Quite the hiatus from blogging, eh? While the rest of the world has busily hurried to catch up to the latest gadgets and technologies, I've been exploring the antiquated trappings of paper pages. What a delight it has been. So many pages have passed underneath my fingers in the past months that my once dexterous typing skills need to be revisited. Hence I find myself here, putting down my trails of thought into cohesive sentences that I've long since neglected to do.
Beginning with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's direct rebuttal of his country's hapless circumstances during the gulag years, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published by the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir, an amazing feat that took the courage of an author and an editor in a sea of censorship. The novel takes us back to gulag camp life in the amount of time you could spend discussing petty bourgeois trivialaties in a cafe. Don't let this guilt you into reading it, mind you. This master of debate clearly argues in favor of the very freedom to choose how one might spend their free time while painting the picture of daily life for many Soviet citizens under Comrade Stalin. A child of the Revolution (Solzhenitsyn's 1918 birth year was perhaps as foretelling as it was ironic), he spent 8 of his formidable years doing hard labor (this on the heels of years spent as a young Communist and an officer of the Red Army during WWII) and another three in exile. "One Day in the Life..." seeks to make no friends, nor enemies. Its heroes are, afterall, are merely attempting to survive in the harsh climate of Siberia despite being slapped with 5, 10 or 20 year sentences as agitators, conspirators and traitors of the state. If you're after the average Joe (or, erm, rather Ivan) experience of life in the Gulags, and you've got only a few hours to spare for a quick Soviet history lesson, this is the book for you. You might even find that your own humanity prohibits you from enjoying that usual cup of coffee at the cafe afterwards, if only for a day.
On the other hand, if you find yourself wanting more of the astute observations of a '58er' (political prisoner, treated with the ultimate disdain by authorities) that can only come from years spent wallowing in virtual death camps and watching most every ounce of humanity dissipate from every pore of the body, then pick up the abridged version of his "Gulag Archipelago". In so doing, you might feel that you are giving back a particle of a shred of an ounce of dignity and humanity that was virtually forever lost in the lives of millions, if not of a nation. It is only then that the wheels begin to turn as you ponder what, indeed, is life's little secret. Is it the contentment that comes when our bellies are well fed and our bodies are attractive? When bellies are given nothing more than dirty dishwater and a stale slice of rye and exterior beauty leads to rape by protectorates, surely there must be more to life. Is it the knowledge that we have gained from the books we've read and the people we've encountered? When books and people are taken away and all that is left is a smattering of memories too distant to recollect amidst constant hunger pains and frostbite, this too cannot be the secret. Perhaps it lies in the things that we do not know and cannot know, but can only observe. The adrenaline of watching your bunk mates shot, the way the body shuts down in the snow as it prepares to cease working in its final minutes, the piercing pain of felling trees with only rope, bones and the shadows of what were once other men.
These books are the snapshots straight from Solzhenitsyn's mind- a mind which refused to quit despite the shock of what the eyes observed. A rare primary source document mixed with large amounts of secondary sources (storytelling from other prisoners who the author encountered through the years) and a healthy dose of revenge from the pen. If the Gulag taught any lessons to its captives, those of us who sit comfortably in freedom cannot begin to understand them. By peering through the lense that IS Solzhenitsyn while our fingers rapidly turn page after page- nearly fearing what the next paragraph holds- we can observe by proxy. While his statistics are debatable if not impossible to know more often than not, and his ocassionally displayed superiority can be irksome at times, an open mind will quickly accept that this man, along with some 15 million others, know more about life than most- an irony that comes from those who have seen their own graves.
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Thanks for the reminder of Solzhenitsyn's accomplishment: bringing the USSR -- and the West -- face-to-face with the Gulag. My first reading of him in the mid-1970's changed the way I view the world.
ReplyDeleteI am happy to have provided the reminder. As you say, Solzhenitsyn did indeed open many eyes within his own land, let alone in the West. Sadly, many in the West failed to acknowledge the Gulag atrocities and even to this day most people know very little details other than the mainstay catch phrases of 'gulag' or 'Siberia' (which are so ubiquitous that I remember being told that I should be happy to eat my vegetables as those in Siberia had none!). Even more interesting is that many Soviets (and young Russians today) did not confront this aspect of their own history. For many reasons, ex-prisoners were often mum on the subject and the oral history has in large part been neglected. For his own part, Solzhenitsyn realized this would be the case and begins his 'Gulag Archipelago' with the thought that it might serve as a reminder to some and a lesson for future generations.
ReplyDeleteAh- I could go on but I'll stop :) Thanks for the comment!