‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag survivor. Sentenced to hard labour for Trotskyist activities, Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, primarily in Kolyma, located at the edge of the Arctic Circle, eight time zones east of Moscow and ‘one of the most uninhabitable places on earth’, according to the geopolitical journalist Tim Marshall.‘Instead of yesterday’s minus 40 it was only minus 25,’ Shalamov writes in one of the stories, ‘and the day seemed like summer.’
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Shalamov set out to chronicle life in the camps, producing 1,000 pages of what Masha Gessen, the Russian–American author and translator, has aptly called ‘the most harrowing and claustrophobic descriptions in the history of literature’. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, an avowed atheist, despite being the son of an Orthodox priest, refuses any redemptive narrative. Human beings live ‘by instinct’, he writes, ‘a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal’.
The stories appeared piecemeal in the late 1960s in émigré journals and were passed around as samizdat in Russia. Although such distribution increased awareness of his work, Shalamov resented the loss of authorial control, as editors took liberties amending and reordering the text. He died in 1982, seven years before perestroika allowed for their official publication in Russia, which saw people queuing to buy copies.
Thanks to this new two-volume translation by Donald Rayfield, English speakers now have access to the six collections of stories in the Kolyma Tales in their entirety. (Rayfield has worked directly from the original manuscript, whereas the previous translator, John Glad, relied on edited émigré editions.)
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