Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors by Leona Toker (review)

Abstract

258 Reviews this volume by the attentive and determined reader, and after all, attentiveness and determination are qualities that any lover of Platonov's works must possess. WOLFSON COLLEGE, OXFORD PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. By Leona Toker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2000. xv + 333 pp. ?28.50. ISBN 0-253-33787-9. Return from theArchipelago is a comprehensive, thorough, and well-written study of an exceptionally important body of Russian literature. Separate and detailed chapters are devoted to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag fiction. The endnotes are copious, erudite, and germane . Gulag narratives, argues Professor Toker, have certain features in common (topoi as she calls them): arrest (the shock factor); dignity (tryingto preserve some moral and intellectual integrity); stages (adaptation to the camp regime); escape (dreams of and in some cases attempts); moments of reprieve (there but for the grace of God go I); room 101 (an allusion to Orwell and one's own special terror); chance (some lucky or unlucky event); the zone and the larger zone (awareness of the camp universe); and end-of-term fatigue (will this ever end?). This is an effectiveway of dealing with a vast amount of material, making it manageable for both author and reader alike. It also has the added advantage of quantifying, albeit roughly, the extent to which a memoir conforms to a Gulag standard, given, as Toker observes, that most Gulag narratives contain no fewer than seven topoi (p. 82). Arrest, the moment when the individual is confronted with the crushing power of the totalitarian state, does not support the Toker view that 'Gulag narratives contain littleevidence oftorture forthe sake oftorture, as at the hands ofthe Nazis' (p. 88). She might well read Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty's account ofhis being tortured by sadistic Communist interrogators, who were clearly engaging in torture forthe sake of torture, or Viktor Kravchenko's / Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946; with a new introduction by Rett R. Ludwikoski (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Publishers, 1989))?discussed in Return from theArchipelago? which provides a powerful account of the prolonged effectsof sleep deprivation and the obvious relish with which his NKVD interrogators did their work (Kravchenko, pp. 242-44). And The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror,Repression, ed. by Mark Kramer, trans. by Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), cited in the bibliography, contains photographs which bear witness to Communism's insatiable appetite fortorture and mass murder (see between pp. 202 and 203, and between pp. 490 and 491). Prolonged interrogations, sleep depri? vation, rape, and the sadistic delight in finding novel ways to incriminate and to arrest people (see, again, the inventiveness deployed by the NKVD and noted in Volume 1 ofthe Gulag Archipelago, Part 1,chapter 1, Arrest'), all demonstrate that Soviet inter? rogators had nothing to learn from their Nazi counterparts. In Volume 11ofthe Gulag Archipelago (Part iv, chapter 3, 'Our Muzzled Freedom'), Solzhenitsyn, who provides the template for Toker's topoi-based approach noted above, lists ten features which the zeks share with those who are supposedly free: constant fear; servitude; secrecy and mistrust; universal ignorance; squealing; betrayal as a form of existence; corrup? tion; the lie as a form of existence; cruelty; and slave psychology. Taken together, these indices of totalitarianism represent torture of the worst possible kind, especially the power of the lie, which, as Jean-Louis Margolin has pointed out, 'breaks some? thing inside people' (La Condition inhumaine: cinq ans dans les camps de concentration sovietiques, cited in The Black Book of Communism, ed. by Kramer, p. 318). MLRy 98.1, 2003 259 A number of omissions can be noted. For example, Professor Toker's discussion of escape makes no mention of two important narratives published in the 1950s: Josef Martin Bauer, So weit die Fufie tragen [As Far as myFeet Will Carry me] (1955; Hamburg : Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1998)); and Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk (1956; Bury St Edmunds: St Edmunsbury Press, 1998). Both accounts are escape epics of astonishing and heroic proportions and merit some mention, even ifjust confined to...