Readers of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy (Kolyma Stories)—at least those innocent of the experiences described—face the perplexing question of how to interpret the literariness of these texts, set in a world that has been utterly transformed into a kind of hell. Scholars continue to wrestle with the question of genre of the tales, which resemble fiction and are at the same time intended to serve as document, as evidentiary proof of the evils of Stalinism.Footnote 1
In 1965, after completing the first four cycles that represent the height of his literary achievement, Shalamov (1907–82) set out his aesthetic credo in an essay-manifesto “On Prose.” He declares the novel dead, and discusses his devotion to the document, rejecting “literariness” or “literary stuff” (“literaturshchina.”)Footnote 2 His predilections reveal the enduring influence of the Left Front of Arts (LEF), formed in the 1920s in response to the revolution and to the widely diagnosed “crisis of the novel,” and advocating “literature of fact” (literatura fakta).Footnote 3 Scholars have noted that his Kolyma Tales realize (albeit in strange ways) some of the movement’s goals.Footnote 4 Yet, Shalamov distanced himself from LEF after temporarily coming into its orbit, citing as his objection the importance of form, as well as emotion, in the document: “The documentary prose of the future is emotionally stained, a memoir document, stained with soul and blood …”Footnote 5 Declaring himself a follower of Aleksei Remizov (1877–1957) and Andrei Bely (1880–1934), he underscores the symbolism in his reality-based prose: “Any detail of the landscape becomes a symbol, a sign, and only then does it retain its meaning, vitality, necessity.”Footnote 6 Shalamov’s thaw-era attempts to continue traditions of the Silver Age and of the avant-garde, together with his rejection of moralizing in literature contrast starkly to the ethics and aesthetics of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who achieved greater fame for his Gulag writings (beginning with “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” published in 1962).Footnote 7
In this essay, however, I will not consider Shalamov’s prose with respect to the literary movements of the early twentieth century (LEF, symbolism), nor to the fact/fiction distinction. My focus will be on the relationship between narrative and experience from the perspective of storytelling. Specifically, I hope to shed new light on the genre of Kolyma Stories by reconsidering them with the help of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” If we take Shalamov’s prose not just as document and fiction, but rather, as document and story (in a broadly Benjaminian sense), we might deepen our understanding of his creative process, aesthetics, and how his prose is intended to act on the reader. Benjamin’s peculiar notion of storytelling places emphasis neither on genre, nor on documentary truth, but rather, on relationships between teller and listener, on collectives and communities, and on the material and bodily aspects of storytelling. Shalamov tries to communicate experiences that seem unbelievable, even fantastic, while gaining readers’ trust. Storytelling, employing a certain artifice, creates distance from authorial or authoritative aspects of autobiography without loosening an attachment to personal experience. Shalamov becomes a camp storyteller, in short, to break free from the hold of the Russian realist tradition, which he saw as overly didactic.
In what follows, I discuss Benjamin’s notions of storytelling and then compare these to Shalamov’s concepts of “new prose.” I devote particular attention to the question of advice, both because it is central to Benjamin’s framework and because we must scrutinize carefully Shalamov’s contradictory stance on whether his stories contain “lessons.” I move on to survey, briefly, the fusion of document and folktale in several stories, with reference to Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Finally, I treat a story from the sixth cycle, “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” (1970–71), a composite narrative that demonstrates how skazka and story function in relation to memory and advice.
Benjamin’s Storyteller
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) wrote “The Storyteller” (1936) a few years after fleeing Nazi Germany. He laments the aftereffects of the First World War on the communication of human experience: “men returned from the battlefield grown silent.” This devaluation of experience (Erfahrung) has, he claims, led to the decline of the “art of storytelling”:
For experiences have never been refuted more thoroughly than strategic ones were by trench warfare, economic ones by inflation, physical ones by mechanized warfare, ethical ones by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars found itself under open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds were unchanged and below them, in a force field crossed by devastating currents and explosions, stood the tiny, fragile human body.Footnote 8
Even before the cataclysms of total war, and the accompanying shifts in the scales and methods used for interpreting human experience, storytelling was a dying art. The first herald of this trend was the rise of the novel, which takes the form of a printed book, and which “neither comes from nor feeds into the oral tradition.”Footnote 9 Novels and their readers are marked by individuality and solitude—so too are their heroes, with their singular fates. Storytellers, on the other hand, draw upon “experience that is passed from one mouth to the next,” and depend on a “community of listeners.” Footnote 10 They retell those stories they’ve heard, which are based on collective reminiscences about “multiple scattered events.”Footnote 11 One narrative usually interlinks with the next—as with the classic example of Scheherazade.Footnote 12 The second sign of the demise of storytelling, according to Benjamin, was the rise of newspapers, in which relevant reportage gained the most traction. Information must be verifiable, “comprehensible in and of itself”; it should “sound plausible.” By contrast, in a story temporal and spatial distance increase its validity and necessity. Implausibility is expected in a story: “Extraordinary and miraculous events are recounted with great precision, but the psychological context is not forced on the reader.”Footnote 13
Observing that in his own era people had all but lost “the ability to exchange experiences,”Footnote 14 Benjamin summons a literary exemplar from the nineteenth-century, Nikolai Leskov (1831–95), though he admitted privately that the Russian author, whom he knew scantily and in translation, primarily served as an excuse to “take an old hobby-horse out of the stable.”Footnote 15 Leskov became a writer after traveling on business across Russia, as well as England; he considered storytelling a “handicraft.”Footnote 16 He thus combined the two main storyteller archetypes: “traveling journeyman” and “resident master craftsman.” Benjamin’s essay retains its relevance less for its interpretation of Leskov (based on a German edition with an unusual selection of texts), than for its insistence that discourse is embedded in its context, and that lengthy human interactions provide the most fertile ground for the conferral of wisdom.Footnote 17
Benjamin overlooks examples of modern storytellers. He harkens instead to a distant past—One Thousand and One Nights (eighth-thirteenth centuries), Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE), and traditional fairy tales.Footnote 18 Building on Paul Valéry’s description of the lost artisanal world, he imagines the retelling of stories as a “slow accumulation of thin, translucent layers.”Footnote 19 In dialogue with Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1916), Benjamin locates story on the side of the epic, because its muse is memory: stories, committed to memory, can be transmitted generationally.Footnote 20 Storytelling’s waning relevance was for Benjamin (then fashioning himself into a heterodox Marxist) “a side effect of historical secular forces of productivity.”Footnote 21
Storytelling and the Camps
Unbeknownst to Benjamin, at the very time he was composing his essay, the horrific conditions of the Soviet Gulag were fostering the emergence of certain kinds of stories that could communicate experiences not of a beautiful past, but of the brutal present. Kolyma, a remote colony of labor camps in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, was filled with all strata of Soviet society including workers, villagers, and peasants (“craftsmen”) of all ages. Objective information about Kolyma was hard to come by; it could trickle out to the Soviet “mainland” only in survivors’ stories, should they risk telling them.Footnote 22 Moreover, the hundreds of camps of the Gulag archipelago (Solzhenitsyn’s term) had their own rules, codes, culture.
Shalamov depicts inmates on the border of human and nonhuman, whose physical deprivation often prevents them from remembering, let alone relating, the “multiple scattered events” to which Benjamin refers when speaking of storytellers living in freedom. The dangers around verbal interaction could reduce zeks (the Russian parlance for prisoners) to silent decoding of one another’s words, behavior, clothing, and details of the material environment.Footnote 23 Yet there were occasions when the inmates dared exchange experiences, teaching one another camp rules, how to circumvent them, whom to avoid, how to gain an advantage.Footnote 24 In The Kolyma Stories, we see zeks sharing with one another their experiences from distant lands—the lore of the Moscow metro (“Field Rations”) the “terrible” Jankhara mines (“The Snake Charmer”) or the deadly truth about the “clean air” of the camps (“The Tatar Mullah and Clean Air”).Footnote 25 Many zeks committed to memory their companions’ names, stories, and fates.
The camps were home to their own oral traditions. Inmates were forbidden from writing anything but letters to relatives; these were heavily censored, and thus highly formulaic.Footnote 26 Yet news of arrests traveled by word of mouth through the camp “grapevine” months ahead of public announcements in newspapers.Footnote 27 Literature became, at times, a lifesaver. Memoirs such as those of Evgeniia Ginzburg (1904–77) attest to how prison inmates recited poetry to one another from memory.Footnote 28 Shalamov notes that when other basic physical requirements had been met, a prisoner discovered a “need to listen to poetry.”Footnote 29 Criminal convicts had a tradition of “pulling” or “pressing” novels (“tiskatʹ rómany,” pronounced with the accent on the wrong syllable): they would hire political prisoners, through the bribe of extra rations, to retell adventure tales (Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, or similar works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Lew Wallace, or Victor Hugo).Footnote 30 Endless, empty prison time gave rise to this practice: indeed, Benjamin had postulated that boredom was the ideal condition of oral storytelling.Footnote 31 Shalamov’s well-known story “The Snake Charmer” illustrates this “layered” camp storytelling: Platonov (a fictional character named after the author Andrei Platonov, who in real life was spared the camps) “pulls novels” for criminal inmates, then tells the narrator about this, calling his own story “The Snake Charmer.” Our narrator relays this tale to us out of “love” for Platonov, who died from hard labor and starvation three weeks after transmitting this story of his camp life.Footnote 32
When speaking of Shalamov and some of his characters as storytellers, of course, one must reconfigure Benjamin’s somewhat nostalgic lens, updating this notion to the catastrophically unfree conditions of Kolyma. Shalamov describes the camps as manufacturers of hatred: “Prisoners in the camps learn to hate labor. That is all they can learn there.”Footnote 33 Yet, when “the secular forces of productivity” (Benjamin’s phrase) are transformed into a machinery of torture, storytellers (contrary to Benjamin’s assumption) are those who can convey—with an intensity that makes them irrefutable—experiences of suffering, death, and survival.
Shalamov’s “New Prose”: Story as Document
Shalamov began composing Kolyma Stories in 1954, a few years after his final release, having survived almost seventeen years in the camps (Vishera, 1929–32 and Kolyma, 1937–51).Footnote 34 The style of the tales is stark and minimalistic. Short sentences composed of verbs and nouns (with few adjectives or adverbs) intentionally echo the prose style of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837), but with a muscularity that makes them feel “like a slap.”Footnote 35
Even before his first arrest in 1929, Shalamov was already fashioning himself as a writer. After his return from Vishera in 1932 he started publishing articles and short stories, such as “The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino” (1935), influenced by Ambrose Bierce.Footnote 36 He never aspired to be a novelist: “Whereas I practically never thought about how to write a novel, I thought about how to write a short story for decades, even in my youth.”Footnote 37 Suggestive of his orientation towards tales, Shalamov took as one of his early models the neo-Romantic Alexander Grin, whose Scarlet Sails calls itself a feerie.Footnote 38 When Shalamov began to be known (during his lifetime, only through samizdat and tamizdat) for his documentary stories of the camps, he insisted he was a writer first, one who “simulated not literature, but life,” a chronicler “of his own soul, nothing more.”Footnote 39
There is remarkable overlap between Shalamov’s concept of “new prose” and Benjamin’s notions of the story. First, Benjamin suggests that “nothing commends a story to memory more effectively than the chaste brevity that eludes psychological analysis.” If a storyteller manages to “avoid all psychological shading,” the listener can more easily assimilate and retell it (whereas readers forget the elaborate explanations in novels, and must reread them).Footnote 40 Shalamov claims to have memorized “thousands of plot variants” answering life’s vital questions, from which he had only to “choose and drag one onto paper as it passed by.” He declares that “analysis in the Kolyma Tales is in the very absence of analysis.”Footnote 41 He may not have adopted this style in order to enhance memorization, and yet, it seems not to be mere coincidence that his prose, written from memory of life in extremis, is minimalistic. Moreover, he programmatically rejects psychological explanations. Benjamin’s comment that “the perfect story is revealed through the stratification of numerous retellings” finds a strange realization in Shalamov’s repetition of episodes, characters, events, and generalizations across his oeuvre. These repetitions recall the compositional methods of skazka as oral performance, discussed by Shalamov’s contemporary Viktor Shklovskii.Footnote 42 Whether Shalamov’s repetitions relate primarily to the origins of these tales in traumatic experience or serve as a conscious literary device is difficult (or impossible) to judge.Footnote 43 The reality he represents is a traumatized one: camp survivors, as Benjamin Paloff has recently put it, have suffered “epistemological violence”: their “experience of the real” is “built on uncanny inversions, paradoxes, and performances.” Footnote 44
Benjamin singled out Leskov as among the “very few [who] have dared venture into the depths of the inanimate world.”Footnote 45 Shalamov goes much further in his depiction of rocks, minerals, and corpses buried in permafrost (he also ponders animals and vegetation). Readers might wonder about the possible influence of Sergei Tretiakov, who in “The Biography of the Thing” (1929) recommended centering the object (qua product of assembly-line labor) as a method of depicting the masses through a socio-political lens.Footnote 46 Yet Shalamov prefers to animate an object to the point where it resembles a goner (dokhodiaga) —still alive but irreversibly headed for death—and conversely, to portray a human as similar to a stone, tree, or sack of bones. Whereas Tretiakov complained that traditional writers talk excessively about “how people die,” Benjamin’s notion that the storyteller gets his authority from death deeply resonates with Shalamov’s tales.Footnote 47 Shalamov tells continually of death, even as it fails to impress as an event. Following Benjamin’s model in yet another respect, Shalamov’s stories never read like newspaper reports, whose information is “valuable only for the moment in which it is new”; each of the Kolyma Stories “preserves its inherent power, which it can then deploy even after a long period of time.”Footnote 48
What is essential for both Benjamin and Shalamov is the relationship between the storyteller and experience. Storytelling, says Benjamin, “plunges the thing into the life of the teller and draws it out again. The storyteller’s traces cling to a story the way traces of the potter’s hand cling to a clay bowl.”Footnote 49 The old art of storytelling was akin to a manual craft.Footnote 50 Shalamov, though he composed his stories in solitude, wrote with a hyperawareness of his hand (whose new layer of skin makes it no longer “the hand of a Kolyma goner.”)Footnote 51 He had a habit of holding an object in order to trigger his memory. He demands that the writer of the “new prose” be no simple observer nor witness, but rather, “a participant of the drama of life” who is also “a sufferer.”Footnote 52 Like other intellectuals sentenced under Article 58 (“counter-revolutionary activity”), Shalamov was assigned to hard labor, given impossible work quotas, and frequently beaten. He composed poems about the body’s memory of pain.Footnote 53 His trace as a storyteller is not a handprint on a clay vessel, but rather, his own skin and blood.Footnote 54
Shalamov attempted to write “not a short story [rasskaz], but that which would be not literature. Not the prose of document, but prose that is suffered out in the form of a document [vystradannaia kak document, suffered out as/like a document].”Footnote 55 The prose is evidence of suffering, and bears extra-literary weight. He would compose a story when seized by a compulsion to retrieve a “conclusion” (vyvod) or “judgement” (suzhdeniie) about human life and psychology (like Benjamin’s “lesson”), gained at the cost of great suffering (which is to say, experience). The desire to recapture his finding would (in his account) give birth to feelings as intense as those evoked in “living life,” by the original events, people, or ideas.Footnote 56 After this, Shalamov would search for a plot structure (siuzhet), a process he found relatively simple, since “any fairy tale, any myth can be found in living life.”Footnote 57 (The phrase “living life” has a long history in Russian literature and thought, and is most famously associated with Dostoevskii.)Footnote 58 Fairytales and myths had particular currency in the camps, where life itself was imbued with what Shalamov referred to as “fantastic realism”: chance, lawlessness, or arbitrary rule resulting in sudden misfortune, death, or (less often) food, warmth, rest, survival. Footnote 59 Shalamov calls the camps a place where “everything is too unusual, too improbable, and a poor human brain is simply incapable of conceiving concrete images of life there.”Footnote 60 His prose reproduces the disorientation of the camps so completely that his documentary prose sometimes resembles the fairytale or, as Larisa Zharavina prefers, anti-fairytale, because of the ubiquity of death and the lack of magical agents or happy endings.Footnote 61
What Does It Mean to “Take it as a Fairytale”?
The stories of which Benjamin speaks have an instructional function, which originates in the fairytale (“das Märchen”).Footnote 62 “[Every real story] serves, overtly or covertly, a useful function. This usefulness may consist in one case of imparting a particular moral, in another of offering a bit of practical advice; a third case may involve a proverb or maxim—in each case, the narrator is a man of good counsel for his audience.”Footnote 63 Benjamin broadens the notion of advice by explaining that “good counsel is less an answer to a question than a suggestion of how to continue a story (that is already in progress).”Footnote 64 The comparison of counsel to emplotment implies a degree of control over one’s fate, or at least the right to monitor it without risking your life. In Kolyma, however, the lagernik’s (campmate’s) immediate future was so unpredictable that the idea of recommending or charting a path based on a resulting narrative might have seemed absurd.
Can we speak of an advice function, either in relation to the effect Shalamov intends Kolyma Stories to have on their reader, or in the represented world of the stories? In 1961, Shalamov compiled a list with the title “What I saw and understood in the camps,” containing forty-five items, the first of which concerns “the extreme fragility of human culture, civilization.”Footnote 65 The existence of this list implies that Shalamov thought camp experience provided insights into what constitutes being human. Around 1969 or 1970, he jotted in a notebook: “My stories are, in essence, pieces of advice about how to behave in a crowd.”Footnote 66 And within some of his stories, lagerniki learn from what they witness, or from the tales they hear.
And yet, Shalamov insisted his stories did not contain any “lessons” for the reader, by which he meant recommended guidelines for action or an ethical learning curve. None of his narrators will dictate advice from an elevated authorial position. By and large, he rejects Benjamin’s “moral of the story” as much as he denounces the novel’s unriddling of the “meaning of life.”Footnote 67 Insistent that just as not one person becomes better after the camps, not one reader becomes better after reading about them, he writes in order to deliver a “slap in the face” to Stalinism.Footnote 68 He excoriated nineteenth-century Russian realist novels for their moral didacticism. In a 1971 letter to Irina Sirotinskaia (posthumously published as “About My Prose”), Shalamov even implicates the “failure of humanistic ideas,” those propagated in the Russian classics, in the “historical crime” of Stalin’s camps and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.Footnote 69 The typical intellectual abandoned “his civilization and culture” in Kolyma just as quickly as the next person: “in the shortest imaginable time, a matter of weeks.”Footnote 70
One reason to wonder about the relationship between Shalamov’s texts and the fairytale’s capacity to teach lessons through unbelievable stories is that his characters often rehearse the camp proverb “Ne verishʹ—primi za skazku,” or “If you don’t believe it—take it as a fairytale.”Footnote 71 How might we interpret this saying? Does it relate to Benjamin’s storyteller?
Shalamov’s narrators warn, “if you don’t believe it—take it as a fairytale” in order to express the absurdity of Gulag terminology and practices.Footnote 72 The narrator of “Maxim” (Sententsiia)Footnote 73 glosses the expression as follows:
I didn’t know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them anything, and not because I was observing the Arab saying, “Ask no questions, hear no lies.” I didn’t care at all whether I would be lied to or not. I was beyond truth and lies [вне правды, вне лжи]. For such occasions the gangsters had a harsh, colorful, coarse saying, imbued with profound scorn for any questioner: “If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale” [Не веришь—прими за сказку]. I didn’t question or listen to fairy tales [не выслушивал сказок].Footnote 74
Camp gangsters deployed the phrase “If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale” as a threat, to discourage listeners from asking questions. The zek should assess a story’s truth value (if he cares) silently, alone. The narrator claims to avoid questions, as well as fairytales (literally he says that he “didn’t listen to fairy tales to the end,” describing the minimal freedom of not becoming a captive audience). Like the narrators across Kolyma Stories, he is hesitant to pry into another person’s life story.Footnote 75 Better to live by unspoken codes, and to interpret certain objects, words, or events as talismans and omens. Not unlike the realm of fairytales, the camp world was full of riddles and signs, which those “inside” would have to decipher in order to operate or survive (though survival was mostly beyond one’s control).
Consider the well-worn English proverb, “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” Footnote 76 The harsher Gulag version, “Ne verishʹ—primi za skazku” has a different nuance, even if skazka can also be translated in this context as “lie,” fabrication.Footnote 77 It suggests that the only choice available to camp subjects was to change their reception of a story. Condemned to maximum unfreedom and nearly powerless to control their fates, they could either take a story as reality or gain an illusion of agency by receiving it as (priniatʹ za) fairy tale (or lie). This predicament relates to Shalamov’s posture as a writer: he leaves it to readers whether to take his tales as reality, fairytale, or both—even if he ultimately wants to convince us that they are true. In my view, Shalamov invokes skazka to signal both his departure from the traditional role that fiction had played in Russian culture, and from the usual aesthetics of documentary prose. A shift to the mode of skazka suggests a distance from document in any strict sense; it meanwhile (as we shall see in our analysis of “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova”) relieves the teller and listener from the duties of giving, or receiving, advice. This is in part because storytelling (as skazka) allows experience to speak as if anonymously, without a biographically identified source (of advice or preaching).
Fairytale Elements in Kolyma Stories
The six story cycles of Kolyma Stories exhibit a diversity of forms, ranging from the more tightly plotted tales (such as “On the Slate” [Na predstavku], 1956), to the composite narratives like “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” that combine six stories in one, to those resembling the sketch [ocherk] (“The Dwarf Pine” [Stlanik] 1960, “Poorcoms” [Kombedy], 1959, “Crooks by Blood” [Zhulʹnicheskaia krovʹ], 1959) and everything in between.Footnote 78 In the texts that do incorporate fairytale elements (while lacking magical agents and ending with the hero’s death or with return to camp life, roughly equivalent to death) it is possible to identify most of the functions enumerated in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928). For example, as Zharavina has demonstrated, Shalamov’s story “The Duck” (written 1963) is a version of the animal tale “A duck for a rolling pin” (Za skalochku—utochku), built on Propp’s cumulative principle. Footnote 79 A “goner” dreams of capturing a duck and using it to bribe his foreman into keeping his name off the “ominous list” of a deportation party. (In folk tales, domestic fowl often serve as the object of exchange.) Typically for the camps, the zek’s goal is merely to stay in place (the motto “a person never sought to exchange the good for the better” appears across several stories). As the plot unfolds, we see that the prisoner is likewise a “sitting duck” to the foreman (who plans to use the duck to save himself from transfer), and so on up the chain of camp hierarchy. Yet the dreamt-of exchanges come to naught, because the emaciated prisoner cannot outsmart the duck (“he’d never been taught to think about the possibility of such hunting,” but only how “to live in such a way that no personal decision was needed”).Footnote 80 Just as the fowl is left to die on the frozen pond, the living “corpse” (mertvets), readers assume, will die in his barracks. By evoking the fairytale, Shalamov only underscores the impossibility of a happy ending, and the powerlessness of the zek for whom “it was extraordinarily difficult to intervene in one’s own fate, to turn it around.”Footnote 81
“Berries” (written 1959) is another story of exchange, in which the narrator’s fellow prisoner Rybakov dies while trying to collect a canful of berries to trade with the cook for bread. There are hints of a magical world in the “frost-covered grass” that “changed color on contact with a human hand” and the descriptions of “enchanted” berries with an “unsayable” taste and “intoxicating” effect. The convey guard Seroshapka (his name, meaning “Gray Hat,” evokes fairytale) has marked off the boundaries of the work area by hanging “bundles of yellow and gray hay” on the few remaining trees.Footnote 82 Rybakov crosses over into the forbidden zone. Seroshapka, violating regulations, shoots him without warning (firing the “warning shot” afterwards, as cover). He later sneers to the narrator that he had wished to kill him, if only he had crossed the line. There are two exchanges: Rybakov takes the bullet intended for the narrator; the latter profits by obtaining Rybakov’s berries. Any sense of a happy ending is overshadowed by the suggestion of ubiquitous death: Rybakov’s corpse shrinks in size against the enormous backdrop of “sky, mountains and river,” causing the narrator to remark, “God knows how many people you could have laid down on the footpaths between the tussocks in these mountains.”Footnote 83 This line reverses the cumulative chain of events—from fortune to misfortune, on a massive scale.Footnote 84 In “The Glove,” which is written from the first-person “I” of Shalamov, the author generalizes: prisoners were always trying to cross into a forbidden, magical zone where berries grew (their bodies intuiting how to prevent scurvy), only to be shot at and killed. “Berries” is an exemplary “lesson,” told as tale.
“The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” (“Zagovor iuristov,” written 1962) is a particularly skazka-like story.Footnote 85 It begins with a version of the absentation,Footnote 86 includes four interrogations (Function XII), the semblance of “magical agents” (gifts of tobacco and white bread, Function XIV), a “spatial transference between kingdoms” (Function XV), the hero’s reaction to the acts of a future donor (Function XIII), his rendering “service to a dead person” (Function XIII), and scenes of riddle-guessing (Function XXV).Footnote 87 A fairytale quality emerges from the shape of Andreev’s fantastic journey, a rather rare plot in Shalamov’s stories. Like the hero of fairytales, Andreev is not the agent of the action. He survives because of blind luck.
One of the more peculiar effects of Shalamov’s prose emerges through the reader’s encounters with familiar fairytale motifs within stories about completely unfamiliar camp experiences. Writing to Irina Sirotinskaia in 1971, Shalamov explains what makes “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” one of his best stories:
The story “Lawyers’ Conspiracy” was absolutely new. The lightness of a future corpse has never been described in literature. Everything in this story is new: the return to life that is hopeless and indistinguishable from death. The cheese, which is not fully eaten by the teeth of the head of the Secret Political Section (SPO), the captain [Rebrov], the refectory, the bread, which I was swallowing, hurrying, so as not to die before I swallowed a piece [хлеб, который я глотал, торопясь, чтобы не умереть, пока я не проглотил кусок].Footnote 88
When Shalamov articulates what sets this story apart, he makes a list of details that appear to function as literary symbols, while being new to literature and originating in camp life. His slippage from describing the “short story” (rasskaz) about the fictional hero Andreev to invoking his own painful experiences (“the bread which I swallowed”)Footnote 89 reminds readers that his material originates in personal memory. The list form itself seems to imply that his memory retained perceptions of certain objects in the physical world that acquired heightened significance since he was seeing them for the first time. Shalamov connects novelty, memory, and narrative when he remarks, “Everything in this story is new.”Footnote 90 The real wonder of “Lawyers’ Conspiracy” is that a goner, occupied most of all with basic comforts (warmth, sleep, a cigarette, food), is nevertheless human enough to observe, evaluate, and later remember people and places he encountered on his mysterious journey to expected death.
Shalamov claimed that novelty, when combined with faithful transmission of details, increases the reader’s belief: if new details come from life, rather than from literary predecessors, they are more convincing: “Novelty itself, accuracy [vernostʹ, which can mean fidelity, or truth], exactitude of these details makes one believe in the story, in everything else, not as one believes in information, but as one believes in an open heart wound.”Footnote 91 “Trauma” (the Greek word for “wound”) may even function as literary device, though its origins are in reality.Footnote 92 Painful feelings—rarely enunciated in the tales themselves—underpin the details that are new to literature. These details are from a faraway, horrifically implausible land, where reality takes on a fantastic quality. Through the statement about the “open heart wound,” we can circle back to Benjamin’s theory of storytelling as relying on experience (for Shalamov, suffering), which separates it from mere reporting. Shalamov seems to argue that his stories are the more convincing the less they resemble the newspaper with its “information.”
A “Vitally Important” Feeling: Recovering a Memory in Arkagala
Benjamin writes that memory “weaves the net all stories ultimately form together.” For the greatest storytellers, “every episode in a story evokes a new story.”Footnote 93 Shalamov’s “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” weaves together traces of six other tales that he wrote up separately. This “reconstructive” quality, as Laura Anne Kline has noted, is typical of the final cycle, The Glove, or Kolyma Stories II.Footnote 94 “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” is less striking for any resemblance to anti-fairytale than for its dramatization of Shalamov’s formation as an author and storyteller of the camps. The most emotionally intense moment in the story concerns the retrieval of a memory by the “I” figure named “Shalamov” (I will refer to him as such, henceforth without quotation marks, while mindful that he is not identical with the author).Footnote 95 Of relevance to the Benjamin connection is how an effort to pursue this memory emerges from the desire to find a lesson in past experience.
When Shalamov is assigned to stoke stoves at the laboratory run by Zybalova, a non-convict woman, the feeling of his throbbing toes is overwhelmed by a sensation (oshchushcheniie) that is “brighter, more vitally important.”Footnote 96 He rejects the Kolyma prisoner’s need for “something so unreliable and so fragile and so clinging and so all-powerful” as memory. Yet there, in Arkagala (1941), he remembers the excellence of his own memory before its destruction by four years of hard labor. He then beseeches his memory “as one implores a higher being” (как молят высшее существо):
What was I asking for?
I was repeating endlessly the surname of the woman who managed the laboratory: Galina Pavlovna Zybalova! Zybalova! Pavlovna! Zybalova!
I had heard that surname somewhere. I used to know someone called Zybalov—not Ivanov, Petrov, or Smirnov. This was a metropolitan surname. And suddenly, sweating with tension, I recalled it.Footnote 97
The repetition of “Zybalova” serves as an incantation, until Shalamov’s brain “takes pity” (szhalilsia) on him. He recalls an encounter from 1929, when he was serving his first sentence in the Urals. There was a man, “an exile by the name, I believe, of Pavel Pavlovich Zybalov,” (the idea of a “metropolitan surname” recalls a fairytale division of space/kingdoms) who taught him economics and advised him to “accept the post of manager of the office of labor economics at the Berezniki thermoelectric power station.”Footnote 98 Shalamov took his advice and temporarily landed a well-paying job (the theme of advice doubles across inner and outer narratives). This memory has no ulterior motive: memory itself is the reward.
This retrieval ushers in a dilemma: should Shalamov speak with Galina Pavlovna Zybalova, verify the memory, and potentially deepen his connection to a person whose father was a positive figure in his prior life? He recalls another episode from his past, in which one zek’s decision to reconnect to his old colleague nearly caused the death of the two of them, several others, and Shalamov himself. This is the story of “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy,” which the author refers to directly by name, ascribing it to the genre of “memoir,” despite the fictionality of the central protagonist (Andreev).Footnote 99 In a spirit contrary to his denial that his Kolyma Stories can offer advice, Shalamov attempts to use his own Kolyma past (which later formed the plot of a “story”) to guide his actions: “The arrest in the ‘lawyers’ case’ three years earlier did at least teach me one important camp law: never go around asking things from people you used to know when you were free—it’s a small world, and such encounters happen. Such requests in Kolyma are almost always unpleasant, sometimes impossible, and can lead to the death of whoever is asking.”Footnote 100 Shalamov goes on to adduce other examples of the awful consequences of reforged connections, or of mere recognition.Footnote 101 Using experience as a guide, he should refrain from reconnecting with Galina Pavlovna Zybalova.
Shalamov promptly breaks this camp law. He explains that recognition should be harmless in this instance, for Galina Pavlovna exists in a separate (free) world to which convicts relate as if watching a film. Moreover, he assesses her character: she is a “good” person, not an “active enemy of prisoners.”Footnote 102 Therefore, Shalamov converses with her, verifies his memories, and corrects several minor details, such as Galina’s father’s patronymic (Osipovich, not Pavlovich).Footnote 103 Significantly, Shalamov does not then edit the narrative with the benefit of this knowledge: instead, he employs the incorrect patronymic in the first part (leading up to the dialogue), signaling uncertainty with the word kazhetsia (it seems).Footnote 104 The story, whose narrative jumps around in time, thus dramatizes the uncertainty of the “I” of Shalamov at Arkagala, as well as the process of fine-tuning personal recollections through conversation with others.
This conversation about a shared past in Berezniki leads not to harm, but rather to Shalamov’s receipt of two unsolicited favors. The first transpires after Galina Pavlovna writes a letter to her father, who follows “camp law” by sternly denying any knowledge of Shalamov. The father issues an instruction: “Treat Shalamov as you would treat me if you came across me in Kolyma.” On the surface, this message would please the authorities (who read correspondence) by advising that she treat Shalamov as a zek. The hidden directive, of course, is that she relate to Shalamov as family.Footnote 105 She finds the perfect way to follow this advice: she dismisses Shalamov as an orderly (seemingly a negative consequence), but as a result, he is effectively promoted to the post of laboratory assistant and technician.Footnote 106
The second unsolicited favor comes in the form of curiosity satisfied. Galina Pavlona invites Shalamov to glimpse an infamous character newly arrived at Arkagala, a certain Second Lieutenant Postnikov. Here Shalamov sketches out yet another story: a few months prior, when he was “still doing the donkey work at Kadykchan,” a fugitive appeared in his barracks at night: “pale, having lost a lot of blood, and unable to speak: he merely stretched out his arms.”Footnote 107 A guard takes the man into the taiga, and Shalamov assumes that he intends to finish him off in the bushes, rather than deliver him to Arkagala.Footnote 108 This prisoner had attempted escape across the mainland, only to be stopped by Postnikov, who could not be bothered to deliver him to Kadychkan. Instead, he shoots him on the spot, then chops off the convict’s hands and places them in a bag to accompany his report. (Fingerprints serve as the primary proof of identity in the camp system, making the physical hands of a dead man a seeming guarantee.)
Postnikov faces no consequences for his heinous act. His story spreads through the camps: “there was a lot of talk of Postnikov, even in the hungry enslaved world in which I then lived: the incident was totally new.” When Zybalova offers Shalamov the opportunity to behold the man, he takes “a close and eager look, trying to detect the slightest sign of any Lavater or Lombroso feature on Second Lieutenant Postnikov’s face.” These pseudo-scientific methods reveal no trace of depravity. The image he records—in documentary fashion—pointedly lacks any artificial exaggeration: Postnikov was “a fair-haired man, but not an albino, more of a northern, blue-eyed, maritime type, slightly taller than average, a very ordinary man.”Footnote 109
In “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova,” Shalamov treats his formation as a storyteller of the camps by dramatizing his method of recovering interconnected memories. He portrays himself as a careful observer who (from a position of relative safety) seeks to increase his knowledge. Stories built around memories from Berezniki (1929), Magadan (1938), Kadykchan and Arkagala (1941) coalesce, following Benjamin’s model of the storyteller, around the theme of lessons (sometimes disregarded) about the pros and cons of recognizing past acquaintances.
“I’ll Tell You a Fairy Tale”: Skazka as Alibi
Near the end of “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova,” the eponymous heroine seeks the narrator’s advice, expecting Shalamov to have counsel for her because of his vocation as “writer.”Footnote 110 When Galina Pavlovna approaches Shalamov for advice in matters of the heart, he replies:
“Galina, ever since I became an adult, I’ve been living according to an important commandment: ‘Don’t give your neighbor advice.’ [Не учи ближнего своего.] Like a Gospel commandment. Each person’s fate is unique. All recipes are wrong.”
“But I thought you writers—”
“The trouble with Russian literature, Galina, is that it pokes its nose into other people’s affairs, tries to direct other people’s fates, gives an opinion on questions it understands nothing about, when it has no right at all to intervene in moral problems, to condemn, when it doesn’t know anything and doesn’t want to know.”
“Fine. Then I’ll tell you a fairy tale [я вам расскажу сказку], and you can evaluate it as a work of literature [как литературное произведение]. I take all responsibility for any artifice [условность] or realism [реализм]—which seem to me to be the same thing.”
“Excellent. Let’s hear the fairy tale.” [Отлично. Попробуем со сказкой.]
Galina quickly sketched one of the most banal diagrams, a triangle, and I advised her not to leave her husband.Footnote 111
When the two characters agree to speak “as if” (or, literarily), they thereby consent, in a quasi-legal fashion, to bracket real-life experience within a sphere in which “intervention in moral problems” does not occur. Detaching from their tellers, stories seem to create a judgment-free zone, while giving their listeners an alibi. If Shalamov reacts to the autobiographical narrative as skazka, he will not to be issuing advice, but rather, literary criticism (of a problematic sort, one might add).
Perhaps coincidentally, the dialogue between the writer and Galina Pavlovna Zybalova distantly recalls Leskov’s “Apropos the Kreutzer Sonata,” one of several lesser-known stories Benjamin enlists in his storyteller essay.Footnote 112 Leskov’s tale engages with the debates on marital infidelity and sexual morality that were sparked by Tolstoi’s radical work, which features a performance of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” In Leskov’s framed narrative, an anonymous female character who has been unfaithful to her husband seeks practical counsel from an author she admires.Footnote 113 The writer, reluctant to offer advice, nevertheless opines that she should stay with her husband, concealing the affair.Footnote 114 Such surface similarities help underscore significant differences between the worlds that Leskov and Shalamov depict. For example, what for Leskov’s character is a moral dilemma is for Galina Pavlovna only a practical, “banal” one.Footnote 115
Galina Pavlovna’s attempt at skazka falls flat, collapsing into geometry: a triangle. The failure of the tale as such frees Shalamov to offer advice: she should stay with her husband. He provides numerous reasons (better to stay with her husband, a “good person,” rather than risk a “boxful of the unexpected”) and justifications meant to absolve himself of the sin of giving advice. He states that, “When one’s own heart is concerned, advice is only taken when it doesn’t contradict the inner will of the person.”Footnote 116 Galina Pavlovna’s belonging to the free world supposedly makes real interference impossible—a possible gesture towards Shalamov’s relationship to his “free” readers. He even qualifies his advice as “purely literary” (sovet moi—chisto literaturnyi), stating that it “did not conceal any moral obligations.”Footnote 117
Shalamov exonerates himself still more completely by going on to describe how “in complete accordance with nature’s traditions” (v polnom sootvetstvii traditisami prirody), “higher forces” (vyshie sily) intervene to render his counsel meaningless. After her lover’s wife raises complaints about the affair, the political administration dismisses Galina Pavlovna and transfers her to another post. (The lover happens to be the new chief engineer of the coal sector; the authorities have an interest in keeping his family whole, lest he abandon Arkagala.) Her husband, an automobile engineer, is suddenly (and symbolically) killed “by a passing truck in the winter darkness.” Shalamov, while ruling out suicide, leaves open the question of whether the collision was accidental or an act of murder. Of this real-life denouement, he notes ironically that it was a plot out of Aeschylus (kompozitsiia eskhilovskaiia).Footnote 118
When Shalamov is himself dismissed by Galina’s replacement, he notes, “the Kolyma bosses didn’t need to formulate reasons, and in any case I didn’t expect any explanations. That would have been too literary, too much in the style of Russian classics.”Footnote 119 The logic of Kolyma accords with that of the Benjaminian story: real-life plots resemble Greek tragedy; the mortals involved receive no explanations. Shalamov’s paradoxical declaration that “There exists not a single line, not a single phrase in Kolyma Stories that aims to be ‘literary,’” refers in part to this deliberate lack of explanations, and to the rupture in cause and effect.Footnote 120 One can attempt to learn from life experiences (do not connect to past acquaintances), then violate this law (connect); one can break one’s own rule against offering advice; and everything gets swallowed up in the illogic of chance, the intervention of superior forces. The story ends with the words, “I never in my life saw Galina Pavlovna again.” Footnote 121 This dislocation at the whims of the higher authorities, and the powerlessness of the individual, are perhaps the larger lessons here.
The advice scene in “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” suggests that the fusion of skazka and document forms part of Shalamov’s strategy for avoiding the didacticism that he found so problematic in nineteenth-century Russian literature (and in his contemporary, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Meanwhile, despite his engagement with fairytale, it was important for Shalamov that his readers take his writing as truth: “the Author hopes that no one will doubt that what is in the 33 stories of the collection is the truth of living life.”Footnote 122 In other words, the implausibility of events in Kolyma Stories does not, in Shalamov’s view, impinge on the question of the “truth of living life.”Footnote 123 Fairytales happen in reality, as the author reminds us: “life to this day preserves situations of skazka, epics, legends, mythologies, religions, monuments of art (which bothered Oscar Wilde more than a little).”Footnote 124
Until the seventeenth century, as Vladimir Propp relates, the word skazka “signified something trustworthy, written or oral testimony, or a witness with legal strength.” Later, it came to mean the exact opposite: “a lie, an invention, something completely untrustworthy.” (The inversion likely occurred because testimonies taken at trial “tended to be so undependable, so filled with lies…”)Footnote 125 The narrator of Shalamov’s “Field Rations” remarks, “We realized that truth and lies were twin sisters, and that truth on earth came in thousands of different forms.”Footnote 126 The camp maxim “if you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale” has multiple meanings. In stories such as “Condensed Milk,” we see a savvy narrator escape death (and even profit, in the form of two cans of condensed milk) precisely by taking the plan or story of his fellow prisoner as deception, as skazka. On a broader epistemological level, the maxim suggests that because camp life was fantastical, zeks learned to take experience (one’s own, or others’) as fairy tale, and simultaneously as real. The scene from “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” suggests that to receive a story as skazka is to avoid the whole problematic of advice or lessons. It is the listener who takes a story as “truth” who (somewhat counterintuitively, considering the instructive function of fairytales in Benjamin’s essay) may find (or impart) a lesson (or advice).
A particular coexistence of truth and fantasy may be common to the experience of camp survivors, as has been recently noted by Benjmain Paloff in his study of literature of concentration camps (Nazi and Soviet) and besieged cities. As he writes in a discussion of Jorge Semprún and Primo Levi, “The survivor’s eyes have been opened to a fundamental, Platonic truth, that the everyday world is an illusion, only the reality just beyond it is not one of ideal forms, but of parody, inversion, and ambiguity.” The person who has survived the camps carries within themselves a “bifurcated reality”: the camp “anti-world,” a world of impossibility, coexists with the “real” world, which now seems like an illusion.Footnote 127
Shalamov maintains that the camps produced “new psychological regularities,” and that the camp experience was unique in the Soviet twentieth century.Footnote 128 He claims that the novel details in “Lawyers’ Conspiracy” came directly from life. (Tellingly, he once defined his main task as the battle with literary influences.Footnote 129 ) Still, in many ways, camp themes and problematics developed out of the twentieth century’s earlier cataclysms, such as war and revolution; Shalamov’s contemporaries and predecessors had treated them in literature, whether documentary or fictional. Likewise, the ideologies that underpinned the creation of the Gulag emerged out of earlier ideologies. There were continuities between pre-Soviet and Stalin-era camp traditions—for instance, in the culture of the criminal world—even if the scale of intensification was enormous.Footnote 130 These continuities help explain, contra Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis, why human storytellers can speak with power and authority about the Stalin-era camps and the extreme experiences of World War II. Unlike what he discerned as happening in Europe after World War I, the human body that suffered in the camps sensed itself as part of a collective, whose only means of making itself heard was through the fragile, human voice. In their ways of connecting personal and collective experience, their techniques of memory, compactness of style, absence of analysis, and occasional fairytale motifs, Kolyma Stories displays the influence not only of those literary movements Shalamov absorbed in his youth, but also of the traditions of storytelling.
Emily Van Buskirk is Associate Professor of Russian and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University, where she also serves on the Core Faculty of Comparative Literature. Her book Lydia Ginzburg’s Prose: Reality in Search of Literature (Princeton, 2016) was co-winner of the MLA Scaglione prize (2015–16), and was named the AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Criticism in 2016. She is co-editor, with Andrei Zorin, of Lydia Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities (2012) and Prokhodiashchie kharaktery (Passing Characters) (2011), a scholarly edition of Ginzburg’s wartime prose, as well as editor of a translation of Notes from the Blockade (2016). She is currently researching Shalamov in the context of a book on documentary literature about the Soviet experience of the camps and of war.
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