Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

by John Gray

Varlam Shalamov, according to the gulag survivor Gustaw Herling ‘a writer before whom all the gulag literati, Solzhenitsyn included, must bow their heads’, was first arrested in 1929 when he was only twenty-two and still a law student at Moscow University. He was sentenced to three years’ hard labour in Solovki, an island that had been converted from an Orthodox monastery into a Soviet concentration camp. In 1937 he was again arrested and sentenced to five years in Kolyma, in northeastern Siberia. At a conservative estimate, around 3 million people perished in these Arctic camps and one third or more of the prisoners died each year. Shalamov spent seventeen years in Kolyma. His book Kolyma Tales is written in a spare, Chekhovian style, with none of the didactic tones of Solzhenitsyn’s works. Yet in occasional terse asides, and between the lines, there is a message: ‘whoever thinks that he can behave differently has never touched the true bottom of life; he has never had to breathe his last in “a world without heroes”’. Kolyma was a place in which morality had ceased to exist. In what Shalamov drily called ‘literary fairy tales’, deep human bonds are forged under the pressure of tragedy and need; but in fact no tie of friendship or sympathy was strong enough to survive life in Kolyma: ‘If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great,’ Shalamov wrote. With all meaning drained from their l...

lives, it might seem that the prisoners had no reason to go on; but most were too weak to seize the chances that came from time to time to end their lives in a way they had chosen: ‘There are times when a man has to hurry so as not to lose his will to die.’ Broken by hunger and cold, they moved insensibly to a senseless death. Shalamov wrote: ‘There is much there that a man should not know, should not see, and if he does see it, it is better for him to die.’ After his return from the camps, he spent the remainder of his life refusing to forget what he had seen. Describing his journey back to Moscow, he wrote: It was as if I had just awakened from a dream that had lasted for years. And suddenly I was afraid and felt a cold sweat from on my body. I was frightened by the terrible strength of man, his desire and ability to forget. I realised I was ready to forget everything, to cross out twenty years of my life. And when I understood this, I conquered myself, I knew I would not permit my memory to forget everything that I had seen. And I regained my calm and fell asleep. At its worst human life is not tragic but unmeaning. The soul is broken, but life lingers on. As the will fails, the mask of tragedy falls aside. What remains is only suffering. The last sorrow cannot be told. If the dead could speak we would not understand them.