Mia Levitin

Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature

No detail is spared of the gulag’s barbarity, where political prisoners were at the mercy of hardened criminals as well as the guards

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  • Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories

    by Varlam Shalamov, translated from the Russian by Donald Rayfield

    NYRB Classics, pp. 576, £18

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