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• 1 2021-12-15T01:28:41+00:00 Religion in Russian Prison Literature 66 Xenya Currie image_header 2021-12-17T17:43:15+00:00

  Russian prison literature, or works written in the Russian language which pertain to experiences of incarceration, spans a long history, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present. Works in this literary tradition can be autobiographical, memoiristic, fictional, nonfictional; they can take the form of prose and poetry, novel and short story. Despite the great range of time over and circumstances in which works in this tradition have been written, various nodes of specificity emerge as continuous throughout many Russian prison texts. One such recurrent node is religion and appeals to religious belief, practice, and imagery. This is not to suggest that such appeals to religion appear in every single work in the tradition of Russian prison literature; rather, religion emerges as a relevant theme in various works throughout the tradition. This encyclopedia entry seeks to chronologically and non-comprehensively survey some such manifestations of religiosity in Russian prison literature.
  
  17th Century
  
  The Life Written by Himself
  
  One of the first works in the tradition of Russian prison literature was Archpriest Avvakum’s The Life Written by Himself, written from approximately 1669 to the mid-1670s. Avvakum Petrov (1620/1–1682) was an Old Believer, an Eastern Orthodox Christian who opposed the reforms to the Russian Orthodox Church introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. In the Life, Avvakum recounts his experiences of imprisonment, exile, and persecution for his religious dissent. Avvakum’s Life establishes a model of the Russian prison text, one identifiable aspect of which is religiosity, that will be followed by later writers. Avvakum’s engagements with religion are immediate—he begins the Life with an appeal to the “[a]ll-holy Trinity” (Avvakum 37)—and persistent: he frequently references Biblical passages, recounts praying for divine aid, and retells experiences of God working miracles through him. That Avvakum frames his text as an hagiographic saint’s life reveals his self-presentation as a saint and a martyr. Key for Avvakum is the idea that “a true Christian [...] not only [...] live[s] in tribulations even unto death for the sake of the Truth, but passing away in ignorance of the world, [...] liveth forever in wisdom” (Avvakum 38). In appealing to this religious conviction and the ideal of Christ’s kenosis, Avvakum imbues his incarceration with religious significance, suggesting that despite his external imprisonment and suffering, he is in fact an internally liberated participant in divine wisdom.
  
  19th Century
  
  Notes from a Dead House
  
  Fyodor Dostoevsky's (1821–1881) 1862 Notes from a Dead House “was the first published account of life in the Siberian hard-labor camps” (Pevear xii). Dostoevsky’s semi-autobiographical account of his eight years of hard labor and military service after his arrest serves to humanize those who are incarcerated, a project imbued for him with religious significance. Although Notes from a Dead House’s fictional narrator Goryanchikov suggests throughout the text that his fellow prisoners are transparently legible to him, Dostoevsky’s spiritual transformation recounted in the appendix reverses this perception. A transcendent childhood encounter with the peasant Marey, who “could not have given [Dostoevsky] a look shining with more radiant love” (303) when comforting the frightened young Dostoevsky by praying that “Christ be with [him]” (302) and doing the sign of the cross, facilitates Dostoevsky’s recognition of the depth of Marey’s inner experience, regardless of his “dirt-covered” physical appearance (303). This revelation transforms Dostoevsky’s perception of those with whom he was imprisoned, such that “all the hatred and anger in [his] heart [...] vanished completely” (303). The emergent project, of affording both Dostoevsky’s fellow prisoners and Marey “respect for [their] human dignity,” is, for Dostoevsky, a deeply religiously-motivated type of vision (111).
  
  20th Century
  
  "After the Ball"
  
  Leo Tolstoy's (1828–1910) short story “After the Ball,” written in 1903 and published posthumously in 1911, also engages with religious imagery. Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis and transformation in the 1870s; as one of his post-crisis works, “After the Ball” employs religious imagery as a plea for sympathetic mercy. Religion serves to temporally place the story’s events, for Ivan Vasilyevich notes that it occurs during Butter Week, a religious and folk holiday celebrated the week before Russian Orthodox Lent begins. After the eponymous ball, Ivan Vasilyevich encounters a Tatar being beaten for desertion, whose repeated pleas for mercy are ignored by the colonel, the father of Ivan Vasilyevich’s love interest Varenka. The horror of the merciless violence to which the Tatar is subjected involuntarily invites invocations of God, for the blacksmith utters “O Lord” at the sight (Tolstoy 278). Tolstoy’s text condemns this violence through Ivan Vasilyevich’s affective response to it, for he experiences “an anguish that was almost physical to the point of nausea” and falls out of love with Varenka (278). Paralleling the Tatar’s suffering to Christ’s encourages Tolstoy’s reader to display the compassionate mercy, which the colonel fails to demonstrate, for the plight of prisoners and victims of state-sanctioned violence.
  
  Memoirs of a Revolutionist 
  
  Vera Figner's (1852–1942) 1927 memoir, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, recounts her experience of imprisonment for over twenty years for her participation in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Figner’s religious belief fortifies her throughout the suffering she endures, allowing her to feel “[c]alm and radiant” as she “looks firmly ahead, fully conscious of the fact that what is coming cannot be escaped or averted” (Figner 205). That she regards Christ’s life as an ideal “example of self-sacrificing love” helps her understand her incarceration as a test of her willingness to suffer “for that good which [s]he has longed to attain, not for [her] own transitory self,” but for the sake of others (205). Although the prison, as a “living grave” (205), seeks to deny those imprisoned within it their human dignity, Figner encounters fellow prisoners who conduct themselves with profound goodness, such as her friend Ludmila Alexandrovna, a “loving, self-sacrificing spirit” who goes out of her way to avoid stepping on insects (202). Figner also finds comfort in an icon, given to her by her mother after her trial, of the “Most Holy Virgin of Joy Unexpected,” the sight of which encourages Figner to seek the small joys, without which prison life would be unendurable (228).
  
  "Requiem" 
  
  Religious imagery appears in Anna Akhmatova’s (1889–1966) poetic cycle “Requiem,” written between 1935 and 1961 about the Stalinist terror. Akhmatova parallels her son’s suffering to Christ’s, synecdochally encouraging sympathy for all incarcerated in the gulags and the “tall cross [they] bear” (Ehre 362). Yet Akhmatova’s appeals to the religious imagination also encourage a sympathetic understanding for the plight of those left behind, outside of the gulag; in section X, ‘Crucifixion,’ Akhmatova analogizes not only her son to Christ but also herself—and all the other women, particularly mothers, waiting in the prison lines—to Mary, the Mother of God. Akhmatova emphasizes the response to the crucifixion of the women who witnessed it. Mary is set apart because her grief, like Akhmatova’s, is so profound that it emerges as unwitnessable: although those around can gaze upon “Mary Magdalene trembl[ing] and we[eping]” and John “turn[ing] to stone,” “no one dared to lift his eyes / Where His Mother stood, silent and alone” (364). This invocation of religion encourages a recognition of the intensity of maternal grief which, Akhmatova suggests, both she and the Theotokos experience at their sons’ suffering.
  
  The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
  
  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (1918–2008) The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, one of the best-known works of Russian prison literature, brings to light the horrors of the Soviet gulag system. Solzhenitsyn engages with religion to suggest that imprisonment permits a greater degree of internal freedom than is otherwise accessible without incarceration, for prison offers him “a free head” even when his “feet [cannot] run along” (Solzhenitsyn 607). Furthermore, prison “causes the profound rebirth of a human being,” through which one’s personality, character, and soul are transformed (604). This transformation carries, for Solzhenitsyn, a religious dimension, as it helps him realize that “[o]nce upon a time [he was] sharply intolerant,” “never forgave anyone,” and “judged people without mercy” (611). His carceral experiences also facilitate his spiritually-motivated conviction that he is unwilling to survive at any price when survival at any price entails survival “at the price of someone else” (603). As incarceration enables the “soul, which formerly was dry, [to ripen] from suffering” (611), it is Solzhenitsyn’s time in the gulag which helps him “come to love [his] neighbors in the Christian sense” and to attain a greater degree of internal freedom despite external imprisonment (603). 
  
  Bibliography 

  Akhmatova, Anna. “Requiem,” translated by Milton Ehre, Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 6.3, 2004, pp. 358–365. 
  
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage-Random House, 2016.
  
  Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Authorized Translation from the Russian, Northern Illinois University Press, 1991. 
  
  Petrov, Avvakum. The Life Written by Himself. Translated by Kenneth N. Brostrom, Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979, pp. 35-113.
  
  Pevear, Richard. Foreword. Notes from a Dead House, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage-Random House, 2016, pp. vii–xvi. 
  
  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney, Harper & Row Publishers, 1975, pp. 597-617. 
  
  Tolstoy, Leo. “After the Ball.” Tolstoy’s Short Fiction: Revised Translations, Backgrounds, and Sources Criticism, edited by Michael R. Katz, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2008, pp. 271–279. 

• 1 media/michael-yuan-7Zo4YeXmrEQ-unsplash.jpg 2021-10-14T20:01:38+00:00 The Theme of Community in Notes from a Dead House and Assata: An Autobiography 30 This is an analytical comparative essay examining the theme of community in Notes from a Dead House and Assata: An Autobiography. By Gillian Farah-Bumstead image_header 2021-10-15T03:12:38+00:00

  The Theme of Community in Notes from a Dead House and Assata: An Autobiography

  
  Notes From a Dead House and Assata: An Autobiography tell the story of political imprisonment. Though the protagonists differ in race, class, gender, location, and time period, Dostoevsky and Shakur foreground the role of community in resisting the dehumanizing nature of incarceration. The goal of these texts is to communicate the experience of incarceration to the reader. Despite their radically different experiences and narrative choices, both protagonists form bonds with their fellow prisoners in order to survive their incarceration and reclaim their humanity.
  Shakur and Dostoevsky existed in a historical moment of extreme state repression where it was possible to be seized from your community at any moment and taken into the hands of the state. Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) which operated as an underground militant revolutionary organization in the U.S. throughout the 1970s. Shakur was arrested in 1973 and later sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a state trooper. She escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in 1979 and gained asylum in Cuba where she remains to this day. Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 for his participation in a utopian socialist reading group that read books that were banned for their criticism of Tsarist Russia. He was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp directly followed by 6 years of forced military labor in exile. Notes from A Dead House was published in 1861 featuring the protagonist Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov (a man sentenced to ten years of forced labor in Siberia for the murder of his wife) who functions as a stand in for Dostoesvky. Dostoevesky was not able to publish an autobiography of his experience in hard labor due to political repression.
  
  The conditions of each prison are described by the authors as dehumanizing. “There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open the small windows located near the ceiling. The average temperature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes” (Shakur 66). The beginnings of each text are characterized by the themes of alienation and loneliness. Shakur and Goryanchikov have just been ripped from their communities and placed in a traumatizing space they have yet to learn how to navigate. Goryanchikov upon arrival feels deep isolation, depression and grief; he is a nobleman and the majority of the prison population are serfs. This class difference causes immediate mistrust and alienation from his fellow convicts. While this causes him pain throughout the novel, he initially believes that his fellow convicts are bad people he has no desire to connect with, stating “Later on, I came to realize that there was yet another torment in addition to confinement and compulsory labour, perhaps the sharpest of all. It was forced co-existence. To some degree, coexistence is forced upon us” (Dostoevsky 31). This attitude, his class status, and the labor conditions of the prison keep him from being able to form a community.
  
  This is in direct contrast to Shakur’s initial experience of incarceration. Upon arrival at the prison, she is kept in a single cell and not allowed to leave. She had been tortured before being placed in prison, and is immediately comforted by hearing the voices of other black women with whom she feels safe. “Behind the guard, through the open door, i could see some of the women standing around. They were all, it seemed, Black. They smiled and waved at me. It was so good to see them, it was like a piece of home” (Shakur 46). Shakur is a black woman from a working class background, as are almost all the other women in the prison. She describes her fellow convicts with love and sees them as her community, but is unable to interact with them because the prison sees her ability to organize community as a threat to the system.
  
   Despite Goryanchikov’s challenges to having a community, he begins to form deep connections with his fellow convicts. At some point in the beginning of his term (Notes from A Dead House is not written linearly so it is difficult to tell when this begins to happen), Goryanchikov starts to consider whether his initial judgements of his fellow convicts are wrong.“‘These people, perhaps, are no worse than others whom I had left behind.’ But I shook my head doubtfully as I thought this. And yet, how right I was!” (Dostoevsky 82). One of the people he regards to be a good person is Sushilov, who desires to serve Goryanchikov in exchange for money. Though Goryanchikov is initially frustrated by this, when he later yells at Sushilov, he expresses deep regret and guilt. As he learns to trust the other prisoners and some begin to trust him, he starts to feel a sense of community in the prison which lightens his depression. He forms many relationships in which they mutually care for each other. In the appendix, Dostoevsky writes of a spiritual awakening he had during his sentence. He thinks of an interaction he had with his family's servant as a child in which the servant defied all his pre-existing expectations of who Dostoevsky thought he was, and treated him with unconditional love and patience. This causes him to reconsider his perception of the other prisoners because he realizes they all may be capable of treating him the way this servant did that day. Though this was Dostoevsky’s experience, this transformation can be seen in his character as well. When Goryanchikov forms connections, it is because of his newfound ability to see the complexity in his fellow prisoners and look past his judgments.
  Shakur works to be with other prisoners at any cost, often physically fighting to achieve this. Throughout her years of incarceration, she is repeatedly moved from prison to prison and often kept in solitary confinement. While Goryanchikov is mostly fighting with himself, Shakur is constantly fighting with the system. When she is being kept in solitary, she begins to push past the guards in the doorway when they would deliver her food and walk into the common area to be with the other women. She did this everyday, and she bonded with a woman named Eva. “Eva and i got on famously...She taught me a lot about prison, and she was forever telling some funny story about her life” (Shakur 60). After a while, the guards attempt to physically remove her from the communal area and bring her back to her cell. When the guards ask which prisoner is JoAnne Chesimard (Shakur’s government name), Eva claims that she is Assata, and the other women follow suit. This ends in Shakur and her community militantly resisting the guards taking her back to her cell. In every prison Shakur is in, she approaches the other black women with love, kindness, and solidarity, and manages to form a community.
  
  The prison described by Goryanchikov is a space in which connections are hard to form. The hard labor and the living conditions crush the human spirit. “There was no end to gossip and backbiting: our lives were a perpetual damnation” (Dostoevsky 20). Goryanchikov argues that “prison and hard labour do not reform the criminal, of course, but only serve to punish him and to safeguard society” (Dostoevsky 23). Despite this, the prisoners manage to build their own society inside the prison that replicates the outside world. Goryanchikov states “No matter how humbled he may be, he instinctively demands respect for human dignity. The convict very well knows that he is a convict and an outcast, but no brands or fetters can make him forget that he is a man and that he must be treated as a human being therefore” (Dostoevsky 129). In this framework, Dostoevsky is arguing that building community within the prison system is a battle to regain humanity, and therefore a direct act of resistance to the system.
  
  This understanding of incarceration is the backbone of what Shakur communicates through her Autobiography. Shakur understands the prison system to be a replacement for slavery (therefore at its core, the prison industrial complex exists to dehumanize black people) and dedicated her life to the liberation of black people. While in prison, she released a statement to the public titled . In this statement Shakur writes, “We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains!” (Shakur 52). This is the revolutionary ideology underpinning her Autobiography. In every prison she occupies, she fights by any means necessary to connect to her people, thus regaining her humanity which exists as the antithesis to the state’s power. 
  
  These texts threaten the power structures that exist to erase Shakur and Goryanchikov by demonstrating the value of forming bonds with other prisoners. Telling their stories directly counteracts the goal of their incarceration by communicating what goes on inside these institutions to the outside world, revealing to their readers the stories and the people who have been hidden.
  
  Works Cited
  Davis, Angela, and Assata Shakur. Assata: An Autobiography. Zed Books, 2016
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Vintage; Translation Edition , 2016.