The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Way of Life and Customs of the Natives I 209
lost-Ieggers with being themselves to blame, must takeupon
themselves the disgrace of their own preserved lives.
And among the surviving, the orthodox Communists now write
.me lofty protests: How base are the thoughts and feelings of the
heroes of youi' story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich!
Where are their anguished cogitations about the course o~ history?
Everything is about bread rations and gruel, and yet there
are sufferings much more unbearable than hunger.
. Oh--so there are! Oh--so there are indeed much more unbearable
sufferings (the sufferings of orthQdox thought) '1 You
in your medical sections and your storerooms, you never knew
hunger there, orthodox loyalist gentlemen!
It has been known for centuries that Hunge~ . . . rules the
world! (And all your Progressive Doctrine is, incidentally, built
on Hunger, on the thesis that hungry people will inevitably revolt
against the well-fed.) Hunger rules every hungry human being,
unless he has himself consciously decided to die. Hunger, which
forces an honest person to reach out and steal ("When the belly
rumbles, conscience flees"). Hunger, which compels the most unselfish
person to look with envy into someone else's bowl, and to
try painfuIly to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor. is
receiving. Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to allow
it to be distracted by anything else at all, or to think about anything
else at all, or to speak about anything else at all except food,
food, and food. Hunger, from which it is imp~sible to escape
even in dreams-dre~ are about food, and insomnia is over
food. And soon-just insomnia. Hunger, after which one cannot
even eat up; the man has by then turned into a one-way pipe and
everything emerges from him in exactly the same state in which it
was swallowed.
And this, too, the Russian cinema screen mus.t see: how the
last-Ieggers, jealously watching their competitors out of the corners
of their eyes, stand duty at the kitchen porch waiting for
them to bring out the slops in the dishwater. How they throw·,
themselves on it, and fight with one another; seeking a fish head,
a bone, vegetable parings. And how one last-Iegger dies, killed
in that scrimmage. And how immediately afterward they wash off
this waste and boil it and eat ii:. (And inquisitive cameramen can
continue with their shooting and show us how, in 1947 in
Dolinka, Bessarabian peasant women who had been brought in
from· freedom hurled themselves with that very same intent on
210 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
slops which the last-leggers had already checked over.) The
screen will show bags of bones which are still joined together
lying under blankets at the hospital, dying almost without movement-and
then being carried out. And 9n the whole . . . how
simply a human being dies: he was speaking-and he fell silent;
he was walking along the road-and he fell down. "Shudder and
,it's over." How (in camp at Unzha and Nuksha) the fat!faced,
socially friendly work assigner jerks a zek by the legs to get him
out to line-up-and he turns out to be dead, and the corpse falls
on its head on the floor. "Croaked, the scum!" And he gaily gives
him a kick for good measure. (At those camps during the war
there was no doctor's aide, not even an orderly, and as a result
there were no -sick, and anyone who pretended to be sick was
taken out to the woods in his comrades' arms, and they also took
a board and rope along so they could drag the corpse back the
more easily. At work they -laid the sick person down next to the
bonfire, and it was to the interest of both the zeks and the convoy
to have him die the sooner.)
What the screen cannot catch will be described to us in slow,
meticulous prose, which will distinguish between the nuances of
the various paths to death. which are sometimes called scurvy,
sometimes pellagra, sometimes alimentary dys~rophy. For instance,
if there is blood on your bread after you have taken a bite
-that is scurvy. From then on your teeth begin to fallout, your
gums rot, ulcers appear on your legs, your flesh will begin to fall
off in whole chunks, and you will begin to smell like a corpse.
Your bloated legs collapse. They refuse to take such cases, into
the hospital, and they crawl on all fours -around the camp compound.
But if your face grows dark and your skin begins to peel
and your entire organism is racked by diarrhea, this is pellagra.
It is necessary to halt the diarrhea somehow-'-so they take three
spoons of chalk a day, and they say that in this case if you can
get and eat a lot of herring the food will begin to hold. But where
-are you going to get herring? The man grows weaker, weaker,
and the bigger he is, the faster it goes. He has already become so
weak that he cannot climb to the top bunks, he cannot step across
a log in his path; he has to lift his leg with his two hands or else
crawl on all fours. The diarrhea takes out of a man both strength
and all interest-in other people, in l,ife, in himself. He grows
deaf and stupid, and he loses all capacity to weep, even when he_
is being dragged along the ground behind a sledge. He is no longer