Dark Mode On

Solzhenitsyn's wry language puts handles on atrocity.

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash

Stalin famously quipped that one man’s death is a tragedy; the death of millions, a statistic. This reminds me of an equally grim observation credited to Mel Brooks:

‘Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.’

Callous as it is, the barb hits home.

Where our own suffering cries out like an opera, other people’s suffering is at best, an interlude. To be fair, we recognize the tune, but moving from the small, intimate, and concrete to the aggregate strains our attention. For an example of this, see the small and up-close is more effect in horror movies.

With scale in mind, the Twentieth Century's body counts beggar belief. For all our documentation, the sheer, industrial size of the Shoah, the Cambodian genocide, or the Gulag (to echo what Einstein said about the cosmos) remain their quarantine.

Stalin, who loved his gallows humor, makes this point with numbers—but even there the joke’s on him. One of the tens of millions who suffered in his wake makes it more potently, and just as grimly, with figurative language.

I’m talking, of course, about Solzhenitsyn, the anti-totalitarian icon who survived the Soviet prison system and chronicled his firsthand knowledge of it in The Gulag Archipelago—some 2,000 pages of grisly close-up, spread over three volumes.

In chapter after chapter, Solzhenitsyn’s pointed, frosty language teems with imagination. Dark metaphors make us shudder, but again and again they strike home. The effect is making his bitter, unfathomable subject clear and memorable. For that alone, and for a reminder of how simple language can mold reams of experience into a poignant, pounding narrative, this long-suffering Russian is worth a read.

While I won’t be doing justice to all 2,000 pages (truth be told, I haven’t read all of them—I’m working through ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged’) my English teacher hat is fastened and ready.

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Solzhenitsyn, 1974. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

More than most non-fiction writers, (to say nothing of his being an eye witness many times over) Solzhenitsyn uses figurative language as a kind of shorthand. Better yet, he sears his subject with language that’s so wry, shocking and yet surprising you might describe it as dry-ice cold. Descriptions of torture, arrest, and sub-human conditions are despairing, but at the same time, lively.

Metaphor after metaphor boils down everything, from history tactics, incentives and perpetrators to the daily experience of some 20 million labor camp victims into conclusions any reader can grasp.

That, of course—jolting us with an intimate knowledge of what the world ignored for decades—is his purpose. With a few examples, let’s circle in on why, or at least my inkling of why Solzhenitsyn’s choice of language serves this end.

Dark Mode On

Like any emotion via written description, dread and menace come in shades. As shades go, simile, metaphor, sensory detail and personification can bring the color out, or in cases where authors spill the paint bucket, make things top heavy.

Take, for example, Charles Dickens’ damming description of Coketown in Hard Times, the industrial town built entirely for necessity and riddled with pollution.

As he gets going, Dickens splashes color like he’s Jackson Pollock.

‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.’¹

It’s hard to knock a passage that turns descriptive power up to eleven and gets away with it. With the hard-to-miss purpose of cutting soulless, industrial-age utilitarianism down to size, Dickens raises a blowtorch.

To that end, cartoonish description—purple, evil-smelling dye, melancholy madness, …the painted face of a savage—certainly get the job done, but the language is so colorful that it leaves little to the imagination. Moving swiftly to streets all very like one another and people equally like one another doing the same thing day after day, Dickens props up his target like a cardboard cutout and then clobbers it.

Bully for him, and Hard Times is well worth reading.

But having read this prose, what’s left to contemplate? What ideas and connections are we left to chew on? What crumbs do we follow and reflect on, with the goal of mapping some overarching theme or pattern for ourselves? In the style of a novelist who traveled throughout England to read his books out loud in lecture halls, Dickens’ makes his preference known—none at all.

Not lacking confidence, his language does all the imagining for us. Like an impulsive teacher’s pet, Coketown squirms to be read out loud. On a second or third read, the fanciful wordplay borders on performance art.

Love it or hate it, Dickens’ satirical language keeps Dickens centerstage.

Photo by Anja Bauermann on Unsplash

Prose of the Archipelago

Solzhenitsyn, by contrast, was not known for reading his works out loud. His three-volume opus was published in 1973, well before the Soviet Union dissolved, and at a time when it could only be read and circulated underground. He might have easily imagined ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ being whispered in a cell from one stone-faced prisoner to another. If his audience and demeanor could not be more different, then it’s surprising to see Solzhenitsyn using figurative language as often, and at times, as exuberantly, as Charles Dickens.

Even where Solzhenitsyn grabs us by the lapels to focus our attention, the choice of image or metaphors give us brooding pause. His goal that we walk away knowing, and feeling in our bones the totality of an atrocity is clear enough, and a hidden deftness serves that end.

Where Dickens shouts, Solzhenitsyn pulls us close and hisses.

The title, for starters, is an apt conceit. An archipelago (for the record, a group of islands) captures the permanence, isolation, and interconnectedness of prisons scattered over a frozen, lonely taiga. Chapters titles run with this—Ships of the Archipelago (prisoner trains), Ports of the Archipelago (train stations), The Archipelago Rises from the Sea.

Down on the prose level, Solzhenitsyn gets right to work. In the first chapter, ‘Arrests’ he likens the NKVD’s tactic of arresting en masse to a spreading contagion. Simply, and even dreadfully, the figurative language serves his purpose.

‘Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like an epidemic. Just as people transmit an epidemic infection from one to another without knowing it, by such innocent means as a handshake, a breath, handing someone something, so too, they passed on the infection of inevitable arrest by a handshake, by a breath, by a chance meeting on the street. For if you are destined to confess tomorrow that you organized an underground group to poison the city’s water supply, and if today I shake hands with you on the street, that means I, too, am doomed.’²

If Solzhenitsyn exaggerates, it’s not by much. With a few choice words, and especially the final if / then clause ‘If today I shake hands with you… I too, am doomed’ he captures the fear and suspicion that Orwell mapped with an entire novel: 1984.

Even if we don’t believe it, we’re spellbound.

In the next chapter, he lists whole categories of arrestees. To capture the enormity, Solzhenitsyn lists waves of people—peasants, intellectuals, Kulaks, returning soldiers from the Eastern Front who saw enough of Western Europe to be suspect.

‘…for war’s end and for many years after, there flowed uninterruptedly an abundant wave of Ukrainian nationalists.’³

From there:

‘The waves flowed underground through the pipes; they provided sewage disposal for the life flowering on the surface.’⁴

His imagery divides and grows, casts a light on the dreadful regularity of mass incarcerations. With nothing to stop them, waves become rivers (Solzhenitsyn likens their size and depth to actual rivers in Russia). Rivers flow through the state’s sewer system, the bowels, as it were, of a living tyranny.

Bleak as this is, the symmetry is hard to miss.

‘Through the sewer pipes the flow pulsed. Sometimes the pressure was higher than had been projected, sometimes lower. But the prison sewers were never empty. The blood, the sweat, and the urine into which we were pulped pulsed through them continuously. The history of this sewage system is the history of an endless swallow and flow; flood alternating with ebb and ebb again with flood; waves pouring in, some big, some small; brooks and rivulets flowing in from all sides; trickles oozing in through gutters; and then just plain individually scooped-up droplets.”⁵

Flowing, pulsing, pouring, pulping. The parallel phrases roll forward like swells coming in—so naturally that we scarcely notice metaphors mixing. When Solzhenitsyn describes the lack of outcry over six collective farmers murdered for gathering leftover hay, the motif becomes a lake or a pond—a chilling one.

‘What utterly repulsive and infamous serf-owner would have killed six peasants for their miserable little clippings of hay? If one had dared to beat them with birch switches even once, we would know about it and read about it in school and curse that name. But now, heave the corpses into the water, and pretty soon the surface is all smooth again and no one’s the wiser.’⁶

This reminds me of a poignant scene in Orwell’s ‘1984’—a sequence when Winston ventures into a London slum (as a party member, he’s forbidden to be there) and zeroes in on an old man in a pub. “Tell me,” Winston pleads, “What life was like before the party? Were things better or worse than they are now?”

Where Orwell prompts, Solzhenitsyn (like Dickens) comes out and tells us, but with an image we won’t forget.

Hearts, People

Solzhenitsyn’s most enduring language is probably his quote about the line that separates good and evil running neither states, nor classes, nor political parties, but through ‘every human heart.’ In an age of polarized tug-of-war, mistrust of history and institutions, and presidents and ideologies (both left and right) looming as veritable messiahs, that line running through every heart is an evergreen.

At the controls of every behemoth sits people no more prone to good or evil, no more immune to power or flattery or temptation than you or I. Chapters that explain how the Soviet system incentivized interrogators and made torture routine by rewarding numbers of confessions make us bristle.

On a lighter note, Solzhenitsyn’s description of fellow prisoners one meets in prison, or on trains to prison, and then never sees again, is just as potent. Here, and with a focus on so many forgotten victims, his language flickers.

‘Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away under there.’⁷

‘Thin strands’ is a world in itself. Earlier and throughout, Solzhenitsyn gives us the starved, shell-shocked souls who were shuffled from island to island, and here we fill in the gap ourselves. We put our ear to the ‘quiet humming’ of trains wheels underneath and imagine those trapped on board for hours, days, weeks.

As Golda Meir once put it ‘each person is a universe.’

Where ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ spills with dark detail, eagerly exposing any and all skeletons, such throwaway moments keep us afloat. A human life, hammered into sheet metal, is still, after all immortal; still framed and created for light, joy, and fellowship with the Creator Himself.

Solzhenitsyn’s book echoes this reality.

Printing and canonization—and I hope, future reading by billions—raises his book over the sprawling Gulag in a bleak, but unmissable triumph. His language reminds us that any country run by any political system could turn this hellish, and that human nature plays no small role in said turning.

Lest we forget.

Dawn, Malaysia. 2012.

Waiting for Dawn

Literary memory often hinges on an author’s language.

We remember the Gulag and its victims because of Solzhenitsyn’s skillful prose—his ability to makes the unfathomable concrete with islands, waves, rivers, and thin stands of human lives. Reading it through without shying is no cakewalk, but it’s all the better for know what happened, knowing ourselves, and knowing how fast pied pipers peddling paradise, protection, racial solidarity, or anything else can take us to hell.

While there’s no end to vigilance, there’s another simile to warm our hands by.

In his 130th Psalm, David calls out from the depths. Knowing God ‘marks his inequity’ he hangs all hope on forgiveness. Hope, along with God’s very presence, beckons like the coming dawn.

‘I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
    and in his word I hope;
 my soul waits for the Lord
    more than watchmen for the morning,
    more than watchmen for the morning’

Whatever happens, and in whatever situation we find ourselves, we’ll need language to remember, language to wait in hope.

1. Dickens, Charles, Chapter Five ‘Hard Times’.

2. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged.’ Page 29

3. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged.’ Page 35

4. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged.’ Page 24

5. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged.’ Page 20

6. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged.’ Page 132

7. Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago Abridged.’ Page 158