Varlam Shalamov, June 18, 1907 to January 17, 1982 
Athenian Nights
Once I had finished my training as an assistant doctor and started working in a hospital, the crucial question of the camps - to live or not live - disappeared, and I realized that only a rifle, an ax or the collapse of the world on my head could prevent me from living my life to the limits set by the sky.
I felt my whole flesh of a prisoner without any action by the thought. Or rather, thought there was no logical basis but as an illumination dedicated purely physical processes taking place inside the cracked and painful wounds of scurvy, open sores in the past ten years of my flesh inmate in this tissue Human tortured to tear that kept still, to my great surprise, a huge reserve of strength.
I noticed that the formula of Thomas More was enriched by new content. In Utopia He has set four the number of basic human needs, whose satisfaction provides what is in his view the greatest happiness. It gives first place to hunger, to the satisfaction with the food. The second need is the sexual urge. The third, the need to urinate and the fourth one to defecate.
These four basic pleasures we were just not allowed in camp. The authorities love as a need that can bind, alter, remove. "You never see a c. .. living your life! "Was one of the classic jokes of camp.
Concentration camp authorities were struggling against love in circular strokes, they were enforcing the law. Dystrophy food was a powerful ally and steadfast in his power struggle against the human libido. But the other three needs were undergoing the same metamorphosis, the same alterations, the same degradation at the hands of fate embodied by the prison authorities.
hunger was insatiable, nothing can compare with the sensation of hunger that is sucking the steady state if the inmate is a 58, a crevard. Hunger crevard has not yet been sung. The bowls that are picks up in the canteen, the other one licks plates, crumbs of bread which is collected in his hand and catches it with one language, all that arouse a reaction in the stomach purely qualitative. It is not easy to allay their hunger. It is impossible. Many years will pass before the inmate gets rid of his perpetual desire to eat. What he eats, he hungry again half an hour later.
pleasure to urinate? Urinary incontinence is a common disease in the camps where people are dying of malnutrition and where it touches the bottom. Where Is it the pleasure of urinating when urine from your neighbors bedsteads higher flows over you face? But you supported. It's a chance that you are on the bottom bunk, you could be on top, and do you inundate those below. That's why you rales for the form, you just wipe your face and you fall asleep in your weight, with only the dream of loaves of bread that hover like angels from heaven ...
Defecation. Relieve himself is no mean feat for a crevard. Buttoning his pants on a cold is less than fifty degrees above its strength, besides a crevard does relieve once every five days, denying the textbooks of physiology and pathophysiology of the same. Expulsion of dried pellets of excrement, because the body has extracted all that could keep him alive. No
crevard feels pleasure in defecating. As with urine, his organization operates beyond its control and must hurry to drop his pants. Tricky, the inmate reduced to a semi-animal defecation to take rest, to pause on the way to cross the gold mine. It's only fraud in its struggle against the omnipotence of the state, against this army of million soldiers escort, social communities and governments. Of all the instincts of his behind, crevard protests against the colossal force. A
crevard expects nothing of the future. All tests, all the novels deride it is a slacker who hinders his comrades, a traitor to his team at the field, in terms of gold mine. One day a writer will pop-wheeler which will represent in a light comedy. Besides, he has already made a few attempts, this writer, he sees no harm in joking about the camps. There is a time for everything is not it? It is possible that one day we approach the camps through humor.
Personally, I think it's a sacrilege. It seems that only a villain or an opportunist, which is the same thing, can write and dance the rumba to Auschwitz or the blues of the Serpentine.
The camp can not be a theme of comedy. Our destiny is not a matter for comedians. And he never will lend itself to a joke, not tomorrow or a thousand years.
Never was able to approach a smile ovens of Auschwitz or pits of the Serpentine.
These attempts to rest and unbuttoned his pants and squatting in a second, less than a second time at a glance, to forget the torture of labor, these attempts are certainly worthy of respect. But it may only novices. Because after it is even harder, more painful to straighten the spine. Yet again sometimes takes this opportunity to blow illegally, he steals, he steals a few minutes on the day government work.
The soldier escort, rifle in hand, is eager to expose the dangerous then simulator. In spring 1938, on a face of the mine supporter, I saw a soldier waving his gun and require a Comrade:
"Show me your shit! It's the third time you go there! Where is your shit? "He accused the
crevard half dead from being a simulator.
We found no shit. And
crevard Seryozha Klivanski, my classmate on the benches of the university, second violin at Stanislavsky Theatre, was accused in front of me to be a saboteur and take a rest illegal defecating on a cold under sixty degrees, accused delay the work of the chain, team, industry, mining, region, state. As in the famous song on the horseshoe that was missing a nail. Seryozha was implicated not only by the escort, by supervisors and team leaders, but also by his fellow workers - work that corrects the mistakes and redeems.
Seryozha actually had nothing in the intestines. But his stomach "the tugging." It would have taken to be a doctor, and yet, not a doctor of Kolyma, but a doctor from the capital of the continent, before the revolution, to understand and explain it to others. Here Seryozha expected to be shot for the simple reason that he had nothing in his intestines.
But we did not shoot.
He was executed later in the Serpentine, when massive repression of Garantine.
My controversy with Thomas More drags on but after I arrive. These four requirements were crushed, trampled, broken, yet their destruction is not yet marked the end of life, all have risen. After the resurrection of each of these sensations, even amputated and deformed, the prisoner sits on the seat, following with interest the progress painless, soft and warm, something sweet along the intestine alive, as if the excrement never went to regret. Then it falls into the hole with splashing, foaming, and it floats well in the surface of the cesspool without finding him. That's the beginning, a miracle. And now they get to pee in spurts, stopping at will. That too is a small miracle.
We start to meet the eyes of women with a confused and unreal interest - oh, this is not the disorder, no! - Without knowing, moreover, still offer them, and if the process of impotence (it would be fairer to say castration) is reversible. Impotence in men and amenorrhea women are the result of constant and binding dystrophy food that is to say from hunger. This is a knife that destiny plant in the back of all detainees. This phenomenon of castration is not due to prolonged confinement in a prison or camp, but for other reasons more direct and safer. The answer to the riddle is the ration concentration, despite all the formulas of Thomas More.
The key is to end hunger. And all organs are retained for not overeating. We are hungry for years. Painfully, we cut his day with breakfast, lunch and dinner. For years, nothing else exists in the brain, in life. You can not enjoy food, feel full, eat their fill. It was perpetually craving.
Then comes the hour when, by an effort of will, it manages to dispel the idea of food and feed, where we stop to ask whether the meal will be for dinner or for breakfast next day. There are no potatoes in Kolyma. Were also excluded from the gourmet menu of my dreams, and rightly so, if these dreams were no longer dreams: they would become too unreal. Gastronomical fantasies of a prisoner of Kolyma not affect the bread and cakes, semolina, rice, oatmeal, pearl barley, wheat, but not potatoes.
I did not eat potatoes for fifteen years, and when I tasted once free, on Grande Terre, Turkmen, in the Tver region, I felt like it ' was poison, a food unknown and dangerous: I was like a cat that you want to eat something that threatens his life. I put at least a year to get used to potatoes. Just get used to. Even today, I am unable to enjoy them. And once again, I note that the recommendations of the prison medicine, with its "catalog substitutes" and "food standards" are based on designs of great scientific depth.
Potatoes ... And then? Cheers pre-Columbian times! The human body can do without potatoes.
And here arises, more haunting than the thought of food, a new need, a new requirement that Thomas More has completely forgotten in his simplistic classification of human needs.
The fifth need is the need poetry.
All physicians assistants grown, my colleagues from hell, had a notepad on which they copied verses with inks of various colors that fell into their hands. No quotes from Hegel or the Bible, but only worms. That need comes just after hunger, sex, defecation and urination pleasure.
appetite for poetry, including Thomas More disregarded.
Poems, everybody a.
Dobrovolsky pulls from his breast a thick notebook of which rise and dirty sounds divine. This writer is former assistant doctor at the hospital.
Portugalov, the cultural leader, we marveled at the images he draws his unfailing memory of actor, very lightly oiled with the fat of his propaganda work. Portugalov never reads, recites everything from memory.
I contracted my brain that once so many hours devoted to poetry and, to my own surprise, in spite of myself, of my throat rise from the words long forgotten. These are not my verse that I come back, but those of my favorite poets: Tyutchev, Baratynski, Pushkin, Annenski. They are there at the back of my throat.
We are three in the surgical dressings where I am on guard: Dobrovolsky, aid-call doctor service ophthalmologist, Portugalov, an actor in the cultural section, and me. The room is mine and I am also responsible for the evening. But nobody thinks of the responsibilities, everything is done secretly. True to my old habit of always act first and ask permission to do that then, I took the initiative of these poetry sessions in the surgery department tank.
An hour of poetry. An hour into an enchanted world. We were all very excited. I even dictated Dobrovolsky Cain Bunin. This poem was etched in my memory by chance, Bunin is not a great poet, but he sounded just fine for an anthology composed orally in Kolyma. These poetic
nights began at nine o'clock in the evening, after care, and ended at about eleven o'clock or midnight. Dobrovolsky and I were on duty, Portugalov had the right to arrive late. We organized a number of poetic evenings, which were subsequently named "Athenian nights.
We immediately discovered that we were all lovers of lyric poetry of the early twentieth century.
My contribution: Blok Patsernak, Annenski, Severianin, Kamensky, Bely, Essenin, Tokhonov, Khodassévitch, Bunin. Among the classics: Tyutchev, Baratynski, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov and Alexis Tolstoy. The contribution of
Portugalov: Goumiliov Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Tikhonov, Selvinsky. Among the classics, Lermontov and Grigoriev, Dobrovolsky and I knew mostly by hearsay. Only Kolyma we assessed the value of worms amazing Grigoriev.
contribution Dobrovolsky: translations of Burns and Shakespeare Marchak, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Pasternak - until the last news of "samizdat" of the time. Dobrovolsky we recited it to Lili as a letter and this is also the time that we learned is the approaching winter. Dobrovolsky we also recited the first variant of Poem Without a Hero Written in Tashkent. Pyrov Ladynina and had sent to the former writer with The Tractors.
We all understand that poetry is poetry, and that in this field, fame means nothing. Each of us had his poetic criteria, I would say his "classification of Hamburg," if that term were not so overused. By mutual agreement, we had decided not to waste time in this anthology include oral names as Bagritsky, Lougovski and Svetlov, though Portugalov had been part of the same literary circle as one of them. Our list was developed long ago. Our choice is the greatest mysteries, because we had chosen exactly the same names on our own, many years earlier, in Kolyma. Our choice came together for both names to the poems, for the verses and even worms that each of us had met. The poetic legacy of the nineteenth century does not satisfy us, it seemed inadequate. Everyone recited what he remembered and he had noted during the interval between those nights. We had no time for reading to our respective (it was obvious that all three of us had made components or worms), as our Athenian nights were interrupted unexpectedly.
There was in the surgical department over two hundred sick prisoners, and the hospital had a thousand beds. Part of the T-shaped building was reserved for contract-free. It was a measure ingenious and profitable: the detained doctors, and there were many celebrities among them medical nationwide, and had the right to treat formally free as consultants, and they were always on hand at any time of day, the year of the decade ...
The winter of our poetic evenings, the service contract was not yet free. There was just in the surgical service for prisoners, a double room intended for free in case of emergency hospitalization of accident, for example. This room is never empty. At the time, it was occupied by a young girl of twenty-three years, a Moscow Komsomol affected in the Far North. She was surrounded by criminals, but that does not disturb. She worked as secretary of the Komsomol in a nearby mine. Not asking any question, she simply behaved, probably through ignorance of the peculiarities of Kolyma. This young girl was dying of boredom. It turned out she was not suffering from the disease for which he had been hospitalized, but medicine is still medicine, and she had to stay some time in quarantine before they cross the threshold of the hospital and disappear into the abyss of the cold. As she had connections to the Directorate, in Magadan, he had been hospitalized in the hospital Men.
This girl asked me if she could attend one of our poetry evenings. I'd be allowed. She arrived in the service tank from the beginning of recitation and remained until the end. She had also attended the following evening. These sessions took place during my guard every other day. Early in the third, the door opened wide, and the hospital director himself, Dr. Doktor, entered the room. This
Doktor hated me. I was sure he had received reports about our events. In Kolyma leaders generally act as follows: if there is a "signal" they are taking action. A "signal", a term devoted to computer long before the birth of Norbert Wiener, is taken here in the sense of "information signal" as part of the trial or prison. But if there is no signal, that is to say, oral accusation, but formal, or order of higher authorities who earlier picked up a signal (from above, we see not only better, but you hear better), it is rare for leaders to look formally at their own initiative, a new phenomenon camp life which they are responsible.
Dr. Doktor was different. He considered it a vocation, a duty and a moral imperative to track down all enemies of the people under any form under any excuse and at every opportunity. Deeply convinced
to fish something important, he had rushed into the service tank without donning the gown as he tended Pomané however, aid-call doctor service treatment, a former officer in the face Romanian ruddy and a supporter of King Mikhailovich. Dr. Doktor entered the service wearing a leather jacket in the same cut as the jacket of Stalin, the blond curls of her favorites at the Pushkin (he boasted of his resemblance to the poet) all ruffled in the heat of the manhunt.
"Ah, ah! said the director, casting his gaze from one to the other participants before fixing on me. It's you I seek! "
I got up at the seams by hand, and stood to attention to you as it should.
"And you, where do you come? "He pointed
the girl sitting in a corner, which had not closed at the entrance of the formidable director.
"I am hospitalized here, "she said dryly. And please do not show me the finger.
- How was hospitalized here? "
The commander, who had followed his leader, explained the status of the young patient.
"Well, I'll clarify this story! said the doctor, in a threatening tone. We'll see! "
He left the service. Portugalov and Dobrovolsky had spun a long time.
"What will happen? "Asked the girl.
We felt no anxiety in his voice, just curiosity about the legal nature of events. Interest, but no fear either for itself or for others.
"I think nothing will happen to me. But you, you may be referred to the hospital.
- If he sends me, "she said, I'll make him pay! To lift a finger, and he will know the highest authorities of Kolyma! "But Dr. Doktor
kept quiet. It was not returned. He inquired about the relationship of this young girl and decided to ignore the incident. She stayed the scheduled time, then went away, faded into nothingness.
The director does not stop me either, it does not send me to jail, not sent me not in an area not affected me discipline and not to general work. But in making his report to the regular meeting of employees of the hospital, in the cinema of six hundred seats filled to bursting, he recounted in detail the scene unacceptable to him, the director, had seen with his own eyes in the surgical service, during service: the physician's assistant was sitting in such an operating room to enjoy cranberries in a bowl the same woman. Here in the operating room ...
"It was not in the operating room, but in the service tank!
- It does not matter!
- Yes! "Dr. Doktor
blinked. The voice was that of Roubantsev, the new head of surgery, a military doctor came to the front. Dr. Doktor ignored the unwelcome and continued his invective. The woman was not named. For some incomprehensible reason, Dr. Doktor, Lord Almighty for our souls, our hearts and our bodies, did not mention the name of the heroine. In such cases, we note the reports and instructions on every imaginable detail.
"And what happens to the assistant surgeon held for a flagrant offense and, moreover, determined by the Director in person?
- Nothing.
- And it?
- nothing either.
- Who was she?
- Nobody knows. "Someone had advised
Dr. Doktor curb his zeal administrative, for once.
Six months or a year after these events, while Dr. Doktor had left the hospital for a long time (his zeal had procured him promotion, he was promoted), a physician's assistant who had been my classmate me asked, as we passed in the corridor of the surgical department:
"It Here, the service took place where your septic Athenian nights?
- Yes, I said. It's here. "
- - - - -
The Tales of Kolyma Varlam Shalamov, Editions Verdier
(Translated from Russian by Sophie Benech.)
© International Parliament of Writers.
pilfered shamelessly here
Dead Souls 
