read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the First World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Mediterranean. I spent mine above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.
It was a while before I worked out what he meant, Lev, when he said of the murdered snake that “his conscience was
not
unclean. That’s the point.”…In freedom, in the big zona, the informer ruined lives. In camp, in the little zona, the informer worsened, and sometimes shortened, lives that were already ruined. Anonymous denunciation, for self-betterment: you can tell it’s profoundly criminal, and profoundly Russian, because only Russian criminals think it isn’t. All other criminals, the world over, think it is. But Russian criminals—from Dostoevsky’s fellow inmates (“an informer is not subjected to the slightest humiliation; the thought never occurs to anyone to react indignantly towards him”) to the current president, yes, to Vladimir Vladimirovich (who has expressed simple dismay at the idea of doing without his taiga of poison pens)—think it isn’t. *4 For my part, then, in the extermination of the snakes, I am guilty on the following count: they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!” Now I see the obscure charm—the pathos of that scandalized cry. And then we stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three. I couldn’t have done a fourth. Nevertheless, I did three.
The camp was more war, Venus, more war, and the moral rot of war…The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil or sectarian war. The war between the snakes and the fascists was a proxy war. Now that the snakes were gone (siphoned off as a class), the battle lines were forming for a revolutionary war: the war between the fascists and the pigs.
Lev was an innocent bystander in the first war (as we all were), and he was a conscientious objector in the second war. No one could avoid the third war. And early on he took a wound.
4.
“Meet Comrade Uglik”
T he pigs.
They were all semiliterate, but even I could remember the tail end of a time when the pigs were as humanly various as the prisoners—cruel, kind, indifferent. We had other things in common. They were almost as frozen, starving, filthy, disease-ridden, slave-driven, and terrorized as we were. But by now they had evolved. They were second-generation: pigs, and the sons of pigs. And what you saw was the emergence of human beings of a new type. Such was Comrade Uglik.
I shadowed my brother, over the years, and did some quiet roughing-up on his behalf. But there wasn’t anything I could have done about Uglik. He was just Lev’s bad luck.
I asked him, Why are you crying?
These were the first words I had addressed to Lev in ten or eleven months. By this time (January 1953), his level in camp was on a par with the shiteaters—or lower still, for a while, because the shiteaters were merely pitied and then ignored, and Lev was ostracized. There were people who had a bit more respect for him now. Something to do with his size and shape—the little bent figure, the sloping shoulders under the crumpled face, and always alone, aloof, against. Chinless, of course, but the whole set of him as defiant as a barrel-jawed dwarf in a city street. He wouldn’t cross a picket line or walk away from a sit-down or anything like that. The offense he was giving was moral and passive and silent. He wouldn’t partake of the ambient esprit. He just wouldn’t come to the well. Lev, now, was twenty-four.
I asked him, Why are you crying?
He flinched, as if my voice, grown unfamiliar, held a hardness for him. Or else, perhaps, he had
It was a while before I worked out what he meant, Lev, when he said of the murdered snake that “his conscience was
not
unclean. That’s the point.”…In freedom, in the big zona, the informer ruined lives. In camp, in the little zona, the informer worsened, and sometimes shortened, lives that were already ruined. Anonymous denunciation, for self-betterment: you can tell it’s profoundly criminal, and profoundly Russian, because only Russian criminals think it isn’t. All other criminals, the world over, think it is. But Russian criminals—from Dostoevsky’s fellow inmates (“an informer is not subjected to the slightest humiliation; the thought never occurs to anyone to react indignantly towards him”) to the current president, yes, to Vladimir Vladimirovich (who has expressed simple dismay at the idea of doing without his taiga of poison pens)—think it isn’t. *4 For my part, then, in the extermination of the snakes, I am guilty on the following count: they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!” Now I see the obscure charm—the pathos of that scandalized cry. And then we stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three. I couldn’t have done a fourth. Nevertheless, I did three.
The camp was more war, Venus, more war, and the moral rot of war…The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil or sectarian war. The war between the snakes and the fascists was a proxy war. Now that the snakes were gone (siphoned off as a class), the battle lines were forming for a revolutionary war: the war between the fascists and the pigs.
Lev was an innocent bystander in the first war (as we all were), and he was a conscientious objector in the second war. No one could avoid the third war. And early on he took a wound.
4.
“Meet Comrade Uglik”
T he pigs.
They were all semiliterate, but even I could remember the tail end of a time when the pigs were as humanly various as the prisoners—cruel, kind, indifferent. We had other things in common. They were almost as frozen, starving, filthy, disease-ridden, slave-driven, and terrorized as we were. But by now they had evolved. They were second-generation: pigs, and the sons of pigs. And what you saw was the emergence of human beings of a new type. Such was Comrade Uglik.
I shadowed my brother, over the years, and did some quiet roughing-up on his behalf. But there wasn’t anything I could have done about Uglik. He was just Lev’s bad luck.
I asked him, Why are you crying?
These were the first words I had addressed to Lev in ten or eleven months. By this time (January 1953), his level in camp was on a par with the shiteaters—or lower still, for a while, because the shiteaters were merely pitied and then ignored, and Lev was ostracized. There were people who had a bit more respect for him now. Something to do with his size and shape—the little bent figure, the sloping shoulders under the crumpled face, and always alone, aloof, against. Chinless, of course, but the whole set of him as defiant as a barrel-jawed dwarf in a city street. He wouldn’t cross a picket line or walk away from a sit-down or anything like that. The offense he was giving was moral and passive and silent. He wouldn’t partake of the ambient esprit. He just wouldn’t come to the well. Lev, now, was twenty-four.
I asked him, Why are you crying?
He flinched, as if my voice, grown unfamiliar, held a hardness for him. Or else, perhaps, he had
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