Posts Tagged ‘Varlam Shalamov’

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Patrick Kurp, who blogs at the matchless Anecdotal Evidence, has some thoughts about the curious attraction of Soviet prisoners to Marcel Proust… this time it’s Varlam Shalamov‘s sequel to Kolyma Tales…

What are we to make of the unexpected fondness inmates of Soviet prisons and labor camps had for Marcel Proust? In 1940, the first book Aleksander Wat read in Lubyanka prison after a bookless year was Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. In My Century, Wat describes it as “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” The following year, in a prison camp 200 miles north of Moscow, Józef Czapski lectured his fellow inmates on Proust’s novel, a book he was “not sure of seeing again.” His audience “listen[ed] intently to lectures on themes very far removed from the reality we faced at that time.” And here, in his story “Marcel Proust,” Varlam Shalamov describes the theft in a Gulag camp of Le Côté de Guermantes, the third volume of Proust’s masterwork: “Who was going to read that strange prose, so weightless that it seemed about to fly off into space, a world whose scales were displaced and switched around, so that there was nothing big and nothing small. […] The horizons of a writer are expanded extraordinarily by that novel.”

He would have been surprised…

He and the book’s owner, a paramedic named Kalitinsky, “recalled our world, our own lost time,” but the volume is never recovered. Shalamov’s stand-in portrays himself as a civilized man, an inheritor of the Western tradition who cherishes books, though he knows his values mean nothing in the alternate universe of the Gulag: “You might meet admirers of Jack London in that world, but Proust? It could only be used to make playing cards: it was a heavyweight large format book. […] It went to make cards, cards … It would be cut up and that was it.” Like morality and religion, art means nothing. Only survival counts. The lives documented by Shalamov are Hobbesian: “[S]olitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In 2018, New York Review Books published Donald Rayfield’s translation of Kolyma Stories. With this second volume, Sketches of the Criminal World, we now have all 145 stories written by Shalamov after his 17 years in Stalin’s prison system. …

Read the rest here. 

She made a movie on the “slaves of the slaves.”

Russian American filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya sent me a short note after she read the earlier Book Haven post on her new film Women of the Gulag, based on the research and book by Paul Gregory. The film is now up for an Oscar next month in the “short documentary” category. 

Her email included an endorsement from Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who spent a dozen years in the psychiatric hospitals, prisons and labor camps of the USSR. In December 1976 he was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán. Bukovsky now lives in the UK.

So he knows what he’s talking about. Here’s what he had to say about Women of the Gulag – consider it an endorsement from the depths of hell:

The film Women of the Gulag is an important document of the era.

The U.S.S.R. was a huge zone of human suffering.

Inside that zone there was also a hell that contained its powerless slaves—the GULAG.

But within that hell, there was an even more terrible hell.

Varlam Shalamov, the great writer who lived through the GULAG hell, said the women in the camps were slaves of the slaves.

Gulag survivor Shalamov, author of “Kolyma Stories”

Their experience was so horrific that eyewitnesses were afraid to describe it in detail.

I could not understand how you can make a film about “what a person should not know, should not see, and if he has, he is better off dead,” as Shalamov wrote.

Marianna Yarovskaya has managed to do it. Her heroines, who survived the GULAG, say almost nothing about their suffering. But I could hear their desperate screams during their silences.

To go through such suffering without going mad is a spiritual feat.

To make such a film is a moral feat.

I would compare the appearance of Women of the Gulag with the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

The Gulag Archipelago was awarded the Nobel Prize. [Editor’s note: Solzhenitsyn was awarded, rather than his masterpiece.]

I am glad that there is the opportunity to award an Oscar to Women of the Gulag.

Freedom at last: Bukovsky at the 1987 Sakharov Conference, the Netherlands: (l. to r.) Prime Minister Lubbers, Vladimir Bukovsky, Prof. Jan Willem Bezemer, Stanford historian Robert Conquest (Photo: Creative Commons)