Thirty years ago, in 1974, the Paris-based emigre publishing house YMCA Press released the Russian edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." This book stunned the global community, becoming the first shock in the moral earthquake that would make the Soviet regime collapse less than two decades on.
But there were other shocks, too. Now that passions around "The Gulag Archipelago" have subsided, we can give it an impartial look and try to determine its legitimate place in the history of 20th-century Russian literature.
It seems obvious now that there are at least two other equally compelling non-fiction books about Stalinist terror and camps-"Sinking into Darkness" by Oleg Volkov (1900-1996) and "Cave Paintings" by Efrosinya Kersnovskaya (1907-1994).
"The Gulag Archipelago" offers a bird's eye view of the terror machine, a collection of hundreds of documentary accounts whereas "Sinking into Darkness" tells one person's life story. This latter book is a confession by an exponent of the social class partially exterminated during the Bolshevik upheaval and brought to the brink of extinction in the subsequent years of totalitarian rule. Volkov was born into an aristocratic family in St. Petersburg and he studied at an elite lyceum together with Vladimir Nabokov. He was a staunch opponent of the Bolshevik revolution, but paradoxically, it was his opposition to Bolshevism that enabled him to narrowly escape execution. Authorities tried to "rehabilitate" the man, hoping his stay in correctional institutions would eventually make him adopt the new social order. Six prison sentences added up to 28 years of custody in Stalinist camps.
But Volkov stoically weathered all the hardships, including years of custody in the notorious Solovki camp. Released after Stalin's death, he would live to be 97 years. This tall, gray-haired man with an aristocratic poise retained robust health and tenacious memory even at an advanced age, and the indignities and inhumane conditions of prison life did not change his outgoing and amiable personality.
"Sinking into Darkness" is not just about a man's survival, but also about his spiritual empowerment, about faith in God becoming the lifeline to get him out of an abyss.
"The Gulag Archipelago," by contrast, has no mystic dimension to it; here one can find politics, censure of Bolshevism, analysis of social problems, and moral torments. "Sinking into Darkness" complements Solzhenitsyn's epic with an insight into the fate of Russian religious consciousness. This book teaches stoicism, contending that there is a deep meaning behind all the trials and tribulations that befall humans.
Volkov can be likened to Jonah, who spent three days and three nights inside a whale's belly and who described the experience as hell. Like the Biblical character, he reemerges from his ordeal only to glorify God's name.
Kersnovskaya's autobiographical account stands out in the triad as the most powerful. This is a look at "The Gulag Archipelago" from the inside, and from a woman's perspective. A young Romanian living in Chisinau finds herself in a labor camp in 1941, after Bessarabia's annexation to the Soviet Union. A naive maximalist, she insists on being exiled to Siberia so that she could prove her innocence there. Eventually, authorities let the officious girl have her way, if only to get her out of their sight. Once in a camp, this Russian Joan of Arc rushes to help her miserable inmates, becoming something of a redeeming angel to them. The Providence protects Kersnovskaya even when she-out of resentment-escapes from the camp to walk 1,500 kilometers through the taiga forest in early spring. Miraculously, no beast attacks her along the way, and she survives exposure to freezing temperatures. But as she comes out of the taiga and gets to a railroad, the girl is caught by security forces and sent back to prison for another ten-year term.
Freed from custody, Kersnovskaya described her prison experiences in 12 thick notebooks, illustrating her sincere account with hundreds of equally sincere, naive drawings. In terms of emotional intensity, her narrative can be put on a par with such universally acknowledged masterpieces of writing as "A Confession" by Leo Tolstoy and "The Confessions" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
All the three books--Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago,"
Volkov's "Sinking into Darkness," and Kersnovskaya's "Cave Paintings"-form a tragic triptych exploring people's suffering amidst cruel social experiments. Three human islands in the archipelago of Russian history. No work of last century's world literature can possibly match this triptych in terms of emotional impact.
