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If respect for others helped some maintain their humanity, respect for themselves helped others. Many, particularly women, speak of the need to keep clean, or as clean as possible, as a way of preserving one’s dignity. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg describes how a prison cell mate “washed and dried her white collar and sewed it back on her blouse” every morning.¹²⁵ Japanese prisoners in Magadan set up a Japanese “bath”—a large barrel, to which benches were attached—along the bay.¹²⁶ During sixteen months in Leningrad’s Kresty prison, Boris Chetverikov washed his clothes over and over again, as well as the walls and the floors of his cell—before going through all of the opera arias he knew in his head.¹²⁷ Others practiced exercise or hygienic routines. This is Bardach again:

. . . despite my fatigue and the cold, I kept the exercise routine I had followed at home and in the Red Army, washing my face and hands at the hand pump. I wanted to retain as much pride in myself as I could, separating myself from the many prisoners I had seen give up day by day. They’d stop caring first about their hygiene or appearance, then about their fellow prisoners, and finally about their own lives. If I had control over nothing else, I had control over this ritual which I believed would keep me from degradation and certain death.¹²⁸

Still others practiced intellectual disciplines. Many, many prisoners wrote or memorized poetry, repeating their verses and those of others to themselves over and over again, later repeating them to friends. In Moscow, in the 1960s, Ginzburg once met a writer who could not believe that in such conditions prisoners had really been able to repeat poems to themselves and derive mental relief from doing so. “Yes, yes,” he told her: “he knew I was not the first person to attest to this, but, well, it still seemed to him that the idea came to us after the event.” Ginzburg writes that the man did not understand her generation, the men and women who still belonged to an “epoch of magnificent illusions . . . we were flinging ourselves into Communism from the poetic heights.”¹²⁹

Nina Gagen-Torn, herself an ethnographer, wrote poetry, often singing her own verses to herself:

In the camps I understood, at a practical level, why pre-literate cultures had always passed on texts in the form of song—otherwise you don’t remember, you can’t be sure of the exact words. Books appeared among us accidentally, they were given and then taken away. Writing was forbidden, as were study groups: the authorities feared they would lead to counter-revolution. Thus did everyone prepare for himself, as well as he could, food for the brain.¹³⁰

Shalamov has written that poetry, among “pretense and evil, decay” saved him from becoming completely callous. This is one verse he wrote, entitled “To a Poet”:

I ate as a beast, growling over food A simple sheet of writing-paper Seemed a miracle Falling from the sky to the dark forest.

I drank as a beast, lapping up water Soaking my long whiskers Measuring my life not by months or years But by hours.

And every evening Surprised that I was still alive I repeated verses As if I heard your voice.

And I whispered them as prayers, I honored them as the water of life As an icon saved in battle As a guiding star.