Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [232]
. . . despite my fatigue and the cold, I kept the exercise routine I had followed at home and in the Red Army, washing my face and hands at the hand pump. I wanted to retain as much pride in myself as I could, separating myself from the many prisoners I had seen give up day by day. They’d stop caring first about their hygiene or appearance, then about their fellow prisoners, and finally about their own lives. If I had control over nothing else, I had control over this ritual which I believed would keep me from degradation and certain death.128
Still others practiced intellectual disciplines. Many, many prisoners wrote or memorized poetry, repeating their verses and those of others to themselves over and over again, later repeating them to friends. In Moscow, in the 1960s, Ginzburg once met a writer who could not believe that in such conditions prisoners had really been able to repeat poems to themselves and derive mental relief from doing so. “Yes, yes,” he told her: “he knew I was not the first person to attest to this, but, well, it still seemed to him that the idea came to us after the event.” Ginzburg writes that the man did not understand her generation, the men and women who still belonged to an “epoch of magnificent illusions . . . we were flinging ourselves into Communism from the poetic heights.”129
Nina Gagen-Torn, herself an ethnographer, wrote poetry, often singing her own verses to herself:
In the camps I understood, at a practical level, why pre-literate cultures had always passed on texts in the form of song—otherwise you don’t remember, you can’t be sure of the exact words. Books appeared among us accidentally, they were given and then taken away. Writing was forbidden, as were study groups: the authorities feared they would lead to counter-revolution. Thus did everyone prepare for himself, as well as he could, food for the brain.130
Shalamov has written that poetry, among “pretense and evil, decay” saved him from becoming completely callous. This is one verse he wrote, entitled “To a Poet”:
I ate as a beast, growling over food A simple sheet of writing-paper Seemed a miracle Falling from the sky to the dark forest.
I drank as a beast, lapping up water Soaking my long whiskers Measuring my life not by months or years But by hours.
And every evening Surprised that I was still alive I repeated verses As if I heard your voice.
And I whispered them as prayers, I honored them as the water of life As an icon saved in battle As a guiding star.
They were the only link with another life There, where the world choked us With everyday filth And death followed closely on our heels. 131
Solzhenitsyn “wrote” poetry in the camps, composing it in his head and then reciting it to himself with the aid of a collection of broken matchsticks, as his biographer Michael Scammell recounts:
He would lay out two rows of ten pieces of matchstick with his cigarette-case, one row representing tens and the other units. He then recited his verses silently to himself, moving one “unit” for each line and one “ten” for every ten lines. Every fiftieth and hundredth line was memorized with special care, and once a month he recited the whole poem once through. If a line was misplaced or forgotten, he would go through the whole thing again until he got it right.132
Perhaps for similar reasons, prayer helped some too. The memoir of one Baptist believer, sent to the post-Stalinist camps in the 1970s, consists almost entirely of accounts of when and where he prayed, and of where and how he hid his Bibles.133 Many memoirists have written of the importance