8-2-2004

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

Варлам Тихонович Шаламов

(1907–1982)

GULAG

Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerej

Varlam Shalamov was a political prisoner who was arrested twice. His first arrest took place while he was in his early twenties and was arrested several years later and charged with "anti-Soviet Trotskyite activities." The first time, he was sent to Solovki and then to Kolyma. Kolyma was one of the deadliest, if not the deadliest network of labor camps. Conservative estimates calculate that 3 million people died in Kolyma. About 25-35 percent of the prisoners in Kolyma died each year. Kolyma is located in northeastern Siberia. The environment is harsh year round. A prisoner's rhyme says: Kolyma, Kolyma Wonderful planet Twelve months winter, the rest summer. Winter temperatures drop to -90 degrees f. Waters are ice 9 months of the year and soil is frozen throughout. Insects, such as gadflies, appear in summer. Certain types are especially big and can sting through animal hide.  In addition to the environmental rigors of life in a place like Kolyma, the conditions of those living in the camps made harder an already difficult life. Mining was the sole operation in the Kolyma camps. Gold was discovered in 1910 and mining in the area began in 1927, however, laborers were free and the operation was worked on a very small scale. In the early 1930's mining began using forced labor and continued until well into the 1950's. Kolyma was a region comprised of about 120 full scale camps, 80 of which were dedicated to mining. One of the most tragic points about Kolyma was that "almost without exception" the prisoners held, many of whom ended up dead, were "entirely innocent."

LINKS:

Biography and Bibliography

Poems in russian:    O      O      O      O

Athenian Nights

Las noches atenienses

On the translation of his poems to french

Shalamov around the world

Vom Nachttisch geräumt

von Arno Widmann

19.12.2003

Zwei Katzen und der tote Bär

Warlam Schalamow wurde 1907 als Sohn eines russisch-orthodoxen Priesters geboren. 1929 kam er das erste Mal ins Gefängnis. Er war dabei erwischt worden, wie er "Lenins Testament", jenen Brief, in dem der todkranke Lenin vor Stalin warnte, verteilte. 1931 wurde Schalamow aus der Haft entlassen, ging zurück nach Moskau. 1937 wurde er wegen "konterrevolutionärer Aktivitäten" erneut verhaftet und zu fünf Jahren Lagerarbeit verurteilt. Er wurde nach Kolyma geschickt, in jene kaum bevölkerte Zone im Osten Sibiriens, die das Zentrum des Gulagsystems war. Kaum entlassen, wurde er wieder dorthin geschickt. Seit 1947 arbeitete er nicht mehr in Minen, sondern als Arzthelfer.1953 kehrte er zurück nach Moskau. Seine Freundschaften mit Nadeschda Mandelstam, Pasternak und Solschenizyn zerbrachen. Von letzterem sagte Schalamow, er habe keine Lager gekannt und er habe sie überhaupt nicht verstanden. Schalamow schrieb Gedichte, Essays, eine Autobiografie und einen Antiroman. Vor allem aber arbeitete er von 1954 bis 1972 an seinen "Kolyma-Erzählungen". Teile davon wurden klandestin verbreitet. Eine erste russische Ausgabe erschien 1978 in London. Taub und blind starb Schalamow am 17. Januar 1982 in einer psychiatrischen Klinik in Moskau. Auf deutsch erschienen kleine Auswahlbände. Derzeit ist keiner lieferbar. Auf französisch liegen die "Recits de la Kolyma" jetzt vollständig auf 1515 Seiten vor.

Der Umfang schreckt ab. Wann soll man 1500 Seiten lesen? Ich habe noch nicht mehr als 300 Seiten davon gelesen. Aber es handelt sich um keinen Roman, auch um kein durch argumentiertes Sachbuch, sondern um eine Sammlung von 146 Geschichten. Die meisten berichten von Personen, stellen sie in einer konkreten Situation vor und erzählen dann, wie sie dorthin kamen und was später mit ihnen geschah. Soweit Schalamow das herausfinden konnte. Man kann die sechs Seiten über Tante Polia lesen oder das Dutzend zur Schocktherapie, man kann auch die Bärengeschichte lesen oder die über Caligula. Schalamow bietet noch in der kleinsten Zelle seines Riesenwerkes die gesamte unverwechselbare DNA seiner Erzählkunst. In der Bärengeschichte zum Beispiel reagieren zwei Katzen höchst unterschiedlich auf die Erschießung eines Bären. Die eine verkriecht sich, als wolle sie mit der Gewalt nichts zu tun haben, die andere wirft sich auf den toten Riesen und leckt - wie triumphierend - sein Blut. Es ist immer beides möglich. Niemand ist dazu gezwungen, so zu reagieren, wie er reagiert.

Schalamows Geschichten zeigen den Lageralltag. Der Leser gewöhnt sich an ihn, wie die Insassen sich an ihn gewöhnten. Das ist das Beunruhigendste an den Kolyma-Erzählungen. Schalamow macht klar, wie selbstverständlich der Mensch nach einem kurzen Erschrecken das Schreckliche nimmt. Da sagt ein Arzt zum Häftling, es müsse furchtbar sein, in einer der Baracken zu leben. Man könne sich nicht einmal eine Zigarette anzünden, schon blickten fünfzig Augenpaare neidisch, gierig auf einen. Das, was den Reiz einer Zigarette ausmache, dieser Augenblick der Ruhe, werde einem im Lager nicht gewährt. Man liest das und fragt sich und den Autor: Ist der Arzt verrückt? Gibt es nichts Genaueres über den Archipel Gulag zu sagen, als dass man sich dort nicht in Ruhe eine Zigarette anzünden kann? Es gibt - so zeigt uns Schalamow - Momente, in denen der Wunsch nach einer in aller Ruhe genossenen Zigarette alles andere auslöscht. Und es hat diesen Arzt gegeben, der in diesem Augenblick alles, was ihm an Mitleid zur Verfügung stand, in das Bedauern darüber goss, dass einem Häftling möglicherweise nicht die Zigarette, wohl aber ihr Genuss vorenthalten bleiben musste. Fünf Zeilen danach liest man, wie derselbe Arzt Patienten die Nägel von den abgefrorenen Gliedern schneidet. Man bekommt eine Ahnung davon, dass es Situationen gibt, die gerade die Betroffenen selbst nicht beim Namen nennen wollen und können. Das Gespräch über Zigaretten mag die Gräuel der Lager verschweigen, aber für die, die Bescheid wissen, ist es ein schreiendes Schweigen.

Varlam Schalamows Kunst besteht darin, seine Geschichten immer wieder bis an den Rand des Schreckens zu treiben. Schalamow beschwört den Schrecken nicht. Er nennt ihn nicht beim Namen. Er versucht nie, ihn einzufangen. Er kreist ihn ein. Manchmal kommt Schalamow von ganz weit, aus Momenten, die denen des Glücks zum verwechseln ähnlich sehen, dann wieder ist er dem Schrecken vom ersten Satz an hautnah.

TOAST EN L’HONNEUR DE L’AIAN URIAH *

Je porte un toast – au layon,

À ceux qui tombent en chemin

À ceux qui sont épuisés

Que l’on force à se traîner.

Aux lèvres bleuies et crevassées

À l’identité des visages

Aux pelisses trouées et givrées,

Aux moufles qu’ils n’ont pas.

Au quart d’eau, à la boîte de conserve

Au scorbut pris dans leurs dents

Aux dents de chiens gras et nourris

Qui les houspillent dès le matin.

Au soleil qui du ciel louche

Sur ce qui se passe à l’entour.

Aux blanches sépultures de neige,

Don charitable de la tourmente.

À la ration de pain gluant

Engloutie en toute hâte

Au ciel pâlot, et trop haut,

À la rivière Aian–Uriah !

(*) L’ Aian–Uriah est un affluent de la Kolyma au bord duquel étaient exploitées les mines d’or du camp de la mort d’Arkagala,au pôle du froid de l’Extrême-Orient russe. Chalamov y demeura plus d’un an. N.D.T.

(*) Traductions en français par Christiane Loré, du recueil

Varlam Chalamov, Tout ou rien, ISBN : 2-86432-183-1

Éditions Verdier, 1993.

Fri., April 15, 2005 Nisan 6, 5765  

"Sipurei Kolyma" ("Kolyma Tales") by Varlam Shalamov, translated from the Russian by Roi Chen, Yedioth Ahronoth, Hemed Books, 269 pages, NIS 84 [English edition: "Kolyma Tales," translated by John Glad, Penguin, 528 pages].

Fragments from the gulag

By Raviel Netz

When Russian intellectuals get to talking about books written about the horrors of Stalinism, the discussion generally begins by tearing apart Aleksander Solzhenitsyn: "Highly overrated ..." "Not a great writer ..." "Very superficial ..." That will get some people jumping up to defend him, and everyone will agree: "Of course you have to hand it to him for his courage in writing `The Gulag Archipelago.'" A minute later, someone will exclaim, and the crowd will parrot after him: "Now Shalamov is a real writer. Maybe one of the greatest writers of the 20th century!"

Shalamov was a "one-subject author." He wrote about the gulag, and more specifically, the gulag of Kolyma. He was there himself, and the truth radiates from his stories. But Shalamov is a spinner of tales, not just an eyewitness. From an artistic standpoint, he keeps company with Russia's finest literary lights. Hence the importance of reading him twice: once to learn the truth about Kolyma (a truth than only fiction can convey) and again, to expose oneself to another pinnacle of Russian writing. Apart from the masterpieces of the 19th century, the 20th century has also produced some gems.

The publication of this Hebrew edition of Shalamov is thus an important and welcome literary event, for which the publisher deserves kudos. Likewise, we owe the translator, Roi Chen, a special note of thanks and appreciation. In the past, Chen has translated Daniel Kharms, another brilliant 20th century Russian author.

Varlam Shalamov, born in 1907, was sent to the gulag in 1929 and only gained his full release in 1953. Over the next 20 years, when he was old enough to have been reaping the benefits of a flourishing literary career, he lived the impoverished life of an ex-prisoner on the margins of Soviet society. During that time, he wrote more than 100 short stories, enough to fill two thick volumes. The stories are organized in sections, and Part I is the section that has been translated into Hebrew.

Shalamov's tales are essentially self-contained: One can read them in any order almost without losing anything. For example, the story "Berries," which begins with the narrator sprawled on the snow, refusing to continue the night march back to the camp dragging a heavy log for firewood. Accused of feigning illness, he is beaten. He curses the guards, and one of them promises to shoot him dead one day. The next day, the narrator is with a fellow inmate, Rybakov, gathering berries for the camp. This was a particularly desirable job - not very taxing physically, and one could gather a bit "on the side," for those willing to take a risk. The nature descriptions here are typical Shalamov - brief and sparing but also lyrical.

As always in the gulag, any place where the prisoners happened to be was immediately divided into "permissible" and "forbidden" zones. In this case, the guard - the same man who threatened the narrator the night before - has used bundles of grass to mark the boundaries. A tempting bunch of berries lies just beyond. Rybakov steps over the line and is shot to death by the guard. On the way back to the camp, he snarls at the narrator: "It's you I wanted. But you didn't give me the chance, you piece of filth!" That is how the story ends.

Is this a "happy end"? It's hard to see it any other way. Reading "Kolyma Tales," the will to survive comes across very strongly. Every tale is measured by the narrator's success in staying alive. Only later the irony seeps in. Does the narrator bear any kind of moral responsibility? Did he foresee what was about to happen and in some sense allow Rybakov to die? At the end, he adds a comment about how he got his hands on Rybakov's crate of berries, hoping it might earn him an extra crust of bread. But what kind of morality exists in this world that Shalamov describes? It is a world where people are executed on a whim, where a guard sets a trap, and when the wrong person falls into it, he goes ahead and pulls the trigger anyway. The story does not supply an answer to any of these dilemmas.

Arbitrary world

In tales like "Berries," Shalamov avoids the "heroic" genre, in which the protagonist is portrayed as a hero who overcomes terrifying ordeals. But neither does he fall into the trap of pathos, depicting the narrator as an innocent victim. Invoking heroism or pathos, with their conventional literary and ethical codes, would be an affirmation of normalcy amid the horror. To describe the hellishness of Kolyma without compromise, Shalamov invents a literary form free of all convention, and therein lies his greatness.

It is tempting to compare Shalamov to the Polish-Jewish writer Ida Fink. The short story is essential to the oeuvre of both authors, and the question is why. We are touching on something very fundamental here. The essence of a short story lies not so much in its length but in its not being a novel. Novels are based on a logical plot in which the protagonist achieves - or more often, fails to achieve - his heart's desire while engaged in a battle with those around him. The outcome of the story is a product of cause and effect: The protagonist has chosen to do such and such, and therefore such and such happens. The novel is teleological. It belongs to an ordered universe. The short story, at its best, frees the author from teleology.

To put it simply, Shalamov, like Ida Fink, describes a world where there are no causal relationships, where one thing does not lead to another. The core event in Western literature - the death of God - becomes the product of arbitrary, unpredictable circumstances that have no collective significance. That is precisely where Solzhenitsyn went wrong. He chose to write novels about the gulag, i.e., he tried to create protagonists whose experience was coherent and causal. The outcome was a kind of socialist realism behind barbed wire. Shalamov's use of the short story, the fragment, fits so much more for the fragmentary, arbitrary world of the gulag.

Comparing Shalamov and Fink presupposes a comparison between the gulag and Auschwitz - one that begs to be made, but is also a source of discomfort for Israelis who have been raised on the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust, and for adherents of the same politically enlightened views shared by the leftist intellectuals of Western Europe, who justified the atrocities in Stalinist and Soviet Russia. Kolyma, the setting of Shalamov's stories, is the perfect place for probing these issues - a remote province that was beyond the reach of any railway, deep in northern Siberia, one of the coldest and most godforsaken places on the planet.

Kolyma was cursed with large gold mines. The Soviet regime sent out millions of human beings to extract the gold, even if they had to die for it. In Kolyma, more than anywhere else, the gulag camps were death camps. The brutal slave labor in subfreezing temperatures was a source of torment no less horrible than any other saga of human suffering. Some people like to pounce on slight differences. They will see a veneer of economic rationality in the exploitation at Kolyma (although Nazi slave labor made even more economic sense), or argue that Kolyma laborers were not selected by race (although Stalinist reality was such that being a member of the middle class - defined by who your relatives were - was often a death sentence in itself). Morally, though, there was no real difference.

At the same time, the experience of the gulag victims was distinctive in a certain respect. As Soviet citizens, they never believed for a moment that they were looking at a rational, predictable system. They were familiar with the corruption and the chaos that characterized Soviet life as a whole. They assumed that luck, and finding someone with influence, might offer protection and some chance of survival, however slight. In this sense, there was something "Russian" about the gulag, which helped to mitigate some of the horror.

Card games and duels

The renowned cultural theorist Yuri Lotman has written about the importance of arbitrariness in the Russian imagination - the way that wealth and poverty, as well as violent death, tend to be a product of unforeseen circumstances. Think of how symbolic card games and duels are in Russian culture. In Shalamov's stories, the characters do play cards, but in some respect, every one of them features a duel in which the bullet misses the narrator by a hair's breadth. In their arbitrariness, Shalamov's "fragments" are thus Russian to the core. His writing may go against the literary principle of the novel, but it is still a continuation - gloomy and chaotic - of a tradition that goes back to Mikhail Lermontov's "The Fatalist" and Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades."

Shalamov's style is lean and devoid of frills, but it approaches the sublime. He succeeds in capturing the crude and dissonant language of life in the gulag without losing the clarity of artistic, Tolstoyian prose. Roi Chen manages to preserve all this in his translation, for which he deserves the highest praise.
 

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