Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  I go into a little wood. I see some juniper bushes. No one will see me behind them. I walk towards them.

  A large green caterpillar is crawling along the ground. I kneel down and touch it with my fingers. Powerful and sinewy, it wriggles several times from side to side.

  I look round. No one can see me. A slight shiver runs down my back. I bow down my head and say in a quiet voice, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, now and for ever. Amen.’

  …………………………………………………Here I temporarily conclude my manuscript, considering it quite long-drawn-out enough as it is.

  Written May–June 1939; first published in 1974

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  VARLAM TIKHONOVICH SHALAMOV (1907–1982)

  Born in Vologda, the son of a priest and a schoolteacher, Shalamov claims to have seen himself as a writer from childhood. He was inspired as a young man by Mayakovsky, whom he heard at a public recital. In 1929, while studying law at Moscow University, Shalamov was arrested and sentenced to three years in a camp in the Urals; he had been trying to distribute the suppressed letter that Lenin had written before his death, recommending that Stalin be removed from his post as General Secretary of the Party. In 1932 Shalamov returned to Moscow, where he worked as a journalist and published a number of short stories. In 1937 he was rearrested and sentenced to five years in Kolyma, the vast labour-camp empire in the north-east of Siberia. His sentence was extended in 1942, and in 1943 he was given an additional ten years for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’; his crime was to have described the émigré Ivan Bunin as ‘a Russian classic’. In 1953 Shalamov was allowed to leave Kolyma, and he returned to Moscow in 1956.

  Solzhenitsyn wrote of Shalamov: ‘His experience of the camps was longer and more bitter than mine, and I say with respect that it fell to him, not to me, to touch that bottom of brutalization and despair to which the whole of camp life dragged us.’ Shalamov, however, rejected Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to collaborate with him on The Gulag Archipelago. In the early 1960s Shalamov was part of a circle that met at the home of Nadezhda Mandelstam, but with time he grew isolated and paranoid. Kolyma Tales was smuggled out to the West in the late 1960s, but it at first attracted little attention. Perhaps as a final gesture of despair, Shalamov compounded his troubles by offending against the dissidents’ strict moral code; in 1972, under only slight pressure from the authorities, he signed a (somewhat ambiguous) denial of the truth of his own stories. In return, he was allowed to publish a small selection of his poetry. Denied the recognition enjoyed by others who had written about the Gulag, he spent his last years in poverty and obscurity. In 1979 he moved to an old people’s home. He died in January 1982, shortly after being transferred, in bitter cold, to a psychiatric hospital.

  A reader who knows only a few of the stories may well imagine the Kolyma Tales to be simply a factual account of Shalamov’s experiences. The events described in each individual story seem entirely real. Only when we read further, when we try to grasp the whole of this epic cycle, do we begin to realize that its truth can never be grasped; we begin, at last, to sense the terrible unreality of the survivor’s world. Successive narrators suffer identical fates, their stories intertwine impossibly, and time stands still. This fusion of realism and the surreal endows Kolyma Tales with extraordinary power.

  Shalamov plays in several ways with a reader’s initial assumption that he is reading a historical memoir: one example of his use of literary artifice is his choice of names for his characters. Several bear the names of Russian writers – Andreyev, Fadeyev, Platonov, Zamyatin – who were never themselves arrested or sent to the camps. In some cases the reason for the choice of name seems relatively simple; Fadeyev, the brutal guard in ‘Berries’, is clearly an image of the Fadeyev who was General Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union from 1946 to 1953. Shalamov’s reasons for naming the storyteller in ‘The Snake Charmer’ after Andrey Platonov are less obvious. It is possible that Shalamov is criticizing Platonov for attempting, during the second half of his career, to accommodate himself to the demands made of him by the authorities; just as Shalamov’s fictional ‘Platonov’ tried to lie to himself about his reasons for telling stories to the criminals who held power in the camps, so the real Platonov may – Shalamov suggests – have deluded himself about his reasons for telling, or trying to tell, the stories demanded by the criminals who held power in the Soviet Union as a whole. In spite of this, Shalamov clearly felt respect – and more than respect – for Platonov; in the context of the loveless world of Kolyma tales, the repeated words ‘I loved Platonov’ are startling.1

  Complete translations of the Kolyma Tales have appeared in many languages, but only a selection has been published in English. Shalamov ordered the cycle carefully; ‘Through the Snow’ is the opening story.

  Robert Chandler and Nathan Wilkinson

  THROUGH THE SNOW

  How are roads beaten through virgin snow? A man walks in front, sweating and swearing, barely able to place one foot in front of the other, constantly getting stuck in the deep, powdery snow. He walks a long way, leaving behind him a trail of uneven black pits. He gets tired, he lies down on the snow, he lights a cigarette, and a blue cloud of makhorka1 smoke spreads over the white shining snow. The man has already gone on further but the cloud still hangs where he rested – the air is almost motionless. Roads are always beaten on still days, so that human toil is not erased by the winds. The man chooses markers for himself in the snowy infinity: a cliff, a tall tree. He pilots his body through the snow, just as a helmsman steers a boat down a river, from headland to headland. Shoulder to shoulder, in a row, five or six men follow the man’s narrow and uncertain track. They walk beside this track, not along it. When they reach a predetermined spot, they turn round and walk back in the same manner, tramping down virgin snow, a place where man’s foot has never trodden. The road is opened. Along it can move people, strings of sleighs, tractors. If the others were to follow directly behind the first man, in his footsteps, they would create a narrow path, a trail that is visible but barely walkable, a string of holes more impassable than virgin snow. It’s the first man who has the hardest task; when he runs out of strength, someone else from that vanguard of five goes out in front. Every one of them, even the smallest, even the weakest, must tread on a little virgin snow – not in someone else’s footsteps. The people on the tractors and horses, however, will be not writers but readers.

  Written in 1956; first published in 1978

  Translated by Robert Chandler and Nathan Wilkinson

  BERRIES

  Fadeyev said: ‘Hold on, I’ll have a word with him myself.’ He came up to me, then put the butt of his rifle beside my head.

  I was lying in the snow, clutching the log I had let fall from my shoulder, unable to pick it up and regain my place in the line of men going down the mountain, each carrying on his shoulder ‘a stick of firewood’ – sometimes a big log, sometimes a smaller one. All of them – both guards and prisoners – were in a hurry to get back home, they all wanted to eat and sleep, they’d had more than enough of the endless winter day. And there I was – lying in the snow.

  ‘Listen, old man,’ said Fadeyev. He went on, addressing me, as he addressed all prisoners, with the polite, respectful word for ‘you’. ‘It really isn’t possible that a giant like yourself should be unable to carry a log, or rather stick, as small as that. You’re clearly a malingerer. You’re a Fascist. While our Motherland battles the enemy, you jam sticks in the wheels.’

  ‘I’m no Fascist,’ I said. ‘I’m a sick and hungry man. You’re the Fascist. It says in the papers how Fascists kill old men. Think about what you’re going to say to your fiancée – how will you tell her what you did in Kolyma?’

  It was all the same to me. I couldn’t bear the rosy-cheeked, the healthy, the well-fed, the well-clothed, and I wasn’t afraid. I hunched up, protecting my stomach, but even this was just a primitive, instinctive movem
ent – I wasn’t in the least afraid of kicks to the stomach. Fadeyev booted me in the back. I felt a sudden warmth – no pain at all. If I died – so much the better.

  ‘Listen,’ said Fadeyev, when he’d turned me over, my face to the sky, with the toes of his boots. ‘I’ve come across your sort before, yes, I’ve worked with people like you.’

  Up walked another guard – Seroshapka.

  ‘Let’s have a look – so I can remember you. Nasty piece of work you are, ugly too. Tomorrow I’ll shoot you myself. Understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ I said, picking myself up and spitting out salty, bloody spit.

  I began to drag the log along the ground, to the sound of the whoops, yells and curses of my comrades – while I was being beaten up, they had been freezing.

  The following morning Seroshapka took us out to work in forest that had been felled a year earlier: we were to gather up everything that could be burnt in the iron stoves that winter. Forests were always cut in winter – the stumps were tall. We levered them out, sawed them up and stacked them in piles.

  Seroshapka marked off the forbidden zone, hanging tags – plaits of yellow and grey dry grass – on the few trees that remained around where we were working.

  Our brigade-leader lit a fire for Seroshapka on a small hillock – only guards had the right to a fire while they worked – and brought him a supply of wood.

  The snow on the ground had long ago been scattered by the winds. The chilled, frost-coated grass slipped through your fingers, changing colour when touched by a human hand. Slowly freezing on the hummocks were low bushes of mountain dog rose; the scent of their iced, dark-purple berries was extraordinary. Still tastier than the rosehips was the foxberry, nipped by the frost, overripe, dove-grey… On stubby, straight little branches hung whortleberries – bright blue, wrinkled like empty leather purses, but still preserving within them a dark, bluey-black juice whose taste was ineffable.

  Berries at this time of year, nipped by the frost, are quite unlike berries in their prime, the berries of the juicy season. Their taste is much subtler.

  Rybakov, my comrade, was collecting berries in a tin can during our smoking breaks and even at moments when Seroshapka was looking the other way. If he picked a whole canful, the guards’ detachment cook would give him some bread. Rybakov’s enterprise had at once become a matter of major importance.

  I had no such clients and I ate the berries myself, carefully and greedily pressing each berry against the roof of my mouth with my tongue – for a moment the sweet fragrant juice of the crushed berry was stupefying.

  I didn’t think of helping Rybakov, nor would he have wanted my help – then he would have had to share the bread.

  Rybakov’s little can was filling up too slowly, the berries were getting scarcer and scarcer, and, without noticing it, we had reached the boundaries of the zone – the tags were hanging right over our heads.

  ‘Look!’ I said to Rybakov. ‘We’d better go back.’

  But on the hummocks in front of us were rosehips, and whortleberries, and foxberries… We’d seen these hummocks long ago. The tree with the tag on it should have been standing two yards further out.

  Rybakov pointed at his can, which was still not full, and at the sun, now dipping towards the horizon, and slowly began to approach the enchanted berries.

  There was the dry crack of a shot, and Rybakov fell face down among the hummocks. Brandishing his rifle, Seroshapka shouted out: ‘Leave him where he is. Don’t go near him!’

  Seroshapka worked the bolt and shot again. We knew what this second shot meant. Seroshapka knew too. There must always be two shots – the first is a warning.

  Lying there between the hummocks, Rybakov looked unexpectedly small. The sky, the mountains and the river were huge – God knows how many people these mountains could hold, laid out on the little paths between the hummocks.

  Rybakov’s little can had rolled a long way, I managed to pick it up and hide it in a pocket. Maybe I’d get some bread for these berries – I knew, after all, who Rybakov had been collecting them for.

  Seroshapka calmly drew up our small detachment, counted us and gave the order to set off back home.

  He tapped me on the shoulder with the tip of his rifle, and I turned round.

  ‘It was you I wanted,’ said Seroshapka. ‘But you didn’t cross the line, you bastard.’

  Written in 1959; first published in 1973

  Translated by Robert Chandler and Nathan Wilkinson

  THE SNAKE CHARMER

  We were sitting on an enormous larch that had been felled by a storm. In permafrost, trees can barely grip the inhospitable earth and it’s easy for a storm to uproot them and lay them flat on the ground. Platonov was telling me the story of his life here – our second life in this world. I frowned at the mention of the Jankhara mine. I had been in some bad and difficult places myself, but the terrible fame of Jankhara resounded far and near.

  ‘Were you in Jankhara long?’

  ‘A year,’ said Platonov quietly. His eyes narrowed, his wrinkles became more pronounced – before me was a different Platonov, suddenly ten years older.

  ‘But it was only the beginning that was tough, the first two or three months. They’re all criminals there. I was the only… literate person. I used to tell them stories, I used to “pull novels” for them, as the criminals say in their thieves’ cant. In the evenings I told them stories by Dumas, Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace. In exchange they fed and clothed me and I worked less. In this place that’s the only advantage you get from being able to read and write – I suppose you’ve probably made use of it too.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. To me that always seemed the ultimate humiliation, the end. I’ve never told novels for soup. But I know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard “novelists”.’

  ‘Is that a condemnation?’ asked Platonov.

  ‘Not in the least,’ I replied. ‘A lot can be forgiven a hungry man – a lot.’

  ‘If I stay alive’ – this was the sacred formula that prefaced all reflections concerning any time beyond the next day – ‘I’ll write a story about it. I’ve already thought of a title: “The Snake Charmer”. Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, I do. You just have to stay alive. That’s the important thing.’

  Andrey Fyodorovich Platonov, a scriptwriter in his first life, died about three weeks after this conversation. He died the way many die – he swung his pick, lost his balance, and fell flat on his face against the rock. Intravenous glucose and strong cardiac medicines could probably have brought him back to life – he wheezed on for another hour or hour-and-a-half – but he was already silent by the time a stretcher was brought from the hospital. The orderlies carried the little corpse to the morgue – a light burden of skin and bones.

  I loved Platonov because he didn’t lose interest in the life beyond the blue seas and the high mountains, the life we were cut off from by so many miles and years and in whose existence we hardly believed any longer – or rather we believed in it only as children believe in the existence of some distant America. Platonov, God knows how, even had some books, and when it wasn’t very cold, in July for example, he would avoid the kind of conversation that usually kept us all going – what kind of soup we had had or would be having for supper, would bread be given out three times a day or just once in the morning, would it be rainy or clear the next day…

  I loved Platonov, and I shall try now to write down his story: ‘The Snake Charmer’.

  The end of work is by no means the end of work. After the whistle you must gather your tools, take them to the storeroom, hand them over, form up in ranks, and go through two of the ten daily roll-calls to the accompaniment of the guards’ curses and the pitiless shouts and insults of your own comrades, comrades who are not yet as weak as you are, but who are tired like you are, who are in a hurry to get back like you are and who are made furious by every delay. Then you have to go through yet another roll-call, form up in ranks, and walk five ki
lometres to the forest to collect firewood – the forest nearby has long ago been felled and burnt. The lumber brigade prepare the wood, but the mineworkers each have to carry a log home. Goodness knows how the heavy logs are brought back, the logs that are too heavy even for two men to carry together. Trucks are never sent out for wood, and the horses are all too sick even to leave their stables. A horse weakens much more quickly than a human being, although the difference between its previous life and its present life is, of course, immeasurably less than it is for human beings. It often seems, and probably it is true, that man rose up out of the animal kingdom, that man became man, the creature able to think up such things as this archipelago and our improbable life here, simply because he had greater physical endurance than any other animal. What made an ape into a human being was not its hand, not its embryonic brain, not its soul – there are dogs and bears who act more intelligently and ethically than human beings. Nor was it a matter of mastering the power of fire – that too was secondary. Man had no other advantage at this time except that he turned out to be considerably stronger, he turned out to possess greater endurance – greater physical endurance. It’s inaccurate to say that a man has nine lives like a cat. It would be more true to say of a cat that it has nine lives like a man. A horse can’t endure even a month of our life here in winter, in cold quarters and with long hours of heavy labour in the frost. Unless it’s a Yakut horse. But then Yakut horses aren’t used for work. Nor, I admit, are they fed. Like deer, they hoof up the snow and drag out last year’s dry grass. Yet man does stay alive. Maybe he lives on hope? But no one here has any hopes. No one here, unless he is a fool, can live on hope. That is why there are so many suicides. No, what saves man is his sense of self-preservation, the tenacity – the physical tenacity – with which he clings on to life and to which even his consciousness is subordinate. What keeps him alive is the same as what keeps a stone, a tree, a bird or a dog alive. But his grip on life is stronger than theirs. And he has greater endurance than any animal.