What the Writer Saw, or Heard About: Zakhar Prilepin’s 'The Monastery' and the Solovki Prison Camp
Peter Lowe draws from the experiences of two writers, Maxim Gorky (who visited the Gulags) and Pavel Florensky (who was imprisoned at Solovki), in his review of Zakhar Prilepin’s 2014 novel The Monastery.
The Solovki Monastery. Image credit: Vyacheslav Dodonov.
Within the history of the Soviet era and its prison camps, the monastery site of Solovki occupies a particularly conflicted place. Set in the north of the country, on one of the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, it had been a place of pilgrimage for Russian Orthodox penitents for six centuries before the Bolsheviks began, in 1923, to see that its remoteness might prove useful for other purposes. Once a refuge for monks fallen from grace, almost cut off from the rest of the world in the winter by snow and ice, the monastery complex was easily repurposed for a new wave of ‘penitents’ drawn from the former White Army soldiers, liberal politicians, journalists, and other opponents of an embattled early Soviet regime As one of the first actual islands in what Aleksander Solzhenitsyn famously termed the ‘Gulag Archipelago’, it hints at what was soon to become ubiquitous: a network of camps into which millions were dispatched, and from which far fewer returned.
If we look at Solovki’s early years, though, we find suggestions that for a brief time, at least, its prisoners may indeed have been viewed as capable of reform and re-education rather than simply objects for punishment. Writing about the camp in his book Engineers of the Soul (2002) Frank Westerman noted that the prisoners once enjoyed “a certain degree of intellectual freedom. The actors among them set up a theatre company and musicians organised a chamber orchestra. The Special Purpose Camp even had its own newspaper, the Solovki Chronicle, edited and printed by the prisoners themselves.”
Even so, reports of harsh conditions and even harsher punishments continued to surface, and if the monastery is now partially re-occupied by a community of monks, and the site itself now on UNESCO’s Heritage List of monuments, the name of Solovki is known for other reasons than its spiritual or architectural qualities. It is not coincidental that the monuments to the Victims of Political Repression in the USSR in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg are blocks of stone from the Solovetsky Islands: the former installed in Lubyanka Square on 30th October 1990 on the date subsequently adopted as Russia’s Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Repressions, and the latter installed on Saint Petersburg’s Troitskaya Square in 2002.
Contemporary Russia’s relationship with the Soviet period continues to be highly complex, and groups like Memorial, set up to document and research the state’s repression, now find themselves more often the focus of official censure than support. Even so, the annual ‘Return of the Names’ on 29th October, where the victims of Soviet Terror are remembered, still takes place at the stone in front of the Lubyanka, symbolically bringing a piece of the camp system to the very doorstep of the NKVD, KGB, and indeed the present-day FSB head office.
A room full of criminals reading newspapers might have looked like evidence of an educational reform policy at work, but all of them were allegedly holding the papers upside down, as if to alert Gorky that all was not well…
One attempt to shape the narrative surrounding Solovki was put into action in June 1929. Having been persuaded by Stalin to leave his self-imposed Italian retreat and at least visit the USSR, if not (yet) move back there permanently, Maxim Gorky travelled to the island to see or to be shown how well it, like the country itself, was working. In the spirit of the deceptively orderly ‘Potemkin Villages’ that the Empress Catherine the Great had been shown a century and a half earlier, his tour was a classic case of stage-management, in which a succession of model prisoners offered ample evidence of how the camp was reforming them into valuable Soviet citizens.
That is one version, at least. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s version of the visit, something very different occurred. As his Chekist guards ushered him from barracks to barracks, subtle clues were planted to alert Gorky that all was not well. A room full of criminals reading newspapers might have looked to the observer like evidence of an educational reform policy at work, but all of them were allegedly holding the papers upside down, as if to alert Gorky – who actually took one newspaper from a prisoner, and returned it right-side up – to the fact that something was amiss. In the children’s barracks, one of the boys spoke out, promising to tell Gorky (alone) the truth of what was going on at the camp. Gorky allegedly spent one and a half hours in conversation with the boy, accumulating lists of the injustices and tortures that were by now commonplace.
Maxim Gorky (second from left) at Solovki, June 1929
If the hope was that this conversation would prompt Gorky to denounce what he saw, however, then it was a forlorn one. No public denunciation followed from the meeting (Solzhenitsyn records that the unnamed boy was shot once Gorky had departed) and Gorky signed a visitor’s book (made specially for his visit, as no one else was going to be visiting Solovki any time soon) stating his admiration for the ways in which “tireless sentinels of the Revolution are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture.” If he did have private reservations they were not of such a nature that would have prevented his effusive praise from being sent out into the Soviet and Western media. In the years to come, Gorky would come to view the regime’s capacity to ‘reform’ prisoners as one of its greatest achievements. He would take the lead role in a ‘collaborative’ volume Belomor (1935) telling the story of the construction of the White Sea Canal, a grandiose project upon which thousands of prison labourers lost their lives, many of whom were transferred to the construction site from Solovki itself.
In his enthusiasm for the Canal, and for the commemorative book that he oversaw, Gorky gave an example of the writer’s new duty to praising the Soviet reality, even as he overlooked the terrible conditions and high mortality rate in which it, like so much of the Soviet Union, was achieved. Having been persuaded to return to the USSR permanently by this time, it may have been that the state’s gift of a dacha, a Moscow townhouse, and a position of effective supremacy in the world of Soviet literature made it easier for Gorky to find the positives in such projects. In a harshly ironic twist, by the end of his life the aging and increasingly infirm writer would be effectively house-bound, and receiving all of his ‘news’ of life in the USSR from a version of Pravda that was assembled especially for him, with unfailingly positive reports in place of the terrorizing to which the rest of the populace were now subject.
In its early narrative, the camp at Solovki was founded upon a model in which the state’s sentencing was not simply punishment, but an opportunity to show that criminals could find the potential for a new life in their sentence…
Solovki, then, has a tendency to blur the lines between the ‘real’ and the realistic as it features in the minds of writers. Like so much else in the early years of the Soviet Union, it is a powerful case-study in what a world of ‘alternative facts’ or ‘fake news’ can be – a reminder, if we needed it, of how reality can be manipulated to suit political ends. A similar blurring is at the heart of Zakhar Prilepin’s novel The Monastery, published in Russia in 2014, and the winner of that year’s Big Book Prize, which is now available in English thanks to Nicholas Kotar’s translation for Glagoslav Publications. Prilepin, whose own career as an author and political activist makes him a problematic figure in contemporary Russian letters, draws on a range of traditions in the construction of his lengthy novel, but ultimately leaves the reader unsure as to how much of the substance in the book is real or invented. His use of Solovki has both historical and contemporary resonance.
At first glance, The Monastery is something with which readers of Russian literature have been familiar since Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1860 account of his imprisonment in The House of the Dead. It is a tale of a prisoner’s progress – the story of Artiom Goriainov’s journey into the camp system and his attempts to survive it. Through him we see a host of other inmates, guards, and administrators, all of whom have their place in the world of Solovki, and whose fortunes rise or fall as their actions, or the actions of others dictate.
Prilepin recognizes that in its early narrative, the camp at Solovki was founded upon a model in which the state’s sentencing of the criminal was not simply punishment for crimes committed but an opportunity to show that just as larger societal transformation was possible under the Bolshevik regime so could those guilty of crimes within society actually find the potential for a new life in their sentence. What could be more enlightened, for a group like the Bolsheviks whose own collective and individual past was often defined by exile or penal servitude, than to extend to each prisoner the chance to one day re-enter society a better person than when they were expelled from it?
Prisoners at Solovki, late-1920s
By the late-1920s, though, when Prilepin’s novel is set, the camp’s purpose was taking on a darker tone. Some of its early enlightenment endured, but there were clear signs of a harsher climate. These signs did not all appear at once. As late as October 1934 when the cleric, writer, and philosopher Pavel Florensky arrived at Solovki after a year in the camps of the Far East, there was still scope for something more than hard labour. Florensky’s letters from the camp record his study while there of the potential extraction of iodine and agar from seaweed. He threw himself into this work enthusiastically, and as a result the camp soon had its own factory and industrial infrastructure. In the Second World War many Soviet soldiers’ lives would be saved by the iodine refined at Solovki.
The iodine factory of Solovki was an emblem of a penal system that was quite literally productive, for the individuals and for the state. Over the course of The Monastery, though, Prilepin uses Artiom’s time at Solovki to chart a very different kind of transition. In the world around Artiom the agenda has become more punitive; the laboratories and discussion groups are shut down; the prospect of reform is neither promoted nor acknowledged. The camp becomes the model for the ever-growing Gulag system rather than a reminder of an outdated model of social regeneration.
Florensky came to see this change directly as his sentence wore on. His letters (preserved in the KGB Archive) show his interest in the islands’ bird and plant life, and sightings of the Northern Lights. He was always, however, under close surveillance, and when he was overheard discussing the likelihood of another war breaking out (as Trotsky had predicted) he was swiftly accused of ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’. His last letter to his family, dated 4th June 1937 and reprinted in Vitaly Shentalinsky’s The KGB’s Literary Archive (1995) is filled with a sense of loss and anxiety:
Everything and everyone has gone. For the last few days I have been appointed as a night watchman, guarding our output in the former iodine factory. […] Life has died away and, more than ever before, we now feel ourselves cut off from the mainland. It’s already 6am. The snow is pouring down and a frantic wind spins it round and round. The broken ventilation panes bang to and fro in the empty rooms as the wind bursts through. Alarmed cries of seagulls reach me. With all my being I feel the insignificance of man, his works and all his strivings.
In this sense, then, Prilepin’s novel reminds the reader that even if faint traces of near-vanished values remained, most of what Gorky was shown was already a fiction by the time of his visit. For his part, Prilepin draws upon a tradition of ‘camp writing’ which acknowledges Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov as key figures, with a host of other memoirs and accounts reinforcing the veracity of their works. This is a curious approach, though, if we consider that Prilepin himself has been a public critic not only of that very genre but also of the ways in which Russia’s present accords too much attention to the chapter of its past that the Gulag represents. Given his long membership of Russia’s National Bolshevik Party, his support for Vladimir Putin’s policies in Ukraine (support that at one point went as far as his personally overseeing the ‘funding’ of a combat battalion) and Putin’s own hostility to the work of groups like Memorial, Prilepin’s journey into the past is not simply another reminder of the excesses of the early Soviet years. Artiom rarely shows the attributes that would qualify him as one of those sympathetic victims swept up in the growing Terror of Soviet life. He is a convicted murderer, and if he is interested in survival, he is not concerned with the moral compass of the system under which he has been sentenced. There is space within the novel for the thoughts of more intellectual prisoners, but little indication that Artiom is any better for his interactions with them. He survives: that’s all.
Florensky himself was not so fortunate. In June 1937, the camp was reorganised again, the iodine factory closed, and new NKVD staff allocated to make it into a proper prison. Over the latter half of 1937 most of the inmates were taken away and shot, although for years the circumstances of Florensky’s death were shrouded in mystery. Various rumours suggested he was shot in the war at a camp in Kolyma (writing in the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn believed this to be the case), drowned on a barge taking him from Solovki, or killed by fellow inmates at some other location. Granted access to the KGB archives in the early 1990s, Shentalinsky finally tracked down a report in the KGB archive indicating that Florensky’s execution had indeed taken place at Solovki on 8th December 1937.
There are many such narratives woven into and around the camp, which Prilepin uses to his advantage. Framing the narrative of The Monastery is an autobiographical introduction, in which he tells the reader that the substance of the novel is essentially a retelling of a series of stories that Prilepin’s great-grandfather told (passed on to Prilepin in turn by his grandfather) recalling his own imprisonment at Solovki at the time when the novel is set. Thus, its characters are presented to us as real people, as well as figures in a literary text. This is counterpointed at the close by the transcription of the ‘diary’ of a warden’s wife, with whom Artiom has an affair within the narrative, and a series of historical notes that track the characters beyond the scope of the narrative and into the later 1930s. By that time, we are told (with Prilepin’s great-grandfather as an authority for the truth of the statement) that Artiom was already dead, “murdered by gangsters in the forest” when he stopped to bathe by a lake.
At the close of these ‘notes’ Prilepin muses what the effect would have been if he had “looked at all that had happened from another point of view,” with the eyes of a different character and with Artiom on the margins of the plot. “Would it have been a different story,” he asks, “a different life? Or would it all have been the same?” Having read of his death in the notes, we turn the page and are perhaps surprised to encounter Artiom alive and well in an Epilogue, brought back to life by the novelist’s touch. Gorky, who believed in the truth-telling power of literature even as he supported a state that used literature to underwrite its own deceptions would, surely, have approved of that textual irony. Even after eighty years it seems that the monastery at Solovki has a lot of fictional potential.
The Monastery by Zakhar Prilepin (translated by Nicholas Kotar) is published by Glagoslav.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Peter Lowe teaches classes in English Literature at the Bader International Study Centre, East Sussex. His interests are in the culture and history of the early 20th century in Russia and in western Europe, and he is currently researching the nature and uses of 'nostalgia' in the early Soviet period