Volume 21, Number 4 · March 21, 1974
Between Earth and Hell
By George F. Kennan
Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Parts I and II,
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
YMCA Press, Paris, 606 pp., an English translation will be published later this year
The nineteenth-century traveler and writer, George Kennan (1848-1924), whose namesake and relative I happen to be, on arriving at the 400th page of his well-known study of Siberia and the Exile System (first published in 1888), tells of sitting 'on one cold raw autumnal day, in a dirty post-station on the great Siberian road,' watching the passage of a miserable party of guarded convicts, who were making their laborious way, on foot and in leg-fetters, over the 1,040-mile stretch from Tomsk to Irkutsk. As they moved through the village they sang, by permission of the convoy, the so-called 'begging song'—the miloserdnaya—in the hope of eliciting mercy, in the form of small donations of food, from the villagers. When they had passed, Kennan was overcome, he wrote, by 'a strange sense of dejection, as if the day had suddenly grown colder, darker, and more dreary, and the cares and sorrows of life more burdensome and oppressive.' This was one of the rare points at which he allowed a touch of subjective feeling to burst the crust of cool restraint that covers his otherwise factual and very Victorian book.
Review, 4146 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |