The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 225

Stalinist practice had grotesquely distorted this Tolstoyan motif, with the willing (or recruited) support of the literary establishment. In 1934, Gorky and thirty-five other prominent writers published a festive volume celebrating the completion of the 140-mile Belomor [White Sea] Canal in the far north. The Belomor project had been directed by engineers arrested for this purpose and built by slave labor, as a model for “re-forging” the social renegade into the New Soviet Citizen through corrective physical labor. Its brutal construction plan, which assigned prison crews the task of chipping with primitive tools through solid granite, cost 100,000 lives and resulted in a waterway too shallow to be of commercial value. Ivan Denisovich was not being “reforged.” Nor does his author focus on the perverse details of that far less harrowing one day. Solzhen-itsyn later remarked that his intent was not to document his own despair, which was very real, but “something more frightening – the gray routine year after year when you forget that the only life you have on earth is destroyed.”2 The “gray routine” of this day nevertheless knew its share of modest success and triumph. That restrained tone surely contributed to the story’s publishability in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s older friend and fellow witness Varlam Shalamov (1907– 82) saw the Gulag inferno in less quotidian fashion. His collection of Kolyma Tales, smuggled out to the West in the early 1970s and drawing on seventeen years in various labor camps between 1929 and 1954, is a sardonic, horrific corrective to Solzhenitsyn’s more heroic-ascetic focus on individual moral growth. Shalamov’s camps contain lepers who pass unnoticed as maimed war invalids and prisoners whose “workday” includes logging a mountainside that, eroded by the wind, suddenly reveals a “mass prisoners’ grave, a stone pit stuffed full of undecayed corpses from 1938” – for in far-north frozen Kolyma, “bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone.”3

Solzhenitsyn’s two quasi-autobiographical novels, The First Circle (1964) and The Cancer Ward (1968), explore other sides of the Tolstoyan legacy: the morality of science collaborating with evil; and the imperative to die well, with circumscribed desires. These great novels in the style of conventional nineteenth-century psychological realism stand apart from Solzhenitsyn’s most ambitious genre hybrid, the massive Gulag Archipelago (1973–75), subtitled “an experiment in literary investigation.” That subtitle deserves attention. Its “investigatory” dimension was meant to expose Gorky’s “disgraceful book on the White Sea Canal, which was the first in Russian literature to glorify slave labor.”4 The “literary” aspect refers, first of all, to the mass of personal narratives woven into the three volumes – but also, one suspects, to the status of Solzhenitsyn’s sources. For the safety of their tellers, these orally transmitted horror stories hadto remain anonymous.Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn challenges us to consider all this unverifiable testimony as non-fiction.