, and in particular the absence of it. Gulag memoirs tend to reject decorous reticence.97 They not only raise the issue, but deliberately pay much attention to the daily hardships in the camps, in which sanitary conditions and body care played a large role. This is, again, less present in later memoirs, because it was so extensively done before in earlier works.

93 Alyokhina, Riot days, 115. 94 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 22, 130. 95 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 82. 96 Ibidem, 83. 97 Ibidem, 84. 41

3) Stages: Gulag memoirs are divided into graphically separated units (like chapters or sections) that deal with well-defined periods of the author’s stay in different prisons or camps. This division of the text kind of re-enacts the stages of a prisoners life.98 The Russian word etap can mean a stage, but can also stand for the period of traveling between two transit prisons, or is used to indicate a group of convicts that is being transported. Transporting prisoners po etapu (by stages) has already been in practice since the czarist times.99 Thus, in a Gulag memoir, it is common to start a new chapter at every location. Inside the camp, divisions tend to be spatial rather than temporal.100 4) Escape: Escape was much easier in the early years of the Gulag, and accordingly, they are a bigger theme in early memoirs. It stayed an important theme later, but then more as idea or temptation. Usually plans or phantasies about escape are only present in the early stage of imprisonment. Escape can also be regarded in a figurative sense, as in escaping in dreams, imagination, memories or poetry.101 5) Moments of reprieve: Named after a book of Primo Levi, Toker argues that Gulag memoirs contain sustained attention to the more pleasant moments in camp life, such as nice conversations, opportunities to read, a bath, occasional freedom of movement, little acts of kindness or an extra piece of bread.102 The effect of such moments of reprieve is that they neutralize the danger of the reader getting numb for atrocities, which would spoil the impact of the prison camp memoir. Alternating the two gives prison camp narratives a pulsating structure. Additionally, Gulag memoirist tend to give much attention to these moments of reprieve, certainly in relation to the duration of the suffering. It is extremely difficult to transfer the duration of suffering to a written account, which consequently makes it near impossible to imagine camp life as it really was on the basis of testimonies of others.

98 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 84. 99 Ibidem, 84. 100 Ibidem, 84. 101 Ibidem, 86. 102 Ibidem, 87. 42

The moments of reprieve thus make that the narrative pulsates: downwards to exhaustion and suffering, and upwards to recuperation and relief. Whether this is deliberately or intuitively done, it stems from the very nature of camp life.103 6) Room 101: Named after the basement torture chamber in George Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 represents ‘untidy spots’ in Gulag memoirs, which are an effect of the author’s reluctance to face some special kind of suffering, depravity or horror.104 The focalizer averts his or her eyes from something very disturbing, out of self-preservation or partial complicity. This leads to a sudden reticence in the narrative, leaving the reader vaguely aware of the gap. It can also be the author, rather than the focalizer, who prefers to keep out of Room 101.105 The luckier the prisoner, the less comprehensive the testimony, since he or she then missed the things others which other prisoners unfortunately did experience. 7) Chance: Chance can consists of lucky moments, like getting assigned to a lighter job, or being able to help each other. Toker explains how in the Gulag ill fortune was the general state of affairs, where survival was no less a matter of luck than a matter of physical and mental strength. The recognition of this tempers the Gulag survivor’s sense of being intrinsically exceptional individuals.106 8) The Zone and the larger Zone: The whole area of the camp was commonly referred to as ‘the zone’. The larger Zone stands for the Soviet Union as a whole. The term larger Zone is derived from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, in which he describes the Big Zone, or the Big Camp Compound, meaning the entire country. The border between the two is thus formed by the barbed wire, but also by the guards. In early Gulag memoirs guards are often described as lazy and relatively non-malicious, but in memoirs about post-Stalin camps authors (for example those of Anatolii Marchenko and Natan Sharansky) present the

103 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 89. 104 Ibidem, 89. 105 Ibidem, 90. 106 Ibidem, 91. 43 guards as malicious. Toker suggests this has to do with the reduction of the camps system and the consequently reduced self-respect of the guards after the death of Stalin.107 The zone-within-a-zone element of Gulag memoirs expresses the attitude of the author toward life inside the camp and life outside the camp: ‘the camp is but a more condensed expression of the tendencies at work in the country as a whole’.108 This thus means that the restrictions of the prison camp also apply to the country as a whole. 9) End-of-term fatigue: Most Gulag memoirs end with the author’s release from the camp. The last days, weeks or months are usually poorly remembered and also sparsely described.109 The narrative counterpart of the weariness of camp life is a paleness of the description of the last period in the camp. The first period in the camp is mostly very vividly described, even though it is a longer time ago. The pale descriptions of the last period in the camp is also connected to that fact that release was not a communal event, like for example release from the German concentration camps. It was briefly communal with the 1955 and 1956 amnesties, and authors who were then released paid much more attention to the last period in the camp.110

3.3.6 Morphological feature no.3 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs 1) The arrest: Alyokhina’s memoir begins with the period shortly preceding the arrest: the period and activities of Pussy Riot that led up to the performance in the cathedral, which was the cause of her arrest. The arrest itself also gets considerable attention. Striking is that her memoir ends with motion, as she sits in a car that is picking up speed, riding away from the penal colony.111 Dadin opens his memoir with short prologue that contains a scene from the prison camp. His first chapter then starts with transportation to the

107 Toker, Return form the Archipelago, 92. 108 Ibidem, 92. 109 Ibidem, 93. 110 Ibidem, 94. 111 Alyokhina, Riot days, 195. 44 prison camp by train. Only much later in the memoir does he give a long flashback about his arrest and consequently the trial. He also gives flashbacks to other periods from his life. 2) Dignity: Both Alyokhina and Dadin include to their narratives situations in which they have to deal with physical shame. Dadin for example writes that the security camera in his first cell is pointed at the toilet. And when he is in a room in the sick-bay, a guard sits at the door with a video camera, continuously recording, also when he uses the toilet.112 Alyokhina writes about body searches, in which prisoners have to squat and bend over naked for the guards. She also describes some of the sanitary conditions, such as the moldy banya in detention and the bathhouse of the penal colony.113 So, their dignity is affected, but they do not write about physical shame in a reserved way. Apart from physical dignity, there is also an element of mental dignity, which is especially strongly present in Dadin’s memoir. He was tortured, but in advance he was strongly convinced that they could not ‘break him’. Later, he later has to face that the guards succeeded:

Mein ganzer Brustkorb tut weh und ist völlig verspannt. Ich kann nicht richtig durchatmen und verfalle immer wieder in ein hektisches Röcheln. Ich habe das Leben gewählt und unter der Folter meine moralischen Werte missachtet. Mir ist klar, dass ich in dieser Situation auch meine Verwandten und meine Frau verraten hatte, nur um ein Ende diese entsetzlichen körperlichen Schmerzen herbeizufuhren. Dieser Gedanke quält mich. Bin ich nun ein Podlez. Ein niederträchtiger Mensch?114

3) Stages: In Alyokhina’s memoir chapters are very much divided into stages. First there are a few chapter about the period leading up to the arrest, divided in chapters about a prior performance of Pussy Riot, the performance in the cathedral, and being on the run for the police which ends in her arrest. After the arrest, the chapters are divided in detention, the trial, transportation to the penal colony, two chapter about the first colony, and lastly a chapter about the second colony.

112 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 29, 144. 113 Alyokhina, Riot days, 49, 79, 157. 114 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 41. 45

In Dadin’s memoir, we can also find stages, but to a somewhat lesser extent. His first chapter opens with a train that sets in motion, towards the prison camp. The second chapter start with the arrival in the prison camp. Then there are a lot of chapters about this prison camp, although he does start a new chapter when he is moved to another cell.115 However, not all chapter are strictly divided according to stages. Alyokhina even comments on the term etap, which is already in use for centuries in Russia:

‘Etap in Russian means the transportation of convicts from one prison to another. From a detention centre to a penal colony. Etap is the convict’s first step on his path to correction. This is what it’s called in Russia: ‘The path to correction’.’116

4) Escape: Escape is not present in the contemporary memoirs in the literal sense. It is, however, present in the figurative sense. Dadin writes about how in the silence of the night he escapes into an inner freedom, fleeing the daily hardships. Sleeping is hereby thus an ‘escape’, in which he only belongs to himself, and not to the guards and their routine.117 Alyokhina ‘escapes’ prison reality with the help of poetry. She writes for example about walking circles in the exercise yard of the detention facility with a book, reciting verses of Osip Mandelstam. The verses are also included in the narrative.118 5) Moments of reprieve: Alyokhina included many so-called moments of reprieve in her narrative. Examples are moments such as discussing Pussy Riot with the other women in her cell in detention, or when Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia was on the television in prison. There are also moments that consists of talking with other prisoners, or even creating friendships. She also mentions reading a lot. Reading is for her one of the ways to escape daily camp routine, as mentioned before. She apparently has a big bag of books, lots of them poetry. She repeatedly quotes from them in her narrative (from poets as Osip Mandelstam, Boris Ryzhy and Shish

115 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 131. 116 Alyokhina, Riot days, 112. 117 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 75. 118 Alyokhina, Riot days, 93-84. 46

Bryansky). She also mentions extended visits, when husbands and children come to visit, and how the women get ready for this as if it were their wedding day.119 This is thus a moment of reprieve that is important to all of the prisoners. In Dadin’s memoir moments of reprieve are less frequent as in Alyokhina’s memoir. As was mentioned about ‘escape’, he sees the nights as interruptions of the daily suffering. Other examples are when, on the train to another penal colony, another prisoner gives him some chocolate and coffee with sugar. He experiences this as a moment of happiness. In the transit prison he can finally take a nice shower and he gets a decent meal in the evening, after which he writes that he finally feels human again.120 Another, quite funny, example, is when he unexpectedly finds that the guards’ search dog is very sympathetic, more than the guards anyway: ‘Ich habe überhaupt nicht damit gerechnet, aber ich freu mich richtig über diesen Hund. Ein netter Anblick.’121 6) Room 101: I have not been able to detect moments where the focalizer or narrating voice averts his or her eyes from certain suffering in the memoirs of Dadin and Alyokhina. Perhaps this element is not so present in the contemporary memoirs, because both Alyokhina and Dadin are very testimonial and thus try not to ‘hide’ any abuse. Or it is absent due to differences in suffering between the Gulag and the prison camps now. 7) Chance: In Dadin’s memoir there are not many moments of chance. His release, though, is very much connected to chance. He had been able to smuggle out a letter via his lawyer, in which he described the torture and abuse. This letter was then published, and therefore Dadin from then on is treated by the rules. This way he enforces the torture and abuse to stop. It was mere luck that he succeeded to smuggle the letter out, and he is also aware that the other prisoners are not as lucky as him. Alyokhina gets lighter jobs because she is a political prisoners, to keep her away from the prisoners who have to perform hard work. She also senses that she will not be badly hurt, since she has so many connections. The

119 Alyokhina, Riot days, 158. 120 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 150. 121 Ibidem, 81. 47 guards cannot afford it to really hurt her: ‘She looks at me with hatred. She looks, but she can’t do anything. She can’t beat me. Try to beat me – the whole world will hear about it.’122 This is luck for her. Alyokhina also does not complete her full sentence, but is released in an amnesty. This was thus also a matter of chance. 8) The Zone and the larger Zone: This element is not present in Dadin’s memoir. Alyokhina however, refers to the penal colony with the term ‘zone’: ‘No one calls a colony a colony. A colony is called the Zone.’123 Apparently, this did not change since the Soviet era. She writes about how there is no third-party in the prisoner-guard relationship. A third party, such as an observer or human rights advocate, will tell others. Thus: ‘Everything that happens in the Zone stays in the Zone.’124 After this, she writes about patriots accusing the opposition of being traitors to the nation, a fifth column: ‘Who is a traitor? Who is a foreign agent? Anyone who observes, who records, who makes public what they have seen – everything they want to keep hidden behind the walls of the Zone. The Zone of Russia.’125 She thus applies the Zone/bigger Zone theme about the Soviet era to Russia today. Walls are also mentioned when she quotes form a song of the Arkady Kotz band (led by the Russian poet Kirill Medvedev):

Let’s destroy this prison, Tear down these unjust walls. Let them tumble to the ground, Let them fall, fall, fall.126

This song (which is actually a Russian adaptation of the famous Catalan protest-song L’Estaca of Lluis Llach from 1968) thus also represents a Russia with walls that should be torn down. This song has grown to be a

122 Alyokhina Riot days, 133. 123 Ibidem, 150. 124 Ibidem, 152. 125 Ibidem, 152-153. 126 Ibidem, 159. 48 popular protest-song under Russian antigovernment protestors.127 Even Dadin mentions this song very briefly in his memoir, but he does not link it to the idea of the zone and the bigger zone.128 9) End-of-term-fatigue: this topoi is clearly visible in both memoirs. In the last chapter of Riot days, Alyokhina is moved from IK-28 (near Perm) to IK-2 (near Nizhny Novgorod). This second prison camp is not as much described as the first one. The emphasis lies more on her friendships with other prisoners than on the daily routine of prison camp life there. In Dadin’s memoir the end-of-term-fatigue topoi is even more extreme. After having spent approximately a year in IK-7 (in Karelia) he only uses the last three pages to describe how he is transferred from one prison camp to the other for a month, until he ends up in IK-5 in the Altai. He does not write anything at all about this new prison camp, indicating that at this point it was not that important to him anymore. He associated the suffering with the first prison camp, and aimed to testify in his memoir about that part. Apparently the other prison camp did not play big enough of a role to be included in his prison camp narrative.

3.3.7 Morphological no.4: A modal scheme that can be described in term of Lent Toker argues that most of the Gulag narratives are written in ‘what, by analogy with the Carnivalesque mode described by Bakhtin, can be called “the Lenten mode.”129 Since she does not first explain the Carnivalesque mode, the Lenten mode is at first the vaguest of her four morphological features. However, she proposes to regard Lent (a period of voluntary asceticism and a fast for physical and/or spiritual purification) not as the opposite but as the second self of carnival. In Gulag memoirs Lent can be displayed by literal fasting (such as hunger strikes) and by figurative fasting, which means fasting to maintain personal dignity. In the figurative sense, fasting is a ‘refusal to become a

127 For the full text, see http://arkadiykots.ru/publikaciya/teksty-pesen/9-stenyi--lestaca-- luis-lyah-1968--kirill-medvedev-2012.html. 128 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 115. 129 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 94 49 cannibal, to prolong one’s own life at the expense of others […] or hold jobs that involve bending the will of others’.130 The effect of this is that in Lenten narratives, the borderlines between the actors and spectators are erased: the focalizer in the capacity of prisoner is both a spectator and a participant, since after observing at first, he or she becomes part of the mass of prisoners. In the Gulag camps people of all layers of society were stripped of their background and all made into a zek131. The differences between them did not matter anymore. Where in Carnivalesque narratives people become close to other people by festive exuberance, in Lenten narratives they are so by ‘extreme deprivation that obliterates individual differences.’132 It thus comes down to the idea that, instead of merging into a crowd through festivity and silly costumes, personal differences disappear and people merge into a mass by physical and mental suffering and a complete absence of privacy: instead of excess there is lack. And thus, according to Toker, the relation between physical and moral survival is one of the main concerns of every Gulag author, and the most interesting are self-critical reflections upon this.133

3.3.8 Morphological feature no.4 in the contemporary prison camp memoirs Firstly, both memoirs contain the element of Lent in the literal sense: hunger strikes. Dadin starts a hunger strike after his first night in the penal colony. As a result of this, he is beaten up, the guards put his head in the toilet and the next day, when he is still on hunger strike, they torture him. After this, he ends his hunger strike. Alyokhina declared multiple hunger strikes. She also describes the effect, such as insomnia, headaches and of course the hunger. She even compares a first hunger strike to a first love:

130 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 95. 131 Soviet term representing the pronunciation of z/k, which was an abbreviation of ‘zaklyuchennyi, meaning ‘prisoner’. Also today in Russia a political prisoner is called a ‘politzek’. 132 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 95. 133 Ibidem, 96. 50

The first hunger strike is like first love – very confusing. Later, you get used to it; but the first time there is only pain, leg cramps, nightmares, Still, it’s worth it.134

She also reflects upon the aim of a hunger strike, arguing that it is an illusion that one goes on hunger strike to achieve results. That is how it begins, but later you realize that it is not for the imagined outcome, but for the very right to protest: ‘A narrow sliver of a right, in a huge field of injustice and mistreatment.’135 Secondly, I could only detect Lent in the figurative sense slightly in the memoir of Alyokhina and not at all in Dadin’s memoir. Perhaps this is caused by his long time in solitary confinement and he does not have or describe much interaction with other prisoners. In the contemporary prison camp narratives, life in the prison camp is more a matter of endurance than of survival, so it would be more apt to speak about enduring not at the expense of others, than of surviving at the expense of others. Perhaps a reflection of this can be see when Alyokhina writes about fight for better conditions in prison backlashes on her. There are about a thousand women prisoners in the colony, They have all been deprived of using the telephone for a month. The guards had said that when Alyokhina would shut up, they could use the phone again. Some women were even denied family visits or an early release: ‘The price of this war, the war I declared on the jailers, has become too great. I feel the tears of the prisoners every day.’136 Also when she is released as part of the amnesty, instead of being happy about it, she argues that everybody needed that amnesty but her.137 She thus expresses here the feeling that she did not want to be favored this way, whilst the other women remained behind the walls of the prison camp. However, these possible examples of the figurative Lenten mode in Alyokhina do not have the effect that she morphs into the mass. On the contrary, it only emphasizes her exceptionality. Thus, the aspect of the focalizer and other prisoners merging into a mass is not so present in the

134 Alyokhina, Riot days, 58. 135 Ibidem, 172. 136 Ibidem, 166. 137 Ibidem, 195. 51 contemporary memoirs. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that the shared physical and mental suffering, and lack of privacy are far from the extremity they took on in the Gulag camps, and therefore played a much more important role in the memoirs about the Gulag camps.

3.3.9 Conclusion on the analysis After this analysis I think that it can be concluded that the four morphological features of the Gulag memoirs as defined by Toker can also be found in the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin. As becomes clear from the analysis, both Alyokhina’s memoir and Dadin’s memoir display a tension between the ethical drive and the aesthetic impulse, and they share the interconnection of individual and communal concerns with the Gulag memoirs. In case of the topoi, I can conclude that Alyokhina displays eight of them, and Dadin seven. Because Gulag memoirs tend to display at least seven topoi, the contemporary memoirs also share this feature with the Gulag memoirs. As for the Lenten mode, this feature is strongly present in the literal sense of hunger strikes. In a figurative sense, the Lenten mode is less present, although slightly in Alyokhina’s memoir. All four features are present, sometimes to a lesser or a larger extend, and sometimes in a slightly different way. What does this mean? It means that the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs share a morphological structure with the Gulag memoirs. By this, they are thus also connected in their forms.

52

4. Looking back in time: the interconnection of Russian prison camp memoirs

This chapter will discuss the way the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs refer to the history of the Gulag and the tradition of Gulag memoir writing. The introduction already briefly discussed the fragment in which Alyokhina identifies herself, as a prisoner in a prison camp, with Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma tales who spent many years in Gulag camps. This chapter will discuss in what ways Alyokhina and Dadin refer to Gulag memoirs and the Gulag camps themselves, and how they deploy the Gulag past in their contemporary prison camp narratives.

4.1 References to the Gulag past Alyokhina refers in Riot days multiple times to Gulag memoir writers Varlam Shalamov and Vladimir Bukovksy. The aforementioned fragment about the Gulag memoirs of Shalamov and Bukovsky comes from the chapter about her detention. She adds to the fragment the following:

Shalamov was declared a ‘socially dangerous element’ and sent to a colony in the Urals almost a hundred years ago. At that time, in 1929, he had already clearly grasped why the government took these kinds of measures. He wrote: ‘From the first moments in prison, it was clear to me that there was no mistake in the arrest, that is was the systematic destruction of a whole “social” group – all those who remembered what they were not supposed to remember from the past, from Russian history.138

The next thing she writes is: ‘A story can always repeat itself.’139 What does she mean by this? She does not explain herself further, but it seems as if she means that the same thing that happened to Shalamov now happened to her. Perhaps not literally, but more the idea of being a political prisoner imprisoned in a prison camp. Later, in the first chapter about the prison camp near Perm, she refers again to Shalamov. First she quotes his saying:

138 Alyokhina, Riot days, 74. 139 Ibidem, 74. 53

‘Nature in the North is not indifferent, not apathetic – it’s in cahoots with the ones who sent us here.’140

Then she writes that the Perm region is also called the republic of convicts, and: ‘This is where the camps of the Gulag were, and the last camps of the Soviet dissidents.’141 She thus very explicitly draws a parallel between her situation and the situation Shalamov and other Gulag prisoners were in. She does this again, when referring to Bukovsky, in the same chapter about the prison camp. She describes how she is brought for a commission because she allegedly violated the prison regime with oversleeping, which she thinks is ridiculous. The she writes:

The words of the dissident Bukovsky come to me: forty years ago, he did time in a labour camp not far from where Major Ignatov wants me to plead guilty: ‘They no longer want people to believe in a bright future; they want submission.’142

So again, she draws a parallel between her situation and that of a Soviet prisoner. This ‘drawing of parallels’ also applies to Dadin. He refers multiple times to the Gulag camps in relation to his own situation. For example when the camp commander Kossiyev tells him he wants obedient prisoners: ‘Du musst schuften. Du musst wie ein Sklave in meinen Steinbrüchen schuften.’143 Dadin writes after this:

Worüber redet dieser Mann? Diese Frage beschäftigt mich. Wir Gefangenen sind doch keine Sklaven, die man zur Arbeit zwingen und mit denen man Geld verdienen kann. Millionen Menschen haben wie Sklaven im Gulag geschuftet. Ich bin entsetzt, denn anscheinend betrachtet sich Kossijew als ein Herr, der über Sklaven gebietet.144

The parallels he draws are not as clear as those in Alyokhina’s memoir. This is also apparent from other fragments. He writes how, in the prison camp, he thinks back to the stories his father told him about how under Stalin, his

140 Alyokhina, Riot days, 125. 141 Ibidem, 125. 142 Ibidem, 138. 143 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 42. 144 Ibidem, 43. 54 family was expropriated and both his great-grandfathers were sent to the Gulag: Der eine Urgroßvater ist wieder zurückgekehrt, wenn ich mich nicht irre.’145 He also writes how in the 1990s, in his father’s house, he saw Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago.146 He only mentions it very briefly, suggesting that he only saw it, and never read it. Just like he was not sure whether one of his great-grandfathers came back from the Gulag or not. Although these two details are very small, they show how before Dadin’s imprisonment, the history of the Gulag did not mean much to him. This changed radically by his imprisonment and experiences of the contemporary Russian prison camps. Now the history of the Gulag started to mean something to him. This becomes clear when Dadin writes about how during his lengthy detention in Moscow, he devoured dissident literature. Before this moment, he knew very little about the dissidents. He writes in particular about Aleksandr Podrabinek. Podrabinek is a journalist and Soviet dissident, and was part of the human rights movement that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1970s:

Sein Buch Strafmedizin über die Unterdrückung politisch Andersdenkender hat mich sehr beeindruckt und mir unsere schreckliche Tradition im Umgang mit kritisch eingestellten Menschen vor Augen geführt. Jetzt erst wird mir klar, wie Podrabinek sich gefühlt haben muss, als er 1978 verhaftet und wegen ´Verleumdung´ des Sowjetsystems zu fünf Jahren Verbannung in Nordostsibirien verurteilt wurde. In der Verbannung wurde er dann 1980 zu weiteren dreieinhalb Jahren Lagerhaft verurteilt, unter anderem weil sein Buch auf Englisch erschienen war.147

Dadin writes how he now understands how Podrabinek must have felt, and thus feels connected to him and his story. A highly interesting fragment follows then, in which Dadin suggest the existence of a sort of ‘succession’ of writing about prison camps:

Aleksander Podrabinek ist so einer [eine Mutige], und ich muss hier in meiner Isolationszelle viel an ihn denken, um nicht den Verstand zu verlieren. Er ist für mich

145 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 75. 146 Ibidem, 76. 147 Ibidem, 78. 55

zum moralischen Vorbild geworden. Wenn ich an ihn denke, Weiß ich wieder, warum ich hier bin. Podrabinek hat aus den Büchern von Warlam Schalamow, Alexander Solschenizyn und anderen gelernt, die für ihre Überzeugungen ins Gefängnis oder in die Strafkolonie gegangen sind, und nun dient er mir als Leitfigur. Vieles, was er schreibt, trifft auf dieses Straflager und unsere heutige Situation zu. Vieles ist wie im Gulag.148

He describes here how he learned a lot from the books of Podrabinek, while Podrabinek learned a lot from the books of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn. A side note is that Podrabinek published Punitive medicine (Russian title: Karatel’skaia meditsina) in 1977, and an English edition was published in 1980. However, he was exiled and sent to a prison camp because of publishing this book, which is thus not about his own experience. There is therefore a difference with Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, who wrote and published their works after they were released from the Gulag. Just like Alyokhina and Dadin wrote and published their memoirs after their release. However, what is most important is the suggested idea of a literary succession. Dadin looks back in time, referring at Podrabinek, who on his turn looked back at Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn. Alyokhina also looks back in time, referring to Shalamov and Bukovsky. Although she does not say it as explicitly as Dadin, by her references to Shalamov and Bukovsky, she too suggests the idea of a literary succession. This is already special in itself, but what makes it even more special, is the fact that there is also a tendency in the tradition of Gulag memoirs writing to ‘look back in time’.

4.2 Gulag memoirs looking back in time This tendency is expressed in a short sketch by Shalamov titled ‘Through the snow’ (In Russian: По снегу). It was already written in 1956, and later served as prologue in his Kolyma Tales. It is a depiction of prisoners walking through the virgin snow, clearing a path for others. The story goes as follows:

How are roads beaten through virgin snow? A man walks in front, sweating and swearing, barely able to place one foot in front of the other, constantly getting stuck in

148 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 79-80. 56

the deep, powdery snow. He walks a long way, leaving behind him a trail of uneven black pits. […] Shoulder to shoulder, in a row, five or six men follow the man’s narrow and uncertain track. They walk beside this track, not along it. When they reach a predetermined spot, they turn round and walk back in the same manner, tramping down virgin snow, a place where man’s foot has never trodden. The road is opened. Along it can move people, strings of sleighs, tractors. If the others were to follow directly behind the first man, in his footsteps, they would create a narrow path, a trail that is visible but barely walkable, a string of holes more impassable than virgin snow. It’s the first man who has the hardest task; when he runs out of strength, someone else from that vanguard of five goes out in front. Every one of them, even the smallest, even the weakest, must tread on a little virgin snow – not in someone else’s footsteps. The people on the tractors and horses, however, will be not writers but readers.149

Most striking about this text is the last sentence, saying that the tractors and horses will be driven by readers rather than writers. Leona Toker explains this ordinary camp scene as an allegory, in which ‘the snow becomes a blank page on which “even the smallest and the weakest” can help leave a trace, if only they do not always walk in the footstep of others but trample down some untouched portion of the snow.’150 Yasha Klots further elaborates this idea in ‘From Avvakum to Dostoevsky: Varlam Shalamov and Russian narratives of imprisonment’ (2016). He argues that this allegory suggests a line of literary inheritance between individual authors, in which each text is destined to leave a new trace in the readers’ vision of the described reality, as long as it adds something new.151 And, every author in this literary procession is this way ‘also bound to play the role of a reader – of those who came before him, of times and places where he or she has not been.’152 In the tradition of prison camp writing, there is thus one who began the path, after which many others followed, creating their own paths and thus their own narratives. For them, the circumstances already differ from the first person. Neither Toker nor Klots reflects on the tractors and horses. I suggest they should be interpreted as the readers, who have not experienced

149 https://shalamov.ru/en/library/34/2.html, accessed on 28-8-2019. 150 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 5. 151 Yasha Klots, ‘From Avvakum to Dostoevsky: Varlam Shalamov and Russian narratives of political imprisonment’, Russian review 75:1 (January 2016), 9. 152 Ibidem, 9. 57 the camp themselves. They follow the path, but as they ‘sit on tractors and horses’, they do not place their own feet in the footsteps of the ones before them, who make their way through the snow. This means the reader can follow the narrative of the writer. The reader can only learn about the camp by following, and thus reading the work of the writer, that has the experience of the camp. If Gulag writers looked back in time, whom did they look at? The major source and point of comparison for twentieth century Gulag writers was Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of imprisonment and hard labor, The House of the Dead (Russian title: Zapiski iz myortvogo doma) from 1862.153 Also David Galloway calls The House of the Dead the foundation text of al Russian prison writing.154 There seems to be an agreement that Dostoevsky created the basis of the entire tradition of Russian prison camp writing. In short, Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 for participating in the liberal Petrashavsky circle. He was sentenced to death, but only minutes before his execution his sentence was changed to exile and hard labor in a katorga camp. The House of the Dead is based upon his own experiences as a political prisoner in Siberia, but it is a fictionalized account, and not a memoir but a novel.155 In what way did Gulag writers refer to Dostoevsky? An example from Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales cited in ‘Recalling the dead: Repetition, identity, and the witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy’ (2011):

There is no need to polemicize with Dostoevskii about the advantages of ‘work’ in labor camps in comparison with the idleness of prison and the merits of ‘fresh air’. Dostoevskii’s time was another time, and hard labor then hadn’t reached the heights being told of here.’156

153 Sarah J. Young, ‘Dostoevsky and the Gulag’, http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/05/06/dostoevsky-and-the-gulag/, accessed on 28-8- 2019. 154 David Galloway, ‘Polemical allusions in Russian Gulag prose’, The Slavic and East European Journal 51:3 (2007), 539. 155 Klots, ‘Varlam Shalamov and Russian narratives of political imprisonment’, 8. 156 Young, ‘Repetition, identity, and the witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy’, 363. 58

Shalamov wrote in his notes about Dostoevsky: ‘Колыма не была Мертвым домом, Колыма была лагерем уничтожения.’157 He thus stated that there was no House of the Dead in Kolyma, Kolyma was an extermination camp. Elena Mikhailik gives another example from Kolyma Tales, in which two political prisoners in a Kolyma goldmine compare their lot to that of the Decembrists who were sent to Siberian mines even before Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia:

I told Fediakhin about the quotas the Decembristst were assigned at Nerchinsk according to the “Memories of Maria Volkonskaia,”- three poods of ore per worker.

- And how much would our quota weigh, Vasilii Petrovich? – Fediakhin asked. I did a calculation – it was about eight hundred poods. - Well, Vasilii Petrovich, look how the quotas have gone up…158

This fragment does not mention Dostoevsky, but it shows according to Mikhailik, the nature of distance between the situations described in The House of the Dead and Kolyma Tales: The production quotas have been increased 266,66666(6) times.159 Solzhenitsyn also refers to Dostoevsky in The Gulag Archipelago, according to Galloway about two dozen times. He does this, however, with a joking attitude to the work that is involved. An illustrating example, quoted from Galloway:

As for Dostoevsky’s hard labor in Omsk, it is clear that in general they simply loafed about, as any reader can establish. […] the Tsarist censor did not want to pass the manuscript […] for fear that the easiness of the life depicted by Dostoevsky would fail to deter people from crime.160

157 https://shalamov.ru/library/21/53.html, accessed on 28-8-2019. 158 Elena Mikhailik, ‘Dostoevsky and Shalamov: Orpheus and Pluto’, The Dostoevsky Joural 1 (2000), 147. 159 Ibidem, 147. 160 Galloway, ‘Polemical allusions in Russian Gulag prose’, 540. 59

From the fragments by Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, it becomes clear that they referred to Dostoevsky in a means to compare two different situations. This way they emphazised the wide breech between Dostoevsky’s nineteenth century katorga experience and their own Gulag experience. Because of these obvious disparities, references to Dostoevsky are never harsh criticism, but more a questioning of the relevance of both the reality described and the artistic method of description in The House of the Dead.161 There are also few accounts of Gulag writers who find affirmation in Dostoevsky’s The house of the Dead. An example of this is Gustav Herling. He was a Polish writer and journalist and was arrested in 1940. He spent less than two years in the Yertsevo labor camp near Archangelsk. About his experiences he wrote A world apart (1951) (Polish title: Inny świat: zapiski sowieckie). In this Gulag memoir, he writes about how he twice read The House of the Dead. The title of the memoir alone is already derived from Dostoevsky’s work. Right at the beginning of the first chapter of The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky desribes the katorga camp:

On this side there was a peculiar world, a world set apart that was unlike anything else, a world with its own peculiar laws, its own dress, its own mores and customs – this was a house of the living dead, where life was like nowhere else and the people were special. It’s this special little corner that I will undertake to describe.162

Dostoevsky’s book playes quite a big role in Herlings’ Gulag experience, which culminates in the following fragment (quoted from Klots’ article):

The thing about the book was not Dostoevsky’s ability to describe inhuman suffering as if it were a natural part of human destiny, but that aspect of it which had also struck Natalia L’vovna: that there was not the slightest break between his fate and ours. ... The greatest torment ... was the inexplicable fact that the laws of time ceased to apply to it – between the enguldment of our predecessors and our own struggles there was no pause, the stream was continuous. ... The most trivial details repeated

161 Klots, ‘Varlam Shalamov and Russian narratives of political imprisonment’, 12. 162 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), 8. 60

themselves with nightmarish accuracy: the prisoners of the House of the Dead, at the end of a free day, also whispered with terror: ‘Back to work tomorrow’.163

In his memoir, Herling compares his situation with that described in The House of the Dead, and he sees similarities instead of a deep breech. He sees an affirmation of the novel’s apllicability to the new reality of the Gulag.

4.3 The palimpsest of Russian prison camp memoir writing In the end, Dostoevsky´s The House of the Dead functioned as a reference point for many Gulag writers: whether they identiefied with Dostoevsky and found solace in similarities, or they referred to him as a means to demonstrate in what a dreadful way the Russia campsystem had evolved from that point. The difference between Herling on the one side, and Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov on the other side can perhaps be explained by the difference in circumstances in the prison camps they were in. According to Klots, Herlings description of Yertsevo labor camp would have seemed like a holiday to Shalamov.164 Shalamov was set to work in the Kolyma goldmines, and thus experienced one of the most harshest of Gulag camps. Even Solzhenitsyn admitted that Shalamov’s Gulag experience was more bitter and longer than his, and that Shalamov touched ‘that bottom of brutalisation an despair to which the whole of camps life dragged us.’165 Mikhailik notes that Shalamov sets himself up in Kolyma tales not as an Orpheus, who ventured to Hell and came back, but as a Pluto, an integral part of the netherworld, describing his habitat in his own terms.166 Despite all this, even Shalamov makes a comment in his notes on Dostoevsky about the similaraity between Dostoevsky and himself (quoted from Klots):

163 Klots, ‘Varlam Shalamov and Russian narratives of political imprisonment’, 13. 164 Ibidem, 15. 165 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/19/short-story-survey-varlam- shalamov-kolyma-tales-gulag, accessed on 29-8-2019. 166 Mikhailik, ‘Dostoevsky and Shalamov’, 154. 61

I carelessly promised myself to expose ... the naiveté of The House of the Dead, all of its literaruness (literaturnost’) and ‘obsoleteness.’ Bit there is also something eternal in The House of the Dead. How little Russia has changed.167

Gulag writers were questioning the reality described by Dostoevsky and the method of description (fictionalized account), although they did see a similarity in the two different situations. In the tradition of Russian prison camp writing there is thus a tendency to look back in time. Being imprisoned in a prison camp, one looks at ‘fellow sufferers’ even though the circumstances might drastically differ. For the fact that Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead (as a prison camp narrative, not as a novel) served as a major source and point of comparison to the Gulag writers, Klots developed the idea that The House of the Dead can be viewed as a palimpsest for Gulag texts that came a century later:

A page from which the original writing has repeatedly been washed off, without ever disappearing completely, to make room for a new historical narrative.168

A palimpsest is a very old text or document, in which writing has been removed and covered or replaced by new writing.169 The idea of The House of the Dead as a palimspestis, with Gulag memoirs as later replacements, is a very interesintg representation of the tradition of Russian prison camp writing. In a way, the idea also resembles Shcherbakova’s idea of a ‘hypertext’ of Gulag memoirs (as discussed in the previous chapter). Only now it creates an even bigger context of for ‘hypertext’, transcending the Gulag topic. The palimpsest idea also brings us back to the case of the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs, and how they can be seen in this context. In line with Klots’ palimpsest theory, the prison camp memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin can be regarded as new additions to this literary continuity. They wrote their prison camp narratives on the same ‘sheet of

167 Klots, ‘Varlam Shalamov and Russian narratives of political imprisonment’, 15. 168 Ibidem, 12. 169 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/palimpsest, accessed on 30-8- 2019. 62 paper’ in which Dostoevsky and later the Gulag writers wrote their texts. This whole background of prison camp writing in the history of Russia lies as a bottom layer under the texts of their memoirs, bearing visible traces from the the earlier texts, especially when they refer to Gulag writers. Also, to go back to Shalamov’s sketch ‘Through the snow’, Alyokhina and Dadin step into the footsteps of their predecessors, and so they continue the literary tradition of prison camp memoir writing, as both writers and readers. They do this not in the comparing way of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, but in a similar fashion to Herling, who saw in Dostoevsky an affirmation of the applicability of Dostoevsky’s work to his situation and emphasized the continuity between the two periods. Alyokhina and Dadin see an aplicabillity of texts of Soviet political prisoners to their situation and this way also emphazise the idea of continuity or repetition. This idea of continuity is also well illustrated in Riot days, when the only nice guard in the prison camp, Irina Vasilievna, answers Alyokhina when she asked how the penal colony has changed over time:

Nothing, Masha. Nothing has changed. Look around you. Does it look like anything ever changes in this country?170

Also Dadin forwards the idea of continuity when he writes:

Hier machen dich die Wärter fertig. Das Gefängnispersonal selbst ist kriminell. Ich bin überzeugt, dass nach dem Zerfall der Sowjetunion die Henker ungeschoren davonkamen. Sie haben zuvor unbescholtene Menschen und Dissidenten in den Lagern gequält, wurden aber nie zur Rechenschaft gezogen und dienten dem heutigen Gefängnispersonal gar als Lehrmeister. So bewegt sich Russlands Geschichte im Kreis, weil wir es nie verurteilt haben.171

He expresses here the idea that, because of a an absence of a condemnation of the Gulag, Russian history moved in circled and is thus bound to repeat itself. Indeed, there never has been a Russian couterpart of the Nurmberg

170 Alyokhina, Riot days, 145. 171 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 69. 63 trials, which was a clear condemnation and reckoning with the Nazi concentration camps. In the case of the Gulag, there was not such a reckoning, which made the Gulag past an unprocessed history. So, as was shown in the previous chapters, the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin share the most important aspects about Gulag memoirs, and they share the morphology of the Gulag memoir. Now I have demontrated how they also literally step in the footstept of their predecessors in prison camps. They share with the Gulag writers that they look back in time. By doing so, they inscribe themselves not only into the tradition of Gulag memoir writing but the entire tradition of prison camp writing as it exists since Dostoevsky. By connecting their texts to the text about the Gulag, they forward the idea of continuity.

4.4 Deploying the past in the contemporary prison camp memoirs In their memoirs, Alyokhina and Dadin do not only forward a literary continuity and a continuity of the existence of prison camps. They go even further, by forwarding a continuity in terms of the social situation in the country. This means they do not only draw parallels between there prison camp experience and the Gulag past. They also draw parallels between present day Russia under Putin and Soviet-era society. This way they deploy the Soviet past in order to criticize Russian society today. The message that is expressed in their memoirs, in addition to revealing about life in the contemporary Russian prison camps, is that there are many similarities between life now, and life in Soviet Russia then. This was already introduced a bit when discussing the topoi of the Zone and the larger Zone in the previous chapter. Alyokhina applied this topoi to the context of present day Russia. This drawing of parallels between Soviet society and present day Russian society becomes apparent when Alyokhina for example writes: ‘We joked that, if they caught us, we would be the new dissidents. Which was just what happened.’172 She also includes subtle references to the Soviet

172 Alyokhina, Riot days, 40. 64 past, for example when she says about the shoes of Moscow policemen: ‘Strange, NKVD officials used to wear those, too.’173 She also randomly includes two paragraphs from the Russian national anthem.174 The anthem has the same lyrics as in the Soviet Union. This also emphasizes the idea of continuity. Another fragment that indirectly forwards the idea of continuity is the following:

Power built on totalitarian principles cannot admit its mistakes. To admit a mistake is to show weakness, to back down. To lose. This power sees conspiracy everywhere behind its back, so it lives with its head turned backwards, checking that no one is following it, that no one is dreaming up a revolution. This power must always be on its guard, it claims supreme power, is invincible to itself, the absolute made flesh.175

She does not specify what she speaks of here. It could be the Soviet Union, but it might just as well be about present day Russia. This also subtly creates a parallel. A fragment from Dadin really adds to this, when he identifies himself with Podrabinek. This time not for his prison camp experience, but for his standing up against the corrupt regime:

Er gehörte, so wie ich jetzt, zu einer kleinen Minderheit der ´Normalen´, die sich gegen die korrupte Staatsgewalt auflehnt. Egal, wie sehr sie uns brandmarken und uns als Volksverräter der Fünften Kolonne beschimpfen: Wir sind eigentlich die normalen Menschen. […] Wir sind die Minderheit, die nicht die Augen vor der Wahrheit verschließt.176

As this fragment shows, Dadin speaks in ´we´, as if he and Podrabinek were fighting for the same cause at the same time. Concluding, Alyokhina and Dadin both explicitly connect their prison camp memoirs to Gulag memoirs. They inscribe themselves in the tradition of Gulag memoir writing. By referring to Gulag history and Gulag writers,

173 Alyokhina, Riot days, 33. 174 Ibidem, 48. 175 Ibidem, 136. 176 Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens, 78-79. 65 they show that they are very aware of ‘their history’. They also share with the Gulag memoirs the characteristic of looking back in time. Additionally, they deploy the Gulag past and in general the Soviet past to draw parallels. These parallels are between their narrative and Gulag narratives, and thus also between their social background and the Soviet social background. Their memoirs contain also a social criticism next to the prison camp narrative. For this criticism they make use of the Gulag and Soviet past. Alyokhina writes in the very beginning of Riot days that ‘We, Pussy Riot […] we dreamed of a different history.’177 Not of a different future, no, a different history. Alyokhina and Dadin both use images of the Soviet past to create an image of Russia today, and thus deploy the past in order to criticize present. This ‘deploying of the past’ also shows the importance of remembrance. With their contemporary prison camp memoirs, Alyokhina and Dadin have made the Gulag memoirs highly relevant again. Their memoirs thus advocate the importance of remembrance. Especially now, despite all the hard work by activists, the Gulag past disappears more and more into oblivion.

177 Alyokhina, Riot days, 12. 66

5. Conclusion

The research question of this thesis was: How do contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs inscribe themselves into the tradition of Gulag memoir writing, and how do they deploy the Gulag history in their contemporary narratives? As was shown in the chapter 2, the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs share the important aspects of Gulag memoirs, namely retrospect, the testimonial function, and a bi-functionality. Like the Gulag memoirs, the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin are a reconstruction of their experiences of Russian prisons and prison camps. They also have the testimonial function in common with the Gulag memoirs, in revealing information about the circumstances in the contemporary Russian prison camps. Thirdly, they are bifunctional objects too, like the Gulag memoirs. They provide a testimony, but they are also literary works. Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs have a topical similarity (of the prison camp) to the Gulag memoirs, and they contain some of the same aspects that are important about the Gulag memoirs. Because of these similarities, I decided to study the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin in the context of the literary study of the Gulag memoirs. Gulag memoirs have (and are) being researched as literary texts. They share more than just being a memoir. Leona Toker’s theory that Gulag memoirs contain four common morphological features was the basis of my analysis of the contemporary prison camp memoirs. I extrapolated her theory form the Gulag context to the more general context of the prison camp memoir. In chapter 3 I analyzed the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin for these four morphological aspects: the tension between the ethical and the aesthetic, the interconnection of individual and communal concerns, the inclusion of specific topoi, and the Lenten mode. From this analysis can be concluded that the contemporary prison camp memoirs that they clearly display the first two features. They also include, like Gulag memoirs, at least seven topoi. The fourth feature of the Lenten 67 mode is present in the literal sense. In the figurative sense it is, however, to a much lesser extent present in the contemporary prison camp memoirs than in the Gulag memoirs. Despite the latter, I think it can be safely said that there are large similarities between the Gulag memoirs and the prison camp memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin in the context of their morphology, and thus the structure of their narratives. Chapter 2 and 3 thus showed how there are similarities between contemporary prison camp memoirs and Gulag memoirs in function and form. It appears that they continue in the tradition of memoir writing the way the Gulag memoirists did, only now in a new context. Chapter 4 showed how Alyokhina and Dadin also explicitly inscribe their memoirs in the tradition of Gulag memoir writing. They refer to Gulag memoir writers, and draw parallels between their memoirs and Gulag memoirs. They also draw parallels between the circumstances in the contemporary Russian prison camps and the circumstances in the Gulag. They share this ‘looking back in time’ with the Gulag memoirs writers, who in their turn, looked back at the katorga prison camps and, predominantly, to Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead. The contemporary prison camp memoirs can thus be seen as the successors in the literary tradition of Russian prison camp writing: as new footsteps in the snow, and as a new narrative written on the palimpsest that contains already so many Russian prison camp narratives. Next to their prison camp narrative, they use images from the Soviet past in their narratives, in order to create an image of present day Russian society. They criticize present day Russian by deploying the Soviet and Gulag past. The overall conclusion of this thesis is that it is naïve to associate prison camp literature with the past. As is shown, the prison camp theme is a very actual theme, at least in the Russian context. It is a theme that asks for more research to be done in the future, and like this thesis demonstrates, this can and should be done in combination with other forms of prison camp memoirs. This will learn us more about prison camps, and about the narratives that are constructed about prison camps. This thesis focused on 68 the prison camp memoir, but there are many more forms of prison camp literature that are also worth investigating. As long as nothing changes in Russia, we can only wait for more contemporary prison camp literature to appear. But who knows. The already written texts will forever be preserved on the palimpsest of Russian prison camp writing. However, perhaps one day no more new stories will be added on the palimpsest. Then, in reference to Shalamov’s sketch, the many footsteps will disappear under the snow for good.

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6. Bibliography

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Websites: https://meduza.io/feature/2016/11/01/izbivali-po-10-12-chelovek- odnovremenno-nogami

71 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/10/05/half-russian-youth-say- theyre-unaware-of-stalinist-repressions-poll-a63104 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating- among-russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/19/short-story-survey- varlam-shalamov-kolyma-tales-gulag https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/palimpsest