Prilepin’s novel is a strange mixture of genres that all work together. In constructing such a hybrid work, he emulates the classics of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle (V kruge pervom, 1968) used the fate of imprisoned scientists in a secret lab to mediate on human nature, discuss Dostoevskii, and even develop a steamy (if unconsummated) romance plot. Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining the rise of the novel, praises this genre for its ability to incorporate aspects of many types of literature while still remaining grounded in everyday life — The Monastery exploits this flexibility just as its author skillfully navigates his contradictory status as critic of the state, patriot, author, and ordinary veteran. The novel’s structure reinforces this mix. In the author’s preface, the “real” Prilepin discusses how the plot comes from the comments of his great-grandfather: for many years the author had assumed these stories were about the Second World War, not the Gulag. The main body of the novel focuses on Artiom, imprisoned for murdering his father and thus deemed a “normal” prisoner as opposed to the priests, anarchists, and sundry actual and imagined opponents of Bolshevism populating the camp. My discussion will not reveal more of the plot than is necessary — The Monastery is built around the thrill of unexpected actions and their consequences, a trait it inherits from Prilepin’s earlier prose. Indeed, Artiom is not much older than Sankya, suggesting that The Monastery is the apotheosis of Prilepin’s fixation on violent men. In an afterword, Prilepin explains how he spoke to the daughter of Eichmanis. This is followed by the diary of Galina Kucherenko, Artiom’s lover in Solovki — Prilepin consulted it when writing The Monastery, but received the diary only after he had made significant progress on the manuscript. Following the diary are a series of notes by Prilepin, explaining the fates of the principal characters after the main plot ends in the late 1920s.15
The Monastery also harbors traits of documentary prose: life writing that claims to be based on actual events — the novel purports to be built around the experiences of Prilepin’s great-grandfather Zakhar Petrov (whose first name the author appropriated as his literary synonym). Documentary prose gained popularity in the last decades of the USSR, presenting itself as a supposedly more reliable alternative to the idealized (and sanitized) state versions of history. Yet The Monastery is in reality a clever manipulation of facts with many fictional additions, a scenario recalling Prilepin’s critique of Solzhenitsyn for relying too much on hearsay in writing The Gulag Archipelago. In The Monastery the archival sources and family stories that Prilepin consulted are secondary to the authorial skill that makes them into a coherent fictional narrative.16
The Monastery is also a strange and twisted version of the novel of development (Bildungsroman), familiar to readers of Dickens’ Great Expectations or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In Russian prose Ivan Turgenev and, in a different manner, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii were the most famous authors of this genre, which the USSR chained to the cliché ideological awakening of war heroes and exemplary workers. Artiom matures in many ways, in great part due to his relationship with Galina but also because of his friendship with intellectual Vasilii Petrovich and kind priest Father John (despite both resembling the intelligentsia Prilepin scorns). Prilepin’s entire corpus is a single Bildungsroman, but one where his male protagonists age without internalizing the ‘life lessons’ that shape most novels of development. This is due to the cult of violence and lack of self-reflection in Prilepin’s works; likewise, Solovki as setting raises an obvious question: can characters learn anything positive from the Gulag? The camps were allegedly created to reform prisoners, yet early on any real effort at transformation devolved into slave labor for projects in the inhospitable corners of the USSR.17
Camp prose is, of course, another genre of The Monastery. Prilepin follows in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn and more terrifying vision of Shalamov, the two figures who most shaped writing about the Gulag. Leona Toker identifies the features of this writing, which also appear in Prilepin’s novel: initiation into the camp (the panicked fear of prisoners arriving at Solovki), “Room 101” (a phrase drawn from Orwell’s 1984, denoting a prisoner’s worst experience), and so forth. When Artiom talks to the imprisoned poet Afanasiev after the two have been hauling logs, the man tersely summarizes: “Man is a log to other men.” This odd aphorism is a pun on the prisoner saying “Man is wolf to man,” conveying that one can expect no mercy in the Gulag. Camp prose is suspicious of those who modify its rules: the late-Soviet author Sergei Dovlatov, for instance, was lambasted in the West for his novella The Zone (Zona), an absurdly comic account of the author serving as a camp guard for non-political prisoners in the 1960s. Prilepin, as is obvious from his attack of Solzhenitsyn, thrives on this sort of controversy, using it to attract more readers.18
The Monastery also has a substantial romantic plot involving Artiom and Galina: one is a prisoner while the other is the lover of Eichmanis, the Solovki warden. This scenario is inextricably linked to a key pattern in camp prose: the irony that prisoners and guards could have easily had different fates (and sometimes changed places during Stalin’s purges). Artiom and Galina’s affair begins when Galina is interrogating the prisoner and he shoves his hand up her skirt, prompting her to embrace him. This unlikely scene echoes the connection that Lipovetsky makes between sex and violence in Prilepin’s works: male ferocity conquers women. The power dynamics are now reversed: it is Galina who can destroy Artiom, yet she becomes his lover in response to his brutally masculine behavior.19
The Monastery also contains elements of the philosophical novel, that aspect of great Russian prose that uses literature to debate the purpose of life (be it holiness or building communism) or even the course of human history. Tolstoi famously discusses this last point in the second epilogue to War and Peace; in the twentieth century Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago argues for humane mercy in place of the Bolsheviks’ bloody utopia. Artiom has numerous conversations with more erudite prisoners, a scenario reinforcing how the intelligentsia was a group often persecuted under communism. Some of the prisoners gather for philosophical evenings, reenacting the pre-1917 literary salon (until the camp authorities send its members to the punishment cells). At one point a prisoner compares Solovki to all of Russia, which is like a fine fur coat: “‘Everyone thinks it’s the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks who ruined everything. [. . .] But it’s merely the empire turned inside out, the entire fur coat! There, you find lice, all kinds of vermin, bed bugs — it was all there! It’s just that now, we’re wearing the fur coat with the lining out! And that’s Solovki!’” This comment is important for several reasons. First, it presents the camp as a microcosm of Soviet society, a pattern found in many works about the Gulag. More importantly, the comment reveals that oppression and poverty have always been a part of Russian history — it is only now that the intelligentsia and former aristocrats are aware of it.20
The Monastery places special emphasis on discussions of Orthodoxy, which Prilepin sees as inseparable from Russian culture: this assumption is correct yet elides the long presence of Judaism and Islam (both predate Christianity in the country). Given the context of Prilepin’s earlier works, ignoring the religious traditions of Russia’s minorities is a subtler sign of his muscular ethnocentrism and xenophobia. This approach is another similarity between Prilepin’s fiction and Putin’s policies — both fuse church, state, and ethnicity to create an exclusionary image of Russia.21