Tag Archives: cold

Hell is on Earth

In his short story “A Child’s Drawing”, Varlaam Shalamov shows how far a society can fall and how dark human life can be. Set in the horrendous conditions of the Soviet gulag, Shalamov uses a character finding a child’s notebook full of drawings to contrast the isolating dread of conditions in the far North.

The conditions of the world around the characters in the story can only be described as hell-like. Every moment living in the harsh, unforgiving environment of biting cold and long depressingly dark nights is a punishment. This is hell, a land of punishment that can never be escaped. Shalamov describes the weather as a way of purposefully breaking spirits: “Nature in the North is not impersonal or indifferent; it is in conspiracy with those who sent us here.”

This feeling is furthered by a myth told by the narrator towards the end of the story. He describes God literally abandoning the people of Northern Russia, of God condemning them to an existence not truly meant for those He had made in His image. The end of the legend goes: “Later when God grew up and became an adult, he learned to cut out complicated patterns from his pages and created many bright birds. God grew bored with his former child’s word and he threw snow on his forest creation and went south forever.” God has left the people and the land He Had created, never to return. And there is nothing more lonely, more crushing, then feeling that everyday you move further and further away from God’s light.

Winter Transformations

Both the excerpt from the “Blockade Diary” and “The Cave” highlight winter’s great transformative power and ability to upset the status quo. In Ginzburg’s “Blockade Diary,” the characters are transformed from sensible to senseless beings through the brutality of the cold and paucity of available food. The city dwellers, despite their acknowledgment of the danger, are not afraid of the relentless shelling of the city, and “instead of being frightened, [they are] annoyed; instead of being afraid of death, [they are] afraid of being stopped on the way and herded into shelter” (35). Additionally, “the man of winter,” as the city dwellers are described, no longer fears the military danger of the siege and instead is fixated on “starving [and] freezing” (34-35). While the people would normally take immediate shelter from the shelling, the winter transforms their senses to the point that they no longer think completely rationally and focus only on staying warm and finding food. The winter and scarcity of food renders the people just shadows of themselves, as they no longer feel any emotion and accept that death is upon them. One girl is described as “grown numb,” and “not a person at all” as a result of the sordid conditions, which causes her to “[not] care because [she knew she] could die at any minute” (53). As the winter has brought with it a sense of the inevitability of death, the city dwellers accept death and completely lose care for anything in their lives. As the girl claims, there is no use in caring when you could die at any moment.

Zamyatin focuses heavily on winter’s transformative power in “The Cave.” Not only do the characters’ behaviors change as a result of winter’s approach, but the humans are frequently portrayed using non-human descriptions. When Martin Martinych contemplates stealing Obertyshev’s wood, one transformation occurs as “The caveman, gnashing his teeth, knocked the other Martin Martinych down and… plunged his hand into the stack of wood” (95). While his old persona, “the Scriabin one” would not have committed the crime, the cold has transformed him into a criminal “caveman,” seen as he steals the wood to provide himself with warmth (95). Not only does the cold lead to Martin to commit crime that he normally would not, but it also causes him to be described as both “Mammothlike” and as having “mechanical contrivances” as limbs (98-99). There are many more examples in both works about the transformation of people and the world, which stresses winter’s unrelenting power to upset the status quo.

The Looming Shadow of Predestination

In “The Snowstorm”, Alexander Pushkin reminds the reader that while humans may feel they have personal autonomy, outside forces are often what ends up determining the direction of their lives. Larger things like who your parents are, and the time period and place in which you are born obviously have a major effect on who you become, but it is also smaller things like the books you read or the friends you make that can end up determining big parts of your life, like who you fall in love with, or where you end up working. Pushkin uses the creeping cold of Russia’s winters and the snow that follows, as an example of this. By making the snow almost a character in the story, and showing how it unintentionally shapes the lives of Murya and Burmin, he shows how even great passion and intention can be thwarted by the weather.

The power of the weather at the beginning of this story, specifically the cold, is presented as a fact of life, an arbiter of the quotidian. At one point Murya passively accepts seeing Vladimir less because of the winter, showing how it is an enemy that can’t be beaten: “The winter came and put a stop to their meetings, but their correspondence became all the more active.” However, in other parts of the story, the cold takes a far less passive position. Pushkin shows how the winter actively affects and changes lives by anthropomorphizing it and giving it motivations and goals: “The snowstorm had not subsided; the wind blew in their faces, as if trying to stop [them]”.

All along Pushkin is showing the capacity the brutal cold has to define the perception of a human suffering in it: “But Vladimir scarcely found himself on the open road, when the wind rose and such a snowstorm came on that he could see nothing. In one minute the road was completely hidden; the landscape disappeared in a thick yellow fog, through which fell white flakes of snow; earth and sky merged into one.” This is a testament to the snows power. And it is describing more than a dramatic scene when Pushkin describes the landscape disappearing into the yellow fog, he is describing the passion of a first love disappearing into the annals of a forgotten youth.

Terrified Fascination

While reading Vladimir Korolenko’s “The Cold,” I was struck by the similarities and differences he describes in the reactions to the cold by animals, humans, and nature. A theme throughout the short story is how the cold affects humans physically and emotionally. While animals are showcased reacting to the cold and changing their mannerisms or habits, they do not seem to suffer any fundamental change regarding their priorities. As for nature, Korolenko frequently personifies the cold as an angry perpetrator with the river as its victim.

Sokolskii introduces the idea of the cold changing people after the men watch the deer, who they presume to be mother and child. He says that his friend is wrong in thinking that the cold makes people kinder: “Cold is death. Have you considered, for example, that a man’s conscience can freeze up?” (6). The idea that the cold can change something so engrained in a person as their conscience is incredibly striking, especially considering the frequently seen, yet futile, power struggle between humans and nature.

The relationship between animals and the cold is best seen by the deer. The men describe the how the deer “overcame such danger right before our eyes, and I think that even Polkan was ashamed to have it end with them being killed on the shore… Did you notice how unselfishly the older one protected the younger from the dog?” (6). Though the deer are facing challenging circumstance, they do not panic in the face of danger, regarding the danger of both the ice and the humans, and they continue to protect each other regardless of the adverse conditions.

As the ice takes over the river, it flows “in a thick and unbroken mass, ready to restrain – once and for all – the submissive and now powerless current” (3). Korolenko referring to the river as “submissive” and “powerless” builds on the idea of the cold as an uncontrollable and terrible force. If the cold is so unmanageable, I can’t help but wonder why the arctic and antarctic have such a strong draw for adventure-seekers and researchers.

The Duality of Cold

In the two stories, “The Cold,” and “Master and Man,” reactions to extreme cold are either as firm and unyielding as ice itself or as heartwarming as a cup of hot cocoa after sledding, with the aftereffects of the cold still tingling in one’s limbs. The narrator in “The Cold” blurs the line between extreme cold and extreme heat as he describes the sensation, “I thought I felt someone burning my right cheek with flame” (Korolenko, 1). But internally, a similar leap from extreme cold to extreme warmth occurs. Even the dog, bowing to the need of another animal to escape the dangers of the cold, “simply clenched his tail and ran thoughtfully off, seemingly bewildered by his own benevolence” (Korolenko, 5). Sokolskii and his traveling companion in the story also feel this melting of the heart in the face of bitter cold in the desperation to save first the ducks and then the man. His companion despairs at the other’s apparent indifference, “Our conscious had frozen!… Of course, that’s how it always is: all you have to do is lower the body’s temperature by two degrees and conscience freezes up…it’s a law of nature” (Korolenko, 16). When faced with the delights of the warm sleeping quarters, the men harden themselves against the coldness of letting another live slip by into the ultimate cold of death.

In “Master and Man,” Vasily Andreyevich is hardened to the plight of others by his greed, which explains his treatment (and underpayment) of Nikita. Yet in the face of the cold, his heart burns first with fear, “They say people who drink are soon frozen…he began to shiver, not knowing whether from cold or fear” (Tolstoy, 519). The same kindness that the narrator of “The Cold” highlights in the mother deer saving her baby deer is mirrored by Vasily’s selflessness of using himself as a human blanket, “he could not bring himself to leave Nikita for even a moment and so disturb that happy situation in which he felt himself; for he had no fear now” (Tolstoy, 526). Rather than the icy indifference which causes Vasily to abandon Nikita initially, the sight of another human freezing to death melts Vasily’s heart to put the health of another human being above his own.

Yet both Vasily and Ignatowicz die for their kindhearted actions. Both stories ask the question, “Was this individual’s sacrifice worth it?” After all, Ignatowicz did not even manage to save the other man. Would it be better to harden our hearts to match the environment and so survive individually? Combine heat and resources with one another, reminiscent of the communal sharing in A Dream in Polar Fog? Or sacrifice one’s self for the slim hope that someone else can live and warm oneself with the strength of conviction alone?