The Monastery

Beyond The Monastery: Prilepin, Putin, and the Gulag-2

In 2018 Prilepin starred in Phone Duty (Dezhurstvo), a film praised by the Tribeca Film Festival despite its pro-separatist stance. This role encapsulates his mutable identity — he is a former soldier who became a writer then served as a soldier while portraying a soldier. Tomi Huttunen and Jussi Lasila point out that his actions before and during the war in Ukraine share a macho “patriotic vitality” that Prilepin juxtaposes against a “‘bourgeois’ liberal mainstream” he derides as immoral, weak, and a holdover from the 1990s. Both Prilepin and Putin exploit Russia’s desire for strong, decisive public figures who force respect from other nations.12

Despite upholding brawn over intellect, Prilepin sees his literary persona as an outgrowth of the books he read as a child. He devoured the collected works of Leo Tolstoy and Jules Verne, as well as Hemingway, who was popular in the last decades of the USSR. The list then becomes more surprising, combining the long-banned Vladimir Nabokov, Isaak Babel’ (a Jewish modernist killed by Stalin), and canonical Soviet author Valentin Kataev. This combination represents the precocious and eclectic reading tastes of the late-Soviet intelligentsia, a group Prilepin mocks in Sankya as estranged from the common people.13

Prilepin is far from the original iconoclast he tries to resemble. His blurring of political action, posturing, and talented prose is the evolution of what Andrew Wachtel calls Russian literature’s “obsession with history.” Wachtel focuses on authors such as Solzhenitsyn, who blend historical analysis with fiction and the philosophizing that has been a mainstay of Russian prose before and after the USSR. Prilepin updates this by cannily exploiting social media and the internet to become a household name beyond the angry young men his writing emphasizes. In this sense he fits into the celebrity culture Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo see as emblematic of the Putin era, where real news is subsumed by fame, wealth, and carefully managed scandal. Prilepin is the “anti-celebrity celebrity”, who masquerades as an ordinary man from outside Nizhny Novgorod, a patriot, a soldier, and a writer more authentic than the liberal intelligentsia he scorns.14

It is thus all the more surprising that Prilepin created an original, moving, and thought-provoking novel about Solovki. The Monastery is at one level a thriller — Artiom escapes death multiple times and his fortunes shift by the day if not by the minute as he tries to survive the anger of professional criminals, sadistic camp officials, and the brutal Arctic climate. The prisoner’s constantly shifting fate comes from the arbitrary and cruel life in the Gulag. What results is an omnipresent uncertainty and fear — depicting this is one of the affinities camp prose shares with literature of the h*******t. The Monastery is a success precisely because it stretches these individual moments of possible triumph or disaster out over the course of Artiom’s sentence, immersing readers in a world that it is at first alien then quickly becomes familiar.

Prilepin’s novel is a strange mixture of genres that all work together. In constructing such a hybrid work, he emulates the classics of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle (V kruge pervom, 1968) used the fate of imprisoned scientists in a secret lab to mediate on human nature, discuss Dostoevskii, and even develop a steamy (if unconsummated) romance plot. Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining the rise of the novel, praises this genre for its ability to incorporate aspects of many types of literature while still remaining grounded in everyday life — The Monastery exploits this flexibility just as its author skillfully navigates his contradictory status as critic of the state, patriot, author, and ordinary veteran. The novel’s structure reinforces this mix. In the author’s preface, the “real” Prilepin discusses how the plot comes from the comments of his great-grandfather: for many years the author had assumed these stories were about the Second World War, not the Gulag. The main body of the novel focuses on Artiom, imprisoned for murdering his father and thus deemed a “normal” prisoner as opposed to the priests, anarchists, and sundry actual and imagined opponents of Bolshevism populating the camp. My discussion will not reveal more of the plot than is necessary — The Monastery is built around the thrill of unexpected actions and their consequences, a trait it inherits from Prilepin’s earlier prose. Indeed, Artiom is not much older than Sankya, suggesting that The Monastery is the apotheosis of Prilepin’s fixation on violent men. In an afterword, Prilepin explains how he spoke to the daughter of Eichmanis. This is followed by the diary of Galina Kucherenko, Artiom’s lover in Solovki — Prilepin consulted it when writing The Monastery, but received the diary only after he had made significant progress on the manuscript. Following the diary are a series of notes by Prilepin, explaining the fates of the principal characters after the main plot ends in the late 1920s.15

The Monastery also harbors traits of documentary prose: life writing that claims to be based on actual events — the novel purports to be built around the experiences of Prilepin’s great-grandfather Zakhar Petrov (whose first name the author appropriated as his literary synonym). Documentary prose gained popularity in the last decades of the USSR, presenting itself as a supposedly more reliable alternative to the idealized (and sanitized) state versions of history. Yet The Monastery is in reality a clever manipulation of facts with many fictional additions, a scenario recalling Prilepin’s critique of Solzhenitsyn for relying too much on hearsay in writing The Gulag Archipelago. In The Monastery the archival sources and family stories that Prilepin consulted are secondary to the authorial skill that makes them into a coherent fictional narrative.16

The Monastery is also a strange and twisted version of the novel of development (Bildungsroman), familiar to readers of Dickens’ Great Expectations or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In Russian prose Ivan Turgenev and, in a different manner, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii were the most famous authors of this genre, which the USSR chained to the cliché ideological awakening of war heroes and exemplary workers. Artiom matures in many ways, in great part due to his relationship with Galina but also because of his friendship with intellectual Vasilii Petrovich and kind priest Father John (despite both resembling the intelligentsia Prilepin scorns). Prilepin’s entire corpus is a single Bildungsroman, but one where his male protagonists age without internalizing the ‘life lessons’ that shape most novels of development. This is due to the cult of violence and lack of self-reflection in Prilepin’s works; likewise, Solovki as setting raises an obvious question: can characters learn anything positive from the Gulag? The camps were allegedly created to reform prisoners, yet early on any real effort at transformation devolved into slave labor for projects in the inhospitable corners of the USSR.17

Camp prose is, of course, another genre of The Monastery. Prilepin follows in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn and more terrifying vision of Shalamov, the two figures who most shaped writing about the Gulag. Leona Toker identifies the features of this writing, which also appear in Prilepin’s novel: initiation into the camp (the panicked fear of prisoners arriving at Solovki), “Room 101” (a phrase drawn from Orwell’s 1984, denoting a prisoner’s worst experience), and so forth. When Artiom talks to the imprisoned poet Afanasiev after the two have been hauling logs, the man tersely summarizes: “Man is a log to other men.” This odd aphorism is a pun on the prisoner saying “Man is wolf to man,” conveying that one can expect no mercy in the Gulag. Camp prose is suspicious of those who modify its rules: the late-Soviet author Sergei Dovlatov, for instance, was lambasted in the West for his novella The Zone (Zona), an absurdly comic account of the author serving as a camp guard for non-political prisoners in the 1960s. Prilepin, as is obvious from his attack of Solzhenitsyn, thrives on this sort of controversy, using it to attract more readers.18

The Monastery also has a substantial romantic plot involving Artiom and Galina: one is a prisoner while the other is the lover of Eichmanis, the Solovki warden. This scenario is inextricably linked to a key pattern in camp prose: the irony that prisoners and guards could have easily had different fates (and sometimes changed places during Stalin’s purges). Artiom and Galina’s affair begins when Galina is interrogating the prisoner and he shoves his hand up her skirt, prompting her to embrace him. This unlikely scene echoes the connection that Lipovetsky makes between s*x and violence in Prilepin’s works: male ferocity conquers women. The power dynamics are now reversed: it is Galina who can destroy Artiom, yet she becomes his lover in response to his brutally masculine behavior.19

The Monastery also contains elements of the philosophical novel, that aspect of great Russian prose that uses literature to debate the purpose of life (be it holiness or building communism) or even the course of human history. Tolstoi famously discusses this last point in the second epilogue to War and Peace; in the twentieth century Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago argues for humane mercy in place of the Bolsheviks’ bloody utopia. Artiom has numerous conversations with more erudite prisoners, a scenario reinforcing how the intelligentsia was a group often persecuted under communism. Some of the prisoners gather for philosophical evenings, reenacting the pre-1917 literary salon (until the camp authorities send its members to the punishment cells). At one point a prisoner compares Solovki to all of Russia, which is like a fine fur coat: “‘Everyone thinks it’s the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks who ruined everything. [. . .] But it’s merely the empire turned inside out, the entire fur coat! There, you find lice, all kinds of vermin, bed bugs — it was all there! It’s just that now, we’re wearing the fur coat with the lining out! And that’s Solovki!’” This comment is important for several reasons. First, it presents the camp as a microcosm of Soviet society, a pattern found in many works about the Gulag. More importantly, the comment reveals that oppression and poverty have always been a part of Russian history — it is only now that the intelligentsia and former aristocrats are aware of it.20

The Monastery places special emphasis on discussions of Orthodoxy, which Prilepin sees as inseparable from Russian culture: this assumption is correct yet elides the long presence of Judaism and Islam (both predate Christianity in the country). Given the context of Prilepin’s earlier works, ignoring the religious traditions of Russia’s minorities is a subtler sign of his muscular ethnocentrism and xenophobia. This approach is another similarity between Prilepin’s fiction and Putin’s policies — both fuse church, state, and ethnicity to create an exclusionary image of Russia.21

The Monastery is a remarkable book produced by a deeply flawed author whose politics and prose promote extremism. This does not mean that Prilepin’s novel is not worth reading, but it places a special burden on the reader (and even more so on the critic). Literature — especially in Russia — does not exist without context; it echoes society’s hopes, worries, and shapes how generations will view their country and its place in the world. The Monastery suggests the artistry and introspection that Prilepin is capable of while underscoring the sad consequences of the intolerance and bloodshed he has often encouraged.

Benjamin Sutcliffe

Professor of Russian

Miami University

1 Julie Fedor, “Spinning Russia’s 21st Century Wars: Zakhar Prilepin and his ‘Literary Spetsnaz’,” RUSI Journal no. 6 (2018), 18, 22.

2 “Gulag” comes from the Russian name for the Chief Directorate of Camps аnd Places of Imprisonment (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei i mest zakliucheniia). There is a large historical debate over the number of Gulag prisoners. For an accessible overview of this mammoth system, see David Hosford, Pamela Kachurin, and Thomas Lamont, “Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps and their Legacy,” A Project of the National Park Service and the National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, Harvard University, h***:://gulaghistory.org/nps/downloads/gulag-curriculum.pdf.

3 Fedor notes that in 2017 Prilepin created a group to further the patriotic image of Russia in the arts: see “Spinning Russia’s 21st Century Wars,” 21.

4 For an overview of Solovki before and after the 1917 revolution, see Roy Robson, Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and the official site of Solovetsky Monastery site: h***:://solovki-monastyr.ru/abbey/geography/.

5 Prilepin’s personal web site mixes fact with mythology as it manages his public persona: h***:://zaharprilepin.ruu/bio.html. For a short but disturbing excerpt dealing with his time in Chechnya, see “Pathologies: Zakhar Prilepin,” trans. Arch Tait, Index on Censorship no. 4 (2005).

6 On Prilepin’s contradictory activities, see Mark Lipovetsky, “Politicheskaia motorika Zakhara Prilepina,” Znamia no. 10 (2012), h***:://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2012/10/li12.html. Concerning Prilepin crafting his persona, see Igor’ Frolov, “Zakon sakhraneniia strakha,” Kontinent no. 139 (2009), h***:://magazines.russ.ru/continent/2009/139/fr29.html. For one example of Prilepin disparaging the liberal intelligentsia, see his Live Journal post: Zakhar Prilepin, 24 July 2017, https://prilepin.livejournal.com/tag/интеллигенция.

7 For brief mention of Prilepin as poet, see Frolov. On the success of Sankya, see Tomi Huttunen and Jussi Lasila, “Zakhar Prilepin: The National Bolshevik Movement and Catachrestic Politics,” Transcultural Studies no. 12 (2016), 137. Liudmila Ulitskaia discusses Sankya with the famous liberal journalist Vladimir Pozner: “Zagadochnaia russkaia dusha. Ulitskaia-Pozner,” 18 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmIBSsuWwXA. See the foreword by Alexey Navalny in Prilepin, Sankya, trans. Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker (Ann Arbor, MI, Disquiet, 2014).

8 Lipovetsky notes the connection with Lev Gudkov’s concept of negative identity, outlined in Gudkov’s Negativnaia identichnost’: Stat’i 1997–2002 godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004). In discerning traits of fascism, Lipovetsky draws on Umberto Eco, “Ur-fascism,” in Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, 2002).

9 The head of Memorial in the northwest region of Karelia, for instance, was arrested several times on fictious charges: see “Zaderzhan glava karel’skogo ‘Memoriala’ Iurii Dmitriev,” Radio Liberty, 27 June 2018, https://www.svoboda.org/a/29324182.html. “Truth in Dmitriev’s case – this is what we speak up for,” message sent to the Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe, https://www.memo.ru/en-us/memorial/departments/intermemorial/news/413. See also the organization’s website: https://www.memo.ru/en-us/. Documenting the number of dead in the Gulag is contentious and complex — see, among others, Steven Blyth, “The Dead of the Gulag: An Experiment in Statistical Investigation,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society no. 3 (1995).

10 Zahar Prilepin, The Monastery, trans. Nicholas Kotar (London: Glagoslav Publishing, 2020), 115-116.

11 Cynthia Buckley, Ralph Clem, Jarod Fox, Erik Herron, “The War in Ukraine is More Devastating than You Know,” Washington Post, 4 April 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/09/the-war-in-ukraine-is-more-devastating-than-you-know/. On Prilepin’s earlier support for the war, see Sergei Aleksandrov, “‘Nash fil’m o Donbasse popal v long-list ‘Oskara’,” 27 June 2018, Svoi, republished in Gazeta Kul’tura, h***:://portal-kultura.ru/svoy/articles/zvanyy-gost/210970-zakhar-prilepin-nash-film-o-donbasse-popal-v-long-list-oskara/. On his clip, see ibid. Concerning Prilepin’s criticism of the separatists, see “Prilepin ob’iasnil pochemu on brosil voevat’ v Donbasse,” Gazeta,ru, 6 December 2018, https://news.rambler.ru/ukraine/41382899-prilepin-obyasnil-pochemu-brosil-voevat-v-donbasse/.

12 On Phone Duty, see Aleksandrov, 45. Huttunen and Lasila, 139, 151. For a wide-ranging discussion of how Putin uses masculinity, see Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, ed. Helena Goscilo (London: Routledge, 2014).

13 Zakhar Prilepin, “Ot avtora,” in Doroga v dekabre. Vsia proza v odnom tome (Moscow: AST, 2012), 5.

14 Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994). On celebrity culture, see Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic, eds. Helena Goscilo and Vlad Strukov (London: Routledge, 2011).

15 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

16 For a discussion of the relationship between fact, fiction, and genres in The Monastery, see Benjamin Sutcliffe, “‘Pravdy ne khvataet: Obitel’ Z. Prilepina: dokumental’nost’ i roman vospitaniia,” Slovo. Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Culture no. 55 (2014).

http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1263773/FULLTEXT01.pdf.

17 For an examination of the novel of development, see Lina Steiner, For Humanity’s Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

18 Prilepin, The Monastery, 96. Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 82-94.

19 Lipovetsky, 8.

20 Prilepin, The Monastery, 212.

21 For a discussion of the philosophical novel that emphasize Dostoevskii, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 25.

The Monastery