The Monastery, like many works of camp prose, emphasizes how the Gulag became its own civilization within Soviet society. Solovki has a hierarchy of prisoners and the work they perform, as Artiom discovers when speaking to the intellectual Vasilii Petrovich.
“I need to find another place to live [. . .] What other brigades do they have here? Let’s count them together, maybe we can figure something out.”
Vasilii Petrovich didn’t need any convincing.
“You were already in the thirteenth,” he said. “You’re sick of the twelfth, and I agree, you need to leave it. The eleventh is the brigade of the negative element. It’s also the icebox and I don’t recommend anyone go there. The tenth is the clerical workers. With your obvious literacy, that’s the best place for you. You won’t get into the ninth — that’s the so-called informer’s brigade. It’s filled with former Chekists from the lower ranks, meaning they’re useless for positions of authority, and so they work as guards or overseers.” [. . .]
“The seventh is the artistic brigade, also not the worst place in Solovki. By the by, did you happen to take part in school plays? If so, you’d be perfect for a few of the classical roles.” It wasn’t clear whether Vasilii Petrovich was laughing or not. “The sixth is the custodial brigade. It’s good there too, but by [warden] Eichmanis’s order, they only take former clergymen there.” [. . .]
“The fifth is the fire brigade,” continued Vasilii Petrovich. “It’s wonderful there, but if you can get into the artists’ for your talent or into the clerical because of your ability, for example, to correctly count and beautifully write, to get into the fire brigade, you need to bribe someone. Or, as they call it here, ‘the luck of the draw’. We don’t burn here that often, so they’re not overwhelmed with work. They play checkers more than anything. But we don’t have any money to bribe, so let’s go on. The fourth brigade is the musicians of Solovki’s orchestras. You haven’t hidden any musical talent from me, have you? Maybe, Artiom, you can play on the trumpet? No? Too bad. The third brigade is the Chekists of the highest rank and Information and Investigation Department. So we won’t even consider the third. The second is specialists in positions of authority, for example, professional scientists.” Here Vasilii Petrovich looked at Artiom carefully again, but he didn’t meet his gaze. So he continued, “The first is inmates from among the camp’s administration — the commandants, the leaders of various industries and their helpers. You still have to grow a bit before you can get to the first… or, maybe not.”
“Is that it?” Artiom asked.
“Why?” said Vasilii Petrovich. “There’s still the fourteenth [. . .] maximum security. Those are the inmates that work only within the walls of the kremlin, so they won’t run away. The cooks, the lackeys, the ostlers working for the Cheka. In essence, they’re supposed to be especially punished, because they don’t have the freedom to walk about on Solovki, but they only made it better for them. You decide — it’s one thing to carry logs, it’s a completely different thing to brush the tail of the commissar’s horse. The fifteenth brigade is the artisans — the carpenters, joiners and coopers. There’s one more brigade that doesn’t work at all. You can get there easily without any bribes, and it’s called…?”
“The cemetery, I know,” answered Artiom without smiling. “The cemetery of Solovki.”10
The camp has its privileged and despised classes, with all of them subservient to the Chekists, the secret police whom the Soviets inherited from the Tsarist state. Many of them would be arrested and shot under Stalin’s orders in the 1930s, including Eichmanis, the fictional stand-in for the historical figure Fiodor Eichmans.
The Monastery depicts the horrifying effects of state violence yet Prilepin actively encouraged it in another context. The author’s literary works are impossible to divorce from his role in the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, dominated by Russian-speakers who often felt slighted by the Ukrainian-speaking majority of the country. In 2014 two areas, backed by Russian troops, tried to separate from Ukraine, beginning a war that has claimed 10,000 lives in the region that separatists (including Prilepin) have proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic. The author’s website prominently displays links to songs supporting the breakaway region as well as soliciting donations to his charity. Prilepin proudly discusses how he funded his own battalion and created his own charitable organization to aid victims of the same war he helped promulgate. In a widely-viewed clip he announces that writers are on the side of peace and then gives a command to fire, presumably at enemy forces. In December 2018, however, he announced that the war had become a struggle for big business. Given that the separatists have been connected to corrupt businessmen since the war’s beginning, Prileipin’s change of heart did not come from his long hatred for capitalism.11
In 2018 Prilepin starred in Phone Duty (Dezhurstvo), a film praised by the Tribeca Film Festival despite its pro-separatist stance. This role encapsulates his mutable identity — he is a former soldier who became a writer then served as a soldier while portraying a soldier. Tomi Huttunen and Jussi Lasila point out that his actions before and during the war in Ukraine share a macho “patriotic vitality” that Prilepin juxtaposes against a “‘bourgeois’ liberal mainstream” he derides as immoral, weak, and a holdover from the 1990s. Both Prilepin and Putin exploit Russia’s desire for strong, decisive public figures who force respect from other nations.12
Despite upholding brawn over intellect, Prilepin sees his literary persona as an outgrowth of the books he read as a child. He devoured the collected works of Leo Tolstoy and Jules Verne, as well as Hemingway, who was popular in the last decades of the USSR. The list then becomes more surprising, combining the long-banned Vladimir Nabokov, Isaak Babel’ (a Jewish modernist killed by Stalin), and canonical Soviet author Valentin Kataev. This combination represents the precocious and eclectic reading tastes of the late-Soviet intelligentsia, a group Prilepin mocks in Sankya as estranged from the common people.13
Prilepin is far from the original iconoclast he tries to resemble. His blurring of political action, posturing, and talented prose is the evolution of what Andrew Wachtel calls Russian literature’s “obsession with history.” Wachtel focuses on authors such as Solzhenitsyn, who blend historical analysis with fiction and the philosophizing that has been a mainstay of Russian prose before and after the USSR. Prilepin updates this by cannily exploiting social media and the internet to become a household name beyond the angry young men his writing emphasizes. In this sense he fits into the celebrity culture Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo see as emblematic of the Putin era, where real news is subsumed by fame, wealth, and carefully managed scandal. Prilepin is the “anti-celebrity celebrity”, who masquerades as an ordinary man from outside Nizhny Novgorod, a patriot, a soldier, and a writer more authentic than the liberal intelligentsia he scorns.14
It is thus all the more surprising that Prilepin created an original, moving, and thought-provoking novel about Solovki. The Monastery is at one level a thriller — Artiom escapes death multiple times and his fortunes shift by the day if not by the minute as he tries to survive the anger of professional criminals, sadistic camp officials, and the brutal Arctic climate. The prisoner’s constantly shifting fate comes from the arbitrary and cruel life in the Gulag. What results is an omnipresent uncertainty and fear — depicting this is one of the affinities camp prose shares with literature of the Holocaust. The Monastery is a success precisely because it stretches these individual moments of possible triumph or disaster out over the course of Artiom’s sentence, immersing readers in a world that it is at first alien then quickly becomes familiar.