Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982)

I loved the description in the forward of this book as a "mosaic made of tiny pieces." Each of the stories is a tiny gem, each is peopled with characters who have no idea whether they will be dead or alive the next day. As a character in one story states, "We understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither. We were overcome by indifference." These are not people inspired by hope. They do what they have to in order to stay alive one more day, one more hour. There is no show more moralizing, no lesson stated, no shining example of courage or inspiration. Whatever the action or inaction of any prisoner, each reader must react to the stories in his or her own way.

Highly recommended show less

"We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance", 22 October 2016

This review is from: Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Paperback)
"It was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees below zero, spit froze in mid-air. Spit had been freezing in mid-air for two weeks."

Fantastically crafted short stories set in the gulags in the far east of Russian Siberia. A world where the intellectual political prisoners are the lowest of the low, 'enemies of the people', show more unlike the murderers and thieves who get the top jobs and the warmest bunks.
In the permanent cold, the diseased and underfed strive to avoid being sent down the gold mines to almost certain death; strive to get 'easy' jobs, like being sent out into the taiga to collect cedar needles for vitamin C production, or to be sent to hospital - no matter what the price exacted.
Shalamov, who spent seventeen years in Kolyma, tells of every aspect of life: the camp commanders who for fear of breaking rules order a dead horse be burnt rather than used for food; the lice, the loss of interest in anything beyond survival, the casual brutality. Though short, they pack an immense punch - even more than the much better known 'Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' in my opinion. show less

Between 1929 and 1953, Varlam Shalamov spent 20 years in Soviet labour camps as a dissident. 16 of those in Kolyma, a region in the most distant part of Siberia that at the time was essentially a prison the size of a large country, half a world away from... anything. When he was released, he started writing about it; short stories based on his and others' experiences. Stories of what it's like to survive for decades in an environment where everything is essentially trying to kill you, by show more violence or starvation or cold or exhaustion, specifically designed to be hell.

Life in the camps is horrible; nobody ever became a better person in the camps. The experience is completely negative, every single minute of it. Man deteriorates. That is what happens, nothing else.

Kolyma Tales certainly isn't easy reading; Shalamov is a brilliant writer, but obviously it's not the sort of stories that lend themselves to affirming the best of humanity. Shalamov never tries to find beauty, heroism or transcendence in suffering, quite the opposite; he just wants to document exactly how bad it was, how bad it can be, what people are capable of surviving (not that everyone does, far from it), how it happened - there's a presence in his prose that's just amazing.

It's also remarkable how political the stories are not; Stalin is never even mentioned, and neither are, for the most part, the opinions and actions that landed him and his fellow prisoners. When he raises his eye over the daily slog of trying to stay alive, the image he paints of Stalinism isn't one of deliberate malice as much as complete arbitrariness. Many were there not because of things they had done but for opinions their family members supposedly held. Your sentence could be extended or commuted to a death sentence on a whim, and even if you were technically released you were still stuck in Kolyma with no way to get all the way back to Russia. It was a crapshoot who ended up serving 20 years and who didn't, and who survived it and who didn't. And that's the mentality that spread from the camps.

The Kolyma Tales, however well-written, are ugly. Death, starvation, oppression, the almost complete loss of hope and morality... and yet there's still always something there. It's hard to point at the little gestures of humanity between people, because they're frequently offset and overwhelmed by the complete inhumanity (if anything done by humans can be termed inhuman) of the entire situation. But the simple fact that he wrote about it, that he spent 20 years reliving hell just to tell others about it, all in this razorsharp, vivid detail, says a lot. Stalin captured them, made them non-persons, to fade away and die in the middle of nowhere. In capturing them in prose, making them real again, Shalamov sets them free. show less

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 show more 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. show less