Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov was born in 1907 into a priest's family in Vologda and studied law at Moscow University. In the 1920s he was a young sympathizer of the Left Opposition inside the party, and on February 19, 1929, he was arrested in an underground print shop that was reproducing Lenin's Letter to the Congress, the so-called Testament. For Trotskyist activity he served a three-year sentence in the Vishera camps of the northern Urals. That the occasion of his first arrest was none other than Lenin's final document reads like a foreshadowing of the tragedy that would run through his life.

Released, he worked in Moscow as a journalist and writer, but on January 12, 1937, as the Great Terror climbed toward its peak, he was arrested again for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity" (KRTD). Sentenced to five years, he was landed at Magadan in Kolyma that August and assigned to the diggings of the Partizan gold mine: a world of minus-fifty-degree pit faces, starvation rations, and twelve-hour shifts. In 1943 a remark that Bunin was a classic of Russian literature was construed as anti-Soviet agitation and brought him ten more years.

What saved him was the feldsher (medical assistant) course he entered in 1946 with the help of the prisoner-doctor Pantyukhov; hospital work was deliverance from the mine face. His sentence ended in 1951, but the right to leave Kolyma came only in 1953, and full rehabilitation in 1956. Counting from the first arrest he spent nearly twenty years in the camp world, close to seventeen of them in Kolyma. This archive sets down honestly the arc that took a young Left Oppositionist to the Kolyma diggings, as a record of the wounds the revolution inflicted on its own children.

Shalamov categorically rejected the idea that camp experience could serve as literary material or spiritual tempering. For him, Kolyma was 'an entirely negative experience' where 'a person only becomes worse.' After Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in 1962, Shalamov acknowledged its literary merits but pointedly noted its camp had no lice, had blankets, and prisoners worked in warmth: it was a 'light' camp. When Solzhenitsyn later asked him to contribute to The Gulag Archipelago, Shalamov refused outright and came to view Solzhenitsyn as a 'dealer' striving for Western success at any cost. Shalamov's 'new prose' was neither fiction nor memoir but 'prose lived as document': 'the event itself, the battle, not its description.' Declaring that 'the novel is dead,' he argued the 19th-century Russian novel tradition embodied by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had failed to prevent Kolyma and Auschwitz. He positioned himself instead as heir to Russian modernism, Bely and Remizov, and perfected a compressed form in Kolyma Tales that shows only behavior under extreme conditions, never psychological development. His prose stands as a fundamental rebuttal to any attempt to cast the camps as a site of heroism or correction.

Back from Kolyma, Shalamov began writing the Kolyma Tales in 1954 and shaped them over nearly twenty years into six cycles. His prose is the most unsparing in all camp literature: no narrative of redemption, no growth through ordeal. "The camp is a school of the negative from first day to last" was his conclusion, and he set it down in the stripped short sentences of his "new prose". The manuscripts circulated in samizdat, and from 1966 the New York journal Novy Zhurnal began serializing them piecemeal without his consent. At home, only his poetry could be published.

On February 23, 1972, Literaturnaya Gazeta carried a letter over Shalamov's name. It denounced Western and emigre publications for using his name in anti-Soviet propaganda, declared that "the problems of the Kolyma Tales have long been removed by life", and defined him as an honest Soviet writer. Dissident circles read it as betrayal and literary suicide. The record, however, shows a more complicated picture. In his notebooks and to friends Shalamov maintained that he had written the letter himself and that his anger was real: anger at emigre publishers who cut his work into fragments and consumed it as a political commodity without his consent. He had never wished to be a symbol of the dissident movement, and he refused to let his testimony serve as Cold War ammunition. This archive records the letter as he explained it, neither reduced to a story of forced capitulation nor embellished as pure spontaneity.

When Solzhenitsyn proposed co-authorship of The Gulag Archipelago, he declined; the aesthetics and politics of the two witnesses had parted, and Shalamov held to documentary exactness and literary restraint to the end. In old age, losing sight and hearing, he entered the Literary Fund's home for the aged in 1979, and on January 17, 1982, three days after being forcibly transferred to a psychoneurological institution, he died of pneumonia. The Kolyma Tales were published whole in his homeland only in 1988–1989, in the pages of perestroika. Today the cycle is read as one of the sternest achievements of twentieth-century Russian prose.