Tag Archives: Winter

Continuation of winter and fate in ‘Kolyma Tales’

Last class, we discussed the role of winter in the plots of our various readings. In Lend-Lease from Kolyma Tales, I found that the role of winter played an especially important role in this story’s theme. Further, fate plays a key element in Lend-Lease, as it did in the stories from last class. In this story, Shalamov alludes to the importance of the physical properties of the camp more and more as the plot continues. Toward the middle, he begins to describe the stone and permafrost of the camp as keepers and revealers of secrets, a sort of documentation of the past war. He writes, “Stone keeps secrets and reveals them…The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets”, and of the corpses buried in the stone: “The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost…The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret”. It appears from this quote that these feelings of defeat are regularly experienced in these camps – prisoners past and present, as well as the physical land – yet a glimpse of hope is present in the preservation of secrets Shalamov describes.

Shalamov’s describes the camp as horrifying, cold, and cruel places, as they were, but the theme of fate seems to lurk in his writing. While the cold led to miserable experiences of labor and frostbite, it also created this frozen earth, capable of preserving the bodies of these people lost to starvation, torture, and cold: “All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years…The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost” (178). It seems as if being able to recognize the bodies of these people pays them the respect and admiration they deserve, making it sure that people will not forget them – because their physical bodies have not deteriorated, the camp’s history and the individual experiences of these people, too, will not be erased.

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.