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Chapter 5 Testimony and Testament: Solzhenitsyn and the Scar of the Gulag Solzhenitsyn was an inmate of the Gulag from 1945 to 1953. His crime was having written a few negative remarks about Stalin in a letter to a friend. He was indicted under article 58, point 11 of the Soviet criminal code, participation in an organization for the purpose of propaganda, agitation, or the dissemination of literature leading to the weakening of Soviet power. As Solzhenitsyn explains in The Gulag Archipelago, the fact that "there were two of us" left him vulnerable to the charge of participation in an "organization." Although the book contains some elements of personal narrative, which are important to its overall structure , the scale and scope of the work far exceeds that of a single life. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a massive work of three volumes, chronicles the rise and operation of the Soviet labor camp system, tracing its internal laws and language, mechanisms, institutions, procedures , and regimes-all of which serve to transform the prisoner into "excrement and dust," as the author says. Solzhenitsyn at one point uses the old-fashioned word "archivist" (letopisets) to describe his role. But this term does not adequately convey the range of his project. Solzhenitsyn describes the Gulag as a vast but invisible and silent world just beyond the familiar landscape of socalled normal Soviet life. He seeks to make this world visible and material for his readers. He also shows that normal life depends on the Gulag and is fully implicated in it. The rise of the Soviet state, Solzhenitsyn claims, is the rise of the Gulag; the history of the Soviet Union is, to use his metaphor, "the history of our sewage system." The producThis chapter, along with chapter 4, is a greatly revised and expanded version of my article , "Russian Law and Literature: A Study in Cultural Thematics," Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 15 (1996): 315-34. 157 RUSSIA'S LEGAL FICTIONS tion of the Soviet body politic is the production of the individual body as waste product. The Gulag Archipelago brings into stark and dramatic focus several crucial issues about law, writing, and violence. The operations of literary narrative, the operations of the law, and the operation of violence intersect. The writing of the work is itself a crime, as Solzhenitsyn tells us. In September 1965, he was threatened with the "arrest" of his work and the destruction of his archive.1 The Gulag Archipelago is a form of legal testimony in that it seeks to establish the crimes committed by the Soviet state. It purports to contain "no fictitious persons or events" (1:9). Solzhenitsyn is a survivor of the Gulag, a witness to its abuses, and a witness to the testimony of others. In addition to what he "took out of the Archipelago on my skin, in my memory, in my ears and eyes," the author credits the "stories, reminiscences, and letters" of 227 others whose names he cannot mention (1:10). It is significant that the body and its pain are a source of testimony. Here we must pause to consider one of the central problems posed by Solzhenitsyn's text. It denies that it contains any fiction whatsoever, yet the work bears the subtitle "an experiment in artistic investigation." When Solzhenitsyn speaks of the"arrest" of his work, he uses the Russian word for "novel" (roman). What is the relation between art, fiction, and the fact? On another plane altogether is a question about the accuracy of Solzhenitsyn's facts. I am not interested in evaluating them; others , such as Roy Medvedev, have done so and found them wanting.2 What I wish to explore instead is the rhetorical problem of how Solzhenitsyn establishes his facts, what role his art and his aesthetics play in this process. In order to establish his facts and the facts of other witnesses, Solzhenitsyn must disestablish other facts. He challenges the facts provided by Soviet science, Soviet law, and official Soviet history. In order to make his statements, Solzhenitsyn must define the conditions under which the statements can be made. Solzhenitsyn creates his own epistemology -knowledge comes from pain. He creates his own parodical 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia, 3 vols. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1973-75),579. Henceforward, all citations will be given parenthetically in the text by part and page number. 2. For example, Medvedev alleges that Solzhenitsyn "distorted many details of Yakubovich's testimony." Yakubovich was...

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