Monastery turned prison camp in James L. May's debut THE BODY OUTSIDE THE KREMLIN

HALLIE EPHRON: James L. May's THE BODY OUTSIDE THE KREMLIN debut novel is a historical mystery set in the same era (1920s) as Jess Montgomery's THE HOLLOWS but in a very different place--a notorious Russian prison camp based in a gloomy monastery that housed priceless icons. Amazing setting, right? James is here to talk about why he set his novel there.

JAMES L. MAY: The Solovetsky Archipelago was a strange place for the Bolsheviks to set up the first camp in what would become the Gulag, the secret-police-run prison system in which millions of citizens of the Soviet Union were imprisoned and worked to death. Strange, but maybe inevitable too.

Before Solovetsky was a prison, you see, it was the site of one of the most important monasteries in the Russian north. Located in the White Sea, almost on the Arctic Circle, by the time the camp was established in the 1920s, the place had been occupied by monks for almost 500 years.

When the Communist and anti-religious Bolsheviks seized power, they took the monastery over as part of the general expropriation of the property of the Orthodox Church. With repression being a major part of their political program from the beginning, they needed somewhere to send dissidents: members of competing socialist parties, untrusted intellectuals, Ukrainian nationalists, remaining White Army officers, and whoever else got on the wrong side of the regime. You could be imprisoned for any reason, or no reason at all.

What always surprises me about this is just how easily the monastery’s piety and serenity were translated into the prison camp’s starvation and suffering. Partly this was a matter of its filling practical needs: Solovetsky was remote, it was isolated, and the monks had already built much of the infrastructure that would be needed for a self-sufficient labor camp of the kind the Party had in mind. The Bolsheviks were never hesitant about exploiting this kind of efficiency. But the two institutions also had more in common symbolically than you might think. Russian monasticism, like most Christian monasticism, has always had strong threads of withdrawal from the world and self-abnegation running through it. The Kievan Crypt Monastery, probably the most famous monastery in Russian Orthodoxy, was founded when Saint Antonius couldn’t find a place that would suit his worship in the city; instead he went into the wilderness and dug himself a hole to live in. (In time it was expanded into an elaborate system of crypts by his followers, then a huge cathedral and monastery complex.) Here’s the description of his daily life given in the medieval Russian Primary Chronicle: “Thus he took up his abode there, praying to God, eating dry bread all the day long, drinking little water, and digging the crypt. He gave himself rest neither day nor night, but endured in his labors, in vigil, and in prayer.” Minus the prayer, it sounds like a prisoner’s routine, doesn’t it? Bread, water, and hard work. The monks on Solovetsky didn’t dig crypts, but many of the most devout did go out to live in the islands’ forests as hermits, with little food and no comforts.

The Solovetsky camp’s treatment of its prisoners was like a dark mirror held up to these monks’ self-imposed strictures. Where the monks had fasted, prisoners starved. Where the monks’ days had been ordered by the liturgy, prisoners’ were ordered by the steam-whistle sending them to work or calling them back for curfew. Solzhenitsyn, who devotes a chapter to Solovetsky in his classic Gulag Archipelago, was struck by the fact that supply issues at the camp were so bad that some prisoners were issued sacks as clothing. How can that not bring to mind the sack-cloth shirt a monk might have worn a hundred years earlier to mortify his flesh and demonstrate his repentance?

There’s no evidence that the people who organized the Solovetsky camp had these parallels in mind explicitly. But I do think they show that Russian Communism inherited more from Russian Orthodoxy than its adherents would have been comfortable admitting. The common idea is that human beings, by being removed from the world and denied normal human needs, can be transformed into something beyond human.

For the monks, that something was a more spiritual, more Christlike being. For the Bolsheviks, it was a creature that could be completely dominated and used up by the State. There’s certainly no moral equivalence between those two things! And I don’t want to suggest that Orthodox monasticism was to blame for Soviet repression. But viewed from a certain angle, the resemblance is there.

(I should note that it was never just Russians that had the idea that prisons effectively remove prisoners from the human world. The word “penitentiary” came into use in the US in the 19th century, as people began to think of prisoners as “penitents” – in other words, as people who withdrew to repent their sins and improve their souls, just like monks. And that way of thinking has had some bad results here too. Maybe it’s no wonder that the US incarceration rate is sometimes compared to that of the Gulag in its worst years – though our prisons are nowhere near as deadly.)

Of course monks rarely ever succeed at being as pure and unworldly as they are supposed to be. Monastery-set mysteries, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael novels, have always been favorites of mine in part for the ways that they show people in cloistered life to be as human as the rest of us, just as capable as we are of greed, or pride, or love. (Mysteries are especially good at showing this, since the detective is always trying to discover the motives that people would rather keep hidden.)

One of the reasons I wrote The Body Outside the Kremlin was to do the same thing for the prisoners of Solovetsky. Subject to a regime that aimed to dehumanize, they deserved to have the human details of their lives in the camp imagined and investigated as fully as I could manage in fiction.
I’m curious to know whether this way of thinking resonates with Jungle Reds readers. Do you have favorite mysteries that bring people who have been placed “outside the bounds” of humanity back inside? Any good ones to recommend, whether set in monasteries, prisons, or elsewhere?

HALLIE: Hmmm, mysteries set in monasteries or prisons, places that sequester their inhabitants. Of course, Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile come immediately to mind. Kiss of the Spiderwoman. Surely there are great mysteries set in convents. And maybe we can count the many crime novels in the rarified atmosphere of Oxford or Cambridge. Maybe even Hogwarts.

What else comes to mind?

And I'd certainly like to hear about the research James did in order to write his novel. What is the Solevetsky camp now?