Life in a Russian gulag, based on the author's own years in the Gulag, chronicled in an epic masterpiece.
Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was born in Vologda in western Russia
to a Russian Orthodox priest and his wife. After being expelled
from law school for his political beliefs, Shalamov worked as a
journalist in Moscow. In 1929, he was arrested at an underground
printshop and sentenced to three years' hard labor in the Ural
Mountains, where he met his first wife, Galina Gudz. The two
returned to Moscow after Shalamov's release in 1931; they were
married in 1934 and had a daughter, Elena, in 1935. Shalamov
resumed work as a journalist and writer, publishing his first short
story, "The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino," in 1936. The following
year, he was arrested again for counterrevolutionary activities and
shipped to the Far Northeast of the Kolyma basin. Over the next
fifteen years, he was moved from labor camp to labor camp;
imprisoned many times for anti-Soviet propaganda; forced to mine
gold and coal; quarantined for typhus; and, finally, assigned to
work as a paramedic. Upon his release in 1951, he made his way back
to Moscow where he divorced his wife and began writing what would
become the Kolyma Stories. He also wrote many volumes of poetry,
including Ognivo (Flint, 1961) and Moskovskiye oblaka (Moscow
Clouds, 1972). Severely weakened by his years in the camps, in 1979
Shalamov was committed to a decrepit nursing home north of Moscow.
Following a heart attack in 1980, he dic- tated his final poems to
the poet A. A. Morozov. In 1981, he was awarded the French PEN
Club's Liberty Prize; he died of pneumonia in 1982.
Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at
Queen Mary University of London. As well as books and articles on
Russian literature (notably A Life of Anton Chekhov), he is the
author of many articles on Georgian writers and of a history of
Georgian literature. In 2012 he published Edge of Empires- A
History of Georgia, which has recently come out in an expanded
Russian edition, as have his Life of Chekhov and Stalin and His
Hangmen. He was the chief editor of A Comprehensive
Georgian-English Dictionary. He has translated several novels,
including Hamid Ismailov's Devils' Dance from the Uzbek, and
Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (an NYRB Classic).
Nominated for the 2020 Read Russia Prize
“'Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,' Shalamov
wrote in 1971. . . . Shalamov’s stories are slaps in all our
faces—and, like a slap, they can enliven as well as hurt. . .
. Shalamov is not only a unique witness, but also a fine poet
and one of the greatest of Russian writers of short stories.
He is as important a figure as Primo Levi." —Robert
Chandler, Financial Times
“As a record of the Gulag and human nature laid bare, Varlam
Shalamov is the equal of Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam,
while the artistry of his stories recalls Chekhov. This is
literature of the first rank, to be read as much for pleasure as a
caution against the perils of totalitarianism.” —David
Bezmozgis
“Available only for the last five years in Russia itself, a searing
document, worthy of shelving alongside Solzhenitsyn.” —Kirkus
Reviews, starred review
"The book is packed with gems, each complete in itself. Together
they form part of a mosaic unlike anything in world literature. A
struggle with memory comparable with that of Proust or Beckett,
this is a work of art of the highest order by a writer of
extraordinary daring and ambition . . . He resembled Chekhov in his
combination of non-judgemental realism with unyielding severity in
his view of the human world." —John Gray, New Statesman
"There is pleasure and perturbation in this huge collection.
Shalamov’s writing has a light, clear-eyed quality, even if the
subject is the inhumane futility of life in the Soviet gulag.” —The
Irish Times
"These new translations of Varlam Shalamov’s astonishing short
stories may well establish Shalamov as the new laureate of the
Gulag . . . The power of fiction has never been better exemplified
. . . Shalamov’s unique tone of voice and his pared-down style are
beautifully rendered here by Rayfield — limpid, assured, the scarce
moments of lyricism expertly caught . . . One feels that poor
Varlam Shalamov would be both amazed and delighted." —William Boyd,
The Sunday Times (UK)
"Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave
an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as
though the world is being viewed through a high-resolution lens."
—Charlotte Hobson, The Spectator
“Suffering—elemental suffering—can never be told. There is no other
state where the distance between a narration merely truthful and a
narration that is truth itself creates such an achingly
unfathomable abyss. It is this that elevates the work of Varlam
Shalamov. His torturous secret resides in how the focus of his
attention is turned only toward the frozen crenellation of palpable
concrete details. What he knew about the human being was appalling.
And although none of this can be transmitted—nonetheless, he
transmits it to us.” —László Krasznahorkai
"Shalamov's experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than
my own . . . I respectfully confess that to him and not me it was
given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which
life inthe camps dragged us all." —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"[Shalamov's] prose is as simple and spare as a scientist's. The
stories are exciting because they deal with extremes, like stories
of Shackleton's expeditions, or Jack London's Klondike tales . . .
Sit with them long enough and you begin to sense the depths of
feeling under the permafrost, and something approaching Chekhovian
artistry . . . these stories are literature—great literature, with
their own terrible beauty." —Alex Abramovich, Bookforum
“Like the landscape gardeners of the late 18th century, Shalamov
builds ruins. The sketches remain fragments because they are about
fragments—of men, of society, of dreams.” —Jay Martin, The New York
Times Book Review
“There can be no doubt that Shalamov’s reportage from the lower
depths of the Gulag of a society building a ‘new world’ will remain
forever among the masterpieces of documentary or memoir literature
and an invaluable source for the present and future understanding
of the ‘Soviet human condition.’” —Laszlo Dienes, World Literature
Today
“A numbness of sorts pervades the tales as a whole, as if the
accumulation of horrors could not be related or understood except
under very heavy sedation. In Andrei Sinyavsky’s apt
characterization of Varlam Shalamov: ‘He writes as if he were
dead.’” —Maurice Friedberg, Commentary
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