The question is as follows: Which will prevail within us, determine our relation to life, to reality? The civilization, the tradition in which we grew up, or the faith, the ideology that we possess and profess?
The Austrian Weissberg is a man of the West, reared in the spirit of Cartesian rationalism, of penetrating and critical thought.
Shalamov is a Russian through and through; he never traveled outside Russia; he encountered Western ideas only sporadically; everything about him is Russian from start to finish.
At the same time, the man of the West, Weissberg, is an ardent and committed Communist, while the man of Russia, Shalamov, is a profound anti-Communist.
What attitude will each one of them now have toward his situation as a victim of barbaric repressions and “unnecessary cruelty,” toward the whole nightmarish surrounding world of Stalinist purges, prisons, gulags, and executions?
Weissberg is convinced that he has found his way into an insane asylum, that the investigating officers of the NKVD are demented people, that the Soviet Union of Stalin’s epoch is a world of lunacy, paranoia, of the absurd. That which takes place here, he writes, “is completely senseless, these are the escapades of a debauched aparat, defying all rational interpretation.” Or: “I grabbed my head. Was I in a madhouse?” Or: “Everything is after all the sheerest folly. I simply lack the words to characterize this.” Et cetera, et cetera. And all the while, not for a moment does he abandon his beliefs: “I am a German Communist,” he flings at the interrogating officer, “and I arrived in this country to take part in the building of socialism. I am a patriot of the Soviet Union.”
Convinced that he is in an insane asylum, that he is in a ghastly land of madness and surreal paranoia, Weissberg does not break down; under the most horrifying conditions, in crowded, dirty prisons dripping with blood, his mind, the mind of a Western rationalist, works intensively — it searches for a rational, reasonable explanation for that which is happening around him. In each cell they throw him into, Weissberg strives to discuss, to question, to exchange opinions.
But it is precisely Weissberg whom his Russian fellow comrades in adversity look upon as a madman! What are you thrashing around for? they say. What are you trying to accomplish here? Sit quietly and suffer!
Between these two attitudes there is no communication, no common language. That is why I do not know whether Weissberg and Shalamov could have understood each other.
Shalamov believes that everything that surrounds him is part of the natural world. The camps belong to the natural order of things, and not to the human order. Can a man rebel against the fact of a great frost or a terrible flood? If a flood comes and someone starts to shake his fist at the river, people will say that he is mad, that he escaped from an insane asylum. If a flood comes, one must climb the highest tree and wait patiently until the water recedes. That is rationality, that is the only reasonable response. If a man finds himself in a camp, he shouldn’t revolt, because they will shoot him for that; he should just live in such a way that ensures he will survive. Maybe, sometime, the water in the river will recede; maybe, sometime, they will release him from the camp. Nothing more can or even need be done.
In Kolyma Tales, the world beyond the wires of the camp does not really exist. News about the end of World War II reaches here after a lag in time and does not make an impression. The real and only world is the camp. The camp is a complete and logical structure. Why did Weissberg find all this absurd? If the camp were absurd, it would have collapsed instantly. The camp does have a logic, and that is the logic of murder — a kind of rationality different from the one that the Austrian engineer-Communist was searching for.
It is Shalamov’s mind that is rational and logical and Weissberg’s mind that is astray, lost in abstractions.
“Each intervention in that which fate was bringing, in the will of the gods, was something unbecoming and contradictory to the code of camp conduct,” Shalamov recalls. And between the lines: 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.”
This difference between Shalamov’s and Weissberg’s stance vis-à-vis the world of repression, the “other world” (Herling-Grudzinski) into which they were cast, is explained by perhaps the greatest Russian philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev: “The opposition between the two cultures — the eastern and the western — was already sharply delineated at the dawn of human history. If the East built the foundations of its culture on the ruthless subordination of man to a higher power, the supernatural, then in the West it was the opposite, man was left to his own invention, which allowed for a broad, self-generated creativity.”
ONE WALKS ALONG the streets of Magadan through high-walled corridors dug out in the snow. They are narrow, and when another person is passing one must stop to let him by. Sometimes at such a moment I find myself standing face-to-face with some elderly man. Always, one question comes to my mind: And who were you? The executioner or the victim?
And why am I moved to wander? Why am I unable to look at this man in an ordinary way, without that perverse and intrusive curiosity? For if I could summon up my courage and ask him this question, and if he responded sincerely, I might hear the answer: “You see, you have before you both the executioner and the victim.”
This too was a characteristic of Stalinism — that in many instances it was impossible to distinguish these two roles. First someone, as an interrogating officer, would beat a prisoner, then he himself would be thrown into prison and beaten; after serving his sentence he would get out and take revenge, and so on. It was the world as a closed circle, from which there was only one exit — death. It was a nightmarish game in which everyone lost.
I VENTURED FAR, right up to the bay. In this place one could no longer hear the city. Above all, one could not hear Kolyma. Somewhere beyond the hill descending toward the bay, in silence and darkness, its dead lay. In one memoir I read that Kolyma’s permafrost so preserves corpses that the faces of those buried maintain even their expressions. The faces of people who saw that which, as Shalamov warns, man should not see.
I thought about the terrible uselessness of suffering. Love leaves behind its creation — the next generation coming into the world, the continuation of humanity. But suffering? Such a great part of human experience, the most difficult and painful, passes leaving no trace. If one were to collect the energy of suffering emitted by the millions of people here and transform it into the power of creation, one could turn our planet into a flowering garden.
But what has remained?
Rusty carcasses of ships, rotting watchtowers, deep holes from which some kind of ore was once extracted. A dismal, lifeless emptiness. Not a soul anywhere, for the exhausted columns have already passed and vanished in the cold eternal fog.
THE KREMLIN: THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
I AM RETURNING to Moscow from Magadan by way of Norilsk. From Kolyma to Norilsk it is more than three hours by plane over northern Siberia. It is a clear, sunny noon; the air so transparent and bright that it creates the effect of a great close-up — as if one were looking at the earth through a magnifying glass.
Below, as far as the eye can see, white and more white, a smooth, taut flatness polished by winds to the utmost, absolute luster. Over this blinding and lifeless smoothness, a small, solitary dark blue creature laboriously wends its way — the shadow of our airplane, a mobile sign that it is flying, that we are alive.