Few authors are so commonly cited in anticommunist literature as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Since the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago in the early seventies, it has been invoked at every turn by everyone from the “new philosophers” of France to the Canadian self-help guru Jordan Peterson. No doubt Solzhenitsyn is a great author, from a purely literary standpoint. His reactionary politics are quite separate from this consideration, but ought to have been of much more concern to Jewish ex-Maoists like Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut (who are constantly on the lookout for signs of left antisemitism, yet seem to ignore Solzhenitsyn’s numerous antisemitic statements).
Alain Badiou, who has a bone to pick with the nouveaux philosophes, often contrasts the work of Solzhenitsyn with another chronicler of the gulags. Varlam Shalamov was an adherent of the Left Opposition in Russia, and as such was arrested as a Trotskyist — first in 1929 and then again in 1937. (Perhaps significantly, the Maoist Badiou fails to so much as mention Shalamov’s Trotskyism.) Without question, Shalamov is more redeemable at a political level than Solzhenitsyn. But his prose is no less moving, and in its spareness may in fact be stylistically superior.
You can read below an essay by Valerii Esipov from the Shalamov website, originally written in 2002. Quite good. Even includes a quote from Adorno, which is relatively rare among Russian intellectuals. Right now I’m preparing to review the new translation of Kolyma Stories, so it helps.
Cerebration or Genuflection?
Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Valerii Esipov
Russkii Sever №4
January 23, 2002
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It was almost twenty years ago, back when Brezhnev’s era was coming to a close. A small crowd, some forty people, were paying their last respects to a writer nearly forgotten by his contemporaries.
Many thought he had already died. “Varlam Shalamov is dead,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared to the whole world from America. Meanwhile, Shalamov still walked the streets of Moscow. He could be seen on Tverskaya, when he ventured out from his hole to buy groceries. He was a ghastly sight, reeling down the street like a drunk, falling over. The police force of the “model communist city,” always on guard, would lift him off the ground, and Shalamov, perfectly sober, would present a doctor’s note about his illness, Ménière’s disease, a disorder which affected his balance and had been exacerbated by years of camps. (This note, which the writer always had on him during the last years of his life, is kept in the Shalamov Museum in Vologda).
On top of that he was also almost blind and deaf, and in 1979, when he was already 72, he was put into a nursing home for the disabled. He was alone, without a family, and he was visited only by a few friends and acquaintances, as well as foreign journalists. This kept the KGB ever on the watch. At the hospital, he kept on writing poetry. It contained no politics, only Shalamov’s characteristic stubbornness:
As before, I’ll do without a candle.
And I’ll lift myself without a jack.1
Plainclothes officers were present even at the cemetery during Shalamov’s funeral. But then, only forty people attended in all.
Why bring this up now? Many details are, after all, well known. These details made anyone who has read Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and appreciated his greatness as a writer and a human being feel personally ashamed for Shalamov’s fate. Just as one felt ashamed for the lives destroyed or crippled by Stalin’s regime. Then, back in the first years of perestroika, we believed that this shame could be cathartic to our society.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case. The two sad facts I would like to relate here are entirely unconnected, but each could epitomize Russia’s current demoralization and its recent history. Continue reading