2024-04-16 08:47:38
No, human flesh, that’s going too far for Konrad Widuch. He wouldn’t eat that, or at least in an extreme emergency. Maybe when the last horse and dog have been slaughtered and the last cartridge has been fired and therefore no bear meat in sight.
Widuch himself was already intended as such an emergency ration, as fresh provisions on two legs, and that, of all things, saved his life and enabled him to escape from the Gulag – an escape, however, that now, in the early summer of 1946, led him to nowhere , into the Arctic Ocean, where he is trapped on a boat in the pack ice, desperately waiting for the ice floes to melt.
A century of terror
Okay, first of all press the pause button. The storyline of Szczepan Twardoch’s new Novel “Cold” Calling it “adventurous” would be like calling Homer’s “Odyssey” a cruise through the Mediterranean. If the reader believes that this Konrad Widuch is in a desperate, even hopeless situation on the ice-capable “S/Y Invincible”, then he has no idea what this man has experienced – and survived – since he was a 14-year-old set out from his Silesian village: the tunnels of the Ruhr area, the Imperial Navy, the sailors’ revolt of 1918, the atrocities of Budyonny’s cavalry army and the civil war in Russia, the Holodomor in Ukraine, the Stalinist purges, the torture in the clutches of the NKVD, the labor camp in the Siberian north.
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And that’s when the wild ride actually started. This Konrad Wilgelmowitsch Widuch, as he half-ironically calls himself after his time in Russia, gives an account of the incredible twists and turns of his life. “I’ve got nothing better to do here, so I’m writing.” While he’s stuck in the pack ice until certain death from starvation, freezing or a polar bear bite, he entrusts his memories with crippled fingers to a notebook that, according to all the laws of probability, will never contain one will find a reader. But what does probability mean in this book!
So this “non-existent reader” becomes the counterpart, the recipient of a message in a bottle the length of a novel, so to speak, in which this “widuchlümmel”, sometimes cynical, sometimes resigned, sometimes boastful and sometimes bitingly self-deprecating, takes stock of his existence. “Oh, Konrad Wilgelmowitsch, what nonsense are you talking about – knowing that death was approaching and that you would no longer see anything but the ice – why are you clinging so desperately to life with these claws that are on your battered, crippled hands have remained. Death is near, everything must always be so tragic for you, poor little Konrad, who would have pity for him if not himself.”
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The self-distance of the narrator, who repeatedly interrupts himself, criticizes, corrects and mocks himself, results in the mischievous tone of the novel, which gives even the worst atrocities a smiling, humorous, anecdotal touch. Twardoch’s art lies in the fact that the effect of the horror is increased even further.
Widuch’s story takes the principle of digression to the extreme, in which Twardoch follows a basic book of modernity, Laurence Sterne’s “Life and Views of Tristram Shandy”, which is also a kind of ironic adventure novel. So the notes begin with the most recent miraculous rescue, when the narrator encounters an ice-capable expedition boat with a two-man crew and full of supplies in the polar no-man’s land. But it is not immediately explained why he is now sitting alone on board, nor how he got into this fatal situation.
Instead, he thinks about his fingers, the lost and the crippled ones, remembers felling wood in the camp, the first writing exercises with his little daughter and the “nice” NKVD major with the professor’s face: “In the end everyone signs,” said the major , and he was right, he pulled out the nails with a pair of pliers, carefully so that it wouldn’t hurt too much, unscrewed the board that held my hands on the plate, and gave me the cigarette with a gold mouthpiece into my bleeding, trembling fingers “, gave me a piece of paper and a pencil and said, well then sign, Konrad Wilgelmowitsch, then we’re done for today, and I signed, what else did I have to do?”
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Although there are always intentional gaps, these first chapters already contain the decisive stages of this biography of the century, which is as exemplary as it is extraordinary. After the First World War, Widuch, a communist as a teenager, went to the young Soviet Union with the Polish-German revolutionary Karl Radek. As a fighter in the notorious cavalry army, he met his future wife Sofie, who came from Norway, with whom he fled to Murmansk – in the end in vain – to escape the Stalinist terror. Until the end, Widuch would not find out whether Sofie and her two daughters actually managed to escape abroad by boat. But just the possibility gives him the energy to survive, first in the Gulag and later in the hell of the Arctic.
“Cold” is an adventure novel that hijacks the genre of Joseph Conrad and Jack London like a North Sea pirate to portray the horrors of totalitarianism. Even Karl May appears once, as does Isaak Babel, the author of the “Equestrian Army,” whom Widuch claims to have met once. The interrogation scenes certainly allude to Babel’s terrible end in 1940. The merciless “cold” of the landscape through which Widuch drags himself with his last strength is also the metaphor of a world in which the promised happiness for everyone has turned into a nightmare of violence and pain.
Szczepan Twardoch embedded his novel in an editorial fiction, which is also a classic topos of adventure literature. In a personal crisis, the writer takes a trip to Svalbard (in his 2019 travel essay volume “Whales and Moths” Twardoch talked about his love of the Arctic landscapes).
More cliffhangers than a Netflix series
There he meets an older woman who convinces him to take a trip on her perfectly equipped yacht and gives him Widuch’s handwritten notes to read. How she got the manuscript, whether it is authentic, what relationship the sailor has with Widuch and where the two of them are going on their journey – all these questions add an additional layer of suspense to the story, which is already more of a cliffhanger than some Netflix series has to offer.
According to the fiction of this framework narrative, Twardoch’s interest is aroused by the fact that this Widuch comes from the same Upper Silesian town of Pilchowice as him. Twardoch, who expressly sees himself not as a Polish but as a Silesian author with his very own history, tradition (and language), also tells in “Kälte” an – at least possible – variant of his own family history. He has done this extensively in previous books, especially in “Drach” (2016). While “The Boxer” (2018) and “The Black Kingdom” (2020) focused on the fate of the Jews of Warsaw, the terror of the Nazis, the ghetto and the Holocaust, Soviet totalitarianism now takes center stage.
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Widuch spent the period of the Second World War, which is told in other novels, outside of history, so to speak; his escape from the gulag happened before the war broke out. The second half of “Cold” takes up his year-long stay in Cholod, with a people of hunters and gatherers who live on the coast of the Northern Sea, outside of any civilization.
The Kholodsers who take in Widuch are the absolute antithesis of the high-tech Bolshevik terrorist state: weapons from the Tsarist era, home-made berry schnapps and thermal underwear made from tanned whale entrails, as well as all sorts of shamanism, initiation rituals and appeasement of the gods, which, however, does not shy away from human sacrifice.
While the Cholod society is described in detail that would do credit to ethnological explorers, and the reader at the same time receives a kind of crash course in survival techniques in the Arctic Circle variant, the increasingly distant Russia is declared to be evil par excellence, especially suddenly appear as emissaries. “Because if Russia comes, it will be in such a way that nothing of your life will remain here. Russia came to the Koriaks and the Kamchadals and all the peoples like yours who are alive and had the misfortune of being in the way of it bloating and growing, and as Russia came to them and passed over them, all that was left was shit, eaten and excreted.” Of course, such passages can only be read under the impression of the war in Ukraine. “Cold” is also an illusion-free commentary on the ominous continuity of Russian lust for power and desire for destruction.
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Polish author Twardoch
Not surprisingly, not many of the extremely resilient staff in this story will be left standing in the end. Widuch, after all, himself a defender of the world revolution for many years, and by no means a squeamish one, justifies his own violence by saying that only with Stalin did Bolshevism show its true, namely its eternally imperialist, Russian face. This is, after all, a historical interpretation that can confidently be attributed to the stupidity and naivety that Widuch repeatedly accuses himself of.
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It is also more than questionable whether one should really prefer the archaic world of Kholod, in which widows are buried with their husbands, seriously injured people or disabled children are killed without batting an eyelid, to civilization, Russian or not. Atrocities of all kinds are committed from all sides in this extremely drastic and “explicit” novel; Throats were cut in rows. Cholod’s tribal world is by no means an Arcadia with guaranteed snow, but just a Conradian heart of darkness of a different kind.
Twardoch’s inner compass needle is not directed at any society, at any community, not even at the family. It is a longing for solitude, for a deserted nature, beautiful and icy cold. To the unknown northern country, which cannot be found on any maps but only in literature.
Szczepan Twardoch: “Kälte”. Translated from Polish by Olaf Kühl. Rowohlt Berlin, 432 pages, 26 euros.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third parties [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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