Should i live

My quiet sleep, my dream every minute 1

I must live even though I died twice

June 7th, 2012, 03:39 pm

I must live, although I died twice

I'll start with Mandelstam:

I must live, although I died twice,

And the city went mad from water:

How good he is, how cheerful, like high cheekbones,

How pleasant the fat layer is on the plowshare,

How the steppe lies in the April twist,

And the sky, the sky is your Buonarroti . ..

Buonarroti is not known to everyone. But Michelangelo, no doubt. Most likely, Mandelstam here means the dome of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, the painting of which was carried out by the same Michelangelo Buonarroti - yes, yes, this is the same Italian who lived in the Renaissance, a great master and teacher, never surpassed by any of his students and not a single sculptor in the last 450 years.

Here they are - the dome of the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo:

This is how Osip Emilyevich saw the sky from his Voronezh window in his Voronezh imprisonment - exile. What was the sky above the head of Mandelstam in Kolyma, where he was rotted in the camps, we will never know. And I have nothing to illustrate this never , except perhaps a black hole.

There is such a book in the world called “Slaves of Freedom” by Vitaly Shentalinsky – I am reading it right now. This is the first book in a trilogy (the other two are Denunciation of Socrates and Crime without Punishment) dedicated to the fate of the Russian intelligentsia in the dashing Soviet years. This is not about emigrants, not about the White Guard. This is about Russian writers, poets, scientists, crushed by the iron fist of the Gulag, humiliated and ruined: Isaac Babel, Pavel Florensky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Klyuev, Boris Pilnyak, Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam. An exceptional book, useful for those who are interested in the culture and history of their country. Although I think the book is a must-read for everyone. Because everyone should know this. I do not want to write a lot of beautiful and smart words. And even a few beautiful and clever words. Because this is not about beauty or intelligence. And not even about life and death. Therefore, instead of empty descriptions of what this book is about, I will give a few excerpts.

***

In the camp, Mandelstam was no longer called by his last name, but simply Poet, in contrast to the Lubyanka executioners, who refused him this name. He was reputed to be half-crazy and in December he already became a complete goner - he did not get up from the bunk.

- Alive? - shouted the thieves from the household services, bringing food. - Hey you, raise your head!

The poet slightly got up - and received a ration.

And the dead and dying were carried past every day - typhus was raging in the camp.

Before the New Year, a snow cyclone hit the Pacific coast. It was very cold, and a strong wind was blowing. I will order the prisoners from barrack number eleven to the bathhouse, for sanitation. The poet's fellow camper Yuri Moiseenko was by his side during his last hours. The picture is from Dante's hell!

- We undressed, hung our clothes on hooks and gave them to the heat chamber. Cold as it is outside. Everyone was trembling, but Osip Emilievich's knuckles just knocked. He was just a skeleton, wrinkled skin ... We shout: “Hurry! Frozen!” They waited about forty minutes until they announced: go get dressed. It's on the other half...

A sharp smell of sulfur hit my nose. It immediately became stuffy, sulfur drilled to tears . .. Osip Emilievich took three or four steps, turned away from the heat chamber, raised his head so high, proudly, took a long breath ... and collapsed. Someone said, "Ready." The doctor came in with a suitcase. “What are you looking at, go get a stretcher…”

The end was mundane and terrible - they tied a tag to the leg, threw the corpse on a cart, along with others, took it out of the camp gate and threw it into a moat - a mass grave.

***

From the memoirs of Nina Hagen-Thorn:

There was already a third investigator with me, and I quarreled with him. Refused to sign a protocol written by him and full of monstrous accusations that I had to admit. The investigator transferred me to the punishment cell. The punishment cell, or “box”, as the jailers called it, is a low stone box without a window ... The meaning of boxing is that very soon a person, having exhaled all the oxygen, begins to suffocate. In the iron door, near the floor, there are small holes, but they do not allow you to sit on the floor to swallow the coming air. The peephole of the door opens, the voice says: "Get up!"

The prisoner begins to choke. The attendant looks through the peephole approximately every half an hour. When he sees that the prisoner’s consciousness is completely clouded, he opens the door and says: “To the toilet!”

The prisoner throws himself with joy. While he goes to the restroom and is there - he breathes. It brightens in the eyes, the consciousness is clearer ... it is impossible to suffocate at all during the investigation, therefore, starvation of the breath regulates the supervision of the sentry.

***

There is another category of manuscripts that cannot be called literature in the literal sense. Their value and strength lies in their naked authenticity, in the eloquence of the fact itself.

Simple school notebook. And in it - without commas, with errors, large uneven letters:

... Please excuse the handwriting and punctuation marks, I have a cataract and the double stroke disease paralyzed me twice. For eight years now, he has been paralyzed due to the nervous system...

Ivan Vasilyevich Okunev from the village of Krasnoye, Lipetsk Region, tells about his fate. About how, in the 38th, a twenty-year-old guy, he was arrested and sent to the Kolyma camps only because he had an expired passport, in what terrible conditions he worked and lived there, or rather, tried to survive.

They brought us to Kolyma. Instead of shoes, we were given two sleeves from discarded pea coats and one pair of mittens, all for two years. They worked in the mines in the gold mines, and the sleeves in the mine were quickly torn along the rubble, the cotton wool jumped out and the bare fingers froze. And in December, on duty, the head of the camp, Kuliev, announced who would have what request, say until they left for work.

And so we two began to ask for sleeves And two of us shake torn mittens over our heads. Four of us were ordered out of action and the rest were ordered to work. We were taken to the isolation ward. Kuliev called firefighters with a blow to the rail. We hear and see in the gap between the boards how they came running with a fire hose. The engine started up and was sent to us. We run from corner to corner but he directed at us. We shouted, called dad and mom, scolding them with all sorts of words. And on this day it was fifty degrees in the morning, the frame of the car broke from the frost.

And so they watered for half an hour, then the engine stalled. And about four hours later Kuliev came and began to tell us to go to the barracks, but we were all cold and could not move. Then he called a fireman who came with a small hatchet and began to chop us apart. I stood behind and they knocked me out first and dragged me to the door. And they shouted a march to the barracks! But my wadded trousers were frozen and I said that I could not. I will help! With a kick in the back, I flew out into the street, hit my face on the stitch that was trampled on, broke my lip, two teeth turned out to be in my mouth and it became salty with blood.

Two firefighters ran up and rolled with their feet towards the hut. It was about twenty-five meters from the hut. But when they drove up, I turned into a snowman, snow stuck to my wet clothes and froze. Then they put their backs to the barracks and began to beat the snow with butts so that the bones hurt. I fell. Then they were dragged by the legs over the threshold into the barracks, and the rest were being rolled from behind. Tears of lamentation and swearing of fighters. I lay down on the lower bunk against the stove. I woke up at night with a headache, a high temperature in my chest.

In the morning the orderly announced the rise. I began to wake the wet accomplices, but two were dead. I was taken to the infirmary. The doctor asked the last name, first name and patronymic, he said that you and I are namesakes. Then he asked where he was born from. I said from Moscow, he seemed to be delighted and said, and we are fellow countrymen. He said that he was the head physician of the Kremlin. What were you jailed for? Maxim Gorky was blamed for the death. That's all I remember, but I didn't ask for his last name.

Within a month he cured me. There was pneumonia. The fourth of us died in the medical unit, but I remained alive. Ivan Vasilyevich treated me well, I recovered. Then he said he was leaving me. He asks that I'm afraid of the dead? I said I'm only afraid of the living. Then I'll give you a job. The morgue was located two kilometers from the camp. And I had to heat the stove in the morgue at night to thaw the corpses, and in the morning two doctors came to anatomize.

And so every evening 18 corpses were brought on horseback, that's every day, and so I put 6 corpses on three walls. You lean them frozen against the wall and they stand while they thaw. The room is dark. The stove is a barrel from under the combustible firewood, resin burns hot, the sides of the stove are red. I’ll throw firewood myself, I’ll talk to them whose where is he married or not? But the young probably did not have time to get married? Do you still have a girlfriend waiting? But mine got married, it’s just that such beautiful ones don’t sit for a long time. What's your name? And my Tonya Chubarova is thinking about her right now. Gorgeous.

And thawed out the morgue until 1945.

But the war that we did not know about ended. The mail did not reach, but once they hung up a false box, they wrote a lot of complaints, but after that they called correspondents and beat them unconscious ...

Not far from our camp there was a hill, its name was Ryzhaya, a tractor stood on it. They were brought there from other mines in cars covered with tarpaulins, they shouted goodbye, they drove past our camp.

There, in the prepared trenches, they put people, started the tractor and shot them with a machine gun…

I decided to write this so that they know what Kolyma is, but if I think about it, I'll die and they won't know where the repressed were buried. It's thousands.

Maybe one of the writers will rewrite. But sorry about the handwriting, I'm paralyzed twice and now I'm writing with my shoulders shaking. And I cry when I remember what I've been through.

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