José Clemente Orozco, The Hanged Men from The American Scene, no. 1, 1933–34, published 1935. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

Who were these bloated neutered monsters hanging in the branches, who become the branches, the forest, barklike limbs, truncated, cut down, howling, angled, parched, rocked by the wind-kicked flames that lick, then tickle, then singe, then engulf?

Why so many here in such disarray of splay? Who is the victor? Who wins when the torture is complete, this death upon death? Who gazes upon the eyeless socket, the seedless groin, the voiceless lips that crack under suspicion? What is this thing born guilty before being proved human? How is it able to possess a supernatural capacity to be lazy, shiftless, yet to rape, be conniving, thieving, uppity, unctuous enough to speak, to yell at, scream at, lash out in frustration at your changing rules, your shifting laws, your erased boundaries? How has it deserved this fate? And why will it not die? How are you unable to kill it to your satisfaction?

Erasure, no time for it—is there a crayon black enough to portray the heart of the American Scene? Nineteen thirty-five was also the year of my great-grandfather’s unceremonious Southern death. The drama of the Jim Crow lynch system, medieval in its execution, modern in its speed and dissemination of photos and souvenirs. The laws were simple: to be black, in skin or heritage, is a death sentence. The body that houses the supernatural ailment “nigger” is readily dissolved by the teamwork, rope, and flame of white supremacy. The prize? Skin, kinky blood-matted hair, a severed ear, finger, or penis, a postcard made the night of the “picnic.” Skinned. Cleansed. Sacrificed, but to what bloodthirsty god? Read More

Varlam Shalamov in 1929. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,” Varlam Shalamov wrote to his friend Irina Sirotinskaya in 1971, “and like any slap in the face, has laws of a purely muscular character.” He returns to the idea a little later in the letter, contrasting his own ideal of prose to the expansive “spadework” of Tolstoy: “A slap in the face must be short, resonant.” Most of Shalamov’s stories are indeed short, some extremely so, and constitute an argument both with the great nineteenth-century Russian novels and with the wretched ones of the Stalinist era that sought to pour the pap of socialist realism into a pseudo-epic form. The slap works simultaneously as a figure for aesthetic form and political protest, and in Shalamov’s late essays and letters, it functions as a motto of sorts, a creed of laconic defiance echoing, distantly, the Russian futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste and—more intimately and immediately—the famous opening of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope against Hope: “After slapping Aleksey Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow.”

Mandelstam sent the manuscript of her memoir about life with the poet Osip Mandelstam to Shalamov in 1965, and while neither could hope to publish their prose in the Soviet Union at that time, the two established in the correspondence that followed a shared sense of purpose. He writes: “If I had to give a literature course on the second half of the twentieth century, I would start by burning all the textbooks on the podium, in front of the students. The link between eras, between cultures has been broken; the exchange has been interrupted and our mission is to pick up the ends of string and tie them back together.” She replies: “I don’t think we should burn textbooks: it’s too classical a gesture … Let’s just not use any”; her main concern, too, she writes, is “the link that connects one era to another, the only thing that allows society to be human, a human being to be human.” Read More