"The Pole of Cold and Cruelty"

By Patricia Blake

WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND by Eugenia Ginzburg; Translated by Ian Boland Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 423 pages; $17.50

"Poetry is power," observed Osip Mandelstam, Russia's great 20th century poet who died some time in the late '30s in a Soviet concentration camp. "Poetry is respected only in this country --people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for it."

In Stalin's time, certainly, poetry had the power to arouse the wrath of a dictator bent on destroying his country's intellectual and spiritual resources. At the same time, poetry had the power to console Stalin's victims, as has been amply documented in the writings of survivors of Stalin's gigantic Gulag of prisons, camps and places of exile. A compelling example is Eugenia Ginzburg's description of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison in Yaroslavl. A former schoolteacher and an ardent Communist, Ginzburg was arrested in 1937, like millions of other innocent citizens caught up in Stalin's Great Terror. Lying in a glacial underground punishment cell, where rats scuttled past her face, she asked herself:

"What was I to do? Of course--there was always poetry! I recited Pushkin, Blok, Nekrasov and Tyutchev." She then composed a poem of her own:

A flagstone is my only cushion, But Pushkin, sitting in one corner, Sings me a song...

And, unseen by any guard, Another priceless friend Comes into my cell--His name is Alexander Blok.

"Poetry, at least, they could not take away from me!" she thought. "They had taken my dress, my shoes and stockings, and my comb, they had left me half naked and freezing, but this it was not in their power to take away, it was and remained mine. And I should survive even this dungeon."

That haunting passage is from Journey into the Whirlwind, the first volume of Ginzburg's memoirs, published in the U.S. in 1967. There, she began recounting the 18 years she spent in the Gulag, mostly in the Arctic death camps of Kolyma. In this, the second volume, Ginzburg, who died in 1977, picked up her story about "the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

Evil abounds in the world evoked by Ginzburg. The Kolyma region where she was ultimately imprisoned was the largest and most terrible of the Stalin-era concentration-camp complexes, stretching a thousand miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called Kolyma "the pole of cold and cruelty." It was a place of massacre, where 3 million died, the men digging for gold under the permafrost, the women felling trees at temperatures of --56DEG F. Young men dispatched to the mines quickly succumbed to tuberculosis. Ginzburg, who acted for a time as a medical assistant, reckoned that "something like a thousand" died in her arms. Among her own ordeals was a 46-mile forced march across the frozen taiga, while seven husky, well-fed guards escorted her in relays.

How did she survive to bear witness to these unspeakable happenings? In his moving introduction to her book, the German Nobel-prizewinning novelist Heinrich Boell notes that though many shared Ginzburg's experience, "very few can narrate it, even fewer can write about it, and it is these few who transform personal experience into testimony." Ginzburg tells us that her book was the "main object" of her life in captivity. Like Solzhenitsyn she committed names, facts and events to memory by incorporating them into long rhymed poems that she could more easily memorize.

Once again, poetry, her own and that if others, was the thread that tied her to humanity. Poetry served her also when she was reunited with her younger son Vasya. (Her elder had died of hunger after her arrest.)

By then the 16-year-old Vasya was a stranger. He had been four when his mother was taken away, and he was dispatched to one of the orphanages for the children of the enemies of the people. In Kolyma, mother and son found a means of communicating with each other by reciting poetry during their first night together. Those lines, she recalls, were "a bulwark against the inhumanity of the real world ... a form of resistance." Vasya (who grew up to be the brilliant Russian novelist Vasili Aksyonov) told her "Now I understand what a mother is ... you can recite your favorite verses to her and if you stop she will go on from the line where you left off."

The most remarkable feature of Ginzburg's narrative is the decency and kindness she encountered in the Arctic inferno. She describes the kinship that developed among political prisoners as "the strongest of all human relationships " citing innumerable examples of their virtually suicidal generosity to one another. Alongside her portraits of cruel or monstrously indifferent guards and camp administrators are some of men and women capable of acts of compassion. One camp commander, whom she describes as a "peculiar specimen," intervened again and again to save her and her camp lover later her husband, the prisoner-physician Anton Walter.

Ginzburg experienced not only friendship and love in Kolyma but also snatches of happiness. The post-Stalin years found her desirous, not of bloody vengeance, like many ex-prisoners, but of telling her story of good and evil to Russia and the world. As her husband observed, "You just aren't very good at hating " How striking is the difference between Ginzburg's account of the camps and that of Solzhenitsyn, whose governing passion in the writing of The Gulag Archipelago was an unconquerable rage. No outsider in the West can hazard a judgment as to why the experience of the Gulag should have softened the heart of one prisoner while it hardened the purpose of another. Unquestionably, both pieces of testimony contain their own profound truth. --By Patricia Blake

Excerpt

"There, inside the barbed wire, I came across this gift for sharing the happiness of others. I had always noticed that people's faces light up when they are watching some little wild animal that has strayed into a built-up area. How their faces are transformed!

The same transformation occurred in the faces of prisoners when one of their number was being released. It was an expression of selfless joy. To see a squirrel or a hedgehog that by some miracle has strayed into a town garden is to make contact with nature. To see someone emerging on the far side of the barbed wire was to make contact with freedom."

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