About book The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard's Story (1985)
The guard narrator drops in on Security Officer Bortashevich, intending to ask what kind of trouble is reputedly brewing in one of the prisoner barracks.“Gud ivning,” Bortashevich said, “good thing you showed up. I’m wrestling with a philosophical question -- why do we drink? Let’s suppose, as they said earlier, it’s a vestige of capitalism in the mind of the people, a shadow of the past...And, mainly -- the influence fo the West. Even though we really let ourselves go in the East. But that’s all well and good. Just explain this to me. Once I lived in the country. My neighbour had a goat, a lush the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Be it red wine, be it white -- just pour it. And the West here had absolutely no influence. And a goat has no past, you would think. It’s not like he was an old Bolshevik ... So I thought, maybe some mysterious power is locked up in alcohol, something like the one that appears when the nucleus of an atom breaks up. So couldn’t we harness it for peaceful aim? For example, to get me demobilized before my term is up.” There is a lot of drinking here. A lot. What else to do when you are sent to guard criminals (‘zeks’) in a Godforsaken remote camp near the Arctic Circle? Eau de cologne, alcohol made by the inmates, anything. Or there’s chifir, a strong narcotic tea concocted in a wooden tub. Or as an alternative there is fighting, after you’ve imbibed enough vodka or chifir.This is a very funny, very dark, fictionalized version of Dovlatov’s own experience as a camp guard. It’s written as if each chapter had been smuggled out individually by friends, on microfilm , before after the narrator ‘Dovlotov' left the USSR. Now the narrator is gradually receiving bits and pieces of microfilm and reassembling his chapters with interleaved notes to his editor. The notes offer reflections on art, on the camps, and short ’nonfiction’ episodes distinct from the ‘manuscript’ episodes:As is well known, the world is imperfect...How does the activist, the revolutionary, choose to act in this situation?...What does the moralist try to do in this situation?...The artist takes a different path. He creates an artificial life and uses it to supplement the vulgar reality. He creates an artificial world in which nobility, honesty, and compassion appear to be the norm.The results of this knd of activity are known a priori to be tragic. The more fruitful the efforts of the artist, the more deeply tangible the rift between dream and reality will be. Everyone knows that women who overuse cosmetics begin looking old earlier.I understand that all my arguments are trivial. It was no accident that Vail and Genis dubbed me ‘the troubadour of honed banality”...My conscious life was a road to the summits of banality...I needed twenty years to master the banality instilled in me, in order to make the step from paradox to truism.The most potent writing is in the banter among inmates, and the inmates and guards. Dovlatov riffs on how this banter is the highest form of art in the camps--facility with language is what gains a man respect.I saw Kuptsov in the zone [Kuptsov is an inmate who follows a Mafia-like Code, and who refuses to work in the timber yard, where inmates labor during the day, despite multiple sessions in ’the Isolator’ in punishment for refusal. The Zone is the prison barracks and yards]. This happened just before the changing of the convoy brigades. He walked over and asked without smiling, “How’s your health, Chief?” [the narrator has just been bushwacked for stealing the cash in a convict card game]“All right,” I said. “And you, as before, still refusing to work?”“As long as the law feeds me.”"That means you’re not working?”...“You won’t work?”“Nicht,” he said. “The green prosecutor is coming -- spring! Under every tree, a refuge.”"You thinking of escaping?”“Aha, a little jogging. They say it’s good for you.”“Take into consideration that in the forest I’ll finish you without warning.”“Consideration taken,” Kuptsov said, and he winked.I grabbed him by the breast of his quilted jacket. “Listen, you’re all alone! Your Code doesn’t exist. You’re alone.”“Exactly.” Kuptsov grinned. “A soloist. I sing without chorus.”"Well, you’ll croak. You’re one man against everyone. Which means you’re wrong.”Kuptsov said slowly, distinctly and severely, “One is always right.”Highly recommended.
I'm not sure how I arrived at ordering this book but the library says it's in, so I'll go and pick it up. I thought a goodreader must have recommended it but I see none of my GR friends have read it. Myabe it was another book by him (most likely a short story collection), but the library only had this one..excellent - review later (I hope...)________________________________________________I detected a striking similarity between the camp and the outside, between the prisoners and the guards, between the burglar recidivists and the controllers of the production zones, between the zek* foreman and the camp administration officials. One single, soulless world extended on either side of the restricted areas.We spoke the same criminal slang, sang exactly the same sentimental songs, endured exactly the same privations. We even looked alike..Zone is a peculiar blend of irony, nostalgia, resignation, erudition, and humour that you see in much Russian and particularly Soviet fiction. It’s very literary, packed with references to Soviet writers and philosophers. There are four pages of footnotes to follow up these references, and also to explain the prison slang with which the book bursts (eg murder is a ‘wet job’; *prisoners are ‘zeks’). As illustrated above there isn’t much difference between guard and prisoner, but maybe even the prisoners have the upper hand - there are ‘no go’ areas in the camp run by gangs.If this sounds a bit heavy, nothing could be further from the truth. It is all done with a light, wry touch: Try going to Dr Yavshitz carrying your severed head in your arms. He’ll look at you with his bleary, near-sighted eyes and ask indifferently, “what appears to be ailing you, Sergeant?’Even Soviet totalitarianism is described with this same touch, a necessary defence system perhaps in order to survive the threats and thought police around you, very much like Animal Farm. In a Leningrad food store he sees a poster on the wall: THE GUILTY WILL BE PUNISHED!’ After that not a word. A threat ominously addressed into space.. after that he notices other announcements - on a wall in the office of the head of the militia in the city of Zelenogorsk. It read: ‘DON’T ASK ANY QUESTIONS!’… [and] in the admissions office of a country hospital. It consisted of two words – ‘NOT ALLOWED’ – followed by three exclamation marks.It is set in the 60s, but framed by an 80s narrative in which the author tries to get his manuscript published. Because it was written in prison and smuggled out in pieces there are sections missing and the writer tries to fill in the gaps or explain to his editor the background. This is fascinating and adds an extra dimension. For example, he is asked what he finds most striking about the USA: the fact that it exists, … for us, America was like Carthage or Troy. And suddenly it turned out that Broadway is a reality, Tiffany’s is a reality, the Flatiron Building is a reality, and the Mississippi is a reality.
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In this structurally inventive, often linguistically inscrutable novel, Dovlatov seeks to massage the traditional Russian prison camp novel by using the guards rather than the interned as his narrative focus. Stories of the horrors of camp life are interposed with meditations on the telling of said stories and the toll exacted on one's moral structure by the experiences described. He also takes care to demonstrate the moral fluidity among those being kept and those doing the keeping, and the realignment of the traditional roles of perpetrator and victim. Drawing on his own time as a prison guard for the Soviet Army in the 1960s, Dovlatov tells his camp tales with elliptical, seemingly disconnected discourse that both hints at the insufficiency of language in revealing human horror, and, as he later explains, served as a hallmark of the power and currency of language under conditions where man is reduced to his most basic elements: "In camp, scrupulously chosen speech means having an advantage on the same order as physical strength. A good storyteller in the logging sector means much more than a good writer in Moscow....It is possible to imitate Babel, Platonov, Zoshchenko and Hemingway. Dozens of young writers do so, not without success. Camp speech is impossible to fake, inasmuch as its main condition is to be inorganic." (94)Also of note: "Dear Igor, I keep thinking about our conversation. Maybe the problem is that evil is arbitrary, that it is determined by time and place, and to put it more broadly, by the general tendencies of the historical moment. Evil is determined by the state of affairs, by demand, by the function of its carrier. Besides all this, there's the factoring chance, the unlucky conjunction of circumstance, and even bad aesthetic taste./ ...Man is to man--how shall I put it best?--a tabula rasa. To put it another way--anything you please, depending on the conjunction of circumstances." (79-80)
—Moira Downey
