Re : Book review thread II
Great idea for a thread!
Me, I've been reading this book by Stajner. I must admit to some concerns about style in the early passages, as there was a lot of repetition and jumping around. But the narrative soon gripped me, it is very conversational, with a very light touch (if any) from an editor. This becomes a strength as the authenticity of the memoir begins to take hold of one’s imagination.
As a personal note, whenever I read this kind of recollection, I find it very difficult to connect with it – not least because I have never experienced incarceration, let alone such deprivation, but mostly because I am sure would not have the strength to survive. I have much less fear of death than I do of say, the claustrophobia that would strike me in the immensely over-crowded prison the author describes in the early stages. I have actually been inside the Lubyanka (nowadays it’s almost a tourist attraction, though the FSB (successor to the KGB, which succeeded the NKVD) still operates there) and the vividness of Stajner’s description of events there only seventy years gone really unsettles me.
One wonders what would have happened if he had simply admitted to the charge at first, but his indomitable self-belief seems to be his breastplate armour. The simplicity of his language and descriptions are an enormous strength – such as his sparse reporting of his concerns fro his family – which eloquently elicit the deep emotional response in the reader – what must that be like? – rather than trying to describe the indescribable.
We are creatures of our conditioning, and it is hard to read the account of his “hearings” without the resonance of Orwell’s “1984” echoing through each sentence. The sheer futility of protest, the rigid fantasy world of the interrogators, the sheer illogicality must have been utterly terrifying to a man of intellect – and the more so to a man who believed in the socialist ideals that had driven his life to date. I was struck by the numbers of prisoners that still believed in Stalin and the regime, convinced that the mistake was soon to be rectified. In “1984”, Parsons moans “I didn’t even realise I was a Thought-criminal. It was my children who reported me. Very proud of them.” Though he doesn't weep in broken bewilderment, Yegorov strikes me as having the same mind-set - until we find him later in the islands.
The mundane cruelty is also affecting, but so are the small acts of kindness and politeness. The interrogations were not as brutal as one feared – at least, not physically – but certainly mentally and emotionally. The oddity of prisoners with money being able to buy goods – reminiscent of the nobility’s cells of luxury during the French Revolution (less than the “trading up” in debtors' prisons of Victorian London, which were spawned of raw capitalism whereas revolutionary France and Russia should surely have imposed equal miseries?) contrasts strongly with the individual prisoners sharing their meagre purchases with those unable to afford their own. Is this an expression of their own “purer” socialism in practice, or simply humanity? At this stage in the narrative, there are few instances of selfish veniality but one suspects that as conditions worsen, primeval self-preservation may emerge.
The gulf in conditions between the kremlin of the Solovetsk islands and the awful Muksulma was striking – a deliberate attempt to break the spirit, perhaps? Here we first begin to hear euphemisms to hide the truth of murder – being “sent to Sekirnaya Gora”, and their use as threats. I was also struck by the immense dedication to the inexorable logic of madness exhibited by the story of Gould-Verschoyle, the Irishman who had volunteered to fight with republican Spain. The lengths they went to in order to spirit him away to Russia and then imprison him – quite astonishingly insane, but strangely consistent, as an enemy of the people is that wherever his thought-crime occurs. Perhaps it is this slavish adherence to the internal logic of their regime that allows one human to brutalise another with such disregard?
The voyage to Noril’sk is again somewhat understated but truly horrific. How does anyone find the courage to survive such conditions? I’m sure all readers have, as I did, looked at a map to follow that journey. Have you seen where Noril’sk is? There is nothing but it and a short representation of the railway line to Dudinka. A railway to and from nowhere, joined to nothing. The map and the sparse efficiency of Stajner’s descriptions drain the soul as much as the imagining of the landscape he reports. And this is merely reading a book - how could one stand to look upon that landscape after such a journey?
The steppe is an extraordinary experience. I remember standing on the edge of it in Kazakhstan one day, looking away from the southern mountains that begin the rise up to become the Himalaya and towards the north. The great grassy plain that becomes the taiga and then the permafrost over thousands of miles. The immensity is utterly overwhelming - almost beyond comprehension. How awful would it have been to look south through the snows and understand that same lonely immensity?
I am still searching for a revelation that would bring me to understand why a man would stay alive faced with such desolation. But I suspect that Karlo Stajner may yet have an answer for me, though maybe not one I am able to embrace.
Re: Book review thread II
Apparently the first chapters are written by Kis, he is somewhat of an authority in Hungary. Cancelled order, maybe I shouldn't have, it sounds excellent.
