THE SNAKE CHARMER (Zaklinatel' Zmei)
by Varlam Shalamov, 1954

Most of the stories of Varlam Shalamov deal with specific aspects of camp life. The phenomenon examined in "The Snake Charmer" ("Zaklinatel' Zmei") is the criminal convict's love of listening to narratives of adventure and romance. Numerous memoirs by Gulag survivors interpret this as a form of cultural life. Shalamov, who in a series of essays would criticize the literary convention of romanticizing professional criminals, harshly demystifies even this feature of their camp life.

"The Snake Charmer" begins with a prologue-type conversation between two prisoners seated on a fallen larch tree, probably during a short recess. (For obvious reasons most episodes of camp literature are set during such "moments of reprieve," as Primo Levi has called them.) One of the two is the narrator, the authorial persona; the other is his friend, the scriptwriter Andrei Fedorovich Platonov. Platonov mentions a year he spent in Jankhar, one of the most deadly camps of Kolyma. He survived the year by doing what Shalamov himself would never stoop to—telling stories to criminals in return for extra food, clothing, and protection. He adds that, if he lives to see his release, he will write a story about his experience as a "novelist" in Jankhar and call it "The Snake Charmer." Three weeks later Platonov dies, evidently of a heart attack, falling down like the tree that has provided the setting for the prologue. The narrator, who has likewise been tossed from camp to camp, is familiar with the ways of the criminals, and he survives Kolyma. He decides to write "The Snake Charmer" for Platonov. Thus, the story about storytelling is presented as a self-conscious fictional construct erected on a factual basis.

The narrator composes the Jankhar episode out of sparse "typical" touches, such as the long nail on the criminal chieftain's little finger. In the camps an "honest thief" would not work; he would get by through abusing political prisoners, brazenly appropriating the lion's share of the available clothes and food, and corrupting the guards (the camp authorities were, in any case, lenient to the criminal convicts as "socially closer" to the working class than were the "enemies of the people"). On the day described the camp's seven hardened criminals have been playing cards on the barrack bunks instead of working outside with the rest of the prisoners. At night, when all the regular prisoners are overcome with fatigue, the criminals are bored and restless. Fedia, their chieftain, whiles away some of the time by abusing the newcomer Platonov, who is referred to as Ivan Ivanich, jargon for a naive city dweller. He then orders a pretty boy called Mashka (a female nickname given to young thieves used by the veterans for homosexual diversion) to scratch his heels, another favorite form of entertainment. A flunky suggests that they try the newcomer in the capacity of a storyteller. When Platonov agrees to tell Fedia "novels," he immediately becomes the criminals' protégé, is given some bread, and is obliquely promised impunity for sleeping at the work site.

His new status becomes apparent next morning. A country boy who has slept on the bunks throughout the night's novel pushes Platonov but then, on learning that he is a novelist, is embarrassed and asks him not to complain to Fedia. (This is also typical both of the brutality that young peasants adopted as a way of life in the camps and of their uncritical acceptance of the criminals' rulings.) Platonov is safe, but for how long? His reassuring answer, "I won't tell," the punch line of the story, reminds us that he will not live to tell his version of the events.

Shalamov emphasizes the fictionalized nature of the Jankhar episode by making it contradict a detail in the prologue. Platonov has told the narrator that the first two or three months of his stay in Jankhar were difficult, but the narrator turns Platonov into a novelist, a "snake charmer," on his very first day in the camp. By thus disowning the authority conventionally granted to omniscient narrators, Shalamov invites us to be critical of the generalizations made in the story. Indeed, three different views are presented in the account of Platonov's thoughts on being offered the job of the novelist. Platonov first wonders whether he should "become a jester in the court of the duke of Milan, a clown who was fed for a good joke and beaten for a bad one." (Fedia's entourage is indeed a sordid replica of a nobleman's court.) He then decides to think that he would acquaint criminals with real literature, "become an enlightener," and so do his real work, his duty. Recoiling from this sentimental illusion, the narrator comments that Platonov does not wish to recognize that he would simply earn an extra bowl of soup by what was "more like scratching a thief's dirty heels than enlightenment." Yet this third view is also a private opinion rather than absolute truth: each prisoner draws his or her own line between what should and what should not be done for a bowl of soup, and there are many shades of gray between honor and humiliation.

The problem of the limits of compromise is associated with an issue frequently raised in Shalamov's stories, the ambivalence of people's use of their intellectual and spiritual life for the sake of physical survival. Platonov is shown musing on the peculiar clinging to life that allows people to endure Kolyma better than horses—"a physical tenacity to which [one's] entire consciousness is subordinated." He survives Jankhar by, Shalamov believes, debasing his gifts at the service of those who make an obscene mockery of the so-called spiritual needs. Averse to preaching, Shalamov does not say that some part of one's consciousness should be kept away from the exigencies of the struggle for survival. "The Snake Charmer" bears witness and pays a tribute to a fallen friend; it does not judge him or extract a moral from his experience.

—Leona Toker