The Kolyma Tales

Kolyma Tales is Varlam Shalamov's book of short stories of labour camp life in the Soviet Union. He began working on this book in 1954 and continued until 1973.

Background

Varlam Shalamov was born in 1907 and was arrested for an unknown crime in 1929 while he was a student at Moscow University. He was sentenced to 3 years in a former monastery in Solovki which had been converted into a concentration camp. He was arrested again in 1937 and sentenced to 5 years in Kolyma, northwestern Siberia. His sentence was extended in 1942 until the end of the war and then in 1943 he had to serve another 10 years. In total, Shalamov spent around 17 years in the camps.He began to write Kolyma tales after he was released but it was not to be published in the Soviet Union until after his death in 1982. Instead he published five collections of poetry, although it didn't bring him much success.

The stories

The complete set of Kolyma Tales is based on two areas: personal experiences and fictional accounts of stories heard. He attempted to mix fact and fiction, which leads to the book being something of a historical novel. The style used is similar to Checkov's, in which a story is told objectively and leaves the readers to make their own interpretations. Often brutal and shocking, the matter-of-fact style makes them appear more hard-hitting than using a sensationalist style.The stories are based around the life of the prisoners (political or professional) in the camp and their relations with the officials. We find accounts of prisoners who have become totally dispassionate, insane under the barbaric conditions, unemotionally murderous and suicidal.Despite being written about imprisonment under the Stalinist regime, Shalamov didn't make a single mention of Stalin in the book except for a brief mentioning of a large portrait of the man in an administrator's office.

The publication

The original manuscript of Kolyma Tales was taken to the United States in 1966. Individual tales were published in the New Review between 1970 and 1976. The Russian version appeared in print only in 1978 by Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd in London.They could only be printed with a note claiming that they were being published without the author's consent in order to protect Shalamov.In 1980, John Glad had Kolyma Tales published from his own translations, which featured a selection of the stories. The follow-up book, Graphite, comprised of the other stories by Shalamov.The book first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1989 and it was bought in bulk by queues of Soviet people.

In his book Straw Dogs, the philosopher John N. Gray uses Kolyma Tales as an example of man's inhumanity to man and the fiction of morality:

"Kolyma was a place in which morality had ceased to exist. In what Shalamov drily called 'literary fairy tales', deep human bonds are forged under the pressure of tragedy and need; but in fact no tie of friendship or sympathy was strong enough to survive life in Kolyma: 'If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great'".

References

*Golden, Nathaniel (2004) "Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma tales : a formalist analysis", Studies in Slavic literature and poetics, 41, Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 193 p., ISBN 90-420-1198-X
*Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich (1994) "Kolyma tales" [Kolymskie rasskazy] , Glad, John (transl.), Penguin twentieth-century classics, Harmondsworth : Penguin, ISBN 0-14-018695-6