Zakhar Prilepin

Obitel Cloister
Novel. AST Publishers. Moscow 2014. 746 pages.
awards: 2014 Big Book Award
2014 Shortlist Russian Booker Prize
2014 Book of the Year Russia
Foreign rights: Armenia, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, UK/US

The late 1920s – convicted of murdering his father, Artyom Goryainov is serving a sentence of several years on the Solovki Archipelago. Artyom is a robust student who survives all facets of the hell that is the Soviet camps: hunger, cold, betrayal, as well as the death of friends, a failed escape attempt and an affair. Unlike the many political prisoners, he has no strong convictions. He is a man without qualities who, like the Virgil of Solovki, simply narrates what is happening in front of his eyes. His greatest motivation: simply to survive.

The monastery founded in the 15th century on an archipelago in the White Sea had always served as a prison as well and from 1923 was a so-called “special purpose” camp forming the foundation stone of the Soviet GULAG system. Its uniqueness saw it declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. The novel describes the period in time when Solovki was finally being converted from a re-education camp for socially ‘damaging’ elements into what was solely a mass labour camp. The notion of a Utopia for forging human beings with a library, spartakiads and research laboratories ultimately mutated into a place of organised despotism and brutality.

The plot resembles Plato’s allegory of the cave: what we see is not what actually happens but rather the fleeting shadows of the same on the walls of the cave. Appearing in place of Plato’s ideas are: the camp, the revolution, faith, suffering, man.

In the Foreword Prilepin discloses his own personal and very real link with Solovki, where his own grandfather was once incarcerated. It was not only the grandfather’s stories that were passed on to the father and then to the son. The grandfather’s fur coat remained in the family and became an allegory: Solovki as the exterior of a Russian fur in which all kinds of vermin are to be found.

A contemporary novel about the historical Solovki – an allegory for the whole of Russia.

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