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Loading... Kolyma Stories (New York Review Books Classics) (2018)by Varlam Shalamov
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  bormgans | May 27, 2023 |  no reviews | add a review
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"Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen year that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second the appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953. His stories are at once the biography a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and literary work of unparalleled creative power, insight, and conviction"--Page 4 of cover. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.73Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.69)
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Wikipedia in English
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Shalamov paints a world where people eat boot grease; where they have calluses on their chests from pushing wagons; where they would murder a fellow prisoner just to get a trial and escape labor in the mines for a while; where men won’t move from a fire when somebody was murdered nearby, as they don’t have the energy to move away from the warmth, just like they don’t have the energy to take a bath or disinfect. A world were such disinfection is merely an ineffective but obliged formality, “creating additional torment for the prisoner.” A world where people smear their faeces in an open wound to get an infection to escape labor by being admitted to hospital, or break an arm or a leg on purpose, for the same reason, or eat a gob of spit from someone who was infected by tuberculose – even though it wasn’t a guarantee for anything, as there were also bureaucratic limits to how many people could be off work and in hospital. Hospital patients did receive better food, but were often too ill to eat it. The food, bureaucratically, obviously, couldn’t be given to other, starving prisoners. A similar illustration of the absurd logic of the system, is Shalamov’s story of a very sick man, Soldatov, who was treated in hospital until he was well enough to be shot. Add to that the ironic tragedy that non-political prisoners – i.e. real criminals – generally had it much better, and got much shorter sentences.
I will leave you with some more quotes, quite a lot. They serve a double function: as a reminder for myself, but I also hope they will do the book justice, and convince you to pick up this human masterpiece.
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