Varlam Shalamov (1907–82), a clearer-eyed observer of our species and a survivor (more or less) of almost the worst an all-too-real dystopia could do to him, would, I reckon, have permitted himself a wintry smile. In 1961 he compiled a list of what he “saw and understood” in the Gulag. It included the observation that people there could not survive by means of free will: “They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.”
Then again, Shalamov was proud he had “never betrayed anyone in the camps, never ratted anyone out.”
Then again, in his introduction to Kolyma Stories, a new and extended English-language edition of Shalamov’s great Gulag story cycle, the stories’ translator Donald Rayfield relates how in “Permafrost” (a story I have yet to read; it will be included in a companion volume), Shalamov is shown to be “responsible for the suicide of a young man whom he refused to allow to go on washing floors in the hospital and dispatched to hard labor back in the mines.”
“The camp,” wrote Shalamov elsewhere, “was a great test of our moral strength . . . and 99 percent of us failed it.”
Rayfield also notes Shalamov’s seeming approval of revolutionary violence—if the motives were idealistic and the perpetrators prepared to die for their cause. In that connection, he refers to Shalamov’s “almost deif[ying]” of Nadia [Natalya] Klimova, a pre-revolutionary terrorist, in “The Gold Medal,” another story to be included in the second volume.
Then again, Klimova’s daughter, Natalia Stolyarova (whom Shalamov knew well), helped smuggle The Gulag Archipelago out of the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn praised mother and daughter as representatives of “all the forces of a healthy Russia united.”
Shalamov’s work has been trickling west for years, with the first reliable collection (only a small selection) appearing in English in 1980 as Kolyma Tales. A larger compilation was released in the 1990s under the same title. Now, Kolyma Stories will, with its companion volume, double the amount of Shalamov’s work available in English, going a good way to remedying a gap that should have been filled decades ago.
Shalamov, a priest’s son who had soured on religion (although he maintained that “the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity” in the camps were religious believers), was initially sympathetic to the young Soviet state despite facing discrimination for his “incorrect” social origins. Trouble and his first stint (three years) in a labor camp came with his involvement in the publication of Lenin’s testament, a document containing some unflattering comments about the now-ascendant Stalin. His descent into hell’s lowest circles came with re-arrest in 1937 (for “counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities”), and years in the Gulag, including long stretches in the mines in the Kolyma region—a territory in Siberia’s far east so remote and inhospitable that it was in itself one of the most formidable of all the Gulag’s many jailers.
Shalamov’s life was saved by a doctor, who arranged for him to be trained as a paramedic. He spent his last few years in the camps as a medical assistant, a relatively soft job. Released in 1951, Shalamov eventually arrived back on “the mainland” in 1953.
Partly autobiographical, partly built on observation and extrapolation, these stories are the product of a specific time, place, and experience, but they also transcend them. They stand at the pinnacle of the literature of the long Soviet night, but to describe them solely in those terms would be akin to labeling the short stories of Chekhov—a writer to whom Shalamov is often compared—as nothing more than superbly taken snapshots of late-Czarist Russia.
The stories are concise, spare, dark, matter-of-fact, and unadorned. “There is no polishing them,” Shalamov explained, “but there is completeness.”
Shalamov was also a poet, and he had a poet’s eye for the right word in the right place, but those looking for lyricism, let alone consciously “fine writing,” will almost invariably be disappointed. The power of these stories comes from something else. It is, maybe, a mark of their exceptional quality that it is hard to identify just what. I do know, however, that even some of their shortest of passages can stay with you for a long, long time:
A whole brigade of one-armed men, who’d mutilated themselves, washed gold in winter and in summer. Then they handed over the specks of metal, the gold grains, to the mine’s till. That’s what the one-armed men were fed for.
The life that Shalamov describes is nastier, more brutish, and far shorter than anything that even Hobbes could have dreamt up. These are not tales of redemption or inspiration, nor do they make any claims about the nobility of suffering. Decency (such as the life-saving act of kindness in the haunting “Handwriting”), or, at least, an unexpected absence of cruelty, occasionally lightens the darkness, but these are exceptions, as are flickers of bone-dry humor: “A Dr. Krasinsky, an old military doctor, a lover of Jules Verne (why?), took over his case.”
Unadorned prose offers up humanity unadorned, refined most frequently in its savagery, whether from guards or “ordinary” criminals, “friends of the people” allowed and encouraged to prey on the lowest of the low, the “politicals” who had incurred the rage of the state.
Survival was a matter not of heroism, but of keeping one’s head down:
We had learned to be meek . . . . We had no pride; no self-esteem or self-respect . . . . It was far more important to learn the skills needed to button up your trousers in sub-zero winter temperatures. Grown men would weep when they found they could not do that.
Survival was a matter of grabbing every chance that came a prisoner’s way. In “Cherry Brandy,” the inmates of a transit camp take two days to disclose that a famous poet (unnamed, but clearly Osip Mandelstam, one of the best known of Stalin’s literary victims) has died in his bunk:
His enterprising neighbors managed to get a dead man’s bread for two days; when it was distributed the dead man’s hand rose up like a puppet’s. Therefore he died earlier than the date of his death, quite an important detail for his future biographers.
In another story, Andreyev (sometimes one of Shalamov’s fictional alter egos) muses that he was “kept alive by indifference and resentment.” Each of his tales, Shalamov wrote, was “a slap in the face to Stalinism.”
Kolyma Stories lacks the grand sweep of The Gulag Archipelago (Shalamov declined Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to co-write the latter). Shalamov did not appreciate the epic style (he was no fan of Tolstoy), or even what he dubbed the “narrative genre.” His stories do not attempt to decipher the Gulag’s origins. Nor, except in echoes, do they track its development: new waves of prisoners, new types of prisoners—Balts, a Hungarian doctor, Russian émigrés caught in Manchuria, Red Army soldiers repatriated after the war—tumble into its maw. Henry Wallace—yes, Vice President Wallace—pays a visit.
In “On Lend-Lease,” a parricide, a respectable, “ordinary” criminal, uses a bulldozer supplied by America to its Soviet ally against Hitler to create a new mass grave—up to then almost an impossibility in the permafrost—for the undecomposed bodies of (to quote from one of Shalamov’s poems) some of his “unrotting brothers.” Previously they had been packed in a stone pit that had, most indecorously, spilled over:
Corpses were crawling across the hillside, exposing a Kolyma secret . . . . Every one of those close to us who perished in Kolyma . . . can still be identified, even after decades. There were no gas ovens in Kolyma. The corpses wait in the stones, in the permafrost.
But not, as Shalamov recounts in another story, before their gold teeth had been knocked out. In Kolyma, it wasn’t only the rock that was mined.
Taken together, these tales, each a small shard in which a glimpse of a greater nightmare is caught, form a pointillist portrait of the worst of the Gulag at the worst of times: “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was,” said Solzhenitsyn, “longer and more bitter than my own . . . to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.”
Some of the stories overlap and collide in ways that do not quite make sense, a reminder that in Kolyma what we fondly imagine to be universal rules counted for nothing:
Any human concept, while still keeping its spelling, its pronunciation, and its usual set of letters and sounds, now meant something different, for which the mainland had no name.
The first volume of Kolyma Stories ends with the freed narrator in Moscow: he “had come back from hell.” He had, but its demons hadn’t finished with him. Shalamov’s poetry was published, but only one of his least-controversial Gulag stories appeared in print in the USSR during his lifetime, and even that led to the dismissal of the editorial board that had approved it. When copies of the Kolyma Tales were published in the West, Shalamov publicly objected, “evidently,” writes Rayfield, “under compulsion.” As a reward, possibly the greatest of all the giants of Russia’s twentieth-century literature was finally admitted to the USSR’s Union of Writers, a necessity if he was to make a living selling the few permissible scraps of his craft.
Shalamov—like his narrator—had emerged from hell, but brought some of it back with him. His health never fully recovered. His memories drove his writing but left him forever an ex-prisoner, cautious, distrustful, and “difficult.” “All my skin has been renewed,” he told a friend, “my soul has not.” By the end of the 1970s, Rayfield writes that Shalamov was “homeless.” That might be an overstatement, but Shalamov was certainly in a very poor way. He was placed into an old people’s home. Conditions were appalling, and he reportedly lost much of his vision and most of what was left of his hearing. In 1982, Shalamov was diagnosed with dementia, and transferred, Rayfield writes, “almost naked [and] in the freezing cold” into a psychiatric hospital where he died a few days later.
Shalamov’s tales about Kolyma began appearing in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, but, Rayfield relates, it was only in 2013 that a “reasonably complete” collection became available in Russia. Part of Shalamov’s childhood home now houses a museum dedicated to him, and some memorials are scattered across his homeland, including one in the central Russian town of Krasnovishersk on Dzerzhinsky Street, a street still named after the founder of the Bolsheviks’ Secret Police (why?).