While reading it i almost alway was craving for a round of a rye bread. His reproduction of hunger is soo vivid! ( )

I dare you to find a literary genre more depressing than prison literature – go on, think about it for a bit, I'll wait. Kolyma Tales is a collection of short stories set in the various mines, dormitories, and work camps that made up the vast Siberian "human sewage disposal system" that Alexander Solzhenitsyn so famously chronicled in The Gulag Archipelago. Based on an unimaginable seventeen years of the author's own personal experience with the Gulag system, this is an unforgettably bleak look at one of the absolute worst places in the world. One of the most striking things about the stories here is the nearly complete absence of moralizing, which is very different from Solzenitsyn's angry polemics; the icy detachment of the author as he recounts these horrific conditions and even more horrific human beings who live in such a wasteland of the spirit is subtly unsettling in a way that's almost impossible to describe but unforgettable as you're reading it. Think of the descriptive fatalism of Jack London's To Build a Fire over and over again, with scores of protagonists shuffling through endless permutations of fellow prisoners and guards whose humanity has been gradually frozen out of them over decades of isolation in a hellish world that the American prison system is unfortunately trying to recreate right here at home. I would recommend detoxing with Harry Potter or something after this; it's pretty soul-crushing. ( )

Una joya literaria. Gran literatura. ( )

Kolyma Tales was my first used book purchase via Amazon. (I feel obligated to honor our benefactor at every turn now. I even touch my breast when I say Amazon.)

Emerging from a blue period, I truly had no idea how beautiful this harrowing account would be. I don't detect any tension between the sublime and Kolyma. Imre Kertész has taught me well. It is chance, it is human. Survival simply wasn't possible. Those that did emerge, were stripped of something. A loss occurred. Kolyma is a protean creation: it is a novel, a collection, a testament, an indictment, a discarded path towards something which couldn't be Hope.

Hungry men will always defend justice furiously (if they are not too hungry or too exhausted).

Consider my dilemma, I was so moved by this book over the last few days yet the events depicted are so alien and hostile as to defy comment. I kept reading, finding myself strangely hungry. I was spared the standard Kolyma dream of loaves of rye bread. Even while quaffing ale, I thought about those that drank medical alcohol at the expense of their patients. I thought repeatedly about the carpenter's puppy: that's all I can say about that particular anecdote. There are always foot rags to be adjusted, heels to be scratched time in the infirmary. There are innumerable others. I give Kolyma Tales my highest recommendation. ( )

Shalamov spent 17 years n the Soviet forced-labor camps of kolyma, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, their hopes and plans extending no further than a few hours.