6
When the writer and scholar Andrei Siniavsky came home from the strict regime camp where he had served six years (1965–1971), he felt as though he had been split into pieces:
And I began to weep . . . not for my lost youth but because of the ridge, as I called it, that had suddenly been erected in my mind, splitting me into two halves, into a before and an after my exit from behind the barbed wire, as though foreseeing how difficult it would be to return from there to people and what a chasm now lay between us and them.1
Siniavsky’s major philological works were all written or conceived in the camp, and these works both reflected his camp experience and mourned other victims of the Soviet terror. Following Soviet culture through to its final stages and beyond, Siniavsky’s scholarly writings deserve consideration on a par with his literary fiction, which has received more attention.2 In both its quality and quantity, Siniavsky’s camp output is remarkable, but not entirely unique. There are deep analogies to Siniavsky’s camp oeuvre in the works of other authors who also spent years in camp or exile. They feature the unrestrained, radical “theses that sharply contradicted the conventional wisdom,” which one of these ex-convicts, Dmitry Likhachev, believed to be characteristic of the writings that were produced in the gulag.3 Focused on Siniavsky, this chapter also illuminates a fascinating but largely forgotten group of cultural activists of the Thaw who were members of Siniavsky’s circle before his arrest. It has become traditional to distinguish several strands in the Soviet scholarship and criticism: official, émigré, and dissident. I believe that camp criticism represented an additional, separate, and original strand of twentieth-century Russian scholarship.
Siniavsky and His Company
The son of an active member of the revolutionary movement who was imprisoned, with tragic results, in 1952 (see chapter 3), Andrei Siniavsky was a doctoral student at the elite Institute of World Literature in Moscow. One of his fellow doctoral students was Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, also an expert on Soviet literature.4 According to another classmate, Siniavsky “amazed his peers with his knowledge of the literature that we did not know—the symbolists, the Silver Age.”5 For his dissertation, Siniavsky chose Maxim Gorky’s mammoth novel The Life of Klim Samgin, the story of an intellectual protagonist who falls in love with a female leader of the Khlysty sectarian community. This erotic and heretical plotline follows a long-standing Russian literary tradition, but Gorky’s longest novel continues to baffle critics. The Russian peasantry and its unorthodox religiosity had enchanted many Russian and early Soviet authors, just as they had impressed Siniavsky’s father in his populist youth, and this seems to have been one of Siniavsky’s lifelong interests.6
The Thaw was a time when a routine human experience of getting together with a group of friends felt like a new and radical phenomenon. According to a well-informed participant, Liudmila Alexeyeva, friends’ companies “emerged in a flash in the mid-1950s, stayed vibrant for a decade, then faded away. . . . They performed the functions of publishing house, salons, billboards, confessional booths, concert halls,” and much else: an improvised, highly personal version of the Habermasian public sphere in a society where this sphere had been suppressed for half a century.7 A graduate student of history in the late 1950s, Alexeyeva describes her own “company,” in which recent returnees from the camps debated the events of the Thaw together with future writers, bards, and human rights activists. In the next decade, some of these people went on to become cultural stars and some, political prisoners. Two young and ambitious authors, Yuly Daniel and Siniavsky, both of whom, as it would later be discovered, were smuggling their works abroad at the time, were at the center of this network. Siniavsky’s student, and later a superstar of Soviet popular culture, Vladimir Vysotsky, entertained their mutual friends by singing camp songs, some of them authentic: “Vysotsky did not compose his own songs at that time. He sang old camp songs . . . but he sang them in such a way, slow and passionate, that they felt new and tragic, like those songs that he would compose in the future.”8 From 1961, the earliest songs that Vysotsky wrote himself were all stylizations of camp songs, blatnye pesni.9 Using first-person narration and singing in the low, hypermasculine voice of a convict and drunkard, Vysotsky inserted into his songs references to the geography of the gulag, concepts that were specific to camp life, and a recognizable aesthetics of this folkish genre. It was due to Vysotsky that the companies of the 1960s sang “camp lyrics” in their living rooms or around the campfire, and he owed his popularity to the fact that broad circles of the intelligentsia at the time were longing for an art that would express their preoccupation with the victims of the Soviet system. In a 1964 song, “Not Everyone Was Admitted to Our Circle,” Vysotsky told the story of a victim whose friend had turned out to be an informer; the narrator, now in a prison or camp, is contemplating revenge. Siniavsky remembered how Vysotsky sang this song on Yuly Daniel’s birthday shortly before the real-life arrest of Siniavsky and Daniel, which would enact the song’s plot (one of their friends turned out to be an informer).10 Vysotsky’s lifelong efforts brought this folkish art into the mainstream of literature and theater. Siniavsky took his literary pseudonym, Abram Tertz, from one such camp song about a legendary Jewish thief. He encouraged Vysotsky to write and play these songs, and was disappointed to find out later, after his release from the camp, that Vysotsky had not committed himself exclusively to this genre. Like his teacher, Vysotsky was often on the edge of imprisonment because of his dissident poetry and deviant lifestyle. He was lucky enough to avoid arrest, but the way he performed his camp songs convinced at least one exprisoner, Vadim Tumanov, who had spent six years in the Kolyma camps, that the singer must certainly be a fellow ex-prisoner.
A remarkable personality, Tumanov was a commercial sailor and champion boxer before he was imprisoned in 1948. In the 1960s, after a long odyssey involving fights, flights, retrials, and narrow escapes, this charismatic survivor launched a gold-mining “cooperative” in Kolyma that made him into one of the first Soviet millionaires. In 1977, when Siniavsky was already teaching at the Sorbonne, Tumanov took a group that included Vysotsky, the star poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and several scientists on a guided tour through the ruins of the Kolyma camps. Described in Tumanov’s memoir in exhaustive detail, this tour was a veritable pilgrimage. They visited a makeshift camp cemetery, where wooden boards bearing the personal identification numbers of the dead convicts written in indelible copying pencil marked the graves spreading over the permafrost to the horizon. Yevtushenko took one of these boards as a souvenir, and kept it on his desk in his house near Moscow, wrote Tumanov.11 Vysotsky composed several songs about Kolyma. His plans to make a film about the camps never came to fruition, but he did coauthor a novel about them, The Black Candle.12 One of his most popular songs takes as its setting the Vacha River, where Tumanov’s ex-convicts panned for gold in the tundra: “I go to the Vacha weeping, I return from the Vacha grinning.”
Another friend and a member of Siniavsky’s “company” was the art historian Igor Golomstock. He was five years old when his father was arrested in 1934. Several years later, his mother would voluntarily move to the gulag zone of Kolyma together with her son and second husband; she worked there in a camp as a doctor. Golomstock spent four adolescent years, 1939–1943, among the camp guards, the prisoners, and their children. He makes it clear in his memoirs that these years were formative for his “character, preoccupations, and worldview,” and particularly for his future interest in cultural history. In the paranoiac atmosphere of the 1950s, when some of their friends were reporting on them, Golomstock and Siniavsky could trust one another as fellow sons of political prisoners. Golomstock was one of the first experts to appreciate the work of Boris Sveshnikov, another ex-prisoner (see chapter 5); he also introduced Sveshnikov to Siniavsky. Golomstock and Siniavsky shared an interest in the folklore and writings of the noncanonical religious movement, the so-called Old Belief. From the summer of 1958, they sailed the north Russian rivers in pursuit of rare Old Belief manuscripts. On the way to these hidden treasures, they visited the old sites of the gulag, which reminded Golomstock of his Kolyma childhood. Siniavsky and Golomstock coauthored the first Soviet book on Pablo Picasso, presenting him mainly as the author of Guernica and other tragic images of the war. A few years later, Golomstock took part in the Daniel and Siniavsky trial and was convicted for refusing to cooperate with the court. After his emigration to England, he turned to the history of unofficial Soviet art and published a pioneering comparison of the arts under totalitarian regimes, from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union and China.13
When his Moscow friend, psychiatrist Miron Etlis, also a former prisoner, felt the need to escape from his jealous wife, Golomstock recommended that he go to Kolyma, as his mother had done decades earlier. Etlis followed this advice, and in fact ended up settling there permanently. Decades later, Etlis became the leader of the local Magadan branch of the Memorial Society, a major organization that deals with the memory of the victims of the Soviet and post-Soviet states. In 1989, he negotiated with the émigré sculptor Ernst Neizvestny the erection in Kolyma of a fascinating monument to the victims of the Soviet terror, The Mask of Sorrow (see chapter 9).14 This company of friends was consequential.
Liubimov and Moscow
Siniavsky’s novella Liubimov (1963) presents the well-known events of Russian revolutionary history as a series of miracles, ghostly apparitions, and collective hallucinations. Lenia, a little man in a provincial town, has the power to hypnotize the local population. He confiscates all property in Liubimov, institutes round-the-clock surveillance over citizens, and organizes their collective labor. Supported by the hypnotically induced enthusiasm of the masses, his regime lasts until everyone, the leader and the masses, has exhausted their transformative energies. Curiously, Lenia received his hypnotic skills in the local library, where he borrowed an old mystical book; its author, a mid-nineteenth-century Freemason, visits the library as a ghost. The librarian, a hybrid character who is sometimes under Lenia’s hypnoses and sometimes possessed by the nobleman’s ghost, narrates the whole story. The Soviet government attacks the rebellious Liubimov, but Lenia is able to hypnotize its spies and soldiers. Lenia’s rival and prototype, Lenin, is presented as a werewolf. The Liubimov citizens take the waters of the local river for champagne and Lenya for a dictator, but they feel happy only for so long as the hypnosis lasts. In the meantime, Lenia marries the local beauty. It then becomes clear that he is more interested in men than women, and so he turns a Soviet agent into his closest friend. The story ends when an Orthodox priest prays the Masonic ghost back into his grave, Lenia loses his power, and Soviet tanks raze Liubimov to the ground. An attempt to deconstruct the improbable course of Russian history by magical means, the novella anticipates many subsequent efforts of the writers who would become known in the 1980s or later.
Siniavsky’s international renown as a writer, a dissident, and, after his emigration, a professor at the Sorbonne has overshadowed extraordinary works that his friend Yuly Daniel wrote before their arrests. Siniavsky’s fellow defendant in the trial of 1966, Daniel spent five years in the camps. Among the stories that brought him to the Soviet court was his novella This Is Moscow Speaking, which he composed sometime between 1960, when its action takes place, and 1962, when he published it in Washington, D.C. under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. Born in 1925 and trained in philology, Daniel fought and was seriously wounded in World War II. He donated elements of his own biography—combat, wounding, womanizing, and freethinking—to Tolia, the narrator of This Is Moscow Speaking. A fictional memoir of fantastic events, the novella starts with a company of friends holidaying at the dacha, drinking, flirting, and discussing politics. Suddenly, the radio announces: “This is Moscow speaking. . . . By decree of the Supreme Soviet, Sunday 16 August, 1960 is declared Open Murder Day.” This decree endows every citizen of the USSR with the right to kill any other citizen, “with the exception of persons who are listed in the attachment to this decree.” Initially the protagonist, Tolia cannot believe his ears. His friends’ responses are varied. One friend, a member of the Communist Party, dismisses the broadcast as an American provocation. Another friend, a Jew, worries that the decree is the opening shot in a new anti-Semitic campaign. A fellow resident of Tolia’s communal apartment, a survivor of the gulag, approves of the decree because he believes that “it is the right and duty of the state to pass its power into the hands of the people.” Tolia has no patience for any of these ideas. “Didn’t you learn anything in your camp?” he feels like asking his neighbor. Tolia’s lover suggests that she and Tolia use Open Murder Day as an opportunity to kill her husband so as to get him out of the way. Tolia is appalled, and shows her the door; she is contemptuous, and calls him a “sissy.” Having lost his girlfriend to Open Murder Day before it has even started, Tolia is astonished: “We cheated on him . . . we spent his money on drink, we ridiculed him . . . but to kill him?”
Whatever the ideological framework, which nobody understands in any case, people use Open Murder Day for sorting out their mundane troubles and settling personal scores. Tolia, who killed Germans during the war, reflects on the nature of hatred. Is there anybody whom he hates as much as his former girlfriend hates her husband? He becomes aware of his hatred toward the authority figures of his time, the fat, inarticulate members of the Soviet elite. “What about them? Can we forgive them? What about 1937? . . . They think that since they’ve shat on the grave of the Mustached One, that makes [Stalin] all right?” A recent soldier, Tolia contemplates taking revenge on the Soviet authorities. In anticipation of Open Murder Day, his fantasy reverts to his wartime experiences, the naked physical aggression of a foot soldier with a grenade and a machine gun.
Collective remembrances of the terror of the 1930s, the sacrifice of the 1940s, and the madness of the 1950s punctuate the narrative. More interestingly, Tolia sees the Moscow of the early 1960s as poised on the verge of a new cycle of terror. He takes his metaphors from architecture. The neoclassical edifices of Stalinist architecture still dominate Moscow, but the newest constructions that, as they crumbled into disrepair in subsequent decades, would go down in history under the name of the Khrushchev slums (khrushchoby) embody the hope of emancipation from the Soviet terror. Daniel lists the modest symbols of this hope: imported Finnish furniture, translations of Hemingway, and the sleek trousers that were in fashion at the time. But this world of new prosperity is threatened by the menacing, monumental gray structures that were built in the 1930s. With a “dark sense of their superiority,” these buildings are waiting only for their architect, Stalin, to rise up from the grave and to level the tender green shoots of new life. The fashionable, modern housing of the Thaw would be helpless against the impending attack of the grand multicolumn skyscrapers of the Stalin era. This feeling of the imminent return of the terror and the fragility of the post-Stalinist order would become a permanent feature of late twentieth-century Russia.
Daniel speculates about the nature of violence throughout the story. In a dialogue with a friend, Tolia formulates a hypothesis about Open Murder Day as a technique whose objective is to accustom the population to violence, to make violence routine. The difference between Stalinism and Open Murder Day, he says, is the cynical absence of an ideological justification of violence in the case of the latter. There was “a sauce” in 1937, an ideological dressing that endowed the events with meaning, at least for true believers. But in the case of the coming Open Murder Day, no explanation was given. “Now we are on full self-service,” thinks Tolia.
A week or two later, Tolia notices a strange agitation in the streets. Restless groups of people sing songs, declaim verses, share jokes, and brew their anxiety in a carnivalesque way that was typical for the Thaw. In a warped way, the anticipated horror is transformed into a cheerful solidarity shared by “companies” of friends, these new communities of fear, mourning, and resistance. Daniel’s novella includes damning portraits of Thaw-era bohemians, of their empty talk, and the unlimited compromises they are prepared to make in order to accommodate the regime. Tolia uses or even invents a symbol capturing this combination of imaginary freedom and actual conformism characteristic of the Thaw-era intelligentsia: “figa v karmane,” an obscene finger gesture performed inside the pocket, a stronger Russian version of “tongue in cheek.” The solidarity of the post-Stalin generation does not facilitate but rather obstructs collective action. Gradually, Tolia realizes that the Open Murder Day has failed to bring the “full freedom of homicide.” Fending off an attack by a stranger on Red Square, next to Lenin’s mausoleum, Tolia realizes that this man is an assassin sent by the party authorities to kill him, Tolia.
After a prolonged period of stunned silence and shock in which nobody mentions the events of Open Murder Day, Tolia’s friends gather for another drinking party, and someone breaks the taboo on mentioning Open Murder Day. This prompts an outpouring of rumors and speculations about the events of that day. There is talk of secret lists of victims; mass murders of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and Russians in Central Asia; a boycott of Open Murder Day in the Baltic republics; and plans to make Open Murder Day an annual event. A survivor, Tolia celebrates his victory with a new girlfriend. But his would-be assassin also survives; Tolia did not kill him, even though he had the opportunity to do so.
Daniel and Siniavsky wrote their stories as anti-utopias, and they complement one another. Liubimov is about symbolic and Moscow about physical violence. Liubimov is about the provinces and Moscow about the capital. Liubimov is about the past and Moscow about the future. Moscow is narrated by a survivor of catastrophe and Liubimov by its historian. The key literary references in both novellas belong to the vast genre of satirical anti-utopia; both mention Don Quixote by Cervantes. In Liubimov’s library, people talk ceaselessly about Ernest Hemingway (his novel Fiesta is specifically mentioned) and Lion Feuchtwanger. Preparing for Open Murder Day in Moscow, people read Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France and an unnamed novel by Aldous Huxley, most probably a reference to Brave New World.
Tolia’s fictional father is a Bolshevik commissar who perished in the gulag in 1936. Yuly Daniel’s actual father was a Yiddish writer who died of consumption in 1940 in Kiev and therefore escaped both the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet terror. Yuly Daniel’s son has become a leader of the Memorial Society. Passed through generations of this family, the memory of terror generates fictional narratives and social activism, but does not seem to weaken or fade. A unique feature of Daniel’s and Siniavsky’s narratives, however, is that we have authentic and detailed documents of authorial intentions and readers’ responses: the records of the famous trial of 1965–1966.
In his testimony, Daniel repeatedly insisted that he wanted to warn the public that the Stalinist “cult of personality” could return then, in 1960, in new and even more vicious forms. However, Daniel’s personal theory of Stalinism was quite different from Khrushchev’s. Instead of blaming the cult of personality, Daniel imagined decentered, allegedly spontaneous but in fact subtly manipulated massacres, which are probably close to historical Stalinism. A KGB expert informed the court that Daniel presented “our country as a huge concentration camp”; that the Soviet people in this novel were “oppressed, frightened, and enraged”; and that the authorities there “introduce the wildest measures that throw our country back to an almost primordial condition.” This is a correct reading of the novel, which the critic continued by using one of the favorite concepts of both Daniel and Siniavsky: this fiction, he wrote, was “monstrous.”15 At the trial, the prosecutor said that the novel incited violence against the Soviet leaders, and characterized Daniel’s novel as “wild fantasy,” “furious slander,” and “jeering at the Soviet people.” The court agreed.
A few years after the Siniavsky and Daniel trial, Hannah Arendt commented in connection to the student unrest of 1968 that violence and power were opposites: “when the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” Reflecting on the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the first translated novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, Arendt stated that “rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost. . . . Violence itself results in impotence.”16 This formula is quite close to the fantasies of Daniel and Siniavsky. Both nightmares, of total massacre in Moscow and total hypnosis in Liubimov, fail to create anything close to stability and legitimacy of power. While Siniavsky’s story mocked the idea of “totalitarian” rule based on ideological transformation from above, Daniel’s parable was similar to a subtler version of the so-called revisionist school of Soviet history, which emphasized the spontaneous, unplanned development of terror from below. However, it is also different from this position. Indeed, in Daniel’s story, it was the central administration that decreed the regime of free, unpunished murder. In this imagined situation, the administration did not withdraw its control but implemented it through secret agents, lists, bribes, and amnesties.
Predating One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967), Siniavsky’s Liubimov and Daniel’s Moscow share with this masterpiece of magical realism its complex narrative structure and freewheeling experimentation with history. Siniavsky and Daniel are the two most important predecessors of leading post-Soviet authors such as Vladimir Sharov, Vladimir Sorokin, and Dmitry Bykov, who would continue their experiments with violence, libraries, and time (see chapter 11). Most important, one could read both of these unusual texts, Liubimov and Moscow, as Victims’ Balls (see Introduction), imaginary rituals of mimetic mourning that would have run amok had they been realized. But can we be so sure that they were never realized?
There are details in the life stories and court trials of Daniel, Siniavsky, Brodsky, and even Vysotsky that make me think that, with all the ambivalence that one can imagine, these figures provoked their persecutions and imprisonment through their actions, which we might read as a form of mimetic mourning. After the collapse of its major structures between 1953 and 1956, the gulag became a sacred place, but reaching this destination required a very serious effort. The undertaking of the pilgrimage to the gulag was a task for the writer, the priest of the emerging culture of mourning. Some made the pilgrimage as tourists, and brought back souvenirs from the mass graves for their writing desks. Some made the pilgrimage by turning themselves into prisoners—the way of mimetic self-sacrifice. Some imagined these visits for their readers.
A Voice from the Chorus
If in Moscow Siniavsky spoke as a soloist, in the camp he was part of the chorus. The camp was the place for the chorus of the Soviet tragedy, and Siniavsky liked being there. He saw “an impassable boundary” between the camp and the home. Crossing this border in both directions is traumatic, but he tended to downplay the trauma of imprisonment and emphasize the trauma of liberation.17 Paradoxically, Siniavsky depicted his arrest and long term in the camp as predictable events, a sort of destiny, while his release from the camp features as an unexpected and troubling event, a point of rupture. His novel Goodnight! describes his return from the camp to Moscow as an expulsion from home and a loss of vision. He compared himself to a boy who had completed his prison term and was now supposed to go home, but could not bear to leave, so he wept and begged to be let back into the camp; the guard drove him away, but he kept coming back again and again, unable to bring himself to set off for home. There is a meaningful resemblance between Siniavsky’s self-documented desire to return to the camp and the story that Bitov tells in his Pushkin House of the ex-convict who does return to the site of the camp, to die there (see chapter 3).
After his release, Siniavsky found that he needed to wear eyeglasses. He understood this loss of vision as a symbol of a deeper regress that he experienced when he returned home. He wrote that through his glasses, one of his eyes contemplated the alien Moscow life, while the other eye looked back to the camp. Life in the camp was “more complete and more inspiring” than life in Moscow. Even the prison, the worst place of all, had a “style and rhythm” he never saw again, either in Russia or abroad—“frightening, attractive, and joyful.”18
Both of the memoirists who were closest to Siniavsky—his wife, Maria Rozanova, and his friend Igor Golomstock—emphasize the long-expected nature of Siniavsky’s arrest, which all three viewed as practically inevitable. “We are waiting for the arrest,” wrote Rozanova, and when her husband was arrested, she noted in bold: “Finally.”19 In his Goodnight! Siniavsky mentioned that even when she agreed to marry him, his wife had known that he would eventually go to jail. She never liked to hear him state this as a fact, but he would do so “more and more often” as the arrest drew closer.20 Much in the history of the famous Siniavsky and Daniel trial becomes more comprehensible if one accepts the paradoxical idea of the internal temptation that prison represented for those who belonged to the mournful leaders of the Thaw.
For Siniavsky, the difference between camp and home also meant a difference of genre. He wrote fiction in civilian life and nonfiction in the camp. There he wrote his most successful book, Strolls with Pushkin, and sent it to his wife in dozens of letters by the camp mail, evading the half-literate censorship by inserting fragments of this scholarly and playful text in the middle of routine letters. There in the camp, he also wrote A Voice from the Chorus, a remarkable collection of notes and aphorisms, and the first and major part of another scholarly book, In the Shadow of Gogol. He also drafted in the camp parts of those books on Russian folk life and on the Soviet civilization that he would complete and publish much later, in Paris. By any standard, his output was amazing. Neither in Moscow, where Siniavsky was employed by the leading academic institution, nor even in Paris, where he worked at the Sorbonne, did he ever write scholarly works that surpassed his camp production. In Strolls, Siniavsky said that Pushkin was full of his highest poetic potencies when perched on the very edge of a plague pit.21 In a similar way, Siniavsky was at his fullest when writing his mournful texts from the vantage point of the Soviet camp.
There were several factors that explained the climax of creative energy that Siniavsky experienced in his camp in Mordovia. This post-Stalinist camp for political prisoners, an “exemplary” institution that survived and succeeded the gulag, was a literal realization of the Soviet utopia—a classless, all-male, purposefully unproductive society that built discipline and order on an irrational, unjustifiable foundation. There was nothing better to confirm Siniavsky’s double feelings of historical mourning and political protest than the reality of the camp. It was also a social milieu that was entirely different from the rarefied, select circles of the Soviet intellectual elite. Many members of the intelligentsia experienced a surge of energy when they were emancipated from its institutions, whether through emigration to the West, “internal emigration” into hermetic circles of connoisseurs, or even incarceration. In the camp, Siniavsky met unusual people whom he would otherwise have never encountered, such as Russian sectarians, Ukrainian nationalists, shadow entrepreneurs, and many others who had been criminalized by Soviet law. These people were radically different from “the people” whom his father, a socialist revolutionary, worshipped together with several generations of the populist intelligentsia. Siniavsky followed Shalamov in the conclusion that the experience of the camp undermined the most basic beliefs that had found their expression in the masterpieces of Russian literature, from Gogol to Tolstoy.
Scholarship requires libraries; there was a library in the camp where Siniavsky served the major part of his term, but its holdings were very limited. Using this library, Siniavsky also asked his wife to send books or bring them during her annual visits. Their correspondence is full of such requests, which give an idea of his reading in the camp: it was Russian symbolist poetry and the European high-brow and mystical literature of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Maeterlinck, Kafka, and even Hermann Hesse, translations of which had become fashionable among the intelligentsia. He also read books and essays on Russian folklore, which had been likewise coming into vogue. More surprisingly, he read rare sources on Russian sects, which the sectarians in the camp lent him. Later, when he could use the libraries of Moscow and Paris, his pet subject became Vasily Rozanov, a sophisticated fin-de-siècle thinker who combined eroticism and mysticism. Having produced a profound reassessment of Russian and Soviet values, Siniavsky had to invent a new language of critique and resistance. The originality and richness of his camp-time scholarship were linked to this task. But everything that Siniavsky learned and felt in the camp, he expressed in his speculations about Pushkin and Gogol. Not surprisingly, these speculations were unusual.
After decades of state terror, the camps of the 1960s were full of ghosts. With a deliberate ambiguity, Siniavsky wrote to his wife: “Everything here is a bit fantastic, even flowers and encounters. . . . The sun is lower on the horizon, and therefore the shadows are longer. . . . My neighbor is spectral, we slept and ate together, and suddenly it turned out that he is a specter” (2:62). Those who were released from the camp also felt illusory or hallucinatory, but for a different reason: “they have immediately become spectral and unearthly, as if they were dead” (2:169). Everything was ghostly because of the camp’s boredom and loneliness; everything was haunted because of its history and symbolism. After liberation, Siniavsky himself felt like a specter issuing from the camp: “Leaving prison is like being re-born after death. . . . All that remains is a naked point of view, so you feel like a ghost visiting this world.”22
These ghostly feelings match the worldview of another ex-prisoner whose art had prepared Siniavsky for the camp, Boris Sveshnikov (see chapter 5). As Siniavsky noted, “Sveshnikov’s drawings have a reversible meaning. Anyone who didn’t know this was a camp would never guess it. . . . Those who are in the know (I almost said, the initiated) . . . would make out [the telltale signs] here and there: a stockade, rubbish-dumps, barracks, a prison. Someone has only just hanged himself, someone else is just sitting and waiting out his term.”23 The favorite subjects of Siniavsky’s studies—Pushkin, Gogol, and sectarians—were also, at their best and most creative moments, suspended in this intermediary, reversible state between life and death. Sveshnikov portrayed this condition in his memorable images; Siniavsky depicted it in In the Shadow of Gogol:
In the “transitory condition,” as Gogol put it (and all his work was like a transitory, loose swing between life and death) . . . his personality split into some kind of multitude, which existed on different levels of being and consciousness, dying and resurrecting itself daily, and even from somewhere beyond the grave still reaching back to life, and weeping, and threatening, and arguing with compatriots. (2:189)
Gogol “was dying all his life”; Gogol “encompassed within himself the impassable gap between the living and the dead”; Gogol lived “in the coffin of his tired, almost unresponsive flesh.” Such was also the life of the typical inmates of the camps, the goners. Siniavsky escaped their fate, but Sveshnikov had been one of these soon-to-be-dead before the camp doctor saved him. It was in their shadow—in the shadow of Gogol—that Siniavsky wrote the camp letters that contained his future books. From the vanguard position of the goner, Gogol manifested “a striking ability to reason and control . . . seeing more and farther than normal vision can see.”24
Siniavsky started to write Strolls with Pushkin in August 1966, five months after his term began. He wrote to his wife that he wanted to compose something “non-academic . . . cheerful, light” about Pushkin. While working on Strolls, Siniavsky read Osip Mandelstam’s Conversation about Dante (see chapter 4).25 He immediately felt its affinity to his own project and in a letter to his wife revealed Mandelstam’s “historical method.” Like no other poet, Mandelstam had “an immediate, intrinsic sense of history,” and his historical writing was “not a restoration but a daring intimization of remote centuries.” He approached the past with an attitude of “respectful familiarity,” like that of a “loving son” toward his father.26 These were all features of Siniavsky’s own historicism, which combined the self-conscious modernization of the past with its “daring intimization.”
A Theory of Metaphor
Siniavsky was an ironist, and both his historicism and his mysticism were often parodical. A combination of self-mocking irony and deadly seriousness was a Russian tradition that he appreciated in both Pushkin and Gogol. It is ironical that philosopher Richard Rorty formulated his ideal of combining irony with heroism while reading Vladimir Nabokov, who, while definitely an ironist, was no hero;27 in fact, Siniavsky would fit Rorty’s description much better. Always eager to reveal and mock the internal contradictions within his favorite texts, Siniavsky combined his irony with an unusually serious attitude toward literature. He elaborated his own theory of metaphor that fitted his textual practice. Metaphors (which in his extended use of the term also include allegories and parables) have their own life, flesh, and blood, but these are different from the factual realities that they describe. Good metaphors produce “a piercing physical sensation.” They do not belong to mere literature; they acquire their own being, “as if growing into the physical body.” While Russian romanticism just mentioned the devils and the dead as “pure literature,” its re-visionary, Gogol, “responded to these stories with his very blood” and presented them as “the terrifying truth.” Gogol had seen “the country of the dead”; it had been revealed to him “first-hand.” His most hazardous and shocking metaphors were not blasphemy; they were testimony.
When metaphors are translated into real life, the consequences are disastrous. According to Siniavsky, the overflow of metaphors into history brings catastrophe. “Not communism but literalism is a mortal threat to the world.”28 Realized metaphors are monsters. More precisely, when metaphors are realized, the sublime turns into the monstrous. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the title of Francisco Goya’s series of tragic sketches that Sveshnikov loved and emulated. In Siniavsky’s version, it is not the sleep of reason but rather its incomplete awakening—its inability to differentiate between nightmare and sober reality—that produces monsters.
In Siniavsky’s letters and studies, specters and monsters are organic for literature, which cannot do without them: “Take the shadow of [Hamlet’s] father out of Hamlet, and immediately the play withers away into nothing” (3:140). Maeterlinck suggested a more thorough discussion that touched upon the very essence of the monstrous:
Another question—who depends on whom: the people on the ghosts, or the ghosts on the people. . . . People do not think what their “uninvited guests” are doing in their homes. . . . [The ghosts], in contrast, cling to the people, stare into their eyes, initiate conversations . . . with an unconscious envy for the destiny of man. (1:118)
Siniavsky’s wife sent him a book about vampires and a collection of gothic novels in Russian translation. Sectarians in the camp gave him mystical manuscripts to read. But none of this was ever enough; Siniavsky’s “dream of reading about ghosts” (2:165) remained unsatisfied, and he asked for more. Calling the time of his youth “the period of late, mature, and blooming Stalinism,” he remembered “craziness, plots, horrors . . . ghouls, vampires, which still do not let me sleep,” and also the “atmosphere of the black mass, a dog’s wedding, and howling from beyond the grave.”29 These youthful motifs would often find a place in Siniavsky’s texts. Their poetics is monstrous, but the author saw it as resulting from the historical reality in which he lived and worked. “Monsters are just as universal as the little devils that alcoholics see in their dreams,” Siniavsky wrote (1:356–357)—in other words, not universal at all, but rather specific to the sinner and his sins. Besides this clinical awareness, there was not much to rely on for a child of Stalinism who wanted to stroll with the ghosts.
In his closing speech to the court in 1966, before being sent off to the camp, Siniavsky said: “Frightening passages of the indictment . . . have grown in a monstrous atmosphere . . . in which the real ends and the monstrous starts.”30 Thus at this decisive moment of his life he operated with the category of the monstrous. He did not define it, and his judges were not interested in asking him to do so. Let me try. In Siniavsky’s idiosyncratic vision, the “monstrous” is the Hegelian antithesis of the “sublime.” If the sublime pulls apart the different levels of reality, the monstrous merges them. Combining the human with the inhuman, the monstrous is hybrid; it is supernatural and countercultural. Humans have “always” loved monsters, stated Siniavsky, “for the sake of higher potencies.” Pagan religions portrayed deities as monsters, and Gothic architecture with its chimeras did the same.31 This was the context in which Siniavsky likened Pushkin to a ghoul and Gogol to a tarantula. Metaphors can be monstrous; moreover, in this textual practice, they usually are. Textual games keep monstrous metaphors within the boundaries of speech and prevent them from breaking through into real life. But once they get out of discursive control and materialize in the interplay of human bodies, the monstrous threaten revolution, prison, and death. Here Siniavsky is not far from his beloved Pasternak. At the end of Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak inserted into the conversation between characters from a new generation of Muscovites an astonishing statement:
Take Blok’s line, “We, children of Russia’s terrible years,” and you’ll immediately see the difference between the epochs. When Blok said this, it had to be understood in an extended sense, figuratively. . . . But now everything figurative has become literal; the children are children, and the fears are terrible, that’s the difference here.32
At the trial in 1966, responding to the charges laid against him, Siniavsky said: “Here, really very strangely and unexpectedly, an artistic image is losing its conventionality. The prosecution has taken it literally, so literally that the whole judicial procedure is becoming plugged into the text, as though it were its natural extension.”33 He interpreted the trial not as a punishment for his texts but as their monstrous continuation by other means. In his later novel Goodnight! (1983), Siniavsky confirmed that in his trial and imprisonment, “everything was correct, as it had to be . . . as it had happened many times before in literature—in following through to the conclusion, to the truth, the comparisons and metaphors for which the author, of course, must pay with his head.”34
This formula—overflowing of text into life, with monstrous results—defined the core of Siniavsky’s idea of literature. Siniavsky saw this overflowing in all three of his scholarly subjects, Pushkin, Gogol, and Rozanov. “Or were it the machinations of an ancient literary law according to which fate dealt mysteriously with the author, using the texts of his works for a crib-sheet?”35 The author’s texts predict his life, and this is what people call fate. In the case of writers, fate is comprehensible. One can read and grasp it, though one cannot edit it. Siniavsky’s camp writings are full of these literary games with fate, also a major interest for other intellectual survivors of the camps such as Dmitry Likhachev (see chapter 4). This wisdom works well with Pushkin, who wrote stories about dueling and met his own end in a duel. Responsibility for one’s destiny should be accepted because it has been made by one’s own hands, or rather written by one’s own pen. “Humility and liberty are one when we recognize fate as home,” wrote Siniavsky in Strolls with Pushkin.36
Pushkin the Vampire
Reading the short and striking Strolls with Pushkin, we learn astonishing news: Pushkin was a vampire. In Siniavsky’s treatise, this was illustrated by many examples in which Pushkin’s characters (Don Juan, Godunov, Aleko, Marko) expressed a peculiar interest in the dead, particularly the unburied dead. All of Siniavsky’s examples were drawn from the lives of Pushkin’s characters, not Pushkin himself. This is the very same logic that the Soviet court applied to Siniavsky. Then, he protested with such energy that even his judge agreed that the author could not be tried for the crimes of his characters. This is the logic of literalism, which according to Siniavsky, is the source and the nature of the monstrous. It was also the logic of the gulag. After reading Strolls with Pushkin, Dmitry Likhachev, also an ex-prisoner, commented in his memoirs: “This was fiction of a kind that was typical for camps and prisons.”37
In a later essay, “Journey to the Black Stream,” Siniavsky returned to the idea of the writer as vampire. “Probably every self-respecting writer is by nature a vampire. . . . In the allegorical sense, of course. . . . He operates in a spectral world but pretends that it is real.” The self-respecting writer is a vampire because “he wants to multiply,” and this is why he must bite. In Lermontov’s romantic poem of 1839, Demon—probably the most spectacular beast in Russian literature—fell in love with a human female and killed her with his kiss. In contrast to Demon, the vampire would turn her into a vampire, his equal. The vampire’s nature is vicious but open and productive, and in this it resembles the nature of the poet. Just as love for a vampire produces new vampires, so love for a poet creates new poets.38
Siniavsky never repudiated this monstrous language. In 1989, a Soviet journal asked him to choose a text for his first posttrial publication. Of all that he had published in emigration Siniavsky chose that very section that compared Pushkin to a vampire.39 This publication caused a scandal. One Soviet writer declaimed that Siniavsky was worse than the officer who killed Pushkin in a duel; another suggested that Siniavsky would be better off strolling not with Pushkin but with Shalom Aleichem, the Yiddish writer. A sensible critic, Sergei Bocharov, commented that the real author of Strolls with Pushkin was the camp.40
Siniavsky’s Soviet Civilization, an academic treatise based on his course at the Sorbonne, features the key word on the very first page: Soviet civilization is not just “extraordinary,” it is “a monstrosity.”41 A heart-breaking episode from Siniavsky’s Goodnight! in which he learns, after meeting with his father upon his release from prison, that his father is suffering from paranoid delusions (see chapter 3) combines two key words, “fantastic” and “monstrous.”42 A persistent horror fueled both the prose and the criticism that Siniavsky produced. What he called “fantastic realism” was not a philosophical statement about the fantastic nature of reality, but a historical testimony about the monstrous quality of Soviet reality, as the author knew it. His generation, the people who saw Stalin’s death and brought about the Thaw and then perestroika, experienced a “rapture in the face of the metamorphoses of God.” In one of his delightful metaphors that are worthy of Bakhtin or Sveshnikov, Siniavsky described this ecstatic feeling as something that was summoned up by “the monstrous peristalsis of God’s guts, the convolutions of our brains’ grey matter.”43
A doyen of the gulag ex-prisoners, Varlam Shalamov, admired the courage of Daniel and Siniavsky and rejected the accusation that in their writings they had “slandered” the Stalinist past: “I assert that the concept of libel is inapplicable to the time of Stalin. The human mind is incapable of imagining those crimes that were committed during this period.” The horror of the historical past was so extreme that it was impossible to overstate, claimed Shalamov. But then, could it be represented? Though Shalamov and Siniavsky were close in their political ideas, their textual practices were so far apart as to be polar opposites, and they knew it. In the same letter to a fellow ex-prisoner, Shalamov disagreed with Siniavsky’s idea of fantastic realism and criticized the rampant experiments with the narrative form that were characteristic of both Daniel and Siniavsky. Shalamov specifically questioned the use of what he called “satire” and “the grotesque” in the literature about the past: “our experience categorically rules out the use of the genres of the grotesque or the fantastic. But neither Siniavsky nor Daniel has seen those rivers of blood that we saw. Both of them, of course, can use the grotesque and the fantastic.”44
However, Siniavsky continued his work with history, satire, and magic well after he received his immediate experience of the camps. Combining political pessimism with a sort of cultural optimism, he believed in the relevance of the camp experience for the twentieth century. “The Russian camps will still generate, and have already generated, an amazing kind of literature . . . none of us can escape it, can run from it . . . because we all live in the 20th century—behind the wire.”45
Siniavsky hoped that by returning his books to Russia he would “call forth hosts of vampires, ready to fly through the night.”46 He was right about this. There is a straight route from Siniavsky’s image of Pushkin the vampire to the vampiric novels by Viktor Pelevin, which also experimented with the conjunction between creativity, eroticism, and bloodsucking about forty years after Siniavsky. Even though almost none of the post-Soviet generation of Russian writers has had firsthand experience of living on the wrong side of barbed wire, this generation has filled the literary space with a multitude of haunting and mourning creatures—ghosts, monsters, hybrids, and clones (see chapter 11).47 As Shalamov predicted, this generation of writers, who have never seen the camps themselves, have been increasingly engaged in “the grotesque.” In a recent piece of literary criticism, Dmitry Bykov traced his genealogy of the post-Soviet authors not to Shalamov, but to Siniavsky.48
Uninvited Guests
Siniavsky’s conclusions had always been extreme, but it was the brutal experience of the camp that prompted him to produce a more literal interpretation of the heretical and monstrous than either the Russian symbolist poets or their scholarly heirs, the Soviet semioticians, ever dared to perform. In a way that resembled Walter Benjamin, whom he never read, Siniavsky interpreted the great texts of the Russian poetic tradition—Pushkin’s “Prophet,” Lermontov’s “Demon,” Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance—as memories of religious rituals. “Telling fairytales required dedication and extreme caution. . . . Violating these conditions brought disaster in its wake, even the death of the storyteller. . . . The figure of the storyteller was surrounded by mystery, suffering, and omniscience” (2:385).
The camp experience stimulated the writing of ghost stories and helped to make visible the monstrous aspects of classical texts. In Siniavsky’s camp and postcamp writings, Pushkin was a vampire; the romantic Russian troika was harnessed to the devil; Gogol oscillated between a goner and a revenant; and Soviet civilization was monstrous. There in the camp Siniavsky also developed an unusual version of Russian ethnography, which was focused on the non-Orthodox folk beliefs. In his Ivan the Fool, a book on Russian religiosity, a cursory account of the history of the Russian church gives way to a detailed analysis of heresies, schisms, and sects that occupies the larger part of the book. In this revisionist narrative, a direct line of succession runs from the classical Russian fairy tale to the schismatic priest Avvakum, to the leader of the Skoptsy (castrates) sect Kondraty Selivanov, and then to the sectarian-socialist prophet Vasily Siutaev (who was also a major influence on Lev Tolstoy), and further, to those sectarians whom Siniavsky met in the camp. Expanding on these variegated themes, Siniavsky developed his method that I would define as a playful combination of historicism, mysticism, and ironism. This combination characterized his writings from the precamp Liubimov up to the Parisian treatises, but it grew into a full-fledged method in the camp. In one letter from there, he formulated this method as “twisting the primitive into surrealism.” This method should be different from “the intellectual-modernist formation” because Siniavsky preferred the “ancient, age-old forms of expression that are close to the elemental nature of magical thinking.” After the disappointments of the Thaw, ethnography and folklore were coming into fashion among the intelligentsia. “Demonstration of eternal dreams, fears, and desires . . . [t]he totemic principle . . . [t] he resurgence of the myth . . . [a] deep, unfathomable connection to the folk beliefs” (1:356–357).
From this program of “twisting the primitive into surrealism” followed Siniavsky’s mystical readings of Pushkin and Gogol as well as the interpretations of Communism as a religion and revolution as apocalypse, which organize his Parisian books and essays. Sometimes Siniavsky was perceived as a Slavophile, a word that he eagerly applied to himself.49 What distinguished him from the nineteenth-century Slavophiles was his longing for Russian sects rather than for Orthodox religion. He shared this predilection with one of his heroes, Rozanov, but even for the latter the sects were largely a bookish fantasy.50 After meeting sectarians in the camp and taking part in their secret liturgies, Siniavsky had planned to write a full-scale novel about these sectarians, but completed only a course of lectures on the subject.51 “The Khlysty are the most interesting sect in Russia,”52 Siniavsky told his Parisian students, who surely must have found it difficult to follow him into this territory. He probably inherited a general interest in popular sects and cults from his father; this interest fueled his early, precamp preoccupation with Gorky, also a lay expert in the Khlysty. However, this interest acquired historical grounding, ethnographic material, and intellectual confidence in the camp. Then, he saw the Khlysty everywhere, particularly in his favorite books. After rereading The Brothers Karamazov in the camp, Siniavsky wrote that Dostoevsky was “definitely close to the Khlysty,” in contrast to Tolstoy, who gravitated toward rationalistic sects. Gogol in his later years also “revealed his Khlysty motifs” (3:390). On himself, Siniavsky tried out another sectarian theme: “If I were a Skopets—how much more I could have done!”53
Occupying about half of Ivan the Fool and a part of Soviet Civilization, these sectarian motifs were fed by Siniavsky’s camp experience. The conclusion to Ivan the Fool describes his sectarian friends in the camp. One was the leader of the Skrytniki (Hiders), another an Adventist, and still another a follower of the nineteenth-century prophet Captain Ilyin. A group of Orthodox believers met regularly to recite the Apocalypse by heart. Ecstatic Pentecostals prayed in tongues. “I thought lightning would strike me in the back of the head. . . . They proclaimed to the whole world—in all its languages at once—what it meant to talk to God in a torture chamber.”54 This was Siniavsky’s spiritual home: a coal pit where semiliterate convicts prayed in invented languages and recited the Apocalypse by heart. This mysticism was hidden deep beneath the Soviet soil. It took a stouthearted author to descend to hell to discover it.
Croaking
Siniavsky’s wife made a distinction between death in the camp and death in civil life: in civil life people die, in the camp they croak (dokhnut). Osip Mandelstam, for example, croaked, she said.55 Since life in the camp was not human life, death there was not human death. The difference was social and also temporal. In civil life death is a boundary, an instantaneous turn from one condition to another. There is no gray zone here. It is different in the camp, where there is nothing but the gray zone. “Dying alive is worse than death,” writes Siniavsky in his essay on Shalamov. “Death in Kolyma was dispersed in time and space. Here death was drawn out over many years and thousands of kilometers.” A gradual loss of life turned people into “building material with which the builders could do whatever they liked.” Whether this was life or death, it was not a human condition. “Shalamov writes as though he were dead,” states Siniavsky.56 In his Siberian servitude, Dostoevsky experienced the same “passage through death.”57 Life in the camp was worse than death for two reasons, writes Siniavsky. The first reason was the victim’s pain, the second was survivor’s guilt: “in the condition of Kolyma, every life was egotism, a sin, the murder of one’s neighbor.”58 People create art, wrote Siniavsky from the camp, “for the sake of overcoming death, but also in rapt anticipation of death” (1:64). Art is “just a histrionic one-man-show in the face of death” (2:377). Or—for the unluckiest—of croaking.
In light of Shalamov’s and Siniavsky’s witnessing, bare life of the goners should more properly be called monstrous life. Life in the camp—monstrous life between life and death—knows only the movement toward death. This is why, in the camp, Pushkin was construed as a ghoul, Gogol was imagined alive in his coffin, and the neighbors looked like ghosts: it was the camp. In 1974 in Paris, Siniavsky claimed that the camp was the most important theme of Russian literature of the time. “The Russian writer’s heart doesn’t burn . . . for agricultural or industrial themes right now. He is concerned with other themes: how people get put away, where they’re sent into exile, how exactly (it’s interesting, after all!) they’re shot in the back of the head.”59 Russian books have always been written in blood. An author is the writing dead. The literary form has a shape of a coffin. This is how Siniavsky distributed his monstrous metaphors. His picture of “the literary process in Russia” built on his recent strolls with ghosts: “The camp theme is leading and central today. . . . Now all of Russia is howling in the House of the Dead.”60 In this focus, Siniavsky was different even from his beloved Rozanov. A model for modern Russian writers, Rozanov was always eager to explain human actions as manifestations of sexuality. In contrast, Siniavsky understood even the sexual act itself in the context of death and memory. Describing the annual visits his wife made to the camp, he rendered the rhythm and meaning of the sex act as an act of memory: “Remember before the end. Until the end. Remember. Remember. Understand and remember.”61
The voices of the dead speaking through the lips of the half-dead—this is how Siniavsky saw the Russian literature of his time. “And they’re moving, they’re on the move now. As long as I live, as long as we all live—they will go on and on.”62 They were prisoners at the gates of the camp, and they were either leaving the camp or trying to find their way back to it, we never know which. For Siniavsky, the author is a medium who speaks with both the dead and the living, on behalf of both. “The living owe a debt to the dead.” This is why the Russian author feels most at home in a prison or a madhouse, said Siniavsky. “He sits there quietly . . . and he rejoices: here is my story!” Like Gogol to the cemetery, Siniavsky was drawn to the camp.