Kolyma Tales

Product Information

Conditions were atrocious and the stories reflect this – there is brutality, starvation, freezing cold, extreme isolation, and hard arduous work. This can make for relentlessly glum reading – but all the stories are different and some have a sardonic twist, albeit dark. Life was on a day-to-day basis. There is pleasure and perturbation in this huge collection. Shalamov’s writing has a light, clear-eyed quality, even if the subject is the inhumane futility of life in the Soviet gulag.”— The Irish Times At once, as the convicts are described as writers, the new road becomes not simply a supply route between camp and mine, but a route of transmission between the camp and the wider society, between secrecy and truth, and Kolyma Tales announces itself as a work that will, at all times, operate simultaneously on distinct levels. Similarly, in The Life of Engineer Kipreev, the description of a mirror appears to double as comment on the importance and the cost of bearing witness: This act is enough for the guards to prove to the new supervisor that his strategy of feeding the prisoners properly doesn’t work. This is when the rationalization for the treatment of prisoners comes through; according to one of the guards, the prisoners only “start moving [their] shovels” when they’re cold and hungry (Shalamov 88). Without a proper meal, it’s much harder for a prisoner to keep themselves warm in the freezing Siberian temperatures. By moving and doing work, it helps warm them up. In addition, without the desperation of hunger, prisoners don’t care as much about working towards their next rations. It’s appalling to see how blasé the guards are about basic human rights, but this small portion of the story helps contextualize the treatment of the prisoners throughout the rest of the book. And suddenly I realized that that night’s dinner had given the sectarian the strength he needed for his suicide. He needed that extra portion of kasha to make up his mind to die. There are times when a man has to hurry so as not to lose his will to die.

In 1991, the Shalamov family house in Vologda, next to the town's cathedral, was turned into the Shalamov Memorial Museum and local art gallery. The cathedral hill in Vologda has been named in his memory. Kurtén, B. (1964). "The evolution of the polar bear, Ursus maritimus (Phipps)". Acta Zoologica Fennica. 108: 1–26. Hochschild, Adam (1994). "17: Beyond the Pole Star". The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (published 2003). p.237. ISBN 0-547-52497-8 . Retrieved 14 June 2017. Secret police authorities in Kolyma today say there are records—sometimes a complete file, sometime just a name on a list—of two million men and women who were shipped to the territory between 1930 and the mid-1950s. But no one knows, even approximately, how many of these prisoners died. Even historians who have spent years studying Kolyma come up with radically different numbers. I asked four such researchers, who between them have written or edited more than half a dozen books on the gulag, what was the total Kolyma death toll. One estimated it at 250,000, another at 300,000, one at 800,000, and one at 'more than 1,000,000.' Dalstroy was the agency created to manage exploitation of the Kolyma area, based principally on the use of forced labour. Varlam Shalamov spent, in total, seventeen years in prison and labour camps or Gulags. After his final release he commenced work upon a collection of short stories that dealt with camp and prison life. This collection came to be called Kolyma Tales. Kolyma is the name of the region where the camp was located in which the author served ten years. As this book, and others, attest life in the Russian labour camps was extraordinarily grim, with arctic conditions, beatings, scurvy, meagre rations, and near-unendurable work being the norm; the prisons weren’t much better.There can be no doubt that Shalamov’s reportage from the lower depths of the Gulag of a society building a ‘new world’ will remain forever among the masterpieces of documentary or memoir literature and an invaluable source for the present and future understanding of the ‘Soviet human condition.’”—Laszlo Dienes, World Literature Today The complete set of Kolyma Tales is based on two areas: personal experiences and fictional accounts of stories heard. In 1946, while becoming a dokhodyaga (one in an emaciated and devitalized state, which in Russian literally means one who is walking towards the ultimate end), his life was saved by a doctor-inmate, A. I. Pantyukhov, who risked his own life to get Shalamov a place as a camp hospital attendant. The new career allowed Shalamov to survive and concentrate on writing poetry. Kolyma Tales was finally published on Russian soil in 1987, as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy. May 1952: According to commandant Mitrakov, Sevvoslag is dissolved, Dalstroy transformed into the General Board of Labour Camps

Shalamov joined a Trotskyist-leaning group and on February 19, 1929, was arrested and sent to Butyrskaya prison for solitary confinement. He was later sentenced to three years of correctional labor in the town of Vizhaikha, convicted of distributing the "Letters to the Party Congress" known as Lenin's Testament, which were critical of Joseph Stalin, and of participating in a demonstration marking the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution with the slogan "Down with Stalin". Courageously he refused to sign the sentence branding him a criminal. Later, he would write in his short stories that he was proud of having continued the Russian revolutionary tradition of members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and Narodnaya Volya, who were fighting against tsarism. He was taken by train to the former Solikamsk monastery, which was transformed into a militsiya headquarters of the Vishera department of Solovki ITL [1] [ bettersourceneeded]Late in life, Shalamov got on bad terms with Solzhenitsyn and other fellow dissidents, and opposed the publication of his own works abroad. December 1938: Osip Mandelstam, an eminent Russian poet, dies in a transit camp en route to Kolyma. One interesting story was on Russian prisoners of war who were “liberated” by Stalin’s armies – and then sent immediately to the Gulag (Siberia, Kolyma) to spend twenty or so years for having been captured by the Nazis. Soviet soldiers were not supposed to surrender. The camp administrator is rude and cruel; the persons responsible for propaganda lie; the doctor has no conscience. But all this is trivial in comparison with the corrupting power of the criminal world. In spite of everything, the authorities are still human beings, and the human element in them does survive. The criminals are not human. There are indications that the political prisoners were gradually phased out over the years but it was only as a result of Boris Yeltsin's far reaching reforms in the 1990s that the very last prisoners were released from Kolyma.

Kolyma Tales or Kolyma Stories ( Russian: Колымские рассказы, Kolymskiye rasskazy) is the name given to six collections of short stories by Russian author Varlam Shalamov, about labour camp life in the Soviet Union. He began working on this book in 1954 and continued until 1973. The book is considered Shalamov's magnum opus as a writer and one of the most important works of Russian 20th-century literature.

Success!

Yesipov, Valery (2002). "Cerebration or Genuflection? (Varlam Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsin)". shalamov.ru. Archived from the original on 11 August 2018. Translation from Russkij Sever [The Russian North] №. 4 (23–29 of January), 2002, p. 17 This was a tough read but one I am very glad to have read. This was a collection of stories about the conditions in Soviet forced-labour camps during the Stalinist regime. It definitely filled in many of the knowledge gaps I had of what happened in the Siberian gulags. Only someone who spent time in a Siberian labour camp could ever have come up with such a collection of short stories, stories that capture the abysmal conditions of the camps, describe what the camp does to the human psyche (both the prisoner’s and the officer’s), and the new codes the prisoners must adhere to. What I found astounding were the details included in each story. They were definitely not things most of us would consider. Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich (1994) Kolyma tales [Kolymskie rasskazy], Glad, John (transl.), Penguin twentieth-century classics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, ISBN 0-14-018695-6 Shalamov is suggesting, I believe, that it was his loyalty to old-fashioned ideas of courage and honour that led to him spending over sixteen years in Kolyma. Shalamov was one of the relatively few people whom the NKVD arrested for an actual reason — rather than simply to fulfil a quota. In 1927 he had taken part in a demonstration on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution; one of the slogans had been “Down with Stalin!” And he was arrested for the first time as early as 1929; he had been involved in an attempt to print and distribute the suppressed letter Lenin wrote shortly before his death, recommending that Stalin be removed from his post as General Secretary of the Party. ***

We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months — after that we don’t need him anymore.” – Naftaly Frenkel, Camp commander [from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago].During the Pleistocene the ecology of this part of Beringia was quite different from modern times, with the extinct Wooly mammoth and the wooly rhinoceros being present. [31] The first of the poems in the Kolyma Notebooks is prefatory; Shalamov compares his poems to wild animals that have grown up in a granite cage. This granite cage is, of course, Kolyma, but the implication that the poems are in any way nonliterary is intentionally misleading; Shalamov may have been living far from the supposed centres of Russian culture, but his knowledge of Russian culture was profound. And in the very next poem he alludes to “Echo”, a famous short poem by Alexander Pushkin comparing the poet to an echo: like an echo, the poet responds to all the sounds of the world but receives no response himself. Shalamov describes himself breathing freely and “with all his chest” as he recites his poems to himself in a deserted landscape, with an echo from the distant hills as his only response. What for Pushkin was a metaphor is for Shalamov a literal reality.