Hunger and its Effects: A Dive in the Works of Ginzburg and Shalamov

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Hunger: A Dive into the Works of Ginzburg and Shalamov
Many stories and accounts about the World War, labor camps, and the Soviet Union were made to depict the unimaginable and horrendous capabilities that humans can do to one another. The suffering of many people as the morality among humans collapses comes in various forms like forced labor, bombings, sickness, etc. In the famous literary works of Lidiya Ginzburg’s, Blockade Diary, and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, a repetitive and evident topic is hunger. Hunger and how it affects the plot and, the characters’ psychological state. In this essay, hunger used by Ginzburg and Shalamov as a literary motif will be discussed.
Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary is not what is expected of a usual diary, although it should be noted that it is really based on first-hand experiences at the time of the siege of Leningrad. It is a dispersed collection of descriptions, a certain narration of events, and a few dialogues, written without many emotions, that do not follow a specific plot, but clearly picture the suffering and starvation that the people in Leningrad went through. The way the Blockade Diary was written is also a huge irony due to the lack of feelings or even sentimentality in the way the words are weaved into each other, despite the gravity of the issues and events that are being shared on the page. The 900-day siege also reveals how starvation in addition to being in a closely regulated environment can test the resilience and strength of the human spirit, as it becomes the focus and priority of the human mind in order to survive.
The possibility of being killed is present in this man's mind, but his immediate sensation is hunger, more precisely the fear of hunger, and his hunger urgency, blindly intent on its goal. One can be conscious of a number of things at the same time, but one can't desire them all at the same time with equal intensity (Ginzburg 35).
Due to the starvation that is happening in the siege, food becomes a priority that makes hunger something that is feared so much, even more than death itself.
Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov consists of short fictional stories about life in Kolyma which are actually historically relevant given the actual experience of the author in these perilous times of the Soviet Gulag and revolution. And as stated by Shalamov in Kolyma Tales,
A human being survives by his ability to forget (Shalamov 43).
In Shalamov’s short story, Dry Rations, prisoners were sent out to work in the woods to remove debris and dirt from the road. It somehow felt like a vacation from the daily suffering experienced by the prisoner in the camp due to the poor living conditions. Food, or its lack thereof, is highlighted in this short story to be a moving force that becomes the center of the characters’ minds and actions. The gruesome ending of this short story is Ivan Ivanovich, one of the camp prisoners, ending up dead by suicide, and Savelev, another camp prisoner, intentionally chopping his fingers off, all the day before they are about to return to camp. In relation to hunger, the seriousness of the starvation that is being experienced is truly eati...