Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [236]
Alexander Wat retold Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to a group of bandits while in prison.157 Alexander Dolgun recounted the plot of Les Misérables.158 Janusz Bardach told the story of The Three Musketeers: “I felt my status rise with every twist of the plot.”159 In response to the thieves who dismissed the starving politicals as “vermin,” Colonna-Czosnowski also defended himself by telling them “my own version of a film, suitably embellished for maximum dramatic effect, which I had seen in Poland some years earlier. It was a ‘Cops and Robbers’ story, taking place in Chicago, involving Al Capone. For good measure, I threw in Bugsy Malone, maybe even Bonnie and Clyde. I decided to include everything I could remember, plus some extra refinements which I invented on the spur of the moment.” The story impressed its listeners, and they asked the Pole to repeat it many times: “Like children, they would listen intently. They didn’t mind hearing the same stories over and over again. Like children, too, they liked me to use the same words every time. They also noticed the slightest change or the smallest omission . . . within three weeks of my arrival I was a different man.”160
Yet an artistic gift did not need to earn a prisoner money or bread in order to save his life. Nina Gagen-Torn describes a musical historian, a lover of Wagner, who managed to write an opera while in the camps. Voluntarily, she chose to work cleaning camp sewers and outhouses, since this otherwise unpleasant job gave her enough freedom to think through her music.161 Aleksei Smirnov, one of contemporary Russia’s leading advocates of press freedom, tells the story of two literary scholars who, while in the camps, created a fictitious eighteenth-century French poet, and wrote pastiche eighteenth-century French verse.162 Gustav Herling also derived enormous benefit from the “lessons” in the history of literature which he received from a former professor: his teacher, he speculated, may have benefited even more.163
Irena Arginskaya was even helped by her aesthetic sensibility. Years after her release, she could still speak of the “incredible beauty” of the far north, how at times the sunsets and the views of the open spaces and great forests left her breathless. It even once happened that her mother made the long, terrible journey to visit her in camp, only to discover upon arrival that her daughter had been taken away to the hospital: the visit was in vain. Nevertheless, she spoke “until the end of her life,” as did her daughter, about the beauty of the taiga. 164
And yet—beauty could not help everybody, and its perception was subjective. Surrounded by the same taiga, the same open air, the same sweeping landscapes, Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya found that the scenery made her feel only disgust: “Almost against my will, I remember grandiose sunrises and sunsets, pine tree forests, bright flowers which for some reason had no scent.”165
So struck was I by this comment, that when I myself visited the far north in high summer, I looked with different eyes at the wide rivers and the endless forests of Siberia, at the empty moonscape that is the Arctic tundra. Just outside a coal mine, which stands on what used to be a Vorkuta lagpunkt, I even picked a handful of Arctic wildflowers to see if they had a scent. They do. Perhaps Ulyanovskaya had simply not wanted to detect it.
Chapter 18
REBELLION AND ESCAPE
If I had heard the sound of the sledge dogs announcing the start of the patrol now, I think I might have been physically sick. We ran the few yards to the outer fence . . . we were probably making little noise, but it seemed to me that the commotion was deafening . . . In a final mad scramble we leapt and tumbled over the last lot of barbed wire at the foot of the outer fence, picked ourselves up, breathlessly inquired if everyone was all right, and, with one accord, started to run.
—Slavomir