Like Batyushkov and the political exiles, Shalamov’s father brought to Vologda the air of faraway places. He had been to New York, Hamburg and Berlin, and before Shalamov’s birth served as a missionary in Alaska. In the hallway, he kept a black cupboard eclectically filled with prized exhibits. Father Tikhon Shalamov’s private museum did not contain any copies of classical sculptures like those in the museum of Marina Tsvetaeva’s father in Moscow, Shalamov remarks, but he had a ship in a bottle, a collection of Native American arrows, Eskimo cult objects, shaman masks, a walrus tusk and a picture of the boat on which he had sailed to America as a young priest. To the fury of the local Black Hundreds, his father would pray in front of a reproduction of a Rubens painting stuck on to plywood, instead of venerating icons painted in the local style of Andrei Rublev or Theophanes the Greek. His father was from a long line of northern holy men, Shalamov says; shamans who became priests when Christianity came to Russia, but kept their pagan depths. The name ‘shalam’, he says, is a primitive word whose sound carries the word ‘shaman’ as well as the word ‘shalost’, meaning mischievousness. His father’s sermons against the pogroms of the Black Hundreds led to a breach with the local church hierarchy, and he found work in the service of an anarchist millionairess named Baroness Des-Fonteines. The radical Baroness had been exiled to Vologda, and bought up vast forests and paper factories across the Russian north, building factory schools and a wooden church that looked like a toy, in which Shalamov’s father celebrated the liturgy, attracting foreign employees of the paper business, English and Americans, who came to worship in winter, trudging through the forest on paths cut like tunnels in the deep snow.
Shalamov and his father came into conflict over books. Unlike his unruly brother (who caused Tikhon Shalamov another kind of paternal agony), Varlam was a prodigious reader. The speed of his reading unnerved his father, who kept the keys to the family bookcase, a massive glass-fronted piece of furniture with a deep bottom section in which nothing could be seen. Shalamov remembers with precision, as bookish children do, the sequence of books on the shelves: the gospels; the poetry of Heinrich Heine without a binding; Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg; works of contemporary Russian religious philosophy (some of the same writers that Molotov read in Vologda), and the journals Family and School and Nature and People. Marx stood on the shelves beside Tolstoy. There was nothing, though, that Shalamov considered real treasure: no Shakespeare, no Dostoevsky. His father wanted him to read German philosophy by the light of the kerosene lamp, but Shalamov preferred adventure fiction: Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
It was only in the house of a schoolfriend, one of the illustrious Veselovsky family (in which, Shalamov remarked, there was a distinct literary-critical gene), that he encountered a real library: ‘endless bookshelves, boxes, parcels of books, a kingdom of books that I could touch’. Throughout his childhood, his father’s cry resonated: ‘Stop reading!’, ‘Put down that book!’, ‘Turn out the light!’ After decades of absolute hunger for books in the Gulag, he perceived the hunger for books as the condition of his childhood, the condition of his whole life. His primal hunger was such that no number of books could ever slake it. There is no sweeter thing, he said, than the sight of an unread book.
Shalamov was expelled from Moscow University in 1928 for ‘concealing his social origins’. For his blind clergyman father’s profession, he had put down ‘invalid’. He was arrested for the first time in 1929 and sentenced to five years on Solovki for his involvement, with a group of female university friends, in a Trotskyist underground printing press, illegally producing copies of Lenin’s ‘Last Testament’ (in which the ailing revolutionary made critical comments about Stalin). Shalamov was re-arrested for the same crime (a common Stalinist practice) in 1937 and sentenced under Article 58 to five years in Kolyma in the far north, a sentence which was extended for a further ten years after stool pigeons in the camp reported on various features of his conversation in the barracks. On the Dostoevsky jubilee, Shalamov had laughed mockingly about how all the novelist’s works had still not been published in the USSR. He had disparaged the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov (winner of five Stalin prizes) as a talentless hack, and expressed admiration for Marina Tsvetaeva (the secret police could not quite place her when writing up the protocols of his case, and it was noted that she was just another of those female poets whose subject matter is the bedroom and church who hanged herself ‘for personal reasons’).
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After Shalamov’s house, we found a bench in the sunshine, below an odd new statue of Batyushkov with a horse, and looked across the Vologda River at the Sixth Army Embankment on the other side. (Unlike Moscow, and long before St Petersburg, this city was originally laid out on both banks of the river.) Molotov once lodged on the embankment in the house of a merchant called Velikanov. My map indicated that the large classical building directly opposite was a Psychotherapeutic Centre. Further along the tree-lined embankment were barracks, and an eighteenth-century baroque church with elaborate tracery on its belltower and small ungilded fish-scaled domes. Leaning against its white plaster wall was a wrecked bus. A speedboat passed, splitting the water, driven by a man with three teenage girls in the back, mouths open, long hair flying, their voices lost in the wind. A private drama was unfolding below us: a couple arguing drunkenly across the bonnet of a Lada parked among litter on the grassy riverbank, the woman crying angrily, turning away, then going back for more.
Thinking about Shalamov had made me think about Mandelstam again. He is here in Vologda too: his style and spirit saturate Shalamov’s writing. In his image of Mandelstam is Shalamov’s sense of redemption. Vologda made me sense what Mandelstam meant when he talked about how Dante overheard the ‘overtones of time’. Dante ‘altered the structure of time’, Mandelstam wrote, ‘or perhaps to the contrary, he was forced to a glossolalia of facts, to a synchronism of events, names and traditions severed by centuries’. In The Divine Comedy voices from across historical time talk among themselves in synchrony, in sheer simultaneity. Lifted out of time and place, they are still preoccupied with precisely what has happened in time and place.
Shalamov’s ‘Cherry Brandy’, whose title alludes to Mandelstam’s poem about the Zoological Museum, imagines the poet’s death from hunger in the Gulag. Mandelstam, who once called life ‘a precious gift, inalienable’, is lying in a cold barrack, his fingers – white, bloodless and swollen from hunger – lie on his chest; ‘sometimes there would come, painfully and almost palpably dragging itself through his brain, a simple and strong thought – that someone had stolen the bread he had put under his head’. This acutely terrible thought, which makes him prepared to quarrel, swear, fight, search (if he had the strength), leads to other thoughts: a ship coming to take him away, a birthmark on an orderly’s face, the sense that his past life had been a book, a fairy tale, the knowledge that only the present moment is real. ‘Cherry Brandy’ is a meditation on the dark power of poetry, the life-giving force through which Mandelstam lived. Everything – work, the thud of horses’ hoofs, home, birds, rocks, love, the whole world – could be expressed in verse. All of life makes itself comfortable in words, and every word is a living piece of the world. As the poet eats his last bread ration (‘a miracle – one of many local miracles’), pushing it past his bleeding gums with blue fingers, time floats and spins. The other prisoners tell him to save some of his piece of bread for later. The poet’s last words are ‘When later?’