We understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither. Grown men cried if they weren't able to do that. It was much more important to learn to button your pants in the frost. In "Dry Rations" Shalamov writes: "We had no pride, vanity, or ambition, and jealousy and passion seemed as alien to us as Mars, and trivial in addition. These two dozen tales depict the dehumanization of man as witnessed by a victim who possessed the determination to remember and the talent to communicate.įor example, "In the Night" portrays Glebov, a former doctor, stealing underwear from a frozen corpse to trade for bread or some tobacco. John Glad has made a valuable contribution to our appreciation of an important contemporary Russian writer by making available a representative selection of Shalamov's stories for the first time in English translation, carefully preserving the understated Chekhovian style of the original. "Shalamov's experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own," said Solzhenitsyn, "and I respectfully confess that 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." In "The Gulag Archipelago" Alexander Solzhinitsyn wrote that when he began his work he knew of no memoirs dealing with the camps.Then he became avquainted with the Kolyma stories and asked Shalamov to collaborate with him, but Shalamov was too old and sick to accept.
Shalamov spent almost 17 years in the caps and later described his experiences in 60 short stories that circulated unofficially inside the Soviet Union in samizdatm manuscripts during the last two decades and were published in the West in Russian emigre magazines. Thirty years old in 1937, he was arrested by the secret police during one of the vast political purges of that period for the "crime" of having praised Ivan Bunin, the emigre Russian writer who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature a few years earlier. As Conquest wrote in "The Great Terror." "No cap area had quite the reputation of Kolyma for isolation, cold and death." "Kolyma, Kolyma, faraway planet/ Twelve months winter, the rest summer." This verse was sung by the forced laborers of Stalin's concentration camps in the northeastern Siberian gold fields where, according to Robert Conquest, 2 to 3 million prisoners perished in temperatures reaching minus 70 degrees C.
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