TWO MOMENTS IN GULAG LITERATURE capture the peculiar position of the Soviet prisoner-author. The first is from Varlam Shalamov's “Through the Snow,” in which the author describes a group of men beating a path through the snow, sharing the exhausting task of opening up a new road: “Every one of them, even the smallest, even the weakest, must tread on a little virgin snow — not in someone else's footsteps.” In the next, and final, sentence of the story, Shalamov transforms the road into a discussion of literary production in the prison camp: “The people on the tractors and horses (who come after), however, will be not writers but readers.”
The second moment is when the title character of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich meets Vdovushkin, a graduate student-cum-medical orderly. Sick and waiting in the camp dispensary, Ivan Denisovich notices that Vdovushkin is copying out a “new long poem that he'd finished the previous evening…” Vdovushkin had been a graduate student of literature before he was sent to the Gulag, and thanks to his talents he is under the protection of the camp doctor, for whom he is copying out the poem. Vdovushkin is sympathetic to Ivan Denisovich, but does not put him on the list of prisoners exempted from work.
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