THE DEATHCAMP REALISM AS A SOURCE OF PUTINISM. ON THE PLATONIC HIERARCHY OF HUMAN FACULTIES IN VARLAM SHALAMOV’S GULAG STORIES.

Abstract

In this study, I expedite Varlam Shalamov’s testimony from GULAG to illuminate the Platonic hierarchy of human faculties (appetite, will, intellect) with the help of the key “characters” of Stalin’s death camps: blatar, silovik, politik. I hypothesise that at the heart of Putin’s regime lies a “friendship” between crime syndicates (blatari) and secret police (siloviki) against the intelligentsia (politiki); an alliance of “law-breakers” and “law-enforcers” against “law-makers”. The contrast between blatari and politiki is that between two kinds of freedom: between freedom of choice and political freedom. It is the political freedom that allows us to recognize social life for what it is –– a game that is arbitrary because its rules were “spoken into being” and therefore can be renegotiated for the benefit of all “players”. In absence of this freedom to see the extant game as transient we run the danger of confusing it with an eternal state of affairs and thus turning it into a war to be won by all means necessary. I argue that the ultimate zero-sum-game of the death camp gave birth to the cynical ideology of Putin’s regime. However, Shalamov shows us how participation in the infinite-sum language game –– poetry –– allowed him and some of his fellow inmates to remember an alternative form of life and thus to imagine their way out of the scarcity mindset of the death camp.