The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

226 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The cumulative effect of this strategy is a nightmarish myth spread out along the archipelago of camps – leaping from island to island. Its impact is more powerful than any footnoted facts could ever be, because we know we have access to only a small part of a larger, untellable or lost story. Awe grows as signatures and agents are withheld. This device serves both political and literary ends. It was first perfected by Gogol for his Dead Souls in a comic vein, albeit laced with dread; the same dynamic lends weight, authority, and terror to the ominous rumors circulating through Bely’s Petersburg.

A surprising number of Gogolian moments dot the three Gulag volumes. Among the most grotesque is an episode in Volume I (69–70): no year, no place, referenced only as “told me by N. G – ko.” At the end of a district Party conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin provokes stormy applause. Three, four, five minutes of clapping ensue. But since secret police line the hall, no one wants to be the first to stop, or even to appear to be slowing down. Eight, nine, ten minutes pass. The presiding chairman, a recent replacement for a just-arrested man, doesn’t dare to desist in full view of all. Finally the director of the local paper factory, a decent and strong-minded man, simply sits down. The exhausted hall immediately falls silent. The director is arrested that night. The specific pretext for the arrest didn’t matter; under a system of “economic crimes,” every producer could be criminalized for something. What the system targeted was not so much criminals as unfearful, autonomous people. The clapping episode was one of a thousand preemptive ways to weed them out.

Autobiographical novels, memoirs, and “experiments in literary investigation” were means for coming to terms with a political past that could not yet be openly documented or talked about. They were written “for the drawer” or slipped abroad for publication, waiting for the right time. Russia’s literary canon, however, was effectively timeless, internalized in each reader and ever ready for quotation. Solzhenitsyn’s debts to this canon are reflected in his Nobel Prize speech of 1970. Thematically that speech is permeated by allusions to Dostoevsky – from the 1872 novel Demons as an anticipation of Stalinism, to Dostoevsky’s enigmatic comment that “beauty will save the world,” to a narrowly construed Russo-centrism. But the mission that the Nobel speech laid out for literature was deeply Tolstoyan. Only what is Good and True can also be Beautiful, a justification for aesthetic activity straight out of Tolstoy’s 1898 What Is Art? People belong to such different worlds, Solzhenitsyn argues; the cultural standards of measurement are so diverse that no mere “newscast” can transmit another’s suffering. We might be aroused to anger or curiosity, but we will remain voyeurs. Only the experience of art can communicate the full force