Review: Polina Barskova on Varlam Shalamov
Who was going to read this strange prose, so weightless that it seemed about to fly away into space…? —Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Shalamov ought to be considered one of the most important writers of the Soviet century—and also one of the most contested, to this day inviting polarized opinions and interpretations. On the one hand his magnum opus, Kolyma Stories, an epic cycle of brief novellas narrating his experience in Stalin’s death camps, is widely known and accepted as one of the most striking texts of witness to this historical crime and tragedy. On the other hand, from its very conception, Shalamov’s prose was treated by many, its foes and also its adherents, as something too raw and too painful—the unprocessed material of human suffering, perhaps, rather than the makings of a work of art.
For decades Shalamov has been losing in a game of literary success to the other significant Russian chronicler of the Gulag—Nobel Prize-winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My opinion of why this might be the case can be drawn even from Solzhenitsyn's shortest and most famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the publication of which, in the influential Novy Mir [New World] journal in 1962, was a landmark of the short-lived Soviet Thaw. In his novella, Solzhenitsyn followed Tolstoyan traditions into the twentieth century, focusing on the difficult life of a Russian peasant, who, in spite of his abysmal situation, being exiled to a labor camp, manages to make sense of his existence there—even, it may be, to make peace with it.
Shalamov, by contrast, denies that camp existence makes any sense. He questions Solzhenitsyn’s impulse to describe the camp as the locale of anything human or humane, any comfort, any consolation. In a letter to Solzhenitsyn he asked what kind of camp might have a cat in it—obviously not one of the camps where Shalamov spent fifteen years. There, he insists, the cat would be immediately eaten by the starving inmates.
Shalamov’s experience and representation of camps knows no decorum—but it doesn’t mean that this writing is not artful. Actually, the opposite: the issue is that this is a new, different kind of art, that kind of art that can exist after Auschwitz and the Gulag.
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The second volume of Shalamov’s prose in Donald Reyfield’s translation, Sketches of the Criminal World, completes the English-language publication of Shalamov’s full Kolyma Tales, offering the reader translations of the remaining short stories/sketches/novellas (one can argue about the exact genre definition here) with one important accent: Book Four is dedicated specifically to the relationships in the camps between the political prisoners, like Shalamov himself, and the “usual” criminals—thieves, murderers, rapists. As in many other respects, Shalamov here again challenges traditions of Russian social ethics and also literature—most passionately represented in the prison writings of Dostoevsky, who himself served a sentence in Siberia and described the experience in his Notes from a Dead House.
Unlike Dostoevsky, Shalamov sees urki, the criminals, as the enemies, oppressors and torturers of the political prisoners. Ironically and tragically, they feel themselves protected by the state (governed by a tyrant who spent his “revolutionary youth” robbing banks, being basically a gangster). Investigating this dichotomy, Shalamov insists on telling his tales from the position of the intelligentsia—physically, materially, perhaps the weakest, the most vulnerable part of the camp population, whose only claim to victory, force of spirit, is brutally tried by the Gulag experience.
Shalamov’s style is as radical and difficult as the content and message of his tales. Actually, predictably, these are absolutely connected and mutually dependent. His prose is ultimately dry, like his less well-known poetry, which is also incredibly sparse, not wasting any words. Sometimes I think of this prose as the language of starvation, of meagerness, of lack— the total desolation that Shalamov ascribes to his experience. Not only the body of the prisoner but also his words become ragged, fragile, sharp. And it is this quality of stylistic “poverty” that makes his prose weirdly beautiful—in its all horror and precision.
Polina Barskova has written eight books of poetry and a book of prose in Russian. Her poems have appeared in English editions edited by Ilya Kaminsky and translated by Boris Dralyuk. She is the editor of Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad.
Book notes
On Sunday the opinion editor of The New York Times resigned his post in response to turmoil over a piece by Senator Tom Cotton calling for a military response to nationwide protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Also on Sunday, Ben Smith, former editor of Buzzfeed and now an opinion writer at the Times himself, published an already widely praised essay drawing a connection between the power exerted by reporters in challenging Cotton’s op-ed and the generation of black writers who rose up covering the Ferguson protests. He identifies a group of young journalists, including Wesley Lowery, Adam Serwer, Yamiche Alcindor, Craig Melvin, Rembert Browne, Errin Haines, Joel Anderson, Trymaine Lee, and (not so young) Jelani Cobb, many of whom had to convince their editors that Ferguson was a story, who risked their own safety to report it. Smith writes:
The shift in mainstream American media—driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives—now feels irreversible. It is driven in equal parts by politics, the culture and journalism’s business model, relying increasingly on passionate readers willing to pay for content rather than skittish advertisers.
He quoted Lowery, formerly of The Washington Post, on Twitter
American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment … We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity
Smith cites writers’ direct access to readers through Twitter (how I know all this already, incidentally) as instrumental in empowering this fast-paced evolution. Social media as a spreader of news—like video of George Floyd’s killing itself and journalists’ own rough treatment at the hands of police as they reported its aftermath—has created an engine of information that has traditional media struggling to keep up. (Jon Alsop in the Columbia Journalism Review related more instances George Floyd protest coverage bringing to the surface existential tensions in newsrooms.)
Media observer (and former New York Times public editor) Margaret Sullivan proposed yesterday that instead of pegging truth in some middle ground that references all political sides, the news should ask what information “helps citizens hold their elected officials accountable.” To put in a word from my editorial perch on the subject of what’s being called objectivity: I do think if we want to try to engage the country in a commonly shared set of facts, we should perhaps hold a marker on the notion that we need to be convincing to readers who do not necessarily share assumptions. Yes, hold to a morally grounded standard of truth, but remember to build into coverage its basis in experience and argument, rather than assume that its obviousness is universally recognized.
Meanwhile, back in the country, amidst the continuing protests, which seem since last weekend to have been (on the part of the protesters) peaceful, books unexpectedly find themselves center stage. What to do when you come in off the streets, or if going onto the streets isn’t your thing? Read a book! We noted the flood of anti-racist reading lists in our Book Notes last week. By now you can triangulate your own by searching online, checking with booksellers, and consulting the authors themselves on social media. Lauren Michele Jackson in Vulture recently questioned the sincerity of this phenomenon, but we find the impulse to grapple with a social challenge by reading a book to be heartening, even if it is perhaps sometimes only performative.
Powered by these recommendations, a number of antiracism books have shot to the top of bestseller lists, specifically Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, Layla E Saad’s Me and White Supremacy, and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Last Tuesday was reportedly the biggest day ever over at Libro.fm, an outfit that sells audiobooks through independent bookstores, and every book on its top-ten list was about combating racism.
And some people are going further! Bookseller Jeannine A. Cook teamed up with local high school students to hand out hundreds of copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Kate Clifford Larson’s biography of Harriet Tubman to protesters in Philadelphia. “If you’re going to be out there resisting,” she said, “we also need to be on the [community]-building side of things.” Laurie Hertzel, the books editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, started offering her followers free copies of Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem Citizen (bought from a black-owned bookstore), and moved on, with the help of some publishers and an anonymous donor, to distribute copies of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (rah, poetry!), Ben Crump’s Open Season, Bakari Sellers’ My Vanishing Country, and Carol Anderson’s White Rage. It seems quite remarkable that the two historic upheavals we have experienced in recent weeks have returned us with such force to books.
By the way, we brought together our own comment on our partnership with Black Stone Book Store and Cultural Center (presaging the current rally to black-owned bookselling) and the impact of the uprising on Minneapolis booksellers in an ominibus piece appearing in LitHub last week.
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