Why Have So Many Chinese Books About the Gulag Appeared in the Past Three Years?

The Gulag — short for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps — was the Soviet Union's tool for crushing dissent, and it held millions of prisoners.

While Lin Yuan, who works at the French Embassy in China, quietly began translating The Gulag Meteorologist (《古拉格气象学家》), Chen Feng received an email from the French publisher Éditions Points with an electronic copy of the same book. Chen Feng is deputy editor-in-chief at Thinkingdom; Points, which has worked with her for 15 years, sends its books over regularly.

The first thing in that file to catch her eye wasn't the text but the many small drawings. Reading further, she realized that this work with its literary-sounding title wasn't a novel but a work of nonfiction — and that the drawings, done in pencil and watercolor, came out of the Gulag itself. They were made by Alexey Feodosievich Vangengeim, a Soviet meteorologist in the camps, for his daughter Eleonora, who was not yet four.

The drawings show the northern lights, a black fox, a cat, birds, watermelons, an airplane. Writing letters from the Gulag and drawing these small pictures, the father taught his daughter basic arithmetic and geometry from far away — "the number of lobes on a leaf can stand for simple numbers, its shape can show symmetry or asymmetry, a pinecone can explain what a spiral is," and so on.

"He was a scientist — you young people always say 'STEM guy.' But there's something so literary about him, something soft in there… A man in a Gulag prison, and still like this. The further you read, the more you find — there's much more to it than this."

Chen Feng feels that The Gulag Meteorologist "isn't an indictment," and that it "isn't a big book." Its protagonist is not a "major figure" like the Nobel laureate Solzhenitsyn; he "took no part in politics," and he was certainly no "independent-minded public intellectual." He was just an "ordinary man," "a scientist living a settled, contented life."

The Gulag — in case you don't know — is short for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a branch of the Soviet State Political Directorate and later of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), in charge of forced labor, detention and the like. The camps held criminals of every kind, and the system later became the Soviet Union's tool for crushing dissent, imprisoning millions. In 1973 the word "Gulag" reached the West through Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (《古拉格群岛》), and there it came to mean the Soviet labor camp system and every form of Soviet political persecution.

…Eighty years later, writing his story, I hesitate over whether to add this pitiful detail. Why? Because I would rather he had refused to compromise, like Yevgenia; I would rather admire him. But there is nothing in him to admire — and perhaps that is exactly what makes him interesting. He was an ordinary man, a Communist who asked no questions, or who was not forced to start asking them until later; and think what a shock it took to bring him, timidly, to the point of asking at all. He was a mediocre, innocent man. Dreyfus, too, seems to have been a disappointment, in another way. "Because he suffered an unjust trial," Bernard Lazare wrote, "we demand everything of him, we want him to be perfect. He was innocent — that in itself was a great deal."

The Gulag Meteorologist

That is how Olivier Rolin, the author of The Gulag Meteorologist, accounts for his protagonist, the meteorologist Alexey Feodosievich Vangengeim.

In April 2012 the French writer Olivier Rolin — a "military leader" of the students protesting on the streets of Paris in 1968 — was in Russia when he happened upon the album Eleonora had published in memory of her father. He then made 20 trips back and forth between France and Russia, digging through archives for material, until he had assembled everything there was to know about this "small man" beneath the grand narrative of the Gulag, and out of it he wrote a book. Without that chance encounter the book would not exist, and no one would know the name Vangengeim.

The book has no belly band. The original cover carries nothing but clouds; the Chinese edition adds a little French text and a river, and not one line of praise — a design that does make it look more like a literary novel. Sales abroad have been ordinary; in China it has done a bit better, with print runs now approaching 10,000 copies.

Look at the whole path this book took into China — a group of dedicated people digging Vangengeim out of the past together, the book written in French, translated into Chinese, then published without trouble — and the process itself is something to be glad about.

For Wei Dong, an editor at Guangxi Normal University Press, everything ran the other way. The author of his book was a major figure: Varlam Shalamov, one of Russia's three great labor-camp writers, whose work is grand narrative and whose collected writings run to a full seven volumes. But Wei Dong had no idea where to start in tracking down the rights.

He told QDaily he began looking for them in 2012 — "it took about a year and more to find them" — and then had to find translators. All told it took nearly four years before the first volume, the 784-page Kolyma Tales (《科雷马故事》), finally came out in September 2016. Three or four more volumes of Shalamov are still to come: "once they're all out, it will come to about the length of The Gulag Archipelago."

As luck would have it, the two translators Wei Dong found, both in their seventies, had likewise spent ten years translating more than 600,000 characters of the Kolyma Tales cycle on their own, without any rights agreement either.

Over the past three years, books about the Gulag — and more broadly about Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe — seem to have had a small boom. Besides the two above, whose fates turned out so differently, there is Just Send Me Word (《古拉格之恋》), published in August 2016, which has also done well: its author Orlando Figes's earlier book The Whisperers "made a big impact," so publishing this one "followed naturally."

Gulag: A History, From Moscow to the Gulag, The Road to the Gulag, Life and Fate, Secondhand Time, The Unwomanly Face of War, The Whisperers, Enemies of the People… put together, these books look like a coincidence. If you happen to be a reader who follows this kind of subject, you will see related titles appear in front of you one after another, without a break. They come from different publishers and pass through different editors' hands, and then they arrive together.

Attitude

From his arrest on January 8, 1934, to his execution by firing squad on November 3, 1937, the meteorologist Vangengeim never stopped writing appeals to Stalin, the Soviet Union's supreme commander. He loved his family and his daughter, "loved his work," loved "an age that in his eyes belonged to great political and scientific achievement," loved Stalin, and believed in the Communist system.

Olivier Rolin, though, is a French writer. Chen Feng was "very curious" about what an outsider looking at this history "would feel." What she found was this: "His attitude turns out to be extremely tolerant, and that is different from us — from the way we talk now about, say, the Cultural Revolution or the Anti-Rightist Campaign, or the way Russians talk about that stretch of their own history. They don't have that kind of calm, tolerant attitude," Chen Feng said. She added that 2016 marked 50 years since Lao She's death, and some literary figures "condemned Lao She for being weak" during the Cultural Revolution — never standing "in the victim's position," never taking a tolerant view.

"In the end a man, like everyone else, has his integrity and his loyalty, and also his blind obedience and his credulity," Olivier Rolin wrote.

The cover of The Gulag Meteorologist uses light colors, which gives it a brighter look — a decision made by Thinkingdom's editor-in-chief Chen Mingjun. Just Send Me Word, by contrast, follows the design of the Imaginist Translation Series (the M Series) it belongs to: a cold gray cover carrying only the basic publication details and one large "M," the first letter of "Mirror," meaning "seeing yourself in the mirror, reflecting on yourself."

The cover of Kolyma Tales is a little richer, with two photographs of labor camps and two plain lines of praise. Covers look this way, said Wu Xiaobin, the editor of Just Send Me Word, because "flashy endorsements" would "affect the reader's judgment"; they "don't care for ostentation."

Chen Feng says that a subject like the Gulag "looks a little like certain things around you." The likely readers, she thinks, are "people who want to know something about this history but can't quite bring themselves to open a thick, heavy book." With that in mind, the title was changed from the original The Meteorologist to The Gulag Meteorologist, to make it more familiar to Chinese readers.

"Actually the Gulag has always been a subject we Chinese pay close attention to," Wei Dong said. The Imaginist Translation Series said from the day it was planned that although it is a series of translations, "its focus and its footing are China itself" — "we urgently need other people's experience to help us deal with our own problems."

Considerations like these may be one reason so many such books have poured onto the Chinese market in recent years.

Reservations

Many people think that with books like these, publishing them is harder than making them.

"I don't have reservations, but other people do. Whatever book you make these days, if someone tells you it's sensitive, you have to treat it as sensitive — and really, none of this amounts to anything. I just say: this is only one small man's fate," Chen Feng said.

The Gulag Meteorologist really is about one small man's fate, buried under a vast historical background. Just Send Me Word tells the love story of two young Russians, Lev and Sveta. Lev struggled to stay alive in one of Stalin's labor camps, and he and his girlfriend exchanged more than 1,200 letters in secret. Kolyma Tales, though people treat it as reliable history, is in form still a set of short stories about individual lives, with no direct, sharp attack in it.

"It isn't the kind of book aimed at a particular system or a particular person — even if that was the intent behind the writing, the narrative itself isn't like that. It's still historical detail, laying that out, without making too many value judgments, judgments about the system," Wu Xiaobin said.

Wei Dong thinks that what people call "sensitivity" also has "historical causes," and has now "become part of an imagined territory." That imagined territory marks off no-go zones for some editors, who then don't dare touch these subjects. Even with the rights in hand — as with The Whisperers — a publisher may abandon the project out of caution. And the trouble with this "imagined no-go zone" is that it has no clear border. On which subjects can be written about and which cannot, there is no "clear statement."

So some people take the simple, blanket approach. "You only have to mention a subject and the red light comes on. He hasn't even looked at where the sensitivity lies — he hears the subject and decides it's sensitive," Chen Feng said.

Yet when the books actually came out, editors like Chen Feng, Wei Dong and Wu Xiaobin found they had "run into no obstacles at all" and "met no great resistance."

This "imagined no-go zone," of course, works on readers as well as editors, leaving people with the feeling that "anything banned must be good" and "a banned book makes you want to read it more." But the more important question may be "why it became a banned book in the first place."

Still, even an imagined no-go zone makes editors tread carefully in publishing. They choose praise that is "mild" and does not "provoke" — the back cover of Kolyma Tales, for instance: "He tells of endless suffering with his own uncompromising truth, his only weapon, which makes people feel a sudden pity, and a deep respect, for this man who once lived in hell. — Andrei Tarkovsky." It leans toward literary value rather than criticism.

So Gulag books have slowly developed a character of their own: plain design, no celebrity endorsements, hardly any marketing; translators translate quietly, editors publish quietly.

Sometimes an editor finds a small, oblique way to say something. Wei Dong, for one, deliberately put a line in "eye-catching" red type on the cover of Kolyma Tales: "Labor is a glorious, valiant and heroic undertaking." The line was once carved over the doorframe of every labor camp in the Soviet Union; Wei Dong pushed it to the front because "it is in fact a huge irony."

"Don't make mistakes" has become an unwritten rule of publishing. Such is the wariness that even a popular bestseller like The Kite Runner passed through several publishers before it found a home — everyone feared it touched so-called sensitive subjects such as the Soviet Communist Party and Islam, and one expert reviewer picked more than 100 political errors out of it.

Several of the people we interviewed said that everyone today practices "self-censorship," because "everyone is afraid of losing the little they have," and needs to "look well-behaved."

Wei Dong does have an optimistic side: "We're trying as hard as we can right now. If a problem comes up, it comes up; if it doesn't, it doesn't. There's no clear line drawn anywhere."

Coincidence

Asked why these books came to be published, the editors say it is "really just a coincidence."

Chen Feng doesn't see it that way: "This is a reference point for the present. If you can't talk about China's own affairs, you talk about someone else's affairs, about someone else's history."

Wei Dong and Wu Xiaobin have that thought too, though.

Before Just Send Me Word, the better-known book Wu Xiaobin worked on was The Whisperers, by the same author and in the same Imaginist Translation Series. When it came out in 2014 it drew intense attention, was named one of the year's ten best books by many media rankings and by intellectuals, and reached a print run of 50,000 copies.

The Whisperers was in the first batch of the Imaginist Translation Series, which is now up to its 17th volume. Most of it covers history and politics, and several volumes deal with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — Enemies of the People and Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union among them. The series has a clear purpose: to reflect on China through others, above all through the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which resemble China.

Kolyma Tales, like Just Send Me Word, belongs to a series of its own: "Literary Monuments." Since its first volume, A Biography of Nabokov, appeared in 2011, the series has published 19 books, concentrated on nonfiction in Russian literature — memoirs, diaries, biographies. It includes Lydia Chukovskaya's In Defense of Memory and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. "We can't talk about that stretch of our own history at all freely, so it is largely through works like these that we attend to this kind of subject," said Wei Dong, the series' chief editor.

Chen Feng mentions a detail from The Gulag Meteorologist: the meteorologist Vangengeim had arranged to go to the opera with his wife, but she waited and he never came — he had simply disappeared. Months later she learned that the secret police had taken him, on the baffling charge of "collusion with a foreign country."

"That kind of thing makes your hair stand on end — an ordinary man, settled and content, perfectly fine, and then he's gone, just like that," Chen Feng said. The subjects of these books aren't far from us, either: "During the Cultural Revolution so many people cut ties with each other, husbands and wives divorced — that sort of thing happened constantly," Wu Xiaobin said.

QDaily raised the question in the first place because, searching for books, we kept finding the word "Gulag." But when we asked the editors whether this amounted to a phenomenon, they came back to the word "coincidence."

Wu Xiaobin gave an example: Guangxi Normal University Press's Beijing company alone publishes more than 120 books a year, and the country publishes several hundred thousand a year — "how many of them are about the Gulag? Can that really be a phenomenon, a fashion?"

Judging by the print runs and the copies sold, Wu Xiaobin is right. Take Gulag: A History, the best-selling title in this category: its sales top out at a little over 80,000 copies.

Then again, books like these have never been a widely circulated product.

The cover of Kolyma Tales was designed as a favor by a designer friend at "Oracle," the Social Sciences Academic Press imprint, and the pictures came from the illustrations in Gulag: A History, a book that friend had published. Dai Dahong, Liu Jialin and Mao Junjie turn up again and again on the translator credits of such books; the reviewers are a small group — Zhi An, Si Yu, Yun Yetui and a few others — and it was Zhi An who recommended Gulag: A History to Shang Hongke, general manager of Hantang Yangguang, which is how it came to be published at all.

These are all people from one small circle.

Because print runs are limited, books like these are probably sharing the same pool of readers, and in the end they can't escape reaching only "those who already know." But that is true of most serious work, and the Gulag books are no exception.

Gulag-related books published in the past three years (partial list, in order of publication):

Kolyma Tales (《科雷马故事》), Varlam Shalamov (Russia), September 2016, Guangxi Normal University Press

Just Send Me Word (《古拉格之恋》), Orlando Figes (UK), August 2016, Guangxi Normal University Press

The Conscience of Russia: A Life of Solzhenitsyn (《俄罗斯的良心：索尔仁尼琴传》), Georges Nivat (Russia), August 2016, New Star Press

The Gulag Meteorologist (《古拉格气象学家》), Olivier Rolin (France), July 2016, Shanghai Joint Publishing

Hope Abandoned (《第二本书》), Nadezhda Mandelstam (Russia), May 2016, Guangxi Normal University Press

Secondhand Time (《二手时间》), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), January 2016, CITIC Press

The Road to the Gulag (《通往古拉格》), Jeremy Pullman (UK), January 2016, Modern Press (first edition September 2014)

Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (《布达佩斯往事：冷战时期一个东欧家庭的秘密档案》), Kati Marton (US), January 2016, Guangxi Normal University Press

Voices from Chernobyl (《切尔诺贝利的悲鸣》), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), November 2015, Flower City Publishing House (previously published in 2014 and 2012)

Zinky Boys (《锌皮娃娃兵》), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), November 2015, Jiuzhou Press

The Velvet Prison (《天鹅绒监狱》), Miklós Haraszti (Hungary), October 2015, Central Compilation & Translation Press

The File: A Personal History (《档案：一部个人史》), Timothy Garton Ash (Canada), September 2015, Guangxi Normal University Press

The Unwomanly Face of War (《我是女兵，也是女人》), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), September 2015, Jiuzhou Press

Last Witnesses (《我还是想你，妈妈》), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), September 2015, Jiuzhou Press

Life and Fate (《生存与命运》), Vasily Grossman (USSR), August 2015, Guangxi Normal University Press (CITIC Press published a different translation of the same book that year; it had also appeared in 1989, 1993 and 2000)

The Gulag Archipelago (《古拉格群岛》), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russia), August 2015, Masses Publishing House (previously published in 1982, 1996, 2006 and 2011)

Captain of the Steppe (《官家童话》), Oleg Pavlov (Russia), September 2014, Heilongjiang University Press

Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union (《苏联的最后一天》), Conor O'Clery (Ireland), September 2014, Guangxi Normal University Press

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (《耳语者：斯大林时代苏联的私人生活》), Orlando Figes (UK), August 2014, Guangxi Normal University Press

A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (《失败的帝国》), Vladislav Zubok (US), June 2014, Social Sciences Academic Press

Gulag: A History (《古拉格：一部历史》), Anne Applebaum (US), June 2014, New Star Press (first edition April 2013)

The First Island of the Gulag Archipelago (《古拉格群岛第一岛》), compiled and translated by Wu Yuxing, January 2014, Flower City Publishing House

A Life of Solzhenitsyn (《索尔仁尼琴传》), Lyudmila Saraskina (Russia), December 2013, People's Literature Publishing House

Hope Against Hope (《曼德施塔姆夫人回忆录》), Nadezhda Mandelstam (Russia), September 2013, Guangxi Normal University Press

Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (《流放的灵魂：索尔仁尼琴》), Joseph Pearce (UK), September 2013, Shanghai Joint Publishing

From Moscow to the Gulag (《从莫斯科到古拉格》), Rachel Polonsky (UK), July 2013, New Star Press

Cover image from: siberiantimes