Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

“I have a book for you.”

  Nina Semionovna dug about in her desk drawer and got out something that looked like a prayer book.

  “The New Testament?”

  “No, not the New Testament,” she said slowly, and her green eyes began to shine. “No, not the New Testament. It’s Blok. Take it.” Reverently and shyly, I took hold of the little dirty-gray volume in the small-format Poet’s Library series. I passed my fingers over the spine. My fingers were frostbitten—the skin still had a miner’s coarseness, so I couldn’t sense the shape or the size of the book. The volume had two paper bookmarks in it.

  “Read those two poems out loud to me. Where the bookmarks are.”

  “ ‘A Girl Was Singing in a Church Choir.’ ‘In a Distant Blue Bedchamber.’ I used to know those poems.”

  “Oh did you? Recite them.”

  I began reciting but instantly forgot the lines. My memory refused to let me have the verses. The world I had left for the hospital had done without poetry. There were days in my life, quite a few, when I couldn’t remember and didn’t want to remember any poetry. I was glad of that, it was a liberation from a burden I didn’t need, a burden that wasn’t necessary for my struggle in life’s lower stories, its cellars, its cesspits. Poetry was only a hindrance for me there.

  “Read them from the book.”

  I read out both poems, and Nina Semionovna burst into tears.

  “You understand that it was the boy who died, he died. Go away and read Blok.”

  I devoured Blok, rereading him all night and all during my shift. Apart from “A Girl” and “Blue Bedchamber” there was “Spell by Fire and Darkness,” verses of fire dedicated to Volkhova. These verses aroused utterly new forces. Three days later I returned the book to Nina Semionovna.

  “You thought I was giving you a New Testament. I do have one. Here. . . .” A little volume that looked like the Blok volume, but was dark brown instead of dirty gray, was extracted from the desk drawer. “Read the apostle Paul. To the Corinthians. . . . Here it is.”

  “I don’t have any religious feeling, Nina Semionovna. But of course I have the greatest respect—”

  “What? You, a person who has lived a thousand lives? Who has been resurrected? You don’t have religious feelings? Haven’t you seen enough tragedies here?”

  Nina Semionovna’s face became wrinkled and dark; her gray hair became disheveled and stuck out from under her white doctor’s bonnet.

  “You will read books . . . magazines.”

  “The magazine of the Moscow patriarchate?”

  “No, not the Moscow patriarchate, but from elsewhere. . . .”

  She gave a wave of her white sleeve, which looked like an angel’s wing as it pointed heavenward. . . . Where to? Beyond the wire of the zone? Beyond the hospital? Beyond the limits of the free settlement? Overseas? Over the mountains? Beyond the boundaries of earth and heaven?

  “No,” I said inaudibly, chilled by my inner devastation. “Is the only way out of human tragedies a religious one?” Phrases were turning in my brain, hurting my brain cells. I thought I had forgotten such words a long time ago. And now the words had reappeared: more important, they were submitting to my own will. This was something of a miracle. I repeated one more time, as if reading something written or printed in a book: “Is the only way out of human tragedies a religious one?”

  “The only way, the only one. Go.”

  I left the room, putting the New Testament in my pocket, for some reason thinking about something quite different from the Corinthians, the apostle Paul, or the inexplicable miracle of the human memory. When I imagined what this “something else” might be, I realized that I had come back to the world of the camps, that the possibility of a “religious way out” was too fortuitous and too unworldly. After putting the New Testament in my pocket I was thinking about only one thing: was I going to get supper today?

  Olga Tomasovna’s warm fingers took hold of my elbow. Her dark eyes were laughing.

  “Go, go,” she said as she moved me toward the exit. “You’re not converted yet. People like you don’t get supper from us.”

  The next day I gave Nina Semionovna her New Testament back; with a brusque gesture she put the book away in the desk drawer.

  “Tomorrow you finish your practical. Let me sign your card, your report book. And here’s a present for you: a stethoscope.”

  1963

  THE HIGHEST PRAISE

  ONCE UPON a time there was a beautiful maiden: Maria Mikhailovna Dobroliubova. Blok wrote about her in his diary; the ringleaders of the revolution listened to her and obeyed. Had her fate been different, had she not perished, the Russian Revolution might have taken a different direction. If only it had.

  Every Russian, and not only Russian, generation produces the same number of giants and nonentities. Of geniuses and talents. It is the job of time to give a genius or a talent a path to follow, or to kill them casually, or to suffocate them with praise and with imprisonment.

  Maria Dobroliubova is no lesser a figure than Sofia Perovskaya, is she? But Sofia Perovskaya’s name is on the signs attached to the street-lights, while Maria Dobroliubova is forgotten.

  Even her brother, the poet and sectarian Aleksandr Dobroliubov, is less forgotten.

  A beauty who was educated at the Smolny Institute, Maria Dobroliubova had a good understanding of her place in life. She was endowed with a very great sense of self-sacrifice, with a willingness to face life or death.

  As a young girl she worked with the starving—as a nurse in the Russo-Japanese War.

  All these tests merely heightened the demands, physical and moral, that she made on herself.

  Between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, Maria associated with the Socialist Revolutionaries. She didn’t go in for propaganda. Minor activity didn’t fit the temperament of a young woman who by now had experience of life’s storms.

  Terror, an “act,” was what she dreamed of, what she demanded. She made the leaders agree. “A terrorist’s life span is six months,” as Savinkov [11] used to say. She was given a revolver and went out to commit her “act.”

  But she couldn’t find the strength to kill. Her entire past life rebelled against this ultimate decision.

  Her struggle to save the lives of those dying of starvation, her struggle to save the lives of the wounded.

  But now she had to turn death into life.

  Her living work with people and her heroic past were a hindrance in preparing herself to be an assassin.

  You had to be too much of a theoretician, a dogmatist, in order to distance yourself from real life. Maria could see that she was being manipulated by someone else’s will; this stunned her, and she felt ashamed of herself.

  She couldn’t summon the strength to fire a gun. And she was afraid of living in disgrace, in an acute state of mental crisis. Maria Dobroliubova put the barrel in her own mouth and fired.

  She was twenty-nine.

  I first heard this radiant, passionate Russian name in Butyrki prison.

  Aleksandr Georgievich Andreyev, the general secretary of the society of prerevolutionary political prisoners, told me about Maria.

  “There are rules in terror. If for any reason an assassination attempt has failed, if the bomb-thrower lost his nerve or the fuse didn’t work, or anything else, then you don’t make the same assassin try again. If you use the same terrorists as in the failed first attempt, you can only expect it to go wrong.”

  “How about Kaliayev?”[12]

  “Kaliayev was the exception.”

  Experience, statistics, and underground activity tell us that it is possible only once to summon the self-sacrificial inner strength needed for such an act. Maria Dobroliubova’s fate is the best-known example of this in the oral anthology of our underground world.

  “He’s the sort of man we used to recruit for active service,” said the silver-haired, dark-skinned Andreyev, pointing brusquely at Stepanov, who was sitting on his bunk with his arms around his knees. Stepano
v was a young electrician at the Moscow Power Station. He was taciturn and unremarkable, but his dark blue eyes had an unexpected fire in them. He took his bowl of food in silence, he ate in silence, he accepted an extra portion in silence, he spent hours sitting on the edge of his bunk with his arms around his knees, thinking his own thoughts. Nobody in the cell knew what Stepanov had been arrested for, not even the extrovert historian Aleksandr Filippovich Ryndich.

  There were eighty people in a cell meant for twenty-five. The iron bunks fixed to the walls were covered with sheets of wood, painted gray to match the walls. There was a stack of sheets of wood around the piss pot and by the door, and these were laid as beds almost end to end over the passage between the bunks, leaving just two openings so people could dive down under the bunks, where there were more sheets of wood with people sleeping on them. The space under the bunks was called the “metro.”

  Opposite the door with its spy hole and “food flap” was an enormous barred window with an iron “muzzle.” The commandant on duty, when he inspected the new twenty-four-hour shift, would check the state of the bars acoustically by running over them from top to bottom the key that was used to lock the cell. This particular sound was joined by the clank of the door lock, which took two turns of the key at night and one turn in the day, as well as the jingling of the key against a brass belt buckle, to remind us what buckles were for. The final sound was a warning signal by an escort guard to his colleagues when making a journey down the endless corridors of Butyrki. These were the three elements composing a symphony of concrete prison music, which you remembered for the rest of your life.

  Those who lived in the metro spent the daytime sitting on the edge of the bunks, in other people’s spaces, as they waited for one of their own. During the day about fifty people lay on sheets of wood. These were men waiting their turn to sleep and live in a real space. The first men to come to the cell got the best places. The best places were considered to be those by the window and farthest from the door. Sometimes the interrogations went quickly and the detainee didn’t have time to move up to a window space, where he would get a draft of fresh air. In winter this visible stratum of breathable air shyly but quickly slid down the glass panes to somewhere below; in summer it was just as visible where it met the stifling sweaty sultry air of the crowded cell. It could take six months to get to these blissful places: from the metro to the stinking piss pot, from the piss pot to the stars!

  When the winters were cold the experienced residents, preferring warmth to light, kept to the middle of the cell. Every day someone was brought in and someone was taken away. Having a turn for a place was not just a pastime. No, justice was the most important thing in the world.

  In prison a man is sensitive. A colossal amount of nervous energy is spent on trivia, on an argument about a space, and the argument can develop into hysterics or a brawl. And think of the physical and mental strength, astuteness, intuition, risks expended and taken to get hold of and keep possession of a piece of metal, a pencil stub, a pencil lead—things forbidden by the prison rules and therefore all the more desirable. Such minor things become a test of your personality.

  Nobody here buys a space or hires someone to clean the cell. That is strictly forbidden. There are no rich and no poor, no generals and no soldiers.

  Nobody is allowed to decide for himself to occupy a space when it becomes free. An elected elder makes these decisions. He has the right to allot the best space to someone who has just arrived, if that person is elderly.

  The cell elder has a talk with each newcomer. It is very important to reassure the newcomer, to keep his spirits up. It’s always easy to tell who has been in a prison cell before: they are calmer, they have a livelier, firmer gaze; they examine their new cellmates with obvious interest, for they know that a common cell is not particularly threatening; they can distinguish faces and people immediately, at first sight. But those who have come for the first time need a few days before the prison cell stops being a faceless, hostile, and incomprehensible place. . . .

  At the beginning of February 1937, or it may have been the end of January, the door to cell sixty-seven opened: a man with silver hair, dark eyebrows, and dark eyes, wearing an unbuttoned winter coat with an old caracul lamb collar, stood on the threshold. He was clutching a canvas bag, what the Ukrainians call a torba. He was old, sixty. The cell elder showed the newcomer his place—not in the metro or near the piss pot but next to me in the middle of the cell.

  The silver-haired man thanked the elder: he appreciated what he had done. His black eyes had a youthful sheen. He greedily inspected people’s faces, as if he had spent a long time in solitary confinement and was at last filling his lungs with the pure air of the prison’s common cell.

  There was no fear, alarm, or mental pain. The worn collar of his coat, the crumpled jacket proved that their owner knew, and had known before, what prison was like, and that he had been arrested at his home.

  “When were you arrested?”

  “Two hours ago. At home.”

  “You’re a Socialist Revolutionary, are you?”

  The man burst into loud laughter. His teeth were shining white: perhaps dentures?

  “You’ve all become face-recognition experts.”

  “That’s what prison teaches you!”

  “Yes, I’m an SR, and a right-wing one, too.[13] It’s wonderful that you know the difference. People your age don’t always have a proper grounding in such an important question.” Then he added, looking straight into my eyes with his unblinking, burning black eyes, “Right, right-wing. A genuine one. I don’t understand the left SRs. I have respect for Maria Spiridonova,[14] for Proshian,[15] but everything they did. . . . My name is Andreyev, Aleksandr Georgievich.”

  Aleksandr Georgievich had a good look at his neighbors and summed them up in brief, brusque, precise assessments.

  He was perfectly aware of the real nature of the repressions.

  We always washed our clothes together in the bathhouse, the famous Butyrki bathhouse that was covered in yellow tiles on which it was impossible to write or scratch anything. But the door served as our postbox; it was iron inside and wood outside. The door was covered in all sorts of carved messages. From time to time these messages were planed or scraped off, just as a blackboard is wiped clean; new boards were nailed up and the postbox was back in full operation.

  The bathhouse was a great treat. In Butyrki prison all those who were still under investigation did their own washing: that was a long-standing tradition. There was no official “service” in this respect, and no laundry was allowed from home. Naturally, there was no “depersonalized” camp underwear here, either. You dried your clothes in the cell. We were given plenty of time to wash our bodies and our clothes. Nobody was in any hurry.

  When we were in the bathhouse I took a good look at Andreyev’s body. It was supple, dark-skinned, not at all elderly, yet he was over sixty.

  We never missed a single exercise period. You were allowed to stay in your cell, lie down, say you were ill. But both I and Aleksandr Georgievich knew from personal experience that exercise periods must not be missed.

  Every day, before dinner, Andreyev would walk up and down the cell, from the window to the door. He did this mostly before dinner.

  “It’s an old habit. A thousand paces a day is my norm. Prison rations. Two laws in prison: don’t lie down too much and don’t eat too much. A prisoner should be half starved, so he doesn’t feel any weight in his stomach.”

  “Aleksandr, did you know Savinkov?”

  “Yes, I did. I met him when I was abroad, at Gershuni’s [16] funeral.”

  Andreyev didn’t have to explain to me who Gershuni was. I knew the names of everybody he ever mentioned and had a good idea who they were. That pleased Andreyev greatly. His black eyes shone and he became animated.

  The SR Party had a tragic fate. The people who lost their lives for it, whether terrorists or propagandists, were the best in Russia, the flower of the Russi
an intelligentsia. Their moral qualities made all these people who were sacrificing or had sacrificed their lives worthy successors to the heroic People’s Will, made them successors of Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Mikhailov, and Kibalchich.[17]

  These people went through the fire of the most savage repressions—after all, according to Savinkov’s statistics, a terrorist has a life expectancy of six months. They died as heroically as they had lived. Gershuni, Sozonov,[18] Kaliayev, Spiridonova, Zilberberg [19] were all personalities of the same stature as Vera Figner or Morozov,[20] Zhelyabov or Perovskaya.

  The SR Party played a major part in overthrowing the autocracy, too. But history took another path, and there lies the profound tragedy of the party and its members.

  These thoughts often occurred to me. Meeting Andreyev confirmed these thoughts.

  “What do you consider to be the most memorable day in your life?”

  “I don’t even have to think before I answer, I’ve got a response ready-made. It’s March 12, 1917. Before the war I’d been tried in Tashkent. Under article 102 of the code. I got six years’ hard labor. The hard-labor prison was first Pskov, then Vladimir. March 12, 1917, I was released. Today is March 12, 1937, and I’m back in prison!”

  The Butyrki prisoners moving about in front of us were in some ways familiar and in other ways alien to Andreyev. They aroused pity, hostility, and compassion in him.

  Arkadi Dzidzievsky, the famous Arkasha of the civil war, was dreaded by all the batkas, the nationalist leaders in Ukraine. This was a surname cited by Vyshinsky when he was examining the accused in the Piatakov show trial. If the future corpse was cited by name, that meant that Arkadi Dzidzievsky was alive at the time. He was half insane after going through the Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons. His puffy old man’s hands smoothed some colored handkerchiefs on his knees. There were three of them. “These are my daughters: Nina, Lida, Nata.”

  Take Sveshnikov, an engineer from Chemical Construction, who was told by his interrogator, “Here’s your fascist place, bastard.” Or a high-ranking railwayman, Gudkov: “I had some records of Trotsky’s speeches, and my wife informed on me. . . .” Or Vasia Zhavoronkov: “The instructor in the politics circle asked me, ‘If there was no Soviet power, Zhavoronkov, where would you be working?’ I said, ‘I’d be working in the depot, the same place as now. . . .’ ”