Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
I have translated into Russian two excerpts (so far) from my novel Against Destiny (Russian title Вопреки судьбе, as the novel is advertised in Russian-language journals), for publication in the leading Canadian Russian-language newspaper Nasha Canada (Наша Канада). Below is the first of the two translations. It was published in issue #24 (208) December 2009, page 10.
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Из Части 2 "ПОБЕГ”.
Через пару дней, как Ятта и предсказывал, с утра пошел снег. Не пурга, способная в одночасье накрыть человека с головой, а просто сильный устойчивый снегопад. По словам Ятты, он должен был продлиться дня два. Лучшего времени для начала трудно было себе представить, и было бы глупо упустить такую возможность.
В короткий промежуток времени между подъемом и завтраком Трофимов, Бондаренко, Гольдберг и Тимошкин, собравшись в своем излюбленном месте за стеной сортира, в последний раз обсудили план действий. Сразу после завтрака они наскоро увиделись с Яттой, которому Бондаренко еще раз напомнил, как найти дорогу к их делянке.
Рабочий день шел как обычно. Они вчетвером работали, не прерываясь ни на минуту. Приступать к исполнению плана до обеденного перерыва было нельзя - тогда их отсутствие и труп вертухая будут обнаружены уже в середине дня. Самое лучшее время - вскоре после обеда, когда впереди останется еще шесть часов рабочего времени плюс час на дорогу домой. Этого вполне достаточно, чтобы уйти далеко. А так-как многие бригадиры заставляли своих подопечныхг трудиться и после окончания рабочего дня, чтобы выполнить дневную норму, в их распоряжении будет еще час или около того, пока их хватятся. Плюс еще сорок пять минут пока кто-нибудь из лагерной охраны доберется до делянки и поймет, что произошло. Итого не меньше восьми часов сорока пяти минут.
Ефрейтор Василий Пантелеев медленно ходил по делянке на своих лыжах, не спуская глаз с занятых работой мужиков и куря очередную самокрутку. На его часах было без четверти четыре по-полудни. А это значит еще шесть часов - целая вечность! - до того, как он сможет, наконец, отвести их назад в лагерь и вернуться в теплую казарму к ежевечерней выпивке и картам. И все эти бесконечные часы ему придется дрожать от холода и пронизывающего ветра и завидовать зэкам, согреваемым тяжелой работой. Господи, до чего осточертели ему эти северные края с их коротким и не слишком-то теплым летом и бесконечной лютой зимой, когда даже плевок замерзает на лету! И эта неизменнная говяжья тушенка на завтрак, обед и ужин. Единственная радость в этой постылой жизни - подрочить ночью, лежа на койке и думая о девушке с соблазнительными титьками и круглым задком. Только через год с лишним сможет он, наконец, вернуться в родной городок в среднерусских краях. Хотя, если подумать, много ли радостей ждет его там? Тяжелая работа в забое, очереди в продмаге, бесконечные постылые комсомольские, профсоюзные и всякие прочие собрания! И еще, ему придется постоянно видеть девчонку, за которой он перед службой пытался ухаживать. А она, когда его забрали в армию, взяла и вышла замуж за другого. Они даже и целоваться-то не начали.
Вдруг Тимошкин, размахнувшись топором, как бы невзначай задел плечо Трофимова. Тот с отборной руганью бросил свой топор в снег, кинулся на Тимошкина и наотмаш ударил его кулаком в лицо.
–Эй вы, - крикнул Пантелеев, - что за херня?! А ну живо, паразиты, за работу!
Трофимов с Тимошкиным, как ни в чем ни бывало, продолжали драться.
–Ах вы гниды! - заорал рассвирепевший Пантелеев. - Я вам, падлы, покажу!
Сорвав с плеча автомат, он рванулся к дерущимся и стал исступленно лупить их прикладом. И не заметил, как к нему сзади подскочил Бондаренко с топором. Мощный удар обухом по голове раскроил череп Пантелееву. Безжизненное тело рухнуло на Трофимова с Тимошкиным, повалив их на снег.
–Эй, капитан! Захарыч! Вставайте, он готов! - воскликнул Бондаренко.
Трофимов и Тимошкин поднялись на ноги. Гольдберг отвернулся и судорожно вздохнул.
–Мужики! - Тимошкин радостно взглянул на товарищей и на труп Пантелеева. Мы свободны! - он обнял Трофимова и Бондаренко. - Нет, мы и впрямь свободны! - он радостно прошелся по делянке, нос в крови и синяк под глазом.
–Не искушай судьбу, Захарыч, - тихим голосом возразил Трофимов. - Это только первый шаг, - он бросил взгляд вокруг. - Давай, Михаил, переодевайся в его форму. Она, к счастчью, не в крови.
Бондаренко подтащил труп Пантелеева к костру и стал стаскивать с него зимнюю форму.
–Бедный сукин сын, - вздохнул Гольдберг, - такой молодой, не больше двадцати и вот...
–Не знаю сколько их нам еще придется убить, - заметил Трофимов, - но без сомнения придется, и уже сегодня. Если Ятта придет сюда с конвоем, то... Кстати, сколько времени?
Бондаренко, который уже успел переодеться в зимнюю форму Пантелеева с теплым свитером под тулупом, снял часы с руки мертвого ефрейтора.
–Четыре.
–Через полчаса должен придти Ятта, - напомнил Трофимов и бросил взгляд на Бондаренко. - Ну, Михаил, ты выглядишь как настоящий солдат.
–Неплохой трофей, - согласился Тимошкин.
–Ты услышишь, когда они будут подходить? - спросил Трофимов Бондаренко.
–Само собой!
–Дай нам знак, - он повернулся к остальным, - и мы заляжем в засаду.
Тем временем Бондаренко обыскал карманы своей новой солдатской шубы и вытащил полную фляжку, - гляди, мужики, спиртяга!
–Отлично! - повернулся к нему Трофимов. - Выпей и дай другим.
–За нашу свободу! - Бондаренко поднял фляжку и сделал большой глоток.
Приглушенный свист Бондаренко загнал всех четверых в заросли. Бондаренко схватил автомат. В следующую минуту на делянке появился Ятта, сопровождаемый конвоиром. Бондаренко прицелился и сделал одиночный выстрел прямо в голову вертухаю. Тот свалился замертво. Трофимов, Гольдберг и Тимошкин вышли из своего укрытия.
–Ятта! - воскликнул Трофимов, обнимая товарища.
–Вы однако оцень вовремя, - произнес Ятта, - он уже нацал цто-то подозревать, мол поцему я поставил капканы прямо у рабоцей делянки.
–Ну и ладно! - усмехнулся Трофимов. - Ты здесь, и все тьфу-тьфу идет путем. И у нас еще однин комплект теплой зимней одежды. Ну что, это кому пойдет? - он бросил взгляд на тело в шубе. - Кажется, твой размер, Яков. Не возражаешь, Захарыч?
–Ни в коем случае!
Гольдберг подтащил тело к костру и быстро переоделся. После этого он повернулся к остальным. Его было не узнать в форме.
–Неплохо смотришься, Яков, - одобрительно поднял большой палец Бондаренко, - боец что надо.
–Пошли, - прервал его Трофимов, - гасите костер.
Бондаренко и Гольдберг надели лыжи, оставшиеся от двух вертухаев и взяли автоматы. Тимошкин с Яттой засыпали снегом костер, и все пятеро двинулись в путь навстречу снегопаду.
***
Вернувшись в гостинную, Авдеев, к удивлению гостей банкета, не вернулся на свое место за стoлом, а остался стоять в дверях.
–Извините товарищи, но я должен идти. Немедленно. Беляев, Аристов, за мной!
–Какая жалость, Павел Егорович! - воскликнула жена полковника. - Вы у нас, так-сказать, именинник.
–Ничего не поделаешь, Марья! - оборвал ее муж. - Долг службы. Я надеюсь, Павел Егорович, - повернулся он к Авдееву, - когда орден будет уже у тебя на груди, мы снова отпразднуем от души.
–Спасибо, товарищ полковник! - натянуто улыбнулся Авдеев. - Беляев, Аристов, живее!
–Которая бригада?! - Авдеев в упор посмотрел на лейтенанта Соловьева.
–Четырнадцатая, товарищ майор, лесоповальная. Бригадир - з/к Трофимов, остальные - з/к Бондаренко, Гольдберг и Тимошкин.
–Кто конвоир?
–Ефрейтор Пантелеев, первое отделение, третий взвод ВОХР.
–И как же они его достали?!
–Зарубили топором.
–Мать-перемать! - зарычал Авдеев. - Не иначе как обалдуй ссал!
–Никак нет, товарищ майор. Наша команда досконально обследовала место преступления, и никакой мочи не обнаружено. Да и ширинка у покойного застегнута.
–Е-размое! - взвился Авдеев. - Тогда как же на хрен они это сумели?!
–Очевидно, им удалось чем-то его отвлечь.
–Сколько раз мы им, недоумкам, твердили быть начеку каждую секунду?!
–Мы все узнаем, когда поймаем их, - пробормотал Соловьев, - и еще, товарищ майор...
–Что еще?!
–Там еще один убитый, солдат конвоя.
–Еще один?! - побагровел Авдеев.
–Так точно, товарищ майор. Рядовой Беленко из второго взвода.
–Тоже зарублен топором?
–Никак нет, товарищ майор. Выстрел в голову, вроде бы из пантелеевского АК. Беленко конвоировал Ятту на охоту.
–Ятту?! - глаза Авдеева полезли на лоб. - Ты хочешь сказать...?
–Так точно, товарищ майор. По неизвестной причине Беленко пришел к рабочему месту четырнадцатой бригады и был застрелен. Очевидно, Трофимовым и еже с ним. Я проверил местонахождение Ятты, он ушел в сопровождении Беленко еще утром и до сих пор не вернулся.
–Ятта заодно с этими мерзавцами?! Как он мог?! Какой ему-то прок, так-перетак, бежать?! У него же здесь распрекрасная жизнь!
–Они могли его заставить, запугать, - высказал предположение Беляев, - но, по той или иной причине, он ушел с ними...
–Товарищ майор, разрешите войти? - в дверях стоял лейтенант Макаров.
–Какие-нибудь новости? - спросил Авдеев, сердце которого замерло в надежде на радостную весть о поимке беглецов.
–Так точно, товарищ майор. Патрульная группа А из пяти военнослужащих третьего взвода, командир - сержант Багиров, найдена в зарослях в стороне от окружной тропы, по которой проходил их маршрут. Все застрелены наповал, с них снято все обмундирование, оружие и боеприпасы...
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
An interview in Russian Bazaar/ Интервью в Русском Базаре
Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
Several days ago I was interviewed by a well-known journalist, Natasha Sharymova (Наташа Шарымова), for one of the major Russian-language North American newspapers, Russian Bazaar (Русский Базар), which is based in New York.
The interview has now been published, in Russian. You can access it by clicking here .
If you google “Александр Долинин Вопреки судьбе”, the page will show up in the top 10 listings.
I find one fact about my interviews interesting. So far I have been interviewed three times about Against Destiny (in Russian Вопреки судьбе). The first interview was published in Polish in Australia, and its English original is on my previous post. The second was live on Hamilton radio station CHML on Bob Bratina’s morning show. The third was the present interview by Natasha Sharymova. The three interviewers asked me quite different sets of questions, but independently raised one common question: Is my novel about an escape from Kolyma labour camp to Alaska based on documented information about a real escape? The same question was asked by many of my friends and also by a reader commenting on the novel.
My answer to this question is no. As far as I know, no documents about such an event have come to light, either in Russia or in Alaska. But the topic of an escape fascinated me.
In my last posting I explained that there were some speculations that an escape like this one could have happened. As for my novel, I only explore such a possibility. I develop a fictionalized probability of how this could happen.
Why Alaska? Because it was the closest destination for an escape from the Kolyma region, and the only realistic one. It is actually shorter and less dangerous than other destinations described in memoirs of real escapes. Thus in The Long Walk Slawomir Rawicz describes an escape from a Jakutija labour camp to British India by way of the Gobi desert. In As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me Josef Bauer describes his escape from a camp in Chukotskij peninsular via Siberia proper to the Caspian Sea and to Iran.
As for the characters in my novel, I asked myself a question: Who could carry out such an escape? First, it could be accomplished only by individuals who had a substantial military experience and knew how to fight through the obstacles. Second, in order to cover thousands of kilometers of the subarctic wilderness, there had to be a guide, an aboriginal person, for whom this land is a place of normal habitat.
So the plot of the novel is built around these parameters. The destination is Alaska. The escapees are a group of five, four of them World War II veterans (and there were in reality lots of such people in Stalin’s camps after the war) and one a Chukchi man. To see how events unfold, you have to read Against Destiny. If you read Russian, you can read my Russian translations of excerpts from my novel (entitled in Russian Вопреки судьбе) in Nasha Canada (Наша Канада), in issues 208 (December 2009, already published) and 210 (January 2010, forthcoming at the time of this posting). I plan to post them on my blog “History and Us”.
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
Several days ago I was interviewed by a well-known journalist, Natasha Sharymova (Наташа Шарымова), for one of the major Russian-language North American newspapers, Russian Bazaar (Русский Базар), which is based in New York.
The interview has now been published, in Russian. You can access it by clicking here .
If you google “Александр Долинин Вопреки судьбе”, the page will show up in the top 10 listings.
I find one fact about my interviews interesting. So far I have been interviewed three times about Against Destiny (in Russian Вопреки судьбе). The first interview was published in Polish in Australia, and its English original is on my previous post. The second was live on Hamilton radio station CHML on Bob Bratina’s morning show. The third was the present interview by Natasha Sharymova. The three interviewers asked me quite different sets of questions, but independently raised one common question: Is my novel about an escape from Kolyma labour camp to Alaska based on documented information about a real escape? The same question was asked by many of my friends and also by a reader commenting on the novel.
My answer to this question is no. As far as I know, no documents about such an event have come to light, either in Russia or in Alaska. But the topic of an escape fascinated me.
In my last posting I explained that there were some speculations that an escape like this one could have happened. As for my novel, I only explore such a possibility. I develop a fictionalized probability of how this could happen.
Why Alaska? Because it was the closest destination for an escape from the Kolyma region, and the only realistic one. It is actually shorter and less dangerous than other destinations described in memoirs of real escapes. Thus in The Long Walk Slawomir Rawicz describes an escape from a Jakutija labour camp to British India by way of the Gobi desert. In As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me Josef Bauer describes his escape from a camp in Chukotskij peninsular via Siberia proper to the Caspian Sea and to Iran.
As for the characters in my novel, I asked myself a question: Who could carry out such an escape? First, it could be accomplished only by individuals who had a substantial military experience and knew how to fight through the obstacles. Second, in order to cover thousands of kilometers of the subarctic wilderness, there had to be a guide, an aboriginal person, for whom this land is a place of normal habitat.
So the plot of the novel is built around these parameters. The destination is Alaska. The escapees are a group of five, four of them World War II veterans (and there were in reality lots of such people in Stalin’s camps after the war) and one a Chukchi man. To see how events unfold, you have to read Against Destiny. If you read Russian, you can read my Russian translations of excerpts from my novel (entitled in Russian Вопреки судьбе) in Nasha Canada (Наша Канада), in issues 208 (December 2009, already published) and 210 (January 2010, forthcoming at the time of this posting). I plan to post them on my blog “History and Us”.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Some questions about Against Destiny: The author responds
Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
Many questions have been asked about Against Destiny before and after its publication. An interesting set of questions was raised in my very first interview which appeared under unusual circumstances - it appeared before the book was published, and not in the original English, but translated into another language, and on the other side of the Earth.
How did it happen? The interview (originally in English - below) caught the attention of Rev. Marian Szablewski, CR, a Polish-speaking priest in Adelaide, South Australia, which is more than 10,000 miles from where I live. He had the interview translated into Polish, by Teresa Wilkans, and published, a month before the release of Against Destiny, in the March 2009 issue of the most important publication in Polish in South Australia, the magazine Panorama. If your Polish is good enough, you can read the first page of the Polish translation by clicking here and the second page by clicking here.
Here is the interview:
What is your book about?
--It is about a daring escape of five brave men from a GULAG camp in North-Eastern Siberia to Alaska for a safe haven. More generally it’s about men, destined to seemingly inevitable death in a human hell, who choose to resist their grim fate rather than succumb to it.
Why did you decide to write it?
--In the literature about the GULAG and Stalin’s epoch in general, there was occasional brief mention that probably there were some successful escapes from camps in the Kolyma region to Alaska. There was no detail on the topic, but it somehow inspired me to think how such an escape could have happened and what kind of people could do it. And the novel sort of naturally developed from these considerations with some addition of my own fantasy to fill the gaps in real knowledge.
We already have The Gulag Archipelago. What’s the point of having a work of fiction about the same thing?
--Well, first of all fiction and documentary literature are different things, and one can hardly substitute for another. Documentary literature has the primary task of describing with maximum accuracy what really happened, while in fiction the author is entitled to apply his fantasy and apply it to what and how people think, feel and do in different situations they encounter. And apart from that, the primary topic of The Gulag Archipelago is life in the GULAG, while the primary topic of my novel is escape from it.
Isn’t this just a relic of the Cold War, which ended in 1989? Why should people in 2008 be interested in Stalin’s Gulag?
--For the same reason that they should be interested in Nazi crimes against humanity. Because such tragic periods of history are something that humanity should learn lessons from, at least for the purpose of preventing similar tragedies from happening again.
How would you compare the camps of Stalin’s Gulag to the concentration camps of Hitler? Weren’t Hitler’s camps much worse?
--No, I can’t agree with that. The GULAG camps certainly lacked gas chambers, but there were numerous other no less hideous ways of putting inmates to death, like for example freezing them alive. And above all the number of people who died there is no less, in fact more, than in the Nazi camps–although the GULAG prisoners lived much longer than the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps before they succumbed. In fact, the claim of some historians, that unlike Nazi Germany in Stalinist USSR there were no killing fields, is erroneous: there were a number of places of regular mass executions. Kurapaty in Byelorussia and Butovo Place near Moscow being the most famous. And there were so-called penal camps, in different sections of GULAG, where almost no-one survived, except for those who were lucky enough to be sent there not long before the camps were dissolved.
In general, I find the question inappropriate about who was worse and who was better: Hitler or Stalin. Whatever the intention, recognition of one as worse almost inevitably leads to partial rehabilitation of the other, as happened in the official historiography of Russia in the 2000's. To my mind, the attitude should be that both were extreme evil, which must not be forgiven or forgotten and from whose regimes we should take historic lessons.
Why do you think that there has been so much more written about the Nazi Holocaust than about the Gulag?
--It’s a good question, because so many people see no connection between Hitler and Stalin and, while preserving active memory of the Holocaust, prefer to forget Stalinist terror. I think there are two factors which can explain this situation.
First of all, the Nazi regime was vanquished, completely dismantled, and all its archives and other materials were publicized; as well, Auschwiz and Dachau were taken over by enemy troops. Nothing like that happened in post-Soviet Russia, where for example the KGB archives were opened only partially and some time in the mid-90's were closed again. This was because many people in authority at that time were former Soviet officials, who for understandable reasons were not interested in complete disclosure of the dark parts of Soviet history. And around then the campaign for so-called national reconciliation and concord started under the motto “Not everything was bad”, which reached its peak in recent years under the Putin-Medvedev regime. This regime made it known to the international community that it would regard the mere comparison between Nazism and Communism as an act of hostility towards Russia, which most of the Western public does not want to engage in.
Secondly, there was a difference in the strength of the lobbying to prevent historical amnesia towards the particular tragic events. The Western Jewish community did its best, and is still doing its best, to prevent the Holocaust from being forgiven or forgotten–and rightly so. There is no equally powerful pressure with regard to GULAG.
Do you think that the greater attention to the Holocaust is reasonable?
--No, I firmly disagree with that. Stalin’s terror took at least 20 millions lives, and to my mind that in itself explains why it deserves equal attention with the Holocaust. Above all, if we forget such tragic events, we risk their repetition at some different time in a somewhat different form.
There is a lot in your novel about the Chukchi, an aboriginal people of Northern Siberia. You don’t look Chukchi yourself. How do you know so much about them?
--Well, as I said before, in the beginning I was thinking about what kind of people could manage a successful escape. And I came to the conclusion that one of them had to be a native, who knew both the escape route in that territory and the required survival skills. And Chukchi is the main aboriginal nationality in the extreme North-East of Siberia. So I read several ethnographic reports on them, the main one being the fundamental book Chukchi Material Culture, written by the prominent Russian ethnographer Vladimir Bogoraz in the early 20th century. I also read Russian translations of Chukchi tales and legends. And all that gave a reasonably comprehensive knowledge of this people.
You have five different characters, each with a different type of background, escaping from their labour camp in Northern Siberia and trying to get to Alaska. How did you decide what backgrounds of the prisoners to choose? Do they cover the range of the different types of people who would have been in the camps in the late 1940s?
--Well, again, I started with figuring out what kind of men would be capable of such an escape. This led me to the choice of Trofimov, Bondarenko and Yatta, each of whom were essential for the success of the enterprise. Trofimov is an experienced combat officer, a captain of infantry with a nearly four years of war experience, Bondarenko an equally experienced partizan with expertise in fighting a guerilla war in the woodland, and Yatta a nomadic aboriginal who knows the terrain and all the skills of living in the extreme north in both taiga and tundra. Also, they represented certain types of people who were in GULAG at the time described. The other two were chosen mostly on the ground of representing two distinct groups that were downtrodden and oppressed by Soviet authorities, as they were previously under the tsars: Russian peasants and Jews–Timoshkin being a Russian peasant and Goldberg a Jew. Also, the figure of Goldberg, the most morally reflective of the five, helps to raise the uneasy and controversial issue of whether and to what extent forcible resistance to a reign of terror is justified.
Why do the escapees in your novel head for Alaska rather than for some other place?
--Well, Alaska was the closest foreign safe haven from the point of view of distance as well as availability–being separated from their camp only by land and by a strait which was ice-covered in winter. And the way there lay through wilderness away from populated places and major highways, which made pursuit far more difficult. And, as you can understand, after they killed several camp guards they could not even think of going anywhere within the borders of the Soviet Union.
Was it really possible to escape from the Gulag, or is your novel just an unrealistic fantasy?
--In fact, though official Soviet propaganda claimed that escapes were absolutely impossible, it was not so. There were numerous escapes from GULAG with varying success. A few of them are described in Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG archipelago, volume 2, in the chapter called “Changing one’s fate”. Others are described in one of the Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, “The Green Prosecutor”. As you will read there, some of them were actually successful, although some of the successful escapees were later re-arrested. Also, some successful escapes from GULAG were widely known in the West, and even described by escapees - the most famous accounts being The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz and As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me by Josef Bauer.
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
Many questions have been asked about Against Destiny before and after its publication. An interesting set of questions was raised in my very first interview which appeared under unusual circumstances - it appeared before the book was published, and not in the original English, but translated into another language, and on the other side of the Earth.
How did it happen? The interview (originally in English - below) caught the attention of Rev. Marian Szablewski, CR, a Polish-speaking priest in Adelaide, South Australia, which is more than 10,000 miles from where I live. He had the interview translated into Polish, by Teresa Wilkans, and published, a month before the release of Against Destiny, in the March 2009 issue of the most important publication in Polish in South Australia, the magazine Panorama. If your Polish is good enough, you can read the first page of the Polish translation by clicking here and the second page by clicking here.
Here is the interview:
What is your book about?
--It is about a daring escape of five brave men from a GULAG camp in North-Eastern Siberia to Alaska for a safe haven. More generally it’s about men, destined to seemingly inevitable death in a human hell, who choose to resist their grim fate rather than succumb to it.
Why did you decide to write it?
--In the literature about the GULAG and Stalin’s epoch in general, there was occasional brief mention that probably there were some successful escapes from camps in the Kolyma region to Alaska. There was no detail on the topic, but it somehow inspired me to think how such an escape could have happened and what kind of people could do it. And the novel sort of naturally developed from these considerations with some addition of my own fantasy to fill the gaps in real knowledge.
We already have The Gulag Archipelago. What’s the point of having a work of fiction about the same thing?
--Well, first of all fiction and documentary literature are different things, and one can hardly substitute for another. Documentary literature has the primary task of describing with maximum accuracy what really happened, while in fiction the author is entitled to apply his fantasy and apply it to what and how people think, feel and do in different situations they encounter. And apart from that, the primary topic of The Gulag Archipelago is life in the GULAG, while the primary topic of my novel is escape from it.
Isn’t this just a relic of the Cold War, which ended in 1989? Why should people in 2008 be interested in Stalin’s Gulag?
--For the same reason that they should be interested in Nazi crimes against humanity. Because such tragic periods of history are something that humanity should learn lessons from, at least for the purpose of preventing similar tragedies from happening again.
How would you compare the camps of Stalin’s Gulag to the concentration camps of Hitler? Weren’t Hitler’s camps much worse?
--No, I can’t agree with that. The GULAG camps certainly lacked gas chambers, but there were numerous other no less hideous ways of putting inmates to death, like for example freezing them alive. And above all the number of people who died there is no less, in fact more, than in the Nazi camps–although the GULAG prisoners lived much longer than the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps before they succumbed. In fact, the claim of some historians, that unlike Nazi Germany in Stalinist USSR there were no killing fields, is erroneous: there were a number of places of regular mass executions. Kurapaty in Byelorussia and Butovo Place near Moscow being the most famous. And there were so-called penal camps, in different sections of GULAG, where almost no-one survived, except for those who were lucky enough to be sent there not long before the camps were dissolved.
In general, I find the question inappropriate about who was worse and who was better: Hitler or Stalin. Whatever the intention, recognition of one as worse almost inevitably leads to partial rehabilitation of the other, as happened in the official historiography of Russia in the 2000's. To my mind, the attitude should be that both were extreme evil, which must not be forgiven or forgotten and from whose regimes we should take historic lessons.
Why do you think that there has been so much more written about the Nazi Holocaust than about the Gulag?
--It’s a good question, because so many people see no connection between Hitler and Stalin and, while preserving active memory of the Holocaust, prefer to forget Stalinist terror. I think there are two factors which can explain this situation.
First of all, the Nazi regime was vanquished, completely dismantled, and all its archives and other materials were publicized; as well, Auschwiz and Dachau were taken over by enemy troops. Nothing like that happened in post-Soviet Russia, where for example the KGB archives were opened only partially and some time in the mid-90's were closed again. This was because many people in authority at that time were former Soviet officials, who for understandable reasons were not interested in complete disclosure of the dark parts of Soviet history. And around then the campaign for so-called national reconciliation and concord started under the motto “Not everything was bad”, which reached its peak in recent years under the Putin-Medvedev regime. This regime made it known to the international community that it would regard the mere comparison between Nazism and Communism as an act of hostility towards Russia, which most of the Western public does not want to engage in.
Secondly, there was a difference in the strength of the lobbying to prevent historical amnesia towards the particular tragic events. The Western Jewish community did its best, and is still doing its best, to prevent the Holocaust from being forgiven or forgotten–and rightly so. There is no equally powerful pressure with regard to GULAG.
Do you think that the greater attention to the Holocaust is reasonable?
--No, I firmly disagree with that. Stalin’s terror took at least 20 millions lives, and to my mind that in itself explains why it deserves equal attention with the Holocaust. Above all, if we forget such tragic events, we risk their repetition at some different time in a somewhat different form.
There is a lot in your novel about the Chukchi, an aboriginal people of Northern Siberia. You don’t look Chukchi yourself. How do you know so much about them?
--Well, as I said before, in the beginning I was thinking about what kind of people could manage a successful escape. And I came to the conclusion that one of them had to be a native, who knew both the escape route in that territory and the required survival skills. And Chukchi is the main aboriginal nationality in the extreme North-East of Siberia. So I read several ethnographic reports on them, the main one being the fundamental book Chukchi Material Culture, written by the prominent Russian ethnographer Vladimir Bogoraz in the early 20th century. I also read Russian translations of Chukchi tales and legends. And all that gave a reasonably comprehensive knowledge of this people.
You have five different characters, each with a different type of background, escaping from their labour camp in Northern Siberia and trying to get to Alaska. How did you decide what backgrounds of the prisoners to choose? Do they cover the range of the different types of people who would have been in the camps in the late 1940s?
--Well, again, I started with figuring out what kind of men would be capable of such an escape. This led me to the choice of Trofimov, Bondarenko and Yatta, each of whom were essential for the success of the enterprise. Trofimov is an experienced combat officer, a captain of infantry with a nearly four years of war experience, Bondarenko an equally experienced partizan with expertise in fighting a guerilla war in the woodland, and Yatta a nomadic aboriginal who knows the terrain and all the skills of living in the extreme north in both taiga and tundra. Also, they represented certain types of people who were in GULAG at the time described. The other two were chosen mostly on the ground of representing two distinct groups that were downtrodden and oppressed by Soviet authorities, as they were previously under the tsars: Russian peasants and Jews–Timoshkin being a Russian peasant and Goldberg a Jew. Also, the figure of Goldberg, the most morally reflective of the five, helps to raise the uneasy and controversial issue of whether and to what extent forcible resistance to a reign of terror is justified.
Why do the escapees in your novel head for Alaska rather than for some other place?
--Well, Alaska was the closest foreign safe haven from the point of view of distance as well as availability–being separated from their camp only by land and by a strait which was ice-covered in winter. And the way there lay through wilderness away from populated places and major highways, which made pursuit far more difficult. And, as you can understand, after they killed several camp guards they could not even think of going anywhere within the borders of the Soviet Union.
Was it really possible to escape from the Gulag, or is your novel just an unrealistic fantasy?
--In fact, though official Soviet propaganda claimed that escapes were absolutely impossible, it was not so. There were numerous escapes from GULAG with varying success. A few of them are described in Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG archipelago, volume 2, in the chapter called “Changing one’s fate”. Others are described in one of the Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, “The Green Prosecutor”. As you will read there, some of them were actually successful, although some of the successful escapees were later re-arrested. Also, some successful escapes from GULAG were widely known in the West, and even described by escapees - the most famous accounts being The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz and As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me by Josef Bauer.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Chukchi: a people who would not submit
Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
The colonization of Siberia and North America followed roughly the same pattern: the European settlers built for themselves a better, freer and more prosperous life at the expense of the subjugated aboriginals, who were territorially as well as culturally displaced. There was however one Siberian aboriginal nationality that was not subjugated and fully incorporated into Russia until well into the 20th century: the Chukchi.
This small nationality, which historically numbered between 8,000 and 15,000 people, inhabits the extreme north-east of Siberia, roughly from the lower Kolyma river in the west to the Bering Strait in the east and from the Arctic coast in the north to the Anadyr River valley in the south. The Chukchi belong to the so-called Paleoasiatic peoples, the most ancient population of north Asia, to which probably the ancestors of American natives also belong. In appearance too, the Chukchi resemble North American Indians more than people of Mongolian or Chinese stock. By the time the Russians came, they lived, like most other north Siberian aboriginals, by raising reindeer herds, each of which numbered many hundreds or even thousands of deer.
From the mid-17th century to modern times, the Russians failed to subdue the Chukchi. By using tactics from both conventional and guerilla warfare and by taking advantage of their superior knowledge of their rugged land, they defeated many Russian government units and settlers’ militias. Like the Prairie Indians of the American West, they bothered Russian settlers with raids. Catherine the Great of Russia even signed a decree authorising their total extermination. She sent a military expedition, headed by Major Pavlutsky, remembered in Chukchi folklore as the most cruel of the Russian officers who fought them. Like its predecessors, the Pavlutsky expedition was beaten, and Pavlutsky perished; according to Chukchi narratives, he was captured and brutally executed. The genocidal order of the empress was never implemented, because of the vastness of the mountains, tundra and woodlands, which provided shelter not only to small guerrilla groups but even to whole tribes, and because of the Chukchi’s acquisition of fire-arms, probably from European traders via the North Pacific.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian imperial government was finally forced to make peace with the recalcitrant people. It recognized their independence, and until the very end of the imperial period they, unlike other Siberian aboriginals, did not pay tribute to the imperial treasury and lived by their millennia-old customary laws. In return, Russians got the right to trade and build settlements in Chukotka. This situation persisted not only until the 1917 revolution, but for more than a decade after it. During the Russian civil war (1917-1923), some units of Whites from time to time came to Chukotka and tried to plunder Chukchi, but were repulsed. The Red Army units that arrived later in this period also did not interfere with the traditional Chukchi lifestyle and customary law.
Drastic change came only in the early 1930s with the start of collectivization. The Siberian Soviet authorities successfully imposed collective farms and the Soviet system in general on the previously fiercely independent people. For the first time in history, they could not resist the conquerors. Unlike Russian forces of earlier periods, these invaders were armed with machine guns, armoured vehicles and a few air squadrons. From the 1930s on, the Chukchi shared the fate of other rural Soviet people, Russian and non-Russian alike: forced collectivization, internal exile or labour camps for many, execution of others (particularly all shamans), work on Soviet construction projects. Their children, like many native children in Canada, were forcibly sent to boarding schools, with similar widespread abuse by school authorities. However, a few graduates of these boarding schools rose to prominent positions in Soviet society. The best known is the famous writer Yuri Rytkheu, whose writings are widely read throughout the former USSR and have been translated into European languages.
In the post-Soviet Russia of the 2000s, Chukotka, the most remote region of this country, paradoxically became, under the governorship of the ex-business magnate Roman Abramovich, one of its most prosperous regions, comparable to Moscow and the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia. This prosperity resulted from the successful management of the businessman-governor, who skilfully ran the regional economy and who used his government connections to negotiate a share of profits for the region from its mineral resources. Thus the ancient aboriginal people now enjoy a level of prosperity unknown in any previous period, whether pre-contact, imperial or Soviet.
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
The colonization of Siberia and North America followed roughly the same pattern: the European settlers built for themselves a better, freer and more prosperous life at the expense of the subjugated aboriginals, who were territorially as well as culturally displaced. There was however one Siberian aboriginal nationality that was not subjugated and fully incorporated into Russia until well into the 20th century: the Chukchi.
This small nationality, which historically numbered between 8,000 and 15,000 people, inhabits the extreme north-east of Siberia, roughly from the lower Kolyma river in the west to the Bering Strait in the east and from the Arctic coast in the north to the Anadyr River valley in the south. The Chukchi belong to the so-called Paleoasiatic peoples, the most ancient population of north Asia, to which probably the ancestors of American natives also belong. In appearance too, the Chukchi resemble North American Indians more than people of Mongolian or Chinese stock. By the time the Russians came, they lived, like most other north Siberian aboriginals, by raising reindeer herds, each of which numbered many hundreds or even thousands of deer.
From the mid-17th century to modern times, the Russians failed to subdue the Chukchi. By using tactics from both conventional and guerilla warfare and by taking advantage of their superior knowledge of their rugged land, they defeated many Russian government units and settlers’ militias. Like the Prairie Indians of the American West, they bothered Russian settlers with raids. Catherine the Great of Russia even signed a decree authorising their total extermination. She sent a military expedition, headed by Major Pavlutsky, remembered in Chukchi folklore as the most cruel of the Russian officers who fought them. Like its predecessors, the Pavlutsky expedition was beaten, and Pavlutsky perished; according to Chukchi narratives, he was captured and brutally executed. The genocidal order of the empress was never implemented, because of the vastness of the mountains, tundra and woodlands, which provided shelter not only to small guerrilla groups but even to whole tribes, and because of the Chukchi’s acquisition of fire-arms, probably from European traders via the North Pacific.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian imperial government was finally forced to make peace with the recalcitrant people. It recognized their independence, and until the very end of the imperial period they, unlike other Siberian aboriginals, did not pay tribute to the imperial treasury and lived by their millennia-old customary laws. In return, Russians got the right to trade and build settlements in Chukotka. This situation persisted not only until the 1917 revolution, but for more than a decade after it. During the Russian civil war (1917-1923), some units of Whites from time to time came to Chukotka and tried to plunder Chukchi, but were repulsed. The Red Army units that arrived later in this period also did not interfere with the traditional Chukchi lifestyle and customary law.
Drastic change came only in the early 1930s with the start of collectivization. The Siberian Soviet authorities successfully imposed collective farms and the Soviet system in general on the previously fiercely independent people. For the first time in history, they could not resist the conquerors. Unlike Russian forces of earlier periods, these invaders were armed with machine guns, armoured vehicles and a few air squadrons. From the 1930s on, the Chukchi shared the fate of other rural Soviet people, Russian and non-Russian alike: forced collectivization, internal exile or labour camps for many, execution of others (particularly all shamans), work on Soviet construction projects. Their children, like many native children in Canada, were forcibly sent to boarding schools, with similar widespread abuse by school authorities. However, a few graduates of these boarding schools rose to prominent positions in Soviet society. The best known is the famous writer Yuri Rytkheu, whose writings are widely read throughout the former USSR and have been translated into European languages.
In the post-Soviet Russia of the 2000s, Chukotka, the most remote region of this country, paradoxically became, under the governorship of the ex-business magnate Roman Abramovich, one of its most prosperous regions, comparable to Moscow and the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia. This prosperity resulted from the successful management of the businessman-governor, who skilfully ran the regional economy and who used his government connections to negotiate a share of profits for the region from its mineral resources. Thus the ancient aboriginal people now enjoy a level of prosperity unknown in any previous period, whether pre-contact, imperial or Soviet.
Siberia and North America: parallel histories of exploration, conquest and settlement
Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
The exploration, conquest and settlement of Siberia by Russians from the late 16th century on was in many respects similar to the exploration, conquest and settlement of North America by West Europeans (Dutch, English, French, Spanish).
Siberia too was explored and conquered by people moving, exploring and settling of their own free will, in search of a better life. Most settlers in Siberia were fleeing from serfdom, which was established in European Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries. In much the same way, the British American colonies were settled largely by English ex-peasants who had been dispossessed by the Enclosures.
Like European settlers in North America, Russian settlers in Siberia within a century or so outnumbered the local aboriginal population. As in North America, the progress of Russian colonization meant eventual conquest, subjugation and to a great extent displacement of the aboriginals by various means: outright conquest through warfare, treaties signed by aboriginal chiefs or elders under the strong effects of alcohol, forcing chiefs, elders and their tribes and communities into heavy debts. But colonization also meant coexistence, trade and integration with the aboriginals, including a considerable number of mixed marriages and liaisons, with mixed-race offspring as a result.
In both Siberia and North America, the process of colonization brought about the decline of aboriginal society through wars, European diseases, alcoholism and other causes. At the same time many aboriginals managed to take advantage of such products of the settlers’ civilization as iron tools and firearms. For the settlers, colonization of the new frontiers brought significant improvement in their quality of life, freedom from feudal or bureaucratic oppression, and material prosperity that they could not dream of in their mother country. Siberians even tended to be bigger, stronger and healthier than the peasants of European Russia, who lived in bondage.
In short, the process of colonization of Siberia and North America followed roughly the same pattern: the European settlers built for themselves a better, freer and more prosperous life at the expense of the subjugated aboriginals, who were territorially as well as culturally displaced.
There was however one exception in Siberia to this general pattern. I will talk about this exception in my next posting.
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
The exploration, conquest and settlement of Siberia by Russians from the late 16th century on was in many respects similar to the exploration, conquest and settlement of North America by West Europeans (Dutch, English, French, Spanish).
Siberia too was explored and conquered by people moving, exploring and settling of their own free will, in search of a better life. Most settlers in Siberia were fleeing from serfdom, which was established in European Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries. In much the same way, the British American colonies were settled largely by English ex-peasants who had been dispossessed by the Enclosures.
Like European settlers in North America, Russian settlers in Siberia within a century or so outnumbered the local aboriginal population. As in North America, the progress of Russian colonization meant eventual conquest, subjugation and to a great extent displacement of the aboriginals by various means: outright conquest through warfare, treaties signed by aboriginal chiefs or elders under the strong effects of alcohol, forcing chiefs, elders and their tribes and communities into heavy debts. But colonization also meant coexistence, trade and integration with the aboriginals, including a considerable number of mixed marriages and liaisons, with mixed-race offspring as a result.
In both Siberia and North America, the process of colonization brought about the decline of aboriginal society through wars, European diseases, alcoholism and other causes. At the same time many aboriginals managed to take advantage of such products of the settlers’ civilization as iron tools and firearms. For the settlers, colonization of the new frontiers brought significant improvement in their quality of life, freedom from feudal or bureaucratic oppression, and material prosperity that they could not dream of in their mother country. Siberians even tended to be bigger, stronger and healthier than the peasants of European Russia, who lived in bondage.
In short, the process of colonization of Siberia and North America followed roughly the same pattern: the European settlers built for themselves a better, freer and more prosperous life at the expense of the subjugated aboriginals, who were territorially as well as culturally displaced.
There was however one exception in Siberia to this general pattern. I will talk about this exception in my next posting.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Escapes: getaways and breakaways
Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
In modern English the word ‘escape’ has many meanings. Along with an escape from bondage, imprisonment or captivity, it may mean just a nice vacation somewhere in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Canary Islands or some other part of the world. There is a Toronto travel agency called “Escape Tours”. And there is even a car model “Ford Escape”. This meaning probably involves the idea of an escape from the hard chores of everyday live, work, etc. The escape is only temporary, with a clear plan to return.
But this is not an original meaning. Initially the term involved a person who was subjected to the ordeal of imprisonment, captivity, slavery or bondage and who chose to challenge his fate rather than submit to it. In this case certainly there is no thought of ever going back, where in the best case the escapee would face punishment and return to the former captivity or bondage. In the worst case the returned escapee would face death, often a very painful one, as with escapees from 20th century Nazi or Soviet concentration camps or, earlier, runaways from especially brutal slave-masters. Reaching the desired destination far beyond the reach of the pursuers was the ultimate goal and desired outcome.
In Russia and in the American South, where for centuries up to half of the population were in bondage, the motive of escaping slavery or serfdom became an integral part of popular culture, oral tradition and much of literature. As we know, in 19th century US there was a whole organization named the “Underground Railway” which provided support for fugitive black slaves on their way to Canada, where they became the ancestors of some present-day Black Canadians. In Russia most of the original colonists of the Don river region, Siberia and other remote regions were actually runaway serfs. The Cossacks of Don, Kuban’, Urals and numerous regions of Siberia are their descendants. In Central America and Caribbean there were also large settlements of runaway slaves known as Maroons. The best documentary work about runaway Black slaves is Daniel Hill’s “The Freedom Seekers”, while the best modern fiction book is Lawrence Hill’s “The Book of Negroes”.
One of the hardest places to escape from is a concentration camp or maximum security prison, where the inmates are under almost constant surveillance. Nevertheless some inmates managed to escape even from there. Thus, Giacomo Casanova, the most famous womanizer in history, was detained in the Venetian doge’s personal dungeon for a year and managed to escape. About 130 Nazi concentration camp inmates also succeeded in escaping from their camps, outsmarting their guards and the camp administration. No one knows how many labour camp inmates in the Stalinist USSR escaped. Such escapes are described in some chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”. So far as far as I know there has been no fiction written about them. My novel Against Destiny seems to be the first piece of fiction about a successful escape from a Soviet labour camp.
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
In modern English the word ‘escape’ has many meanings. Along with an escape from bondage, imprisonment or captivity, it may mean just a nice vacation somewhere in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Canary Islands or some other part of the world. There is a Toronto travel agency called “Escape Tours”. And there is even a car model “Ford Escape”. This meaning probably involves the idea of an escape from the hard chores of everyday live, work, etc. The escape is only temporary, with a clear plan to return.
But this is not an original meaning. Initially the term involved a person who was subjected to the ordeal of imprisonment, captivity, slavery or bondage and who chose to challenge his fate rather than submit to it. In this case certainly there is no thought of ever going back, where in the best case the escapee would face punishment and return to the former captivity or bondage. In the worst case the returned escapee would face death, often a very painful one, as with escapees from 20th century Nazi or Soviet concentration camps or, earlier, runaways from especially brutal slave-masters. Reaching the desired destination far beyond the reach of the pursuers was the ultimate goal and desired outcome.
In Russia and in the American South, where for centuries up to half of the population were in bondage, the motive of escaping slavery or serfdom became an integral part of popular culture, oral tradition and much of literature. As we know, in 19th century US there was a whole organization named the “Underground Railway” which provided support for fugitive black slaves on their way to Canada, where they became the ancestors of some present-day Black Canadians. In Russia most of the original colonists of the Don river region, Siberia and other remote regions were actually runaway serfs. The Cossacks of Don, Kuban’, Urals and numerous regions of Siberia are their descendants. In Central America and Caribbean there were also large settlements of runaway slaves known as Maroons. The best documentary work about runaway Black slaves is Daniel Hill’s “The Freedom Seekers”, while the best modern fiction book is Lawrence Hill’s “The Book of Negroes”.
One of the hardest places to escape from is a concentration camp or maximum security prison, where the inmates are under almost constant surveillance. Nevertheless some inmates managed to escape even from there. Thus, Giacomo Casanova, the most famous womanizer in history, was detained in the Venetian doge’s personal dungeon for a year and managed to escape. About 130 Nazi concentration camp inmates also succeeded in escaping from their camps, outsmarting their guards and the camp administration. No one knows how many labour camp inmates in the Stalinist USSR escaped. Such escapes are described in some chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”. So far as far as I know there has been no fiction written about them. My novel Against Destiny seems to be the first piece of fiction about a successful escape from a Soviet labour camp.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
A few words about cats
Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
I love cats. There is certain charm in them that one can hardly deny. I like dogs as well, unlike so many people who like only either one or the other. For me both are our little brothers, or as some call them “our furry friends”. I would not mind having a dog, except that I would have problems getting up at 6:00 a.m. to give my dog a walkout, or having an evening walkout as an absolute must. With cats it is much easier, just giving him/her food and water and cleaning the litter once in a while, and always enjoying stroking the silky fur. One acquaintance of mine, also a writer, used to say that a cat is an ideal pet for a writer, because a cat is less demanding than a dog and eats up your rejection sheets. And there is one thing about cats that few people would deny - all cats are beautiful, there are practically no ugly ones among them (unlike us humans, or dogs). I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But that is how I feel about cats.
Many people believe that cats, unlike dogs, feel no loyalty and emotional attachment to their masters. I think it’s not just grossly exaggerated, but completely not true - at least all my cats were emotionally attached to me, not less than I to them.
As we know (I mean those of us who still read), cats were considered holy creatures in ancient Egypt. One would immediately assume that it’s probably because of their role in guarding crops from mice and rats. True. But I think there was another reason as well - cats look young throughout their lives. And this for people of traditional cultures might look like a sign of divinity - they imagined their gods perpetually young. The life of a cat was sacred for ancient Egyptians. There was one incident somewhere around the first century A.D., when Egypt was already a province of the Roman Empire. A drunken Roman soldier killed a cat and was beaten to death by a crowd of Egyptians, which was, by Roman law, a terrible crime. But the soldier’s superior was a wise man. While giving his killed subordinate an honourable burial (as was proper for a good and loyal Roman soldier), he told his fellow soldiers that the man paid with his life for insulting the gods of the land, and that others should learn a lesson and avoid sacrilege. No-one was punished for this death.
I have had four cats in my life, including the present one, Sonya, whom I inherited from my ex-girlfriend. One prominent general had different periods in his life marked by different horses: from the very first horse with whom he, still a kid, learned to ride, to the last one whom he rode in his old age and who eventually carried his body to the cemetery. I guess periods of my life would be marked by the cats I live with.
(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)
I love cats. There is certain charm in them that one can hardly deny. I like dogs as well, unlike so many people who like only either one or the other. For me both are our little brothers, or as some call them “our furry friends”. I would not mind having a dog, except that I would have problems getting up at 6:00 a.m. to give my dog a walkout, or having an evening walkout as an absolute must. With cats it is much easier, just giving him/her food and water and cleaning the litter once in a while, and always enjoying stroking the silky fur. One acquaintance of mine, also a writer, used to say that a cat is an ideal pet for a writer, because a cat is less demanding than a dog and eats up your rejection sheets. And there is one thing about cats that few people would deny - all cats are beautiful, there are practically no ugly ones among them (unlike us humans, or dogs). I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But that is how I feel about cats.
Many people believe that cats, unlike dogs, feel no loyalty and emotional attachment to their masters. I think it’s not just grossly exaggerated, but completely not true - at least all my cats were emotionally attached to me, not less than I to them.
As we know (I mean those of us who still read), cats were considered holy creatures in ancient Egypt. One would immediately assume that it’s probably because of their role in guarding crops from mice and rats. True. But I think there was another reason as well - cats look young throughout their lives. And this for people of traditional cultures might look like a sign of divinity - they imagined their gods perpetually young. The life of a cat was sacred for ancient Egyptians. There was one incident somewhere around the first century A.D., when Egypt was already a province of the Roman Empire. A drunken Roman soldier killed a cat and was beaten to death by a crowd of Egyptians, which was, by Roman law, a terrible crime. But the soldier’s superior was a wise man. While giving his killed subordinate an honourable burial (as was proper for a good and loyal Roman soldier), he told his fellow soldiers that the man paid with his life for insulting the gods of the land, and that others should learn a lesson and avoid sacrilege. No-one was punished for this death.
I have had four cats in my life, including the present one, Sonya, whom I inherited from my ex-girlfriend. One prominent general had different periods in his life marked by different horses: from the very first horse with whom he, still a kid, learned to ride, to the last one whom he rode in his old age and who eventually carried his body to the cemetery. I guess periods of my life would be marked by the cats I live with.
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