On Tick, by Varlam Shalamov

BIOGRAPHY
Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, that is 500 km north of Moscow, in 1907, and died in Moscow when he was 74, seven years before the fall of the USSR.
He was the son of a priest and of a teacher. His father went to Alaska (when it still belonged to Russia) as a missionary, but returned after the 1905 Revolution.
Although he was a religious man, he didn’t oppose the October Revolution in 1917.
Varlam took part in the revolutionary process as a Trotskyist activist; however he couldn’t go to university because he was the son of a priest, and at that time, workers and labourers were given preference.
For some time, he worked in a leather factory as a tanner, but eventually he could study and get a degree in Law in Moscow.
In 1929 was arrested for Trotskyist activities, and in 1932, he was released. He was imprisoned again in 1937, during the Great Purge, and released in 1942. But, because he praised the writer Ivan Bunin, anti-bolchevik and winner of the1933 Nobel Prize of Literature, he was arrested again and remained imprisoned until 1951.
He was a journalist and a writer, but while he was imprisoned in Kolyma, a labourer camp in one of the coldest places in Russia, he had to do different jobs, usually very hard, but also as a nurse in the camp hospital.
His most famous book is Kolyma Tales. He started to write these short stories in1954 and finished in 1973. Some people consider it the best description of the life in a labour camp. They are written in a dry style, devoid of all literary ornament (there are no metaphors, no allegories, no deep meanings, no ambiguity of any kind), and, what it’s more important, devoid of all political references.
The stories overlap one on another and the same characters appear in different scenes and different times. This way of narrating creates the feeling of a symphony of different voices.
There is a big difference between his narrative and the books by Solzhenitsyn: in Solzhenitsyn the labourers are heroes that suffer martyrdom, and the government is the villain of the story. What is important in Shalamov stories is the human dimension: guards, prisoners, criminals, members of the Party…, all of them are human beings, all of them have their own reasons.

Shalamov remained committed to his ideals throughout the time he was in the labour camp and perhaps that is what gave him the strength to go on living and the power his writings have.
As you can imagine, the Kolyma Tales were forbidden in the USSR, but they were distributed via samizdat (that is, in handwriting copies) and smuggled abroad. In 1960, they were published in an English translation. In 1978 in London, they were published in the original Russian version, and finally in the USSR three years before their dissolution.

ON TICK

This is really the first story of Kolyma Tales, as the first tale works as a prologue. It tells us about the moments of leisure of a group of prisoners in a labour camp after their long and hard workday. In the camp, the criminals have a higher status than the political prisoners, who usually are their servants, or at least, who must obey their orders.

The non-political prisoners are playing cards and betting high. But what do they bet if their belongings are close to nothing?The language is very simple, the descriptions are very precise and minimalist, but every object depicted seems to have a deep meaning. And the outcome of the story is so abrupt and unexpected, that you have to read it twice in order to understand it fully.

QUESTIONS

-Which diffeences do you think there were between German concentration camps and the Gulag?

-What do you know about Mao Cultural Revolution in China?

-According to your opinion, punishments and penitenciary systems are useful? What is it better for the justice, a jury or a judge?

-What can you tell us about Victor Hugo, Yesenin, Gogol?

VOCABULARY

berth, gas, deftness, wizards, stencils, card-sharp, duds, orderly 

Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine, by Neil MacGregor

 

BBC Podcast

Wikipedia

This writing belongs to a book called The History of the World in a 100 Objects. It’s the text of a BBC program and it makes reference only to objects that can be found in the British Museum.

As you can infer by the title of the book, it’s a very singular way (and more entertaining) of narrating History. Each chapter has a description of the object and places it in its historical context. The entry also includes a quotation by a specialist.

Our object is a very small statue, a figurine, of a couple making love. It was made 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age and at the beginning of the transition to sedentary life and farming, when men started growing wheat and barley and keeping herds. So there was no need for hunting, and people had food surpluses and a bit more time to entertain themselves.

The article comes to say that making love hasn’t changed much in ten thousand years, that our ancestors could have been so sophisticated and so tender as we are today, because in the figurine, you can see not only affection, but also a certain expertise, because perhaps the object could be used as a sex toy. Or perhaps they did know more than us about intimacy (that is sex playing). Perhaps our societies, with their religions and moral codes have prevented us from learning about intimacy, an idea that is different from love, sex and sexual desire.

The cliché says that civilized humans are more tender than animals, that the sexual intercourse among most of animals is almost a sort of raping, that the male is the active part and obtains all the enjoyment, and the female the passive one who enjoys less. 

The film Quest for Fire, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1981, makes use of this cliché. The story compares a tribe of neanderthals to a group of homo sapiens. In the film, the Neanderthals are presented as extremely primitive, with minds closer to those of apes than to those of modern humans: they can’t even laugh and there is no sexual love in their tribe, only sex, brutal macho sex, and reproduction. When they come in contact with the Homo sapiens group, they learn, among other things, how to make fire, how to laugh, and how to make love. And the story is set 80,000 years ago. So, according to the film, intimacy is something that can be learned.

In this belief, an experiment was carried out on gorillas at Audubon Zoo in New Orleans in 2004. A male gorilla grown in captivity didn’t understand the courtship signals of the three females whom he lived with. The zoo management wanted the female gorillas to become pregnant in a “natural” way in order to have baby gorillas for the park, but the male was indifferent to the three beauties. So the vets tried to help him by playing some porno gorilla videos, that is, videos where couples of gorillas were mating. But it didn’t work.

There is another film in which we can see the differences between intimacy, sex and sexual love. It’s a very different kind of film: Amantes, directed by Vicente Aranda. Maribel Verdú, in the role of Trini, is Carlos Sanz/Paco’s fiancé. And there is the lover, Luisa, played by Victoria Abril. Trini is a very innocent girl and doesn’t know anything about sex or intimacy; she only loves Paco, and when they have sex, their encounter is rudimentary. Luisa, on the other hand, is an expert in intimacy: she knows how to enjoy these moments and how to make her partner enjoy them too. Paco learns about it and likes it. Couldn’t he have taught Trini? Perhaps he was only a beginner and couldn’t convey his knowledge yet.

 

QUESTIONS

Should this figurine be returned to its original place (if we know it for certain)? And what about all the objects taken from Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere? Should there be an expiration date for restitution claims?

When some people talk about remigration, do they mean also restitution?

Do you think that we have more "humanity" than people from other times or places? Are some cultures more civilized than others?

 

VOCABULARY

chattering, muted, lusher, staple, dwelling