I have never been good with anniversaries: I arrive one day late on the fortieth anniversary of Varlam Šalamov’s death. I bought and read his frightening – frighteningly beautiful – Tales of Kolyma at the sunset of the last millennium, when Einaudi reprinted them with a new editor from which the introduction was suppressed, a long conversation between the translator Piero Sinatti and Gustaw Herling. Like Shalamov, Herling had been in the gulag, and in the conversation he insisted on equating Nazism with Communism. Herling was furious and said that the reason for the cut lay in the parallel, terribly scandalous in the West. Moreover, the same scandal was experienced a few years ago, when the European Parliament produced a resolution that placed the two totalitarianisms on the same level, and did so completely that it seemed to be written by Herling.
Protests and insults arose, almost all of them Western. Of the many European divisions, the clearest seems to me precisely on the judgment on communism and Nazism. In the East, where they tasted both, for all the great twentieth-century greats they are: for the Hungarians Ágnes Heller and Imre Kertész, for the Polish Czesaw Milosz, for the Russian Vasilij Grossman, for the Bulgarian Cvetan Todorov, and for dozens of others whose list would fill the page. In the West, where only one has been tasted, one continues to consider the other a little better. In any case, “Work makes you free” was written at the entrance to the concentration camp. At the entrance to the gulag, said Šalamov in the Kolyma, it was written “Work is a matter of honor, glory, valor, heroism”.