"THE REVERSE SIDE OF THE CARPET": Yu. K. GERASIMOV ABOUT SPIRITUAL RESISTANCE IN THE ABEZ CAMP
Oral memoirs of literary critic and theater expert Yuri Gerasimov (1923-2003) are devoted to his life in the camp in the village of Abez near the Arctic Circle in the first half of the 1950s. It was a camp for the disabled (disabled, old people), where many cultural figures were imprisoned: religious philosopher Lev Karsavin, art critic Nikolai Punin, poet-futurist and novelist Sergei Spassky, Jewish poets Samuel Galkin and Yakov Shternberg, director and philosopher Alexander Gavronsky, Egyptologist Mikhail Korostovtsev, art critic and poet Viktor Vasilenko, and others. Gerasimov talks about his communication with Punin and Karsavin, about the ways of preserving human dignity in inhuman conditions. War veteran, third-year student of Leningrad State University philological faculty, Gerasimov was arrested in January 1948, accused of anti-Soviet activity in the student group and sentenced to ten years of high-security camps. Нe arrived in Abez after five years of works in the coal mines of Inta (Komi Republic). Despite his exhaustion, Gerasimov maintained a «passion for learning». In Abez as a young man he was put in the brigade for camp services, but after work in the evening he tried to learn languages. He studied Ancient Greek with Karsavin. Gerasimov, like many others, had albums, where he wrote verses - not just those he could remember himself, but also those which his interlocutors read to him, there were immigrants among them who knew emigrant poetry forbidden for Soviet readers. During the searches, these albums were taken away and destroyed, but the poems remained in memory. The main way of intellectual development for Gerasimov was conversations with older people - representatives of Russian art and science. In that friends’ circle, where Gerasimov found himself, was the «convection of ideas» - and it helped them to survive. According to Gerasimov, the spiritual resistance was not necessarily conscious resistance to the totalitarism and everything that accompanied him. Some for example just studied the book of chess - and it was an intellectual life. «Religion, of course, was also a very powerful field, which supported people» - there were representatives of different religions, different faiths in the camp. And among people of different nationalities there were ones «who behaved properly in the camp».