Kolyma Tales
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A cycle of stories written by Varlam Shalamov in 1954-1973. In six collections it records in flat prose the camps of Kolyma in the Far East, where the author served fourteen years. It offers neither hope nor lesson. In the USSR it appeared only from 1988, after his death.
In depth
What kind of stories?
Where Solzhenitsyn wrote of an "almost happy" day, Shalamov writes of a place without one. In "At Night" two prisoners, Glebov and Bagretsov, finish supper. After dark they go to a heap of stones, because a body was buried there that day. A toe shows among the stones, they drag the corpse out and strip it. "Brand-new underwear." They lay it back and cover it with stones. The underwear will buy bread and perhaps tobacco tomorrow, and warmed inside his jacket it no longer seems someone else's.
In "Single-Handed Measure", Dugayev, aged twenty-three, hears one evening that he will be measured alone the next day. He spends the day digging and wheeling alone. The overseer comes with his tape: "Twenty-five per cent." To Dugayev the figure seems very large. A night or two later soldiers lead him towards a high fence topped with barbed wire. Understanding at last, he regrets having laboured in vain that last day.
In "On Tick" criminals play cards while the narrator and his partner Garkunov, a former textile engineer, have come to saw firewood for a little soup. Naumov, who has lost everything, looks round for a stake and orders Garkunov to take off the wool sweater, his wife's last parcel. He refuses: "Only with my skin." A knife goes in. The sweater is red, so the blood barely shows. The story ends: "The game was over and I could go home. Now I had to look for another partner for sawing wood."
That is the tone of the book. Another piece imagines the poet Osip Mandelstam's final hours in a transit camp.
How is it different?
Shalamov called his work not documentary prose but "prose lived through as a document". He discarded the novelistic tradition: mocking the eye colour of literary heroes, he wrote, "In Kolyma there were no people who had eye colour." After Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Kolyma, he held, anything didactic must be rejected: art has no right to preach and neither ennobles nor improves people. He named as his teachers not the classics but the modernists Andrei Bely and Aleksey Remizov.
Behind it lies his life. Arrested in 1929 as a Moscow University student for trying to publish Lenin's Testament, he went to a camp; arrested again in 1937, he was sent to Kolyma, and in 1943 got ten more years for calling Ivan Bunin a great Russian writer. Of sixteen years in Kolyma, fourteen were in confinement.
The comparison with Solzhenitsyn is often drawn. Shalamov warmly praised One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as soon as it appeared, yet left no "almost happy" evening in his own book.
Why did the author disown its publication abroad?
This is the bitterest part of the story. Shalamov wanted publication at home. Yet four stories came out in New York's Novy Zhurnal in 1966, a German edition in Cologne in 1967 with his name misspelt, and more in the emigre journal Posev in 1970, all without his consent. Blacklisted, he saw even his poetry blocked. In 1972 he wrote a protest to Literaturnaya Gazeta, widely taken as renouncing the Kolyma Tales. His friend Irina Sirotinskaya recalled his cry: "I never gave my stories to any Posevs or Voices." Later archival work finds the protest sincere. He called the dissidents' position a no-lose lottery for American intelligence and kept his distance.
The complete book came out in London in 1978. Shalamov died in 1982, without one of his Gulag works printed in the USSR. Journals began printing them in 1988 and the first book appeared in 1989, bought up by queues of readers. The first complete English edition came in 2018-2020.