Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

See no evil: literary cover-ups and discoveries of the Soviet camp experience

2000; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 37; Issue: 06 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.37-3263

1943-5975

Cynthia A. Ruder,

German History and Society

Dariusz Tolczyk. See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience. Russian Literature and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xxi, 361 pp. Notes. Index. $37.50, cloth.To render order out of the moral and ethical chaos of the Soviet camp experience confronts anyone who assumes the arduous, indeed frustrating, task of making sense of that which seems incomprehensible. Recent publications on this subject-from memoirs and biographies (Vilensky's Till My Tale is Told, for example) to scholarly monographs (such as Toker's Return the Archipelago or Ivanova's Labor Camp Socialism)-suggest that increasingly scholars are reconstructing and interpreting the multi-leveled reality of the Soviet camp experiences of those inside the camp system and of Soviet society as a whole. To this growing body of essential work we can add Dariusz Tolczyk's masterful study of the establishment's apparent collusion with and support of the Soviet camp system.In see No Evil Tolczyk posits two fundamental and inter-dependent questions that underpin his entire discussion: 1) How does a state convince its populace that organized state terror is both useful and necessary? 2) How do writers construct and contribute to this literary cover-up (as Tolczyk so aptly phrases it)? As the author notes in his Introduction, By tampering with the dynamics of human perception and evaluations of reality, the Bolshevik regime entered a realm traditionally explored by art and literature. And by attempting to reshape these dynamics, the Bolsheviks put themselves in a position of author of a fictional world in which readers-in this case Soviet society-were enticed to suspend disbelief. I call this process 'totalitarian authorship' (p. xiv). Of course, this totalitarian authorship could not succeed without capable writers who scripted the regime's fictive camp reality. this premise, then, Tolczyk's book explores how the symbiotic relationship between the regime and literature developed and shifted as the demands of the regime and its power to control public discourse changed.In Chapter One Fiction and Fear Tolczyk traces how the Bolsheviks constructed a single public discourse that attempted to make terror both necessary and justified. Indeed, as Tolczyk persuasively argues, the modus operandi of a regime is such that, Under totalitarianism, verbal and physical means complement each other, constituting an unprecedented experiment in 'authorship' in which a printing press and a concentration camp represent two sides of the same attempt to reshape the human relationship with the universe (p. 9). If totalitarianism is to succeed, it must control not only reality itself but also the various discourses produced about that reality so that there is one sanctioned, ideologically clean version that documents the enterprise. To explicate this theory, Tolczyk traces the development of concentration camp literature as a means through which a new Bolshevik aesthetic could be imposed. Whereas pre-revolutionaryRussian literature sought to maintain a high moral and ethical stance that championed the suffering and cause of the man, Bolshevik ideology sought to make the little subject to and powerless against the single, unifying authority and destiny that only the Soviet state and its ideology could convey. Consequently, literature, no matter its subject, needed to reflect the one true theme in all its refractions-the superiority, infallibility, and omniscience of Soviet power. How better to do this than through the published representations of the camp experience, that reality which attempted, like no other, to insure that the man was totally subservient to and controlled by the state?In Chapter Two, From Tragedy to Festival, Tolczyk describes how in the 1920s the Bolshevik regime systematically developed an official discourse that not only condoned violence, but celebrated it as the natural outgrowth of the ideological battle between good (Bolshevism) and evil (any -ism contrary to it). …