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“Banality of Evil,” Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Svetlana Boym
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Abstract

In this article, Svetlana Boym proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the everyday practices in the gulag at the crossroads of literature, political theory, and history. Boym places Soviet accounts of the gulag in the comparative context of the twentieth-century reflection on totalitarianism and terror by drawing on Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil, judgment, and imagination. There is something inassimilable in Varlam Shalamov's prose: it confronts the experience of extremity but does not offer redemption. It resorts to the mimicry of Soviet discourse and the technologies of the gulag, but only to challenge any coherent conception of Soviet subjectivity, either enthusiastic or defiant. Boym examines Shalamov's uses of clichés, attention to intonation, blemish, mimicry, and estrangement. Instead of performing ideology, Shalamov's Kolyma Tales expose the breaking points of Russian and Soviet cultural myths, giving new insight into reading historical documents and understanding gulag memory in post-Soviet Russia.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2008 , pp. 342 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

1. Adorno, Theodor, “Commitment,” in Bloch, Ernst et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London, 1980), 188-89.Google Scholar

2. Shalamov, Variant, “O novoi proze,” Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 2004-2005), 5:157 Google Scholar. All translations from Shalamov's essays are mine.

3. Shalamov's biography offers a tragic and ironic coda to the fate of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia. Shalamov wrote that his name is related to two words—shalost’ (whim, frivolity, play) and shaman; whether etymologically correct or not, this was his own poetic reinvention of his origins. The son of an Orthodox priest from Vologda in the Russian north, Shalamov rebelled against his father and, disappointed from an early age in all forms of institutional religion, chose literature instead. In February 1929 he was arrested at the underground printing press that printed the full text of Vladimir Lenin's testament criticizing Iosif Stalin. Shalamov received a five-year term for “KRTD,” the abbreviation for “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity” covered under article 58. Later Shalamov would say that the “T” in this abbreviation stood for Lev Trotskii and tribunal as well as death sentence. (This letter “T” is a key cipher [for Trotskyist] in his story “Lida.“) He is rearrested repeatedly in 1937,1938, and then again in 1943. One of the reasons for Shalamov's later arrest was his having affirmed that the émigré writer Ivan Bunin had indeed received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Once again, as in the case of Lenin's testament, Shalamov was accused of “anti-Soviet propaganda” for stating the factual or documentary truth. See E[vgenii] A. Shklovskii, Varlam Shalamov (Moscow, 1991).

4. Dariusz Tolczyk explores the history of the dual image of the gulag in, See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven, 1999). For the most recent documentary account of the history of the gulag, see Afanasiev, Iu. N., et al., eds., Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga: Massovye repressii v SSSR (Moscow, 2004)Google Scholar; Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Jakobson, Michael, Origins of the GULAG: The Soviet Prison-Camp System, 1917-1934 (Lexington, 1993)Google Scholar; Barnes, Steven A., “'In a Manner Befitting Soviet Citizens': An Uprising in the Post-Stalin Gulag,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 823-50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a discussion of diaries from the time of the Great Terror, see Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: SovietDiaries of the 1930s, trans. Carol A. Flath (New York, 1995) and Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, 2000); as well as writing on diaries: Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). For the debate on “Soviet subjectivity” and approaches to Stalinist culture, see the journal Ab Imperio 3 (2002); and for a critique of applied Foucauldianism in the Russian context, see Engelstein, Laura, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Goldstein, Jan, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)Google Scholar. For an insightful discussion of the “poetics of documentary prose,” see Toker, Leona, “Towards a Poetics of Documentary Prose—from the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies,” Poetics Today 18, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 201-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Toker, Leona, “Documentary Prose and the Role of the Reader: Some Stories of Varlam Shalamov,” in Toker, Leona, ed., Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (New York, 1994), 169-93.Google Scholar1 benefited greatly from the discussion at the conference “History and Legacy of Gulag” organized by Steven A. Barnes at the Davis Center at Harvard University, November 2006.

5. The lines come from the popular “Pesnia o rodine” (Song of our motherland), music by Isaak Dunaevskii, lyrics by Vassilii Lebedev-Kumach.

6. Shalamov, Varlam, “O proze,” Sobranie sochinenii, 6:148 Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., 6:153.

8. Arendt, Hannah, “The Abyss of Freedom and the Novus Ordo Seclorum,” The Life of the Mind, vol. 2, Willing (New York, 1978), 198-99Google Scholar. These concepts are developed throughout Arendt's work; see The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking, 5-7.1 develop a broader framework for these ideas in my forthcoming book, The Other Freedom.

9. Shalamov wrote that the “celebration of Stalinism is the aestheticization of evil [estetizatsiia zla]” in Vospominaniia, zapisnye knizhki, perepiska, sledslvennye dela (Moscow, 2004), 309.

10. Ibid., 933 (letter to Iu. M. Lotman). Shalamov's short texts on intonation include “Poeticheskaia intonatsia,” 21-30, and “Vo vlasti chuzhoi intonatsii,” in Shalamov, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:31-38. The study of intonation belongs to the interdisciplinary field of social linguistics, rhetoric, and social anthropology. The founder of Soviet musicology, Boris Asaf'ev (1884-1949), developed an interdisciplinary conception of intonation as a form of social communication and aesthetic innovation.

11. Ginzburg, Lidiia, Chebvekzapis'mennym stolom (Leningrad, 1989), 310 Google Scholar. Translation mine. This is further discussed in Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 93.

12. By the late Brezhnev era, irony and doublespeak that relied on clichés were superseded by the stiob discourse that used ersatz irony and a different intonation. On the rhetoric of stiob and the legacy of the Soviet heritage in contemporary Russian culture, see Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), 154-56Google Scholar.

13. This concept is fundamental for Arendt and occurs in one of the epigraphs to her unfinished project “On Judging.” It is discussed in Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: Interpretive Essay,” in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1982), 131, and in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, 1982), 533.

14. Shalamov, “O novoi proze,” 5:160.

15. Shalamov, Vospominaniia, 53-56.

16. In his notebooks Shalamov recounts several conversations with Solzhenitsyn, using only the initial “S” rather than identifying him using his full name. Consider, for example, the following account of “S” teaching a less successful Shalamov the way to publish his work abroad—an account that comes from Shalamov's notebooks:

For America—said my new acquaintance quickly and instructively—the hero must be religious. They even have a law about this, so that no American publisher will take a story in translation where the hero is an atheist or simply a skeptic or a man of doubts.

—And what about Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence?

—Well, but this was a long time ago … Now I looked through your stories and haven't found a single story where the hero was a man of faith. So, the voice was whispering, don't send it to America.

The small fingers of my new friend quickly leaf through the typed pages.

—I am even surprised, how can you not believe in God?

—I don't have a need for such a hypothesis, just like Voltaire.

—But after Voltaire came World War II.

—That's precisely why … Kolyma was Stalin's extermination camp. I experienced all its particularities. I could never imagine that in the twentieth century there could be a writer who would use his memoirs for personal reasons. Shalamov, Vospominania, 372-73.

In the next entries Shalamov observes: “The cheaper was the [literary] ‘device,’ the more success it had. This is the tragedy of my life” (373). Contrary to Solzhenitsyn's observation, Shalamov does portray religious prisoners in the gulag, in particular the Old Believers, with great respect, but with a different intonation. When it comes to the complex and deeply personal issue of religious belief, Shalamov's response to Solzhenitsyn is recorded in his notebooks (373, 377). A friendlier dialogue between the two writers can be found in Shalamov's letters to Solzhenitsyn, 641-74.

17. Shalamov, “O proze,” 6:152.

18. Shklovskii, Variant Shalamov, 54.

19. In fact, Shalamov's discussion of documentary prose is not dissimilar from the 1920s discussions of the “end of the novel” and the new “prose of the document” (proza dokumentd), which is not accidental given Shalamov's studies and friendship with members of the formalist circle. Shalamov avoids ostentatious literary devices of narrative framing or explicit decorative tropes.

20. Shalamov, “O proze,” 6:152; Shklovskii, Varlam Shalamov, 155-56.

21. Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Heim, Michael (New York, 1986), 65–68.Google Scholar For a discussion of “poetics of blemish,” see Boym, Common Places, 242.

22. In Arendt's view, totalitarian ideology tends to be quite successful due to the “common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous” and because a great part of the population of the totalitarian country “indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1985), 437.

23. Ibid., 462.

24. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963), 252 Google Scholar. See also Arendt, Life of the Mind.

25. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 49; Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled ‘Lolita,'“ Lolita (New York, 1977), 284.

26. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 252.

27. Vladimir Nabokov, “On Philistines and Philistinism,” Lectures on Russian Literature (New York, 1981). For a detailed discussion of cliche, poshlost', and kitsch, see Boym, Common Places, 11-20. For a discussion of the banality of evil and radical evil, see Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge, Eng., 2002).

28. There is a form of thoughtlessness, as exhibited by Eichmann, which is not mere shallowness or stupidity but an ethical problem and a key to understanding war crimes from the point of view of the perpetrators. “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected to our faculty of thought?” Aiendt asks. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:5. On this issue, see Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, 1999). On the connection between Arendt's political theory and aesthetic theory of estrangement, see Svetlana Boym, “Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Aiendt,” Poetics Today 26, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 581-611.

29. Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1988), 138-39.Google Scholar

30. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (1953): 392. For a more detailed discussion of imagination, see Arendt, Hannah, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1992), 79–85 Google Scholar; Beiner, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: Interpretative Essay,” 89-156; Caygill, Howard, The Art of Judgment (London, 1989), 366-80Google Scholar. Arendt's reading of Kant with a focus on aesthetic judgment is rather eccentric to the tradition, yet crucial for her discussion of public freedom.

31. Varlam Shalamov, “Sukhim paikom,” Sobranie sochinenii, 1:74.

32. Ibid., 1:77-78.

33. Ibid., 1:73.

34. “Kant is a widely popular camp term. It refers to something like a temporary rest, not a full rest… but the kind of work that does not make one labor to the limit of his possibilities, but instead easier, temporary work [pri kotoroi chelovek ne vybivaetsia iz sil\.” Shalamov, “Kant,” Sobranie sochinenii, 1:73.

35. Shalamov, “Sukhim paikom,” 1:83.

36. Andrei Siniavskii wrote about the prisoners of the first Soviet gulag, the Solovki camp, who put their mutilated body parts into a log of wood produced for foreign export. These were their messages to western buyers about the nature of the labor and the product. Savel'ev's fingers sent a message that nobody might have received, yet it was his only means of horrific self-expression. Siniavskii, Andrei, “Srez materiala,” in Shalamovskii sbornik (Vologda, 1994), 1:224-28.Google Scholar

37. Shalamov, “Sukhim paikom,” 1:87.

38. To complicate matters further, Fedia is telling the literal truth. Since he took Ivan Ivanovich's clothes, he now finds himself truly “dressed appropriately for the season.“ And, like the nameless convict in Savel'ev's story, he too has “loafed” appropriately for the circumstances.

39. I am grateful to Leona Toker for drawing my attention to this issue.

40. Lev Vygotsky, “Art as Catharsis,” The Psychology of Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 215. For another interesting discussion of the “aesthetic phenomenon of Shalamov,” see E. B. Volkova, “Esteticheskii fenomen Varlama Shalamova,” Mezhdunarodnye Shalamovskie chteniia (1997), 7-22; and E. B Volkova, “Paradoksy katarsisa Varlama Shalamova,” Voprosy filosofii, 1996, no. 11: 43-57.

41. The title “Sukhim paikom” has a syntactic similarity with another Russian proverb that uses a similar adverbial expression that might be invoked here: “Man does not live by bread alone” (Ne khlebom edinym zhiv chelovek).

42. Varlam Shalamov, “Lida,” Sobranie sochinenii, 1:320-21.

43. Ibid., 1:320.

44. Ibid., 1:325.

45. Ibid., 1:326-27.

46. The reasons Krist's fellow-Zeks propose for his good fortune are interesting in themselves. One sees there an accident of fate; the other believes it is a sign of the thaw, of the change in the political climate; the doctor sees the “will of god.” Ibid., 1:327.

47. Ibid., 1:326. At the moment of liberation, Krist is afraid to speak, just like the convicts at the beginning of “Dry Rations” who were incredulous over their transient luck. The most important things are not to be profaned through impurity of tone.

48. “Revelation [ozarenie] arrived suddenly as usual. Suddenly but after an enormous effort—not only intellectual, not only of the heart, but of his whole being. It arrived the way poems or the best lines of a story came to him. One thinks of them day and night without a response and then revelation comes: the joy of the exact word, the joy of solution. Not the joy of hope—for Krist had already encountered too many disappointments, errors, and backstabbings. The revelation came: Lida.” Ibid., 1:324. Both metaphors and the materiality of writing play an important role in Shalamov's story. If the physical document at the center of the story, the passport with a typo, the document of the liberated Zek, were ever to be found in some imaginary archive, it would require a “thick description“ and multiple layers of reading.

49. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in Séan Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford, Eng., 1999), 84.

50. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, eds., Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (Boston, 2000), 85-86. For more on the conception of “mimicry,” see Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 265-66. The discussion of cryptic disguise occurs throughout Speak Memory and in Nabokov's own review of his text. See Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak Memory (New York, 1989), 124-25Google Scholar; and Vladimir Nabokov, “Conclusive Evidence,” New Yorker, 28 December 1998/4 January 1999, 126. For the discussion of Nabokov's aesthetics and ethics, see Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 259-83 and 337-40.

51. Bhabha, Homi K., “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,“ The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 85–92 Google Scholar. Bhabha offers important insights into the hybridity and subversion of mimicry but his discussion is focused on the postcolonial and colonial contexts and has to be recontextualized when taken into the Stalinist context.

52. Varlam Shalamov, “Vo vlasti chuzhoi intonatsii,” Sobranie sochinenii, 5:31.

53. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York, 1973), 63. See also Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 266-74.

54. Varlam Shalamov, “Stikhi—vseobshchii iazyk,” Sobranie sochinenii, 5:52-53.

55. Faulkner, William quoted in Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (New York, 1969), 10 Google Scholar; Shalamov, “O proze,” 6:148.

56. Shalamov writes, paraphrasing Karl Marx: “History that first appeared as tragedy, reappears a second time as farce. But there is also the third embodiment of the plot: as absurd horror.” Shalamov, Vospominaniia, 309. Marx's original aphorism from “Eighteenth Brumaire” paraphrases G. W. F. Hegel, who claimed that history repeats itself. Besides the striking insight that this observation offers, it is curious that Shalamov uses formalist literary vocabulary and speaks of historic “plots.“

57. Thinking without a banister does not mean thinking without foundations, but rather, thinking without familiar props. For a discussion of banister, see an exchange between Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas in Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York, 1979), 311-15; and Hannah Arendt, “Basic Moral Propositions,“ from Lectures 1966 at the University of Chicago, Hannah Arendt's Papers, The Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., container 46, p. 024608.

58. Arendt, “The Gap between Past and Future,” Between Past andFuture, 3-4.