Spoons and Boots

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of life in a Soviet labor camp--the 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, ushered into print by none other than Nikita Khrushchev--his protagonist has one particularly treasured possession. His spoon.

The reader notices right away that Ivan Denisovich cherishes the spoon, though it may take a while to understand. Early in the text, instructed to wash the floors in the guardroom but not wanting to spend his own precious pre-work time to do the extra task, Ivan Denisovich removes his felt boots and sloshes a full bucket of water on the floor, annoying the guards. "Who washes the floor like that?!" they complain, and eventually agree that he should just sop up the water he has spilled and go back to his bunk.

The perspicacious reader (Nabokov's favorite reader -- but that's a different post) noticed something other than the relations between guards and prisoner, than the argument over how best to wash a mud-encrusted floor.

Portion of hand-made spoon from labor camp
Bugutychag, Kolyma, 1930s.
Perm Gulag Museum

When Ivan Denisovich removed his felt boots, his valenki, he "stuffed his foot rags in them, and his spoon tinkled to the floor." The narrator specifically points out to the non-perspicacious reader: "though he'd made himself ready in a hurry to go to the guardhouse, he hadn't forgotten his spoon."

Some time later, when Ivan Denisovich is in the mess hall getting ready to eat, he "pulls his spoon out of his boot."

Before going on, the reader stops to think: he keeps his spoon in his boot? By now that is obvious ... but why? It's worth holding on to that thought.

Further the narrator explains how Ivan Denisovich feels about his spoon: "It had been with him his whole time in the North, he had cast it with his own hands in sand out of aluminum wire, and it was embossed with the words 'Ust-Izhma 1944.'" And after each meal described in the book, Ivan Denisovich "licked his spoon clean and put it in his boot." Later on, another prisoner gets his hands on some wire and asks Ivan Denisovich to teach him how to make a spoon. 

One really old prisoner has a worn wooden spoon. He, like Ivan Denisovich, eats slowly and with dignity, always removing his cap first.

When I was thinking recently about why I got interested in teaching courses on the history of food in Russia, I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag. Any Gulag memoir or work of fiction will have a description of eating, or being deprived of food, usually so vivid that it sears itself onto your memory.

Soup Ration

Drawing by Jacques Rossi.

Courtesy of Regina Gorzkowski-Rossi.

War fiction and memoirs, too, emphasize the importance of the spoon. And it makes sense. The foods being eaten in these often trying circumstances were usually soup and kasha of some sort -- cereal, oatmeal, groats -- with any luck hot but of course not always. As the Russian saying goes, щи да каша пища наша, (cabbage) soup and kasha are our daily bread. True in prison camp and at the front as much as in the home or university cafeteria.

But what about the boots? You may still be thinking about why Ivan Denisovich keeps his spoon in his boot (or indeed perhaps you already went looking for a definition of foot rags -- if you're really on the ball. Here's one).

Ivan Denisovich is wearing felt boots, because he had to give up his good leather boots at the end of the autumn season. Camp directives stated that he couldn't have two pairs at once, and facing winter without felt boots was impossible to consider. 

Dokhodiaga (Goner)

Drawing by Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, former Gulag prisoner.

Courtesy of Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow.

Why are boots so important in the Gulag?

The same reason they're important in the army, and in much of Russian life: because prisoners, and soldiers, worked out of doors. And they walked. Often for miles and miles. With properly washed and wrapped portianki, and more-or-less properly sized boots, they might make it through. (See image to the right, illustrating the rather horrible slang term that comes up in One Day as well, for a person who is not going to make it. This goner's boots have holes in them and he's clearly not been getting enough to eat.) Rather grim, all this. But you can't think about food without thinking about famine, at least not in the Russian context. And those cold winters go right through the bottoms of poorly made, poorly fitting, or insufficiently thick boots.

Ivan Denisovich isn't the only literary character who mourns the loss of properly fitting leather boots, though. In fact, I would almost say that spoons and boots are present in most if not all such narratives.

For example, in Viktor Astaf'iev's doorstop of a novel about World War II -- The Accursed and the Dead -- the main character also has a sturdy pair of leather boots, and is devastated when he and his platoon have to cross a river. Not good swimmers, many of them drown, and our hero just barely makes it across. However, he has really big feet, and from this point on (with the proper-sized footwear left behind) he will suffer from all kinds of foot injuries and problems.

Y.G. Gorelov, "Do the Russians Want War?", 1962

(Note that his portianki are drying in the sun.)

Spoons and boots are two of the essential ingredients in life. 

My university seems to have embraced the concept of teaching the history of food. What are the chances that I could teach a history of footwear?