The Soviet Rabbit Hole Part I
Soviet Affairs Desk, 12/6/2021
It all started with a newborn interest in revolution. An interest itself born out of the growing sense that one was about to arrive. I had every reason to believe that it would bubble up from the American far left and go ripping through society from there; after all, by 2018 the far left was yowling about revolution a little more loudly than usual, and with some action to back up their incendiary rhetoric. They promised to rise up, to disrupt, to dismantle. In a sense, that is what actually happened. But my initial view of events and where they were leading was insufficiently dynamic. It was two-dimensional. Perhaps because I didn’t have a comprehensive grasp of what government is and what it always seeks to do (I was still a centrist), and certainly because I did not see SARS-CoV-2 coming. (Who did? The World Economic Forum? That’s a different essay.)
I kept my eye on the situation throughout 2018 and 2019. It didn’t make much sense. I knew enough to know that I didn’t know enough. So I hit the books.
Starting with the French Revolution, which I’ve already written a bit about here and here. I read Tocqueville first, who painstakingly mapped out the circumstances preceding the revolution and then tragically died before he could write an analysis of the revolution itself. Then onto what you might call the mother of all revolutions—the Russian One—which I’ve also written a bit about at the links above. There are some who would argue (as Tocqueville did) that, in a way, the French Revolution never ended. But from where I’m sitting, it kind of came and went; there doesn’t seem to be a robust body of literature left behind by the survivors. Not so the Russian Revolution. The ripples of that little stone went on rippling from 1917 right up until 1989 and beyond, and you could fill a library with tales of the terror written by those who lived through it.
That’s how I became interested in the literature of the Soviet period. I wanted to see the history played out in art: not just to know it, but to feel it.
My foray into Soviet lit didn’t begin with Solzhenitsyn, the obvious place to start. There was something intimidating about The Gulag Archipelago. I needed to work up to it. (I was worried for some dumb reason that it would be dryer than Tocqueville.) I started instead with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, which I had read about in a novel called Necropolis by the Colombian writer Santiago Gamboa. We is a dystopian novel about the perversions of collectivism that pretty much lays the ground work for Orwell’s 1984 and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Where We differs from those two books is that it is more heavily laced with the classic tropes and fascinations of science fiction. And that it gets really trippy in the middle, plummeting into hallucinatory episodes that I still don’t understand. Zamyatin was of course censored and persecuted by his Soviet overlords for writing the book; it had to be smuggled out of Russia for publication abroad, and the author himself had to leave (it’s amazing that they let him). Why? Because he told the truth: One state, one party—no individual thought patterns allowed.
Next, I found György Faludy—in Quillette, of all places, before that wonderful publication went stale and its queen, Claire Lehman, started running interference for the Australian Soviet regime. (Is this irony? Is it a phetasy?) Faludy was a Hungarian poet who detailed his imprisonment in a Soviet labor camp in his autobiography, My Happy Days in Hell. The title says it all: Faludy had an unbreakable spirit, no matter what he was up against. The book’s first pages leave it unclear whether he was fashionably communist in his youth or merely a socialist; in any case, when the Nazis invaded Hungary, he had to flee. (The Nazis had some bones to pick with communists. And poets. And Jews.) He escaped to North Africa and eventually ended up in the U.S. When the U.S. joined World War II, Faludy signed up to fight (the stones on this guy…). After the war, against the advice of absolutely everyone, he returned to Hungary—now Soviet Hungary after the Nazis were driven out by Stalin—where he was swiftly arrested and sent to the labor camp. There, he brought cheer to his friends with his mad wit and literacy and worldly wisdom while he watched them starve to death (or work themselves to death; there were really only two ways out of the camp). Always with a defiant song in his heart. Below is one of my favorite passages from My Happy Days in Hell, detailing the mental preoccupations of a starving labor camp prisoner. In it, one prisoner complains of never having had enough money for a slice of chocolate cake, and that now he will die without ever tasting one. Here is Faludy’s response, which should tell you all you need to know about him:
“…I had seen so much in this life and had had the opportunity to eat so many slices of chocolate cake. How many? During my student years and in America—during twice five years—I ate two slices of cake each day. This added up to seven thousand two hundred slices—six hundred whole cakes. If I calculated that a cake is about ten centimeters high, this gave a cake-tower twelve stories high. At the bottom were the heavier cakes: caramel, chocolate, nut; then came the fruit and rum cakes, and finally the feather-light chestnut-creams and vanilla cakes with whipped cream. In this respect I had nothing to reproach myself with; I had eaten all the cakes that were coming to me.”
Onward to Vladimir Voinovich, whom I also discovered in Quillette (RIP). I started with Voinovich’s Moscow 2042, a dystopian sci-fi about a future Russia in which communism never ended (the book was written and published before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Old absurdities have evolved into new ones, but the results are fundamentally the same: the depraved idiocy of an authoritarian uniparty and the sick lies people have to tell themselves in order to chase the damning truth from their brains. I like to think of Voinovich as the Russian Kurt Vonnegut. He is above all a scathing satirist, and I found his humor miraculous—given that he lived under Soviet oppression and was of course persecuted and exiled for subversion.
Oppression. Satire. Mocking humor. Noticing a pattern?
The pattern continues with Tibor Fischer, whom I also also discovered in Quillette (man, that used to be a great place to find out about obscure writers). He’s English, but his father grew up in Soviet Hungary, and his novel Under the Frog draws heavily from his father’s experiences. It is an obligatory tragicomedy about a group of friends united by basketball, chasing tail, and a youthful exasperation with the confines and suffocations of communism. Fischer’s obsession with wordplay is a bit cloying, but the story is full of enough acidic humor and gripping action to make it worth a read. Here’s my favorite of Fischer’s jokes:
“1950 was a good year, I almost slept with four women: a heroic production increase, under strict Marxist-Leninist principles, from 1949, when I almost slept with two women.”
Last year, I finally worked up the nerve to read Solzhenitsyn. I bought the abridged single-volume version of The Gulag Archipelago with a forward by The Lobster. From page one, my fears that the book would be haunted by a Tocquevillian dryness were dispelled. I’ve said it elsewhere, I’ll repeat it here: Solzhenitsyn’s prose is explosive. It moves at an incredible velocity, and is shot through with the blackest of humor and sarcasm. Just in case you’re unfamiliar, The Gulag Archipelago is partially a reflection upon Solzhenitsyn’s experience with imprisonment in the Russian labor camps, but more than that, a collection of the stories of his fellow inmates, sent to him from all over the country—and at great personal risk to everyone involved. These tales of degradation and starvation will rip your heart out and rape it in front of your kids. But they’ll also remind you of the incredible resilience of some human beings in the face of pure, inescapable evil. What do you do when you’re utterly fucked and all hope is lost? You persist.
Yadda yadda yadda, Solzhenitsyn was persecuted and exiled for publishing the book; you know the drill by now.
The Soviet Union is gone (new ones to come shortly, I’m sure), but The Gulag Archipelago remains—easily one of the best books I have ever read, written by very probably the best writer this world has ever known. Eat shit, Hemingway.
In Part II I’ll get back to where I started and try to make some sense of it all…
If you enjoyed reading this you can check out some of my other writing here and here.