Through the snow

How do they trample the road on virgin snow? A man walks ahead, sweating and swearing, barely moving his legs, constantly getting bogged down in loose deep snow. The man goes far, marking his way with uneven black pits. He gets tired, lies down on the snow, lights up, and shag smoke spreads like a blue cloud over the white shiny snow. The man has already gone further, and the cloud still hangs where he rested - the air is almost still. Roads are always laid on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. A person himself outlines landmarks for himself in the vastness of the snow: a rock, tall tree, - a person leads his body through the snow in the same way as a helmsman leads a boat along the river from cape to cape.

Five or six people in a row, shoulder to shoulder, move along the laid narrow and unreliable trail. They step near the track, but not in the track. Having reached the place planned in advance, they turn back and again go in such a way as to trample the virgin snow, the place where no human foot has yet set foot. The road has been broken. People, sleigh carts, tractors can walk along it. If you follow the path of the first track to track, there will be a noticeable, but barely passable narrow path, a stitch, and not a road - pits that are more difficult to wade through than virgin soil. The first one is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another one from the same head five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint. And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses.

For the show

We played cards at Naumov's konogon. The guards on duty never looked into the horse barracks, rightly considering their main service in monitoring the convicts under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by counter-revolutionaries. True, the practical bosses grumbled in secret: they were losing the best, most caring workers, but the instructions on this score were definite and strict. In a word, the konogons were the safest of all, and every night the thieves gathered there for their card fights.

In the right corner of the hut on the lower bunks were spread multi-colored wadded blankets. A burning "kolyma" was fastened to the corner post with a wire - a home-made light bulb on gasoline steam. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of the can - that's all the device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was heated, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs tucked up in Buryat style, the partners were sitting - the classic pose of a prison card battle. There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards, this was a home-made prison deck, which is made by the masters of these crafts at an extraordinary speed. To make it, you need paper (any book), a piece of bread (to chew it and rub it through a rag to get starch - glue sheets), a stub of chemical pencil (instead of printing ink) and a knife (for cutting and stenciling suits, and the cards themselves).

Today's maps have just been cut out of a volume of Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone yesterday in the office. The paper was dense, thick - the sheets did not have to be glued together, which is done when the paper is thin. In the camp, during all searches, chemical pencils were rigorously selected. They were also selected when checking the received parcels. This was done not only to suppress the possibility of making documents and stamps (there were many artists and such), but to destroy everything that could compete with the state card monopoly. Ink was made from a chemical pencil, and patterns were applied to the card with ink through a paper stencil - ladies, jacks, tens of all suits ... The suits did not differ in color - and the player does not need a difference. The jack of spades, for example, corresponded to the image of spades in two opposite corners of the map. The arrangement and shape of the patterns have been the same for centuries - the ability to make cards with one's own hand is included in the program of the "chivalrous" education of a young blatar.

A brand new deck of cards lay on the pillow, and one of the players patted it with a dirty hand with thin, white, non-working fingers. The nail of the little finger was of supernatural length - also Blatar chic, just like "fixes" - gold, that is, bronze, crowns worn on completely healthy teeth. There were even craftsmen - self-styled denture prosthetists, who earned a lot of money by making such crowns, which invariably found demand. As for nails, color polishing them, no doubt, would enter the life of the underworld, if it were possible to get varnish in prison conditions. A well-groomed yellow nail gleamed like a precious stone. With his left hand, the owner of the nail was sorting through sticky and dirty blond hair. He was trimmed "under the box" in the neatest way. A low forehead without a single wrinkle, yellow bushes of eyebrows, a mouth with a bow - all this gave his physiognomy important quality appearance of a thief: stealth. The face was such that it was impossible to remember it. I looked at him - and forgot, lost all features, and did not recognize at a meeting. It was Sevochka, the famous connoisseur of tertz, shtos and bora - three classic card games, an inspired interpreter of a thousand card rules, strict observance of which is mandatory in a real battle. They said about Sevochka that he "perfectly performs" - that is, he shows the skill and dexterity of a card sharper. He was a card sharper, of course; an honest game of thieves is a game of deceit: follow and convict a partner, it is your right, be able to deceive yourself, be able to argue a dubious win.

There were always two players, one on one. None of the masters humiliated themselves by participating in group games like points. They weren't afraid to sit down with strong "performers" - just like in chess, a real fighter is looking for the strongest opponent.

Sevochka's partner was Naumov himself, the foreman of the konogons. He was older than his partner (however, how old is Sevochka – twenty? some wanderer - a monk or a member of the famous sect "God knows", a sect that has been found in our camps for decades. This impression was increased at the sight of a gaitan with a tin cross hanging around Naumov's neck, his shirt collar was unbuttoned. This cross was by no means a blasphemous joke, whim or improvisation. At that time, all thieves wore aluminum crosses around their necks - this was an identification mark of the order, like a tattoo.

In the twenties, thieves wore technical caps, even earlier - captains. In the 1940s, they wore kubankas in winter, tucked up the tops of their boots, and wore a cross around their necks. The cross was usually smooth, but if there were artists, they were forced to paint patterns on their favorite topics with a needle: a heart, a map, a cross, a naked woman ... The Naumovsky cross was smooth. It hung on Naumov's dark bare chest, making it difficult to read the blue tattoo headpiece - a quote from Yesenin, the only poet recognized and canonized by the underworld:

How few roads have been travelled,
How many mistakes have been made.

– What are you playing? - Sevochka gritted through his teeth with infinite contempt: this was also considered a good form of the beginning of the game.

- Here are the rags. This nonsense... And Naumov patted his shoulders.

“I’m playing in five hundred,” Sevochka estimated the suit. In response, there was a loud verbose abuse, which was supposed to convince the enemy of the much higher value of the thing. The spectators surrounding the players patiently waited for the end of this traditional overture. Sevochka did not remain in debt and cursed even more caustically, knocking down the price. Finally the suit was valued at a thousand. For his part, Sevochka played several well-worn jumpers. After the jumpers were evaluated and thrown right there on the blanket, Sevochka shuffled the cards.

How do they trample the road on virgin snow? A man walks ahead, sweating and swearing, barely moving his legs, constantly getting bogged down in loose deep snow. The man goes far, marking his way with uneven black pits. He gets tired, lies down on the snow, lights up, and shag smoke spreads like a blue cloud over the white shiny snow. The man has already gone further, and the cloud still hangs where he rested - the air is almost still. Roads are always laid on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. A person himself outlines landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree - a person guides his body through the snow in the same way as a helmsman guides a boat along the river from cape to cape.

Five or six people in a row, shoulder to shoulder, move along the laid narrow and unreliable trail. They step near the track, but not in the track. Having reached the place planned in advance, they turn back and again go in such a way as to trample the virgin snow, the place where no human foot has yet set foot. The road has been broken. People, sleigh carts, tractors can walk along it. If you follow the path of the first track to track, there will be a noticeable, but barely passable narrow path, a stitch, and not a road - pits that are more difficult to wade through than virgin soil. The first one is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another one from the same head five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint. And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses.

For the show

We played cards at Naumov's konogon. The guards on duty never looked into the horse barracks, rightly considering their main service in monitoring the convicts under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by counter-revolutionaries. True, the practical bosses grumbled in secret: they were losing the best, most caring workers, but the instructions on this score were definite and strict. In a word, the konogons were the safest of all, and every night the thieves gathered there for their card fights.

In the right corner of the hut on the lower bunks were spread multi-colored wadded blankets. A burning “kolyma” was fastened to the corner post with a wire - a home-made light bulb on gasoline steam. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of the can - that's all the device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was heated, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs tucked up in Buryat style, the partners were sitting - the classic pose of a prison card battle. There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards, this was a home-made prison deck, which is made by the masters of these crafts at an extraordinary speed. To make it, you need paper (any book), a piece of bread (to chew it and rub it through a rag to get starch - glue sheets), a stub of chemical pencil (instead of printing ink) and a knife (for cutting and stenciling suits, and the cards themselves).

Today's maps have just been cut out of a volume of Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone yesterday in the office. The paper was dense, thick - the sheets did not have to be glued together, which is done when the paper is thin. In the camp, during all searches, chemical pencils were rigorously selected. They were also selected when checking the received parcels. This was done not only to suppress the possibility of making documents and stamps (there were many artists and such), but to destroy everything that could compete with the state card monopoly. Ink was made from a chemical pencil, and patterns were applied to the card with ink through a paper stencil - ladies, jacks, tens of all suits ... The suits did not differ in color - and the player does not need a difference. The jack of spades, for example, corresponded to the image of spades in two opposite corners of the map. The arrangement and shape of the patterns have been the same for centuries - the ability to make cards with one's own hand is included in the program of the "chivalrous" education of a young blatar.

A brand new deck of cards lay on the pillow, and one of the players patted it with a dirty hand with thin, white, non-working fingers. The nail of the little finger was supernaturally long - also Blatar chic, just like the "fixes" - gold, that is, bronze, crowns worn on completely healthy teeth. There were even craftsmen - self-styled denture prosthetists, who earned a lot of money by making such crowns, which invariably found demand. As for nails, color polishing them, no doubt, would enter the life of the underworld, if it were possible to get varnish in prison conditions. A well-groomed yellow nail gleamed like a precious stone. With his left hand, the owner of the nail was sorting through sticky and dirty blond hair. He was cut "under the box" in the neatest way. A low forehead without a single wrinkle, yellow bushes of eyebrows, a bow-shaped mouth - all this gave his physiognomy an important quality of the appearance of a thief: invisibility. The face was such that it was impossible to remember it. I looked at him - and forgot, lost all features, and did not recognize at a meeting. It was Sevochka, the famous connoisseur of tertz, shtos and bora - three classic card games, an inspired interpreter of a thousand card rules, strict observance of which is mandatory in a real battle. They said about Sevochka that he "performs excellently" - that is, he shows the skill and dexterity of a card sharper. He was a card sharper, of course; an honest game of thieves is a game of deceit: follow and convict a partner, it is your right, be able to deceive yourself, be able to argue a dubious win.

Substitution, transformation was achieved not only by mounting documents. "Injector" is not only a landscape gasket like "Stlanik". In fact, it is not landscape at all, because there is no landscape lyrics, but there is only a conversation between the author and his readers.

"Slanik" is needed not as landscape information, but as a state of mind necessary for combat in " shock therapy”, “Conspiracy of lawyers”, “Typhoid quarantine”.

It -<род>landscape lining.

All the repetitions, all the slips of the tongue, in which readers reproached me, were not made by me by accident, not out of negligence, not out of haste ...

They say an ad is more memorable if it contains a spelling mistake. But this is not the only reward for negligence.

Authenticity itself, primacy, requires this kind of error.

Stern's "Sentimental Journey" breaks off in mid-sentence and does not elicit disapproval from anyone.

Why, then, in the story “How It Started,” do all readers add, correct by hand the phrase “We are still working ...” that I did not finish?

The use of synonyms, verbs-synonyms and synonyms-nouns, serves the same dual purpose - to emphasize the main thing and create musicality, sound support, intonation.

When a speaker gives a speech, a new phrase is formed in the brain while synonyms come out into the language.

The extraordinary importance of preserving the first option. Editing is not allowed. It is better to wait for another upsurge of feeling and write the story again with all the rights of the first option.

Everyone who writes poetry knows that the first option is the most sincere, the most direct, subject to haste to express the most important thing. The subsequent finishing - editing (in different meanings) - is control, the violence of thought over feeling, the intervention of thought. I can guess from any Russian great poet in 12-16 lines of a poem - which stanza was written first. He guessed without error what was the main thing for Pushkin and Lermontov.

So for this prose, conditionally called "new", it is extremely important luck first option.<…>

They will say that all this is not necessary for inspiration, for insight.

God is always on the side of the big battalions. By Napoleon. These great battalions of poetry are lining up and marching, learning to shoot from cover, in the depths.

The artist is always working, and the processing of the material is always, constantly. Illumination is the result of this constant work.

Of course, there are secrets in art. These are the secrets of talent. No more and no less.

Editing, "finishing" any of my stories is extremely difficult, because it has special tasks, stylistic.

You correct it a little, and the power of authenticity, primacy is violated. So it was with the story "Conspiracy of Lawyers" - the deterioration in quality after editing was immediately noticeable (N.Ya.).

Is it true that new prose is based on new material and is strong with this material?

Of course, there are no trifles in Kolyma Tales. The author thinks, perhaps mistakenly, that the point is not only in the material, and not even so much in the material ...

Why camp theme. The camp theme in its broad interpretation, in its fundamental understanding, is the main, main issue of our days. Isn't the destruction of a person with the help of the state the main issue of our time, our morality, which has entered the psychology of every family? This question is much more important than the topic of war. War in a sense plays the role of psychological camouflage here (history says that during the war the tyrant draws closer to the people). Behind the statistics of the war, statistics of all kinds, they want to hide " camp theme».

When people ask me what I write, I answer: I do not write memoirs. There are no reminiscences in Kolyma Tales. I don't write stories either - or rather, I try to write not a story, but something that would not be literature.

Not the prose of a document, but prose suffered as a document.

How do they trample the road on virgin snow? A man walks ahead, sweating and swearing, barely moving his legs, constantly getting bogged down in loose deep snow. The man goes far, marking his way with uneven black pits. He gets tired, lies down on the snow, lights up, and shag smoke spreads like a blue cloud over the white shiny snow. The man has already gone further, and the cloud still hangs where he rested - the air is almost still. Roads are always laid on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. A person himself outlines landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree - a person guides his body through the snow in the same way as a helmsman guides a boat along the river from cape to cape.

Five or six people in a row, shoulder to shoulder, move along the laid narrow and unreliable trail. They step near the track, but not in the track. Having reached the place planned in advance, they turn back and again go in such a way as to trample the virgin snow, the place where no human foot has yet set foot. The road has been broken. People, sleigh carts, tractors can walk along it. If you follow the path of the first track to track, there will be a noticeable, but barely passable narrow path, a stitch, and not a road - pits that are more difficult to get through than virgin soil. The first one is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another one from the same head five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint. And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses.

<1956>

We played cards at Naumov's konogon. The guards on duty never looked into the horse barracks, rightly considering their main service in monitoring the convicts under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by counter-revolutionaries. True, the practical bosses grumbled in secret: they were losing the best, most caring workers, but the instructions on this score were definite and strict. In a word, the konogons were the safest of all, and every night the thieves gathered there for their card fights.

In the right corner of the hut on the lower bunks were spread multi-colored wadded blankets. A burning “kolyma” was fastened to the corner post with a wire - a home-made light bulb on gasoline steam. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of the can - that's all the device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was heated, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs tucked up in Buryat style, the partners were sitting - the classic pose of a prison card battle. There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards, this was a home-made prison deck, which is made by the masters of these crafts at an extraordinary speed. To make it, you need paper (any book), a piece of bread (to chew it and rub it through a rag to get starch - glue sheets), a stub of chemical pencil (instead of printing ink) and a knife (for cutting and stenciling suits, and the cards themselves).

Today's maps have just been cut out of a volume of Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone yesterday in the office. The paper was dense, thick - the sheets did not have to be glued together, which is done when the paper is thin. In the camp, during all searches, chemical pencils were rigorously selected. They were also selected when checking the received parcels. This was done not only to suppress the possibility of making documents and stamps (there were many artists and such), but to destroy everything that could compete with the state card monopoly. Ink was made from a chemical pencil, and patterns were applied to the card with ink through a paper stencil - ladies, jacks, tens of all suits ... The suits did not differ in color - and the player does not need a difference. The jack of spades, for example, corresponded to the image of spades in two opposite corners of the map. The arrangement and shape of the patterns have been the same for centuries - the ability to make cards with one's own hand is included in the program of the "chivalrous" education of a young blatar.

Defiantly refusing artistry, Shalamov creates the best artistic prose about the Gulag - a ruthless and talented testimony of the circumstances in which a person ceases to be a person.

comments: Varvara Babitskaya

What is this book about?

About the life (or rather, dying) of the Gulag prisoners in the late 1930s - 1940s. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov reflected his own experience: the writer spent more than fifteen years in Kolyma (1937-1951), working in gold mines and coal mines, more than once became a goner and survived only because his friends arranged him as a paramedic in a camp hospital. This is an artistic study of a new and unimaginable reality before the advent of the Gulag and Auschwitz, in which a person is reduced to the level of an animal; analysis of physical, mental and moral degradation, the study of the question of what helps to survive in a situation in which it is impossible to survive. As Shalamov himself wrote, “isn’t the destruction of a person with the help of the state the main issue of our time, our morality, which has entered the psychology of every family?”

Varlam Shalamov. 1956

When was it written?

Shalamov began work on Kolyma Tales shortly after returning from Kolyma, where, after his release, the writer was forced to spend another three years. Shalamov started writing the collection in 1954, working as a foreman in peat extraction in the Kalinin region, and continued in Moscow, where he was able to return after rehabilitation in 1956. Kolyma Tales, the first collection of the cycle, was completed in 1962. By this time, the writer was already working as a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, poems from his voluminous Kolyma Notebooks were published in Znamya, and in 1961 the first poetry collection, Flint, was published.

Shalamov's manuscripts. The stories "Vaska Denisov, the pig thief" and "Shock therapy"

How is it written?

In total, Shalamov wrote more than a hundred stories and essays, which amounted to six books. “Kolyma Tales” in the narrow sense is his first collection, beginning with a prose poem “In the Snow” and ending with the story “Typhoid Quarantine”. In the "Kolyma stories" you can see the features of many small prose genres: physiological essay Household, moralizing essay. One of the first “physiological” collections in Russia is “Ours, written off from life by Russians”, compiled by Alexander Bashutsky. The most famous is the almanac "Physiology of Petersburg" by Nekrasov and Belinsky, which became a manifesto natural school ⁠ , an action-packed short story (which Shalamov paid tribute to in his youth, before his first arrest), a poem in prose, a life, a psychological and ethnographic study.

Shalamov considered descriptiveness, the artistic finishing of prose, to be a sin - all the best of him, as he himself believed, was written right away, that is, rewritten once from a draft. The phrase of the story, he argued, should be as simple as possible, "everything superfluous is eliminated even before the paper, before he took the pen."

An important role is played by unusual and accurate details - in Shalamov they become symbols that translate the "ethnographic" narrative into another plane, giving subtext. These details are often built on hyperbole, a grotesque, where low and high, naturalistically rough and spiritual collide: “Each of us is used to breathing the sour smell of a worn dress, sweat - it’s also good that tears have no smell” (“Dry ration") 1 ⁠ .

With rare exceptions - such as the story "Sherry Brandy", which is a stream of thoughts of Osip Mandelstam dying on the bunk - Shalamov always writes about what he experienced or heard himself, the narrator's awareness of the outside world is limited by barbed wire - even war gives about know only American bread under Lend-Lease, and one can only guess about Stalin's death when the guard suddenly turns on the gramophone.

Varlam Shalamov after the first arrest. 1929

Varlam Shalamov after his arrest in 1937

What influenced her?

Shalamov insisted on the fundamental novelty of his prose, consciously fought against literary influences, and even considered them impossible because of the nature of his material: “... I had such a reserve of novelty that I was not afraid of any repetition. My material would have saved any repetitions, but there were no repetitions ... ”He insisted that in“ Kolyma Tales ”“ there is nothing of realism, romanticism, modernism ”, that they are“ outside of art ”. However, in an interview he stated: “I am the direct heir of Russian modernism - Bely and Remizov. I studied not with Tolstoy, but with Bely, and in any of my stories there are traces of this study. These traces are “sound check”, “diversity and symbolism”, something that makes prose related to poetry.

The most important teacher for Shalamov was Pushkin, whose "formula", according to Shalamov, Russian prose lost, replacing it with a descriptive moralizing novel (which reached its climax with Leo Tolstoy, antipathetic to Shalamov). Literature fiction Shalamov predicted a quick death: “What can a writer teach a person who has gone through a war, a revolution, a concentration camp, who has seen the flame of Alamogordo The world's first nuclear test took place at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. ⁠ - wrote Shalamov. “The writer must give way to the document and be the document himself.” He believed that the time had come for "the prose of experienced people" and it was a sin to waste time on fictitious destinies illustrating the author's idea: this is false.

He treated Dostoevsky better, in Kolyma Tales he repeatedly argued with Notes from the House of the Dead, which indeed, in comparison with Kolyma, looked like heaven on earth.

In his youth, Shalamov survived the infatuation with Babel, but later renounced him (“Babel is the intelligentsia’s fear of brute force - banditry, the army. Babel was a favorite of snobs”), but he admired Zoshchenko, a truly mass writer. With all the obvious dissimilarity of material and language, Shalamov found an important creative principle in Zoshchenko - he spoke about himself in almost the same words: “Zoshchenko was successful because he was not a witness, but a judge, a judge of time.<...>Zoshchenko was the creator of a new form, a completely new way of thinking in literature (the same feat as Picasso, who filmed a three-dimensional perspective), showing the new possibilities of the word. Shalamov borrowed many of the principles of his prose from painters: “purity of tone, the rejection of all kinds of embellishments”, according to him, he borrowed from Gauguin’s diary, and in the notes of Benvenuto Cellini he saw features of the literature of the future - “transcripts of real heroes, specialists, about my work and about my soul. Example new literature, both documentary and innovative in form, Shalamov saw in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, written, however, later than his first collection.

Shalamov gave the first cycle of Kolyma Tales to the Soviet Writer publishing house in November 1962 and then offered them to Novy Mir. The time was not chosen by chance: on the night of November 1, by decision of the XXII Congress, Stalin's body was taken out of the Mausoleum, and Solzhenitsyn's was triumphantly published in the November issue of Novy Mir. Shalamov, however, even at this time of de-Stalinization turned out to be an impassable author. In July 1964, when the thaw was already on the decline, Shalamov received an official refusal from the publishing house.

On the other hand, the stories were very quickly and widely distributed in samizdat, placing Shalamov next to Solzhenitsyn in the unofficial literary hierarchy as a victim, witness and exposer of the Stalinist terror. Shalamov also performed with public readings: for example, in May 1965 he read the story "Sherry Brandy" at the evening in memory of Osip Mandelstam at Moscow State University.

Since 1966, Kolyma Tales, exported to the West, began to appear in emigrant periodicals (in 1966-1973, 33 stories and essays were published; for the first time, four Kolyma Tales were published in Russian in New York's Novy Zhurnal in 1966 year). In 1967, twenty-six of Shalamov's stories, mostly from the first collection, were published in Cologne on German, under the title "Stories of Prisoner Shalanov", this edition was translated from German into other languages, for example, into French and Afrikaans (!). In 1970, Kolyma Tales was published in the anti-Soviet emigrant magazine "Sowing" Socio-political anti-Soviet magazine published since 1945. Organ of the People's Labor Union of Russian Solidarists, a political organization of the Russian emigration. In addition to news and analytics, the magazine published works by Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman and Alexander Beck. ⁠ .

Shalamov was indignant at this, since his prose, by design, was an integral mosaic of the camp experience, the stories had to be perceived as a whole and in a certain order. In addition, the author of tamizdat automatically fell into publishing blacklists in the USSR. In 1972, Shalamov published a letter in the Moscow Literaturnaya Gazeta with a sharp condemnation of unsolicited publications - this ruined the writer's reputation in dissident circles, but did not help break the stories into the Soviet press. When, in 1978, Kolyma Tales was finally published in Russian in London in one volume of 896 pages, Shalamov, who was already seriously ill, was glad of this. Before the publication of his prose in his homeland, he did not live. Only six years after his death, during perestroika, "Kolyma stories" began to be printed in the USSR - the first publication took place in the journal "New World", No. 6 for 1988 (the stories "Tombstone", "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev", Stlanik", "First Chekist", "Typhoid Quarantine", "Train", "Sentence", "Best Praise" and several poems). First separate edition collection "Kolyma stories" was published only in 1989.

The first edition of the book in Russian. Overseas Publications Interchange LTD. London, 1978

How was it received?

In the USSR, the Kolyma Tales were not published during the author's lifetime, but the first reviews of Soviet critics appeared on them already in December 1962 (although they saw the light only recently): these were three internal publisher reviews that were supposed to decide the fate of the book.

The author of the first, Oleg Volkov, himself later the author of excellent camp prose, a convict with great experience, warmly recommends the manuscript for publication. In the light of the sensation just made, he compares Shalamov with Solzhenitsyn, and not in favor of the latter. Solzhenitsyn's story "only touched on a number of problems and aspects of life in the camp, slipped by, not only without understanding, but without looking into them"; Shalamov, on the other hand, brilliantly showed by "the means of an artist" a system created to suppress human personality, in its entirety. (In this, another prisoner agreed with Volkov, the author of The Faculty of Unnecessary Things, Yuri Dombrovsky, who said: “In camp prose, Shalamov is the first, I am the second, Solzhenitsyn is the third” - and noted in Shalamov “Tatsit’s lapidarity and power.” ) Volkov noted artistic merit stories and their undoubted veracity without exaggeration, but at the same time - "shortcomings, long lengths, stylistic flaws, repetitions" and partially duplicated plots, not recognizing the conscious author's techniques in all this.

The same mistake was made by Shalamov's first foreign publisher, Chief Editor "New magazine" A literary and journalistic emigrant magazine published in the United States since 1942. Its authors in different years were Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. ⁠ Roman Gul Roman Borisovich Gul (1896-1986) - critic, publicist. During the Civil War, he participated in the Ice Campaign of General Kornilov, fought in the army of Hetman Skoropadsky. From 1920, Gul lived in Berlin: he published a literary supplement to the newspaper Nakanune, wrote novels about the Civil War, collaborated with Soviet newspapers and publishing houses. In 1933, having been released from a Nazi prison, he emigrated to France, where he wrote a book about his stay in a German concentration camp. In 1950, Gul moved to New York and began work at the New Journal, which he later headed. Since 1978, he published in it a memoir trilogy “I took Russia away. Apologia for emigration. ⁠ , who considered many of the stories "totally bad", others "requiring literary processing", and the whole as "very monotonous and very heavy on topics", after which he unceremoniously edited and cut them for publication.

As soon as I hear the word "good" - I take my hat and leave

Varlam Shalamov

The author of the second internal review for The Soviet Writer, Elvira Moroz, recommends printing the stories as important evidence, despite the captivatingly ingenuous claim: "It seems that the author does not like his characters, does not like people in general." The third reviewer, semi-official critic Anatoly Dremov, following Khrushchev, recalled the "uselessness of hobbies" camp theme "and killed the book.

The reaction of the emigrant Viktor Nekrasov was completely different: he bluntly called Shalamov a great writer - “even against the backdrop of all the giants of not only Russian, but also world literature”, and his stories - “a huge mosaic that recreates life (if it can be called life), with the only difference being that each pebble of his mosaic is a work of art in itself. In each pebble is the ultimate completeness.

On the whole, the readers of the first emigration, who, due to the stylistic barrier, did not understand Shalamov’s “new prose,” in which the traditions of Russian formalism and the “literature of fact” of the late 1920s seemed to be frozen in the permafrost of the Kolyma, miraculously converged with many Soviet readers in their perception "Kolyma Tales" precisely as a weapon political struggle underestimating their literary value. As one of Shalamov's publishers, Julius Shreider, noted, the very subject matter of the Kolyma Tales made it difficult to understand their true place in Russian literature. The fashionable and sensational theme not only doomed Shalamov to life in the shadow of Solzhenitsyn, the official discoverer of the camp "archipelago", but in principle prevented his contemporaries from perceiving the Kolyma Tales as fiction, and not just a damning document.

A prisoner in a gold mine. Sevvostlag, 1938

In 1980, The Kolyma Tales was published in English in New York, translated by John Glad, to rave reviews. The Washington Post newspaper called Shalamov "perhaps the greatest Russian writer now," Anthony Burgess called "Kolyma Tales" masterpieces, and Saul Bellow wrote that they reflect the essence of being. In the same year, the French branch of the PEN Club honored Shalamov Freedom Prize The prize was awarded from 1980 to 1988 to writers persecuted by the state. Among the Russian writers who received the award were Lydia Chukovskaya (1980) and Varlam Shalamov (1981). The jury included Dmitry Stolypin, grandson of the Russian prime minister. ⁠ .

Mass recognition in Russia, commensurate with his literary size, Shalamov has not received, it seems, so far. "Kolyma Tales" are not included in full in university and school courses on the history of Russian literature, and the first serious exhibition dedicated to Shalamov - “To live or write. The Narrator Varlam Shalamov," opened in 2013 not in Russia, but in Berlin, and only after a tour of Europe was held in Moscow's Memorial in 2017. The literary guild places Shalamov extremely highly; For example, Svetlana Aleksievich, who quoted Shalamov in her Nobel lecture, considers him an important predecessor.

Based on the Kolyma Tales, director Vladimir Fatyanov made a four-episode film The Last Fight of Major Pugachev, and in 2007 a twelve-episode TV series Lenin's Testament was released, filmed by Nikolai Dostal based on a script by Yuri Arabov. Shalamov is also dedicated to several documentaries: for example, “Islands. Varlam Shalamov" by Svetlana Bychenko (2006) and "Varlam Shalamov. The experience of a young man ”(2014) Perm director Pavel Pechenkin. Now another film is being shot, this time about the last days of the writer - "Sentence" directed by Dmitry Rudakov, where Pyotr Mamonov will play Shalamov.

TV series "Lenin's Testament". Directed by Nikolay Dostal. 2007

Is “Kolyma Tales” fiction or a document?

Like Theodor Adorno Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist. He was the editor of the Viennese music magazine Anbruch, an assistant professor at the University of Frankfurt. Due to the arrival of the Nazis, he emigrated to England, and then to the United States, after the war he returned to teach in Frankfurt. Adorno belongs to the representatives of the Frankfurt School of sociology, which criticized industrial society from the standpoint of neo-Marxism. In his work, he often opposed mass culture, the entertainment industry and the consumer society. ⁠ , who said that it was impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, Shalamov did not believe in the possibility fiction after Kolyma: there a person is faced with such unimaginable conditions that any fiction fades in comparison. “The need for the art of the writer has been preserved, but the credibility of fiction has been undermined.<…>Today's reader argues only with the document and is convinced only by the document," Shalamov wrote. However, his own stories are precisely an artistic phenomenon, they are inscribed in the world literary context, argue with it, and are full of literary allusions.

The first phrase of the story “On the show” (“We played cards at Naumov’s horseman”) echoes Pushkin’s first phrase (“Once we played cards at Narumov’s Horse Guards”). Here the card game becomes a matter of life and death without any mystics 2 ⁠ - the blatari kill the “fraer” - an intellectual for a sweater they put on the line, and home-made cards, in which they actually lose a human life, are cut from the volume of “Les Misérables”, which the same intellectual could retell (“squeeze”) to the same blatar for a ration . This looks like a kind of authorial mockery - Hugo's humanistic novel embodies the intelligentsia's romantic fantasies about the thieves' world, from which reality leaves only rags. The writer blamed Gorky, Babel, Ilf and Petrov for the glorification of the blatars, even Dostoevsky, who “did not go for truthful image thieves." He himself firmly stated: "Blatari are not people." It is they, and not the escorts, who personify Shalamov's absolute evil. In Essays on the Underworld, he writes that thieves are not interested in art, because "those too realistic" performances "that blatari stage in life frighten both art and life." An example of such a "performance", the terrible story "Pain" (collection "Resurrection of the Larch"), is a variation on the theme of "Cyrano de Bergerac" by Edmond Rostand.

Meat on a hungry man is only enough for malice - he is indifferent to the rest

Varlam Shalamov

In the story “Rain”, Shalamov ironically quotes Mandelstam’s poem “Notre Dame”, describing an attempt at self-mutilation with the help of a huge stone he dug in a pit: “Out of this unkind gravity, I thought to create something beautiful - according to the Russian poet. I thought to save my life by breaking my leg. Indeed, it was a beautiful intention, a phenomenon of a completely aesthetic kind. The stone was supposed to collapse and crush my leg. And I am forever disabled!

Of course, Shalamov “was looking for words for something that not only did not have a language in the surrounding social and cultural reality, but, it seems, did not exist at all. It was" 3 Dubin B. Protocol as a primer with pictures // Session. 2013. No. 55/56. pp. 203-207. ⁠ ; nevertheless, the manifestos should not be taken literally: he creates not a document, but the Kolyma “Divine comedy" 4 Podoroga V. The Tree of the Dead: Varlam Shalamov and the GULAG Time (Experience in Negative Anthropology) // UFO. 2013. No. 120. ⁠ . His reflection on new prose goes back to his youth, even before any Kolyma, when the avant-garde proclaimed the "literature of fact", and he memorized the articles of OPOYAZ.

In the article "The End of the Novel" (1922), Osip Mandelstam wrote that "The measure of the novel is a human biography or a system of biographies," which means that in the 20th century, in the era of powerful social movements, mass organized actions, when there is "spraying of biography as a form of personal existence, even more than pulverization - the catastrophic death of biography", the novel dies. In the same 1922, Yevgeny Zamyatin argued that "art that has grown out of ... today's reality" can only be a fantastic, dream-like synthesis of fantasy and everyday life. Shalamov's prose in a strange way exemplifies both of these aesthetic manifestos. He writes non-fiction about a reality that is more fantastical than any dystopia, a hell filled with absurdity, starting with a gate adorned with a Stalinist quote: "Work is a matter of honor, a matter of valor and heroism." And Shalamov, as "Pluto, who rose from hell, and not Orpheus, who descended into hell" 5 Shalamov V. About prose // Collected works: In 4 volumes. Moscow: Khudozh. lit.: Vagrius, 1998. ⁠ , describes it as a system, as a special universe, where everything human perishes and biography is sprayed in the most direct, physiological sense.

Mine "Dneprovsky", Sevvostlag. Early 1940s

Construction of the Kolyma highway. Sevvostlag, 1933–1934

What can you learn about camp life from "Kolyma stories"?

Shalamov reports in his stories a lot of useful everyday details. How, for example, to remove lice from clothes - one of the main camp curses? - It is necessary to bury clothes in the ground for the night (of course, provided that you were lucky to get an outfit not for slaughtering, but for cutting a clearing, and it was in the summer and the permafrost thawed a little), exposing a small tip; in the morning the lice will gather at this tip, and they can be burned with a smut from the fire.

How to make a "kolyma" - a homemade light bulb on gasoline steam? - “Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of the can - that's all the device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was heated, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

What you need to make a deck playing cards in camp conditions? - First of all, a volume of Victor Hugo: “paper (any book), a piece of bread (to chew it and rub it through a rag to get starch - glue the sheets), a stub of chemical pencil (instead of printing ink) and a knife (for cutting and stenciling suits, and the cards themselves).

What is a chifir? - Strong tea, for which fifty or more grams of tea is brewed in a small mug: “The drink is extremely bitter, they drink it in sips and eat it with salted fish. He relieves sleep and therefore is held in high esteem by thieves and northern drivers on long-distance flights. Shalamov warns that chifir should have a destructive effect on the heart, but admits that he has known people who have been using it for years without harm to health.

How to find out the weather forecast in Kolyma? — Shift weather conditions predicts cedar dwarf. This plant in early autumn, “when in the daytime ... it’s still hot and cloudless in autumn,” suddenly bends a straight black trunk two fists thick and, spreading its paws, lies flat on the ground, which owes its name. This is a sure sign of snow. And vice versa: in late autumn, with low clouds and a cold wind, you can not wait for snow until the elfin lies down. At the end of March or April, the elfin rises around and shakes off the snow - this means that in a day or two a warm wind will blow and spring will come. Shalamov also describes a way to find out the temperature on the street, known to the Kolyma old-timers, because the thermometer was not shown to the prisoners (and they were sent to work at any temperature): “If there is a frosty fog, it means that it is forty degrees below zero outside; if the air comes out with noise during breathing, but it is still not difficult to breathe, then forty-five degrees; if breathing is noisy and shortness of breath is noticeable - fifty degrees. Over fifty-five degrees - spit freezes on the fly. The spit has been freezing on the fly for two weeks now.”

What measures of loose bodies were in effect on 1/8 of the territory of the Soviet Union - in the whole of Eastern Siberia? - "The camp Chamber of Weights and Measures established that a matchbox includes shag for eight cigarettes, and an eighth of shag consists of eight such matchboxes."

Playing cards made by prisoners. 1963

Are Shalamov's characters real people?

Some, apparently, yes: Shalamov claimed that all the murderers in his stories were called by their real names. The situation is more complicated with the victims. Although Shalamov describes real episodes that happened to him or which he witnessed, the characters in these episodes seem to be arbitrary.

“My stories have no plot, no so-called characters. What are they based on? On information about a rarely observed state of mind…” Shalamov wrote. He survived by chance and speaks from a mass grave on behalf of all the dead, describes not the biography of a particular person, but the collective memory, although he uses real memories. Therefore, his narration is sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third; the narrator's name is either Andreev, or Golubev, or Krist, the same situations, changing, wander from story to story. “Such repetitions,” notes philologist Mireille Berutti, “create situations of duality, and, consequently, a hidden level of narration, on which, as a result of the disappearance of the double, a document about one’s own of death" 6 Beryutti M. Varlam Shalamov: literature as a document // On the centenary of the birth of Varlam Shalamov. Conference materials. M., 2007. C. 199-208. ⁠ . The story "Tombstone" (1960, collection "Artist of the Shovel") begins with the phrase "Everyone died ..." and briefly repeats episodes from "Kolyma Tales" - "Single Measurement", "Plotnikov", "Parcels" and so on - in the form of a peculiar biographical directory of people who died of hunger and cold, slaughtered by thieves, committed suicide. Deconstructed plots redistributed among new characters are situations in which the narrator himself died and did not die. In "Single Measurement", young contract officer Dugaev, who breaks the brigade's production rate, receives a separate order for work, which, of course, he cannot perform - a common formality before putting the goner into expense "for sabotage". In the "Tombstone" it turns out that Shalamov himself was in Dugaev's situation, and for some reason they shot Ioska Ryutin, his partner. In the story “Berries”, the escort Seroshapka, having shot the narrator’s partner reaching for berries in the forbidden zone, directly says: “I wanted you - but I didn’t poke my head, you bastard! ..” The feeling that the comrade died “instead of you” is widely described as “a feeling Survivor's Guilt" in relation to the prisoners of the Nazi camps. But Shalamov has a famous formula Primo Levi Primo Levi (1919-1987) Italian poet, novelist and translator. Participated in the anti-fascist resistance, during the war he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, from where he was released Soviet army. After the war, his first book about imprisonment in a concentration camp, Is This a Man? Primo Levi was also known as a translator of texts by Kafka, Heine, Kipling and Levi-Strauss. ⁠ “the worst survived - the best perished all” loses its moralistic coloring: “there are no guilty in the camp” - and at the same time there are no innocents, because the camp inevitably corrupts the soul.

Dante was feared and respected: he was in hell! Invented by him. And Shalamov was in the present. And the real one was scarier.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Deconstructed plots, names and characteristics are constantly redistributed among the characters, although their real prototypes are often known. The only story that is not based on a specific memory and is at the same time biographical is Sherry Brandy, an imaginary story about the death of Osip Mandelstam in a transit camp. When published in Novy Zhurnal (No. 91, 1968), the publisher edited and shortened the story in such a way that it actually began to look like documentary evidence - as a result, many readers were offended by the poet, who in the story disparagingly speaks of his own prose (in fact very important for Shalamov).

Shalamov read "Sherry Brandy" in 1965 at the evening in memory of Mandelstam at Moscow State University, and his answer to the question whether he "canonizes his legend" about the poet's death illustrates him well. creative method: Shalamov, who was on the same transfer in Vladivostok a year before Mandelstam and more than once "reached" in the same way as Mandelstam, clinically accurately describes the death of a man and a poet "from alimentary dystrophy, but simply from hunger", trying to "present with help personal experience what Mandelstam could think and feel as he died was the great equality between bread rations and high poetry, the great indifference and calmness that death from starvation gives, different from all "surgical" and "infectious" deaths.

Shalamov fishes out fragments of memories and, relying on the memory of his own body mutilated by the camp, not so much tells the story as recreates the state, creating "not the prose of a document, but prose suffered as a document." In the place of each of the dead, he himself could or should have been - this is how Shalamov, in a sense, resolves the paradox of Primo Levi: the duty of the survivor is to testify to the catastrophe, but the survivors are not real witnesses, since they are not the rule, but an unnatural exception - “those those who saw the Gorgon did not return to tell about this" 7 Yurgenson L. Duality in Shalamov's stories // Semiotics of fear. Collection of articles / Comp. N. Books and F. Comte. M .: Russian Institute: publishing house "Europe", 2005. S. 329-336. ⁠ .

Sergei Kovalev. Clearing in the taiga. From the album of drawings "North". 1943 Place of creation - Belichya village, Sevlag hospital

Is it true that kindness is impossible in Kolyma?

Shalamov explicitly stated that no - like no other good feelings that do not linger in the thin muscle layer of the goner: “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for fame, honesty - left us with that meat, which we have lost during our long starvation” (“Dry rations”).

But a careful reading of the Kolyma Tales does not confirm this. On the contrary: acts of human kindness are at the center of many stories. An elderly craftsman saves the lives of two intellectuals who call themselves carpenters in order to sit out the terrible frosts in a warm workshop (“Carpenters”). "Domino" is a story about a doctor-prisoner Andrei Mikhailovich, who saved the hero from inevitable death at a gold mine by sending him to paramedic courses (in fact, the doctor's name was Andrei Maksimovich Pantyukhov, he was the head of the second therapeutic department at the Belchia hospital). In the story “Rain”, an unknown prostitute (“For there were no other women except prostitutes in these parts”), passing by the prisoners working in the pit, waved her hand and shouted, pointing them to the sky: “Soon, guys, soon! » “I never saw her again,” says the narrator, “but I remembered her all my life - how could she understand and console us like that” (the woman meant that the sun was setting and the end was near labor day- and the desires of the prisoner do not extend further). In the same collection, in the story "The First Death", the heroine of the same episode receives a name, Anna Pavlovna, becomes the secretary of the head of the mine and dies at the hands of the mine investigator Shtemenko.

“Remember evil before good. To remember everything good is a hundred years, and everything bad is two hundred, ”this is how Shalamov formulates his creed, and, however, he remembers the kind word spoken by a free woman to a tormented brigade all his life.

There are probably worse things to do than dine on a human corpse.

Varlam Shalamov

He says that there is no love and friendship in the camp, but the story “The Snake Charmer” was written by him as if for someone else who conceived this story and died s / c (with the speaking literary name Andrei Platonov), because the author loved him and remembered.

The smallest manifestations of kindness are fixed in the memory precisely as excesses against the backdrop of legalized hell. They cannot be counted on either in others or in oneself, there is no pattern that allows a person to remain morally, except perhaps one that can be deduced from the sum of Shalamov's stories: to die beforehand, to renounce hope.

Frida Vigdorova, having read Kolyma Tales in samizdat, wrote about them to the author: “They are the most cruel of all that I have read. The most bitter and merciless. There are people without a past, without a biography, without memories. It says that trouble does not unite people, a person thinks only about how to survive. But why do you close the manuscript with faith in honor, goodness, human dignity? - to which Shalamov replied: “I tried to look at my heroes from the side. It seems to me that the point here is the strength of spiritual resistance to those forces of evil, in that great moral test, which unexpectedly, by chance, turns out to be positive for the author and his characters. breakdown" 8 Banner. 1993. No. 5. S. 133. ⁠ .

In this great test, as he wrote in the note “What I saw and understood in the camp,” he turned out to be stronger than he himself expected: “he didn’t sell anyone, he didn’t send anyone to death, for a term, he didn’t write a denunciation of anyone.”

In the story “Carpenters”, the hero promises himself that he will never agree to the satisfying position of foreman, in order “not to allow someone else’s human will to be violated here. Even for the sake of his own life, he did not want his dying comrades to throw their dying curses at him. As Solzhenitsyn noted in The Gulag Archipelago, Shalamov was a living refutation of his own pessimistic conception.

How does the hero of Shalamov relate to religion?

Shalamov was the son, grandson, great-grandson of priests, but he himself was not religious and emphasizes this in every possible way in Kolyma Tales. Part of the reason for this was the internal controversy with his father, which he led all his life. However, Shalamov's father joined the movement in the 1920s. renovationists Renovationism is a post-revolutionary movement in Russian Orthodoxy. His goal was to modernize worship and make the administration of the Church more democratic. In the 1920s, the Renovationists were officially recognized Soviet authority However, the movement was soon subjected to repression and was liquidated before the war. ⁠ , and this - rebellious - side of religious life just impressed Shalamov. In the poem "Habakkuk in Pustozersk" Shalamov clearly identifies himself with the martyr of the schism. The allusion will become clearer if we consider that Shalamov, in a certain sense, also suffered “for the old rite” - he belonged to the anti-Stalinist opposition and received his first term in 1929 for printing leaflets called “Lenin's Testament” in an underground printing house. But in general, religion for him is a symbol of resistance. human spirit dehumanizing state machine:

... Our dispute is about freedom,
About the right to breathe
About the will of the Lord
Knit and decide.

From the height of his camp experience, Shalamov did not overestimate the ability of both the intelligentsia and the "people" to resist moral decay in the Kolyma hell: "Religious people, sectarians - that's who, according to my observations, had the fire of spiritual firmness." Probably because moral corruption “was a process, and a long process, many years. The camp is the finale, the ending, the epilogue. The "religious" had an experience of spiritual resistance even in the former Soviet life, and this resistance was a daily habit, a discipline. In the story “The Apostle Paul”, carpenter Adam Frizorger, a former pastor (“there was no man more peaceful than him”), who does not start quarrels with anyone and prays every evening, erroneously included the Apostle Paul among the twelve apostles - disciples of Christ. Corrected by the narrator, he almost lost his mind until he finally remembered the real twelfth apostle he had forgotten - Bartholomew: “I could not, should not have forgotten such things. This is a sin, a big sin.<…>But it's good that you corrected me. Everything will be fine". Why exactly Bartholomew - we can try to guess. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says about him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no guile,” Shalamov’s narrator remarks: “There was nothing feigned in Frisorger’s voice.” Frisorger is a model of ingenuous and meek faith, and in a sense he receives it according to his faith, that is, everything turns out to be “good”: the narrator burns in the stove the statement of Friezorger’s beloved daughter, who renounced her father as an enemy of the people, - he wants to save the old man from this last blow. In this free interpretation, the Apostle Paul turns out to be the narrator himself, for whom this situation becomes a kind of "Road to Damascus" An episode from the life of the Apostle Paul, who before baptism bore the name Saul and persecuted Christians. Once, on the way to Damascus, he heard the voice of Christ asking: “Saul! Saul! Why are you chasing me?" - after which he was blind for three days. In Damascus, Saul was healed and was baptized under the name of Paul. Usually, “the road to Damascus” refers to a certain turning point in life. ⁠ : he does not convert, but the spectacle of genuine alien kindness prompts him to show kindness and pity for another - feelings, as he himself claims, are almost impossible in the camp.

The story “The Unconverted” from the book “The Left Bank” makes it possible to understand the essence of Shalamov’s attitude to religion (since the Kolyma Tales itself, the first collection, is, as it were, an exposition, the first circle of camp hell, many topics raised there are clarified in subsequent collections). The head of the hospital, where Shalamov's hero undergoes medical practice, inclines him to faith. And although the answer is likely to affect her decision (whether the hero becomes a paramedic or returns to the disastrous gold mine), he argues with her: “Is human tragedies Is the only way out religious? - and returns the Gospel to her, to which he prefers the volume of Blok.

“Each person here had his very last, the most important thing - what helped to live, to cling to the life that was so persistently and stubbornly taken from us” (“Day off”): for the imprisoned priest, the liturgy of John Chrysostom becomes such a “last” , Shalamov does not share his faith, but understands. He has his own religion - favorite poems.

Gold quarry in Kolyma. 1941–1944

What does nature mean for Shalamov?

“Nature in the North is not indifferent, not indifferent - it is in collusion with those who sent us here” (“Children's Pictures”). Northern nature is beautiful, but Shalamov does not admire the landscape; on the other hand, he writes everywhere about the frost, which penetrates to the bones and is even worse than hunger. In the story "The Carpenters" the hero pretends to own a craft in order to general works to the workshop - he knows that he will soon be exposed, but even two days in the warmth become a matter of survival: "the day after tomorrow the frost dropped immediately to thirty degrees - the winter is already over."

A person, Shalamov notes, manages to live in conditions in which horses do not last even a month. Not thanks to hope (it doesn’t exist), but only thanks to physical tenacity: “Man became a man not because he is a creation of God, and not because he has an amazing thumb on each hand. But because he was physically stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced his spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle "(" Rain "), - Shalamov paradoxically, as it were, agrees with the state, in the eyes of which "a person is physically strong better, precisely better, more moral, more valuable than a weak person, one who cannot throw twenty cubic meters of soil out of a trench in a shift. The first is more moral than the second” (“Dry rations”). In the story “Tamara the Bitch”, the dog touches the prisoners with “moral firmness”, because it does not steal food (unlike them) and, we add, rushes at the guards (the prisoners do not even think about resistance). In the end, the dog naturally dies: one can moralistically conclude that survival in the camp is a sin, because its inevitable price is a moral compromise. But Shalamov is anti-moralistic. He does not condemn the intellectual who slavishly scratches the heels of Senechka the blatar, opposes 9 Leiderman N. “... In a blizzard, ice age» // Ural. 1992. No. 3. ⁠ to him not another hero (there can be no heroes in Kolyma), but the same nature, persistent northern tree elfin, able to survive everything and rise. A “naturalistic”, apparently, description, a landscape picture, as it unfolds, turns into a philosophical parabola: it turns out that we are talking about courage, stubbornness, patience, indestructibility hope" 10 Sukhikh I. Life after Kolyma // Banner. 2001. No. 6. S. 198-207. ⁠ - hope, the very possibility of which Shalamov consistently denies in Kolyma Tales.

Shalamov's nature is often an allegory. The first text of Kolyma Tales is a short sketch, or prose poem, “In the Snow”, about how prisoners tread a path in a chain: “If you follow the path of the first track to the next, there will be a noticeable, but barely passable narrow path, and not the road, - holes, through which it is more difficult to get through than through virgin soil.<…>Of those who follow the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else’s trail, ”and an unexpected conclusion:“ And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.

According to Leona Toker, the last phrase translates this ordinary plot of camp life into an allegory: the snow turns into a white page. It is not only about the continuity between different authors who survived the Gulag and their testimonies, but also about the internal organization of the Kolyma Tales, where each subsequent text is intended to leave " new track"in the author's vision of the experienced - as the author wrote in his key essay "On Prose", "all stories stand in their place."

Home-made chess made by political prisoner Vladas Ravka in the Nizhne-Donskoy ITL. Rostov region, 1953

Extraction of radioactive uranium near the village of Ust-Omchug. Magadan region, 1942-1943

Why did Varlam Tikhonovich and Alexander Isaevich quarrel?

Relations began quite idyllic. Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn met in 1962 at the editorial office of Novy Mir. The writers were in admiring mutual correspondence and tried to be friends until 1966, but mutual cooling was brewing. The gap occurred after Shalamov refused to become, at the request of Solzhenitsyn, a co-author of The Archipelago, and in the history of literature, the two main Russian camp writers remained antagonists. What happened?

Literary jealousy or at least Shalamov's need to exist in literature as an independent "unit" is obvious, and not in the shadow of Solzhenitsyn, who monopolized the camp theme - and, according to Shalamov, is less familiar with it. In an incredibly complimentary letter about Shalamov, he nevertheless pointed out to Solzhenitsyn that his camp was not quite real: “There is a cat walking around the medical unit - also unbelievable for a real camp - the cat would have been eaten long ago.<…>There are no Blatars in your camp! Your camp without lice! The security service is not responsible for the plan, does not knock it out with rifle butts.<…>Where is this wonderful camp? If only I could sit there for a year.”

Solzhenitsyn admitted that his experience was incomparable with Shalamov's: "I consider you my conscience and ask you to see if I did something against my will, which can be interpreted as cowardice, opportunism." Shalamov responded to the request even too literally - after the death of Shalamov, his diary entries, where Solzhenitsyn is called a “dealer”: “Solzhenitsyn is like a bus passenger who at all stops shouts at the top of his voice: “Driver! I demand! Stop the wagon!" The car stops. This is a safe lead extraordinarily" 11 <1962-1964 гг.>// Banner. 1995. No. 6. ⁠ . Shalamov believed that Solzhenitsyn portrayed the camp too graciously for opportunistic reasons, and reproached him for "prophetic activity."

As Yakov Klots notes, however, “the mask of socialist realism, rented by Solzhenitsyn from the official literary dogma and cleverly tried on by the author, who understood the rules of the game, was the only thing that could make it possible for the story to be published in the Soviet press.<…>... It is in this Aesopian combination of the truthful and the permissible that Solzhenitsyn's great achievement lies, who managed to reach out to the mass reader. Perhaps in this way Solzhenitsyn solved the same literary task like Shalamov is to find “a protocol for translating the inhuman camp experience into something accessible to the human perception" 12 Mikhailik E. The cat running between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov // Shalamov collection: Issue 3. / Comp. V. V. Esipov. Vologda: Griffon, 2002. C.101-114. ⁠ . In the "not quite real" camp, where "you can live", the shadow of the real camp - Ust-Izhma, constantly falls, where Shukhov came and lost his teeth from scurvy, the thieves terrorized the political, and for a careless word they gave a new term. And Shalamov noted and welcomed this flashing "real" camp horror, calling "Ivan Denisovich" a work of deep, accurate and true - and, apparently, once hoping for a story as an icebreaker that would pave the way for his own uncompromising truth in Soviet literature. Later, however, he called Solzhenitsyn in his notebooks a graphomaniac and an adventurer, and Solzhenitsyn gave himself up in his memoirs, writing that he was “artistically not satisfied” by Shalamov’s stories: everyone" 12 Solzhenitsyn A. With Varlam Shalamov // New World. 1999. No. 4. Heading "A writer's diary". ⁠ .

In 1972, in samizdat and in a footnote to The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn bitterly reacted to what he considered Shalamov’s apostasy, his letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta: “... He recanted (for some reason, when everyone had already passed the threats): "The problems of the Kolyma Tales have long been removed by life." The renunciation was printed in a mourning frame, and so we understood everything that - Shalamov died. Shalamov, having learned about this, in the last, unsent letter, caustically called Solzhenitsyn "an instrument of the Cold War." Apparently, the sad truth is that the writers were simply incompatible in almost everything - ideologically, aesthetically, humanly - and the attempt to bring them closer was due to a common experience that they ultimately did not share.

⁠ and New York "New magazine" A literary and journalistic emigrant magazine published in the United States since 1942. Its authors in different years were Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov ⁠ , decided to “use his honest name of a Soviet writer and Soviet citizen” and publishes “Kolyma Tales” in his “slanderous publications”, he himself has never collaborated with such publications and does not intend to continue, and an attempt to expose him as an “underground anti-Soviet”, “internal emigrant" - slander, lies and provocation.

The position and the very style of this letter may shock the unprepared reader, accustomed to seeing in Shalamov an unbending opponent of the Soviet regime and subtle artist words: "disgusting snake practice", requiring "scourge, stigma"; "fetid anti-Soviet leaflet". Shalamov's contemporaries were also shocked, who well remembered Shalamov's dismissive comments about the "repentant letters" of Pasternak (his former idol) after the Western publication of Doctor Zhivago, as well as his letter in support of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (in 1966 sentenced respectively to seven and five years in the camps for publishing "slanderous" works in tamizdat under the pseudonyms Abram Terts and Nikolai Arzhak). AT "White Paper" Collection of materials on the case of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, compiled by human rights activist Alexander Ginzburg in 1966. Ginzburg personally brought a copy of the manuscript to the KGB reception with a demand to exchange the book for the release of the writers. In 1967 he was sentenced to five years in the camps, and " White paper was published abroad. ⁠ Alexandra Ginzburg Shalamov admired the steadfastness of the defendants, who “from beginning to end ... pleaded not guilty and accepted the verdict like real people,” without repentance. The writer was especially blamed for the phrase “The problems of the Kolyma Tales have long been removed by life ...”, read as a renunciation of own creativity and betrayal towards other victims of the Gulag. Boris Lesnyak, an old camp friend of Shalamov, recalled: “The language of this letter told me about everything that happened, it is irrefutable evidence. Shalamov could not express himself in such a language, he did not know how, he was not capable.

Kolyma makes everyone a psychologist

Varlam Shalamov

There were suggestions that the letter was a forgery, that Shalamov was forced to sign it. The writer refuted them: “It is ridiculous to think that you can get some kind of signature from me. Under the gun My statement, its language, style belong to me." The writer explained his decision by the fact that he was "tired of classifying him among humanity." As noted Sergey Neklyudov Sergey Yuryevich Neklyudov (1941) - folklorist, orientalist. The largest researcher of the epic of the Mongolian peoples, researcher of the structure of fairy tales. He worked at the Institute of World Literature, was the editor of the Living Antiquity magazine about Russian folklore. Currently professor at the Center for Typology and Semiotics of Folklore at the Russian State University for the Humanities. ⁠ , Shalamov “was a very uncorporate person who did not want to merge with any group, even from a distance and sympathetic to him. He did not want to stand with anyone in the same row. This applied not only to, say, the Writers' Union, which he was initially not going to join for ideological reasons, but also to left-wing radical circles, as they would say now, dissident ones, to which he also belonged. wary" 14 Neklyudov S. Third Moscow // Shalamovsky collection. Issue. 1. / Comp. V. V. Esipov. Vologda, 1994. S. 162-166. ⁠ . According to Neklyudov, Shalamov did not want to be published abroad, because he wanted to receive reparation and recognition from the motherland, which treated him so inhumanly, to defend his right as a writer to tell his compatriot reader the truth.

In part, Shalamov still tried to improve his position by writing. The playwright Alexander Gladkov wrote in his diary in 1972 from his words that the letter was originally intended for the selection committee of the SSP and only then got into the newspaper. Shalamov's friend Boris Lesnyak recalls the writer's words: “What do you think: can I live on seventy rubles of a pension? After the stories were printed in Posev, the doors of all Moscow editorial offices were closed to me.<…>Started up, bastards, stories in bottling and takeaway. If only they printed it as a book! It would be a different conversation ... "The last - artistic - consideration is very important: "Kolyma Tales" is compositionally organized according to the author's intention, this is an integral work. “In this collection,” wrote Shalamov, “only some of the stories can be replaced and rearranged, while the main, supporting ones should stand in their places.”

The most witty consideration about Shalamov's motives suggested 15 Toker, L. Samizdat and the Problem of Authorial Control: The Case of Varlam Shalamov // Poetics Today. 2008. 29(4). pp. 735-758. Translation from English by Maria Desyatova, edited by the author. ⁠ Israeli researcher Leona Toker: the letter to the Literary Gazette was not an act of public repentance and renunciation of the Kolyma Tales, but an attempt to control their fate. Given that the works published in tamizdat and samizdat were blocked from official publications, it can be assumed that in this way Shalamov, on the contrary, draws attention to his "Kolyma Tales" by smuggle in the official Soviet press the first and last mention of their very existence, as well as their exact name and even content (the toponym "Kolyma" spoke for itself), prompting the target audience to look for them in samizdat.

bibliography

• Beryutti M. Varlam Shalamov: literature as a document // On the centenary of the birth of Varlam Shalamov. Conference materials. M., 2007. C. 199–208.
• Varlam Shalamov in the testimonies of contemporaries. Collection. Personal edition, 2011.
• Dubin B. Protocol as a primer with pictures // Session. 2013. No. 55/56. pp. 203–207.
• Esipov V. Varlam Shalamov and his contemporaries. Vologda: Book heritage, 2007.

• Klots Y. Varlam Shalamov between tamizdat and the Union Soviet writers(1966–1978). To the 50th anniversary of the release of "Kolyma Tales" in the West.
• Leiderman N. "... In a blizzard, chilling age" // Ural. 1992. No. 3.
• Mikhailik E. The cat running between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov // Shalamov collection: Issue 3. / Comp. V. V. Esipov. Vologda: Griffon, 2002, pp. 101–114.
• Neklyudov S. Third Moscow // Shalamovsky collection. Issue. 1. / Comp. V. V. Esipov. Vologda, 1994, pp. 162–166.
• Nekrasov V. Varlam Shalamov. Posted by Viktor Kondyrev. The manuscript is stored in the Department of Manuscripts of the Russian National Library (St. Petersburg). F. 1505. Unit. ridge 334. 10 l. Email resource: http://nekrassov-viktor.com/Books/Nekrasov-Varlam-Shalamov.aspx
• Podoroga V. The Tree of the Dead: Varlam Shalamov and the GULAG Time (Experience in Negative Anthropology) // UFO. 2013. No. 120.
• Roginsky A. From evidence to literature // Varlam Shalamov in the context of world literature and Soviet history. Sat. articles / Comp. and ed. S. M. Solovyov. M.: Litera, 2013. S. 12–14.
• Sinyavsky A. About Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales. Slice of material // Sinyavsky AD Literary process in Russia. Moscow: RGGU, 2003, pp. 337–342.
• Solzhenitsyn A. With Varlam Shalamov // New World. 1999. No. 4. Heading "A writer's diary".
• Solovyov S. Oleg Volkov - the first reviewer of "Kolyma Tales" // Banner. 2015. No. 2. S. 174–180.
• Sukhikh I. Life after Kolyma // Banner. 2001. No. 6. S. 198–207.
• Fomichev S. Following Pushkin's trail // Shalamovsky collection. Issue. 3 / Comp. V. V. Esipov. Vologda: Griffin, 2002.
• Shalamov V. From notebooks. Scattered records<1962–1964 гг.>// Banner. 1995. No. 6.
• Shalamov V. About prose // Collected works: In 4 volumes. Moscow: Khudozh. lit.: Vagrius, 1998.
• Yurgenson L. Duality in Shalamov's stories // Semiotics of fear. Collection of articles / Comp. N. Books and F. Comte. M.: Russian Institute: publishing house "Europe", 2005. S. 329–336.
• Toker, L. Samizdat and the Problem of Authorial Control: The Case of Varlam Shalamov // Poetics Today. 2008. 29(4). pp. 735–758. Translation from English by Maria Desyatova, edited by the author.

All bibliography

Kolyma stories Varlam Shalamov. Panorama of living hell

(ratings: 2 , average: 5,00 out of 5)

Title: Kolyma stories

About the book "Kolyma Tales" Varlam Shalamov

Books like Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov are very difficult to read. No, not because it's badly written. Vice versa. But when you read his stories, you begin to understand that everything Hollywood movies horrors “nervously smoke on the sidelines” compared to what millions of Russians actually experienced in the 20th century. Constant insatiable hunger, a temperature of -50, a 16-hour exhausting, full of anger and cruelty, a working day after an unfortunate portion of muddy stew ...

Yes, all this was, and not so long ago. The book "Kolyma Tales" by Varlam Shalamov, a witness to all the events described, is about this. Here's another reason why these little stories are so hard to read. Just because it becomes incredibly sorry for the author and those people who, by the will of fate, ended up in living hell. "Kolyma stories" - one of. I recommend everyone to read it, if only in order to know and remember what humanity can do with a person.

You can download Kolyma Tales at the bottom of the page in epub, rtf, fb2, txt format.

The reader really opens up a cruel, cold and unusually terrible panorama of the life of imprisoned people. Among them most of- former intellectuals who became enemies of the people. These are writers, and doctors, and scientists. Steel state millstones grinded everyone indiscriminately. At the same time, both the soul was broken and the body was crippled ...

Once upon a time, Julius Fucek wrote his "Report with a noose around his neck." I can't even put into words how much more cruel Shalamov's Kolyma Tales is. Here people are not just beaten or interrogated, they are tortured daily. inhuman conditions existence (language will not dare to call this is life). Prisoners' bodies shrivel, teeth wobble, gums bleed, sagging skin covered with bloody sores; frostbitten fingers fester, bones have long been overcome by osteomyelitis, and dysentery does not give rest for a day. And this is just a grain of the horror that the evil and unfair fate has prepared for the prisoners ...

A living one is killed because of a sweater. Linen is stolen from the dead to be exchanged for food. The dead man becomes a doll, with the help of which they get an “extra” portion of bread for two more days. People are mocked to such an extent that they themselves turn into soulless creatures ... They are used only as machines that can work in fifty-degree frost.

Unrealistically terrible physical and mental anguish ... but for what? For saying the word, expressing his thought. God, what a heavenly time now compared to the one described by Varlam Shalamov. We have something to eat, we have a roof over our heads, we are warm and well. And for that you should be grateful!

On our site about books site you can download for free or read online book Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and a real pleasure to read. Buy full version you can have our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginner writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary skills.

Quotes from the book "Kolyma Tales" Varlam Shalamov

And the person lives. Maybe he lives in hope? If he is not a fool, he cannot live in hope. That's why there are so many suicides.

Aunt Polya died in the hospital of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-two. An autopsy confirmed the doctor's diagnosis. However, in our hospital, the pathoanatomical diagnosis rarely disagreed with the clinical one - this happens in the best and worst hospitals.

Man is happy with his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to forget the bad and remember only the good.

It turns out that the person who committed meanness does not die.

The unpunished massacre of millions of people succeeded because they were innocent people. They were martyrs, not heroes.

Another machinist is a representative of the Moscow center of "jokes" (by God, I'm not lying!). Friends gathered on Saturdays as families and told jokes to each other. Five years, Kolyma, death.

I went to book store. Solovyov's "Russian History" was sold in the second-hand bookshop - for 850 rubles all volumes. No, I will not buy books before Moscow. But to hold books in your hands, to stand near the counter of a bookstore - it was like a good meat borscht.

The bears heard a rustle. Their reaction was instantaneous, like that of a football player during a match.

If misfortune and need rallied, gave birth to the friendship of people, then this need is not extreme and the misfortune is not great. Grief is not sharp and deep enough to be shared with friends. In real need, only one's own mental and bodily strength is known, the limits of one's capabilities, physical endurance and moral strength are determined.

The first illusion was over quickly. This is an illusion of work, that very labor, about which on the gates of all camp departments there is an inscription prescribed by the camp charter: "Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism." The camp, on the other hand, could instill and instilled only hatred and aversion to work.

Free download the book "Kolyma stories" Varlam Shalamov

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