Solovecki arhipelag, na severu Rusije, u Belom moru. Na ta udaljena ostrva neposlušne je u progonstvo prvo počela da šalje Katarina Velika, a surova tradicija nastavlja se i nakon Oktobarske revolucije 1917, kada je tu osnovan Solovecki logor specijalne namene (tzv. SLON), prvi iz nove mreže kažnjeničkih logora koja je kasnije prekrila ceo SSSR.

Kraj je dvadesetih godina. Poslednji čin drame srebrnog veka. Široko platno Bošovih razmera. Sa desetinama likova, sa jasnim tragovima prošlosti i odblescima pretnji u budućnosti – i čitav život koji se smestio u jednu jesen. Veličanstvena priroda – i klupko ljudskih sudbina, u kom je nemoguće razlikovati dželate od žrtava. Tragična istorijа jedne ljubavi – i istorija čitave države sa svojim bolom, krvlju, mržnjom, odražena je u Soloveckom ostrvu, kao u ogledalu. Moćan metafizički tekst o stepenu čovekove lične slobode i o stepenu čovekovih fizičkih mogućnosti. To je novi roman Zahara Prilepina, to je Obitelj.

Obitelj je reč slovenskog porekla, i osim što znači „porodica”, znači i manastirsko bratstvo, teritorijia manastira, svi manastirski objekti... U rečniku Matice srpske, osim značenja „porodica”, navedeno je i ovo drugo značenje – оbitelj je „manastirsko bratstvo”. Zanimljivo je da Nikolaj Velimirović u svojm knjigama koristi reč „obitelj“ upravo u ovom značenju. Radnja Prilepinovog romana događa se u Soloveckom manastiru i odnosi se na „obitelj“, zato je i naslov u prevodu na srpski ostao autentičan.

Well, this was an interesting book, and for reasons not entirely to do with the story...

First things first: although a contemporary novel, The Monastery belongs in the category of 'Camp Prose', mostly known to people of my generation through the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). During the Cold War, we read the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) at school (in Form IV? Form V?) — and this is now interesting in itself because it was (at least at my school) the only translated fiction on the syllabus. Convinced as we were meant to be of the grim and unrelenting reality of the horrors of communism, we subsequently saw the film in 1970, the year that Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. Solzhenitsyn was there again at university with Cancer Ward (1968), and some of us even bought The Gulag Archipelago (1973-8), (but, a-hem, never got round to reading its daunting 660 pages).

For us, Solzhenitsyn's writing was Gospel Truth, and also A Warning, and it wasn't until 2016 when I read the Soviet era Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov, translated by John Glad (1970, available in Russia in 1978) that I began to glimpse that there were different kinds of real-life experience of the Soviet camps. But I was still very surprised last year by Zuleikha, by Guzel Yakhina, translated by Lisa C Hayden (2015, translated 2019). This post Soviet novel, while not airbrushing the grim realities of camp life, features a central character, who — based on the author's grandmother's real-life experience — finds some benefits in her life in a Soviet camp. Which brings me to the first interesting thing about The Monastery. As the blurb suggests, it suggests that the gulags initially had a purpose somewhat different to the common conception of them:

Founded in the 15th century on an archipelago in the White Sea, from 1923 the monastery became a “camp of special designation,” the foundation stone of the Soviet GULAG system. The novel describes a period when Solovki was being converted from a re-education camp for “socially damaging elements” into what eventually became a mass labor camp. The notion of a Utopia for “forging new human beings,” complete with a library, athletic events, and research laboratories, eventually mutated into a hell of despotism and brutality.

This concept of the gulag as redemptive reminds me of the surprising elements of Children of the Arbat, (1987) by Anatoli Rybakov, translated by Harold Shukman. It features, to quote my own review....

...the generation born at the time of the Russian Revolution, who by the 1930s were young adults who had grown up believing in Soviet ideals. They were privileged by comparison with most people in the Soviet Union because they had better access to education and opportunity, they were in a position to see the economic progress being made under rapid industrialisation, and they were forgiving of the human cost because they saw it as an unavoidable aspect of the creation of the Soviet State which they wholeheartedly supported. The novel charts the slow disillusionment of this generation as they begin to see the consequences of rule by terror.

In Children of the Arbat, Sasha the central character is sent into exile for spurious reasons, but isn't bitter about it. He believes in communism, and is philosophical about its excesses which he believes are necessary to build a new society.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/11/the-monastery-by-zakhar-prilepin-translated-... ( )