Beyond The Monastery: Prilepin, Putin, and the Gulag
How can we read a brilliant work written by an author whose ideology is deeply disturbing? Discussing Zakhar Prilepin raises a host of questions that are perplexing even by the standards of Russian literature. Given the contentious climate in Russia, it is tempting to simply dismiss Prilepin and ignore his disturbing yet original novel The Monastery (Obitel’, 2014). Yet if those in the West are to understand Putin’s Russia — a country where the leader’s policies are unpopular but unopposed — we must try to untangle Prilepin’s web of paradoxes. Julie Fedor, for instance, labels him a “freelancer” who only supports the Kremlin when his beliefs ally with its doctrine. Determining how this onetime opposition figure came to be a symbol for Russian state oppression explains much about how both literature and culture work in the world’s largest country.1
The Monastery is no less bewildering as a novel — the Russian original weighs in at more than 700 pages as it chronicles the travails of Artiom Goriainov, a university student imprisoned in the Solovki prison camp in the late 1920s for murdering his father. Solovki — the informal name of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp — was the first and in many ways most recognizable prison camp set up by the Bolsheviks as part of the system of prisons, camps, exile, and places of execution known as the Gulag. There is a long and impressive roster of authors depicting these locations, which began under the Tsars but reached their horrific crescendo under Stalin, when the Gulag may have housed up to eighteen million people.2 Why would Prilepin write a damning depiction of this system? How does this act of artistic bravery fit with his arming and fighting pro-Kremlin separatists in eastern Ukraine? This second event smacks of the Moscow-backed oppression that created the Gulag and kept the USSR’s ethnic minorities (including Ukraine) firmly under the Kremlin’s heel — indeed, Putin has tried to whitewash the crimes of the Soviet past as he endeavors to renew Russia’s glory. Prilepin thrives on contradictions and thwarting expectations; his actions have real and deadly consequences as well as disturbing implications for the place of the author in today’s Russia.3
Solovki is a sacred and cursed place for Russian culture. The name refers to the Solovetsky Islands, located on the White Sea in frigid northwest Russia. Constructed in the 1420s-1430s as a Russian Orthodox monastery, Solovki was one of the locations that opposed Church reforms in the mid-1660s until forced into submission. In 1920, three years after the Bolshevik revolution, it became a prison camp for political enemies and criminals. In the Gorbachev era Solovki was a symbol of the lingering trauma of the Stalinist terror; the camp’s name appeared in an early documentary film about the Gulag and in 1990 a stone from the camp was placed across from the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet (and now Russian) secret police. In 2012 the stone was a gathering place for mass protests against the Putin regime, protests that failed to change state policies.4
The Monastery draws on the holiness and horror of Solovki. Zakhar Prilepin is the literary alter ego of Evgenii Nikolaevich Prilepin, born in 1975 to a nurse and history teacher in the village of Il’inka near the city of Ryazan in the Russian heartland of the USSR. He studied at Nizhny Novgorod State University in the chaotic and impoverished 1990s, an era that shaped the crisis, violence, and extreme emotions running throughout his prose. Many Russians saw these years as a period of national humiliation at the hands of the West, an experience that explains Putin’s rise to power in 2000. Prilepin served with Russian forces in the disastrous First Chechen War, where both sides tortured and executed prisoners as Moscow subdued the Muslim region on the southern edge of its crumbling empire. His time in Chechnya was the basis for Pathology (Patologiia, 2005), a collection of stories about the conflict that places him alongside Arkady Babchenko and others who depict Russians fighting in this brutal war.5
Mark Lipovetsky notes Prilepin’s series of careers and political ties: the author worked as a grave-digger and a guard, was involved with the radical left National Bolsheviks, and contributed to the rightist extremist newspaper Tomorrow (Zavtra). Prilepin lauded Eduard Limonov, himself a former émigré who founded the National Bolsheviks; Prilepin also contributed a respected study of Soviet writer Leonid Leonov to Russia’s most popular biography series. The author envisions himself as an ordinary man who decided to take up writing, glossing over his college training in literature in an effort to distinguish Prilepin from the intelligentsia that has long dominated Russian prose. He has repeatedly linked this group to a Western, liberal culture that is alien to his nation’s “traditional” values of masculinity and patriotism.6
Prilepin began his writing career as a poet, a choice that reflects the sacrosanct status of this genre in Russian letters. Sankya (San’kia, 2016) established him as one of Russia’s most important beginning writers — the novel focuses on Sasha Tishin, a young man from a provincial city involved with a radical group strongly resembling the National Bolsheviks. Sasha is a violent but multifaceted character embodying the crushed dreams of those coming of age after the USSR’s collapse. The novel resonated with a generation deeply shaken by the ideological vacuum of the cynical post-Soviet era. Liudmila Ulitskaia, one of the country’s most prominent liberal authors (and an opponent of Putin and the war in Ukraine), praised Sankya as a deeply moving work because of its depictions of poverty and hopelessness. The English translation has a foreword by Alexey Navalny, the political figure who in recent years has solidified opposition against Putin.7
His writing before The Monastery focuses on alienated young men scarred by the 1990s and then Putin’s restrictions, implying that being Russian means being victimized by others — whether they be the new class of mobster-businessmen or immigrants from the Caucasus. This array of enemies constitutes what sociologist Lev Gudkov terms “negative identity”: one’s sense of self is defined by alienation from others, a trait common to Prilepin’s protagonists (including Artiom). His prose promotes the superiority of his ethnicity and connects physical and political dominance to aggressive sexuality — all these, Lipovetsky notes, are hallmarks of fascist culture. This is a particularly disturbing facet of Prilepin’s prose given that he, like all born after 1945, has been raised in the shadow of his nation’s horrifying losses in the war against Hitler.8
Prilepin’s Monastery is itself steeped in the tragedy of Russia’s bloodiest century. The novel takes place in the first decade of the USSR, when Vladimir Lenin had already begun the political repressions that Stalin would expand and intensify. The novel appeared in 2014, the same year as Russia’s seizure of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. Shortly before The Monastery appeared, Prilepin criticized including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in the high school curriculum. This groundbreaking historical study of the labor camps and prisons, Prilepin alleged, was not founded on sufficient evidence. The accusation, while having little merit, was intended to stoke reader interest in The Monastery. No author writing “camp prose” (prose about the Gulag) can escape comparison with Solzhenitsyn. By condemning the magnum opus by the Nobel laureate, Prilepin stakes out his own claim to camp prose, including works by Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Evgeniia Ginzburg, and others. Prilepin’s comments exemplify the charged discourse surrounding public discussion and documentation of the Gulag — already in the early 2000s Putin began attacking Memorial, the most prominent human rights group commemorating the nine million who perished in the camps.9