Kolyma Tales

RAVI VYAS

The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, May 02, 2004

Many factors contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union — an antiquated economy, a senseless political system incapable of modernising, and surely the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on political and moral consciousness of the late-20th Century than Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, published in three volumes between 1974 and 1978. Not only did Solzhenitsyn deliver the historical truth about the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps spread across the vast empire — they were everywhere with 476 complexes and hundreds of smaller units — where over 22 million perished; he conveyed, as no one else did, the demonic atmosphere and the psychology of both prisoners and the guards, as well as the mark it left on the entire society. Quite apart from the death toll, it was the sheer arbitrariness of the system and the appalling conditions that finally brought the Empire crashing down like a house of cards.

The biggest camp was Kolyma in the Russian Far East. Kolyma was not a single camp but, rather, a region six times the size of France with more than a hundred camps; three million died there between 1931, when it was inaugurated as an island in the Gulag archipelago, and Stalin's death in 1953. Varlam Shalamov has written about his experiences in the camp in the classic Kolyma Tales about which Solzhenitsyn has written: "Shalamov's experiences in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all."

• First, there are differences between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, as the British critic, Geoffrey Hosking pointed out. "Where Solzhenitsyn constructs a single vast panorama, loose and sprawling, Shalamov chooses the most concise of literary forms, the short story, and shapes it consciously and carefully, so that the overall structure is like a mosaic made of tiny pieces. Where Solzhenitsyn writes with anger, sarcasm and bitterness, Shalamov adopts a studiously dry and neutral tone. Where Solzhenitsyn plunges into his characters' fates, telling their story from a variety of subjective points, Shalamov takes strict control of his discourses, usually conducting his narrative from an undivided viewpoint and aiming at complete objectivity. Where Solzhenitsyn is fiercely moralistic and preaches redemption through suffering, Shalamov contents himself with cool aphorisms and asserts that real suffering, such as Kolyma imposed on its inmates, can only demoralise and break the spirit."
• Second, central to any discussion of Shalamov's stories is the subject of genre. Here we have a literary form that attempts to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, or faction, something like historical fiction. Shalamov's stories are an artful mixing of fact and fiction where it is not possible to separate aesthetic evaluation from historical appraisal. While the stories should not be accepted as precise factual accounts, it is important to realise that the overwhelming majority of them are autobiographical in nature. When you read the stories you are better informed and "entertained" at the same time. The stories are anchored in historical facts but the factual references never weigh too heavily on your mind or interrupt the flow of the narrative. So, some of the fiction is more true to life than any biography, encyclopedia or history textbook.

The Soviet camp system was not the relatively high-tech factory of death that the Nazis had put in place in their concentration camps. On the whole the system was not designed to mass-produce corpses — even if it did at times. What the Soviets did was to work on the mind, or the mechanism of minimal hope. "You can go on living if you do this or that for our satisfaction." But the doing almost invariably involved a choice so hideous, so degrading that it further diminished the humanity of those who made it.

Shalamov shows how hope mocked again and again can break human identity more swiftly than hunger. But hunger there was, and continuous physical torment, and the sudden cessation of all human privacy. Thus the riddle was not why the inmates did not collectively offer resistance but how it was possible to retain their sanity. Shalamov does not attempt to answer this question; nor does he speak of his sentences in Kolyma. (He was tossed around from camp to camp.) He could have allowed himself some generosity; his modesty did not. All he says is that there is a potential sub-humanity latent in all of us.