Staying alive with the language of love

 
p.29 letters
Timothy Phillips25 May 2012

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
by Orlando Figes
(Allen Lane, £20)

Orlando Figes’s new book, Just Send Me Word, is a quiet, moving and memorable account of life in a totalitarian state. Its subjects are two Russians, who like so many others of their generation (they were born in the 1910s) were forced to lead extraordinary lives because of one or other of the 20th century’s great dictators.

From our perspective, what makes these Russians — Lev and Sveta — special is that they recorded those lives in intimate detail, along with their developing relationship with one another. Almost miraculously, the letters in which they did this have survived, evading both the censor’s pen at the time and the depredations of age. Figes has translated them and made them the backbone of his book.

He says that the volume is “a new departure” for his work. It is a phrase which may leave some of his devotees puzzled. Figes has written extensively about the first decades of Soviet power before, including, in The Whisperers, about Stalinism and the Gulag. But what he means here, I think, is that with Just Send Me Word he is trying to become a historian of a different kind, less academic, more personal. Certainly, all hint of the didactic historian’s voice has gone, replaced by that of a far humbler chronicler, a bearer of witness to important events who allows the individuals involved in them to speak for themselves.

Accordingly, the book often reads like a novel. We learn of Lev and Sveta’s love for one other in their own words, indeed through their own thoughts. Both, it seems, were destined to have difficult lives: Lev’s parents were murdered by the Bolsheviks when he was just a baby and Sveta had a predisposition to depression. But, just as their gentle student relationship was reaching maturity at the beginning of the 1940s, things got worse than even they could have imagined, and from 1941 onwards they were to be apart for more than 12 years, separated first by the Second World War and then by Stalin’s Gulag.

Lev was sent to the Gulag in 1945 for having “allowed himself” to be captured by the Nazis; hundreds of thousands of other Red Army troops received the same punishment. He was kept in Russia’s frozen north, in a parallel world where all the ordinary hardships and brutalities of Soviet life were magnified, and where, though he was in the same country as the woman he loved, he could not see her.

Between 1946 and 1954, he and Sveta wrote some 1,500 letters to each other, smuggling them in and out of the camp by means of a network of brave volunteers. They wrote as sensitive, educated people might anywhere, except that the things they wrote about were so unremittingly hard. Both were trained scientists, and the languages of science and love mix constantly, and with a strange beauty, in their correspondence.

They had to develop strategies to keep sane and this was something they helped one another with. In one letter, Sveta writes that she “must live, not simply wait”, yet wait is exactly what she did: patiently, tenderly keeping the flame of her love, and quite probably her lover himself, alive. At the book’s dramatic heart are her daring attempts to visit him in the labour camp.

Occasionally as I read, I felt Figes could have quoted rather less from some letters, and sometimes I would have liked more historical context. A newcomer to this subject matter might get a bit lost at times, I fear.

But any newcomers should, and probably will, persevere because the picture of human life that Figes, Lev and Sveta together paint is a captivating one. “I knew he was my future from the start,” she said of Lev, when she was interviewed by Figes in Moscow in 2008. It is an amazing statement, and, as this book shows, in the circumstances an even more amazing thing to have made come true.

Timothy Phillips is the author of Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1.

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