Talk: ‘Kolyma Stories’ by Varlam Shalamov

Pushkin House invites to join the talk devoted to the publication of the second volume of Donald Rayfield’s new translation of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories.

These stories present an inimitable depiction of the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. A journalist and poet with pro-Trotsky sympathies, Shalamov faced fifteen years of imprisonment over the course of Stalin’s reign. After years of brutally enforced labor in the gold and coal mines of Kolyma, Shalamov eventually became a medical assistant, a fact which probably saved his life. These years in the camps formed the basis of his life’s work, a monumental collection of short stories that took him nearly twenty years to complete. Only a few of the stories in Sketches of the Criminal World have been translated into English before; many of the original manuscripts have only been recently discovered in the Russian archives.

Shalamov’s work is often compared to Solzhenitsyn’s classic The Gulag Archipelago. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, however, Shalamov refuses to sentimentalize his harrowing experiences or engage in ideological battles. The irredeemable exists, he insists, and this new volume centers on the seemingly boundless displays of immorality he witnessed in the camps and the mines. His subject is not his Soviet captors nor political dissidents but the criminal subcultures among the convicts: prisoners who, jailed not for intellectual or political “crimes” but for violent offenses, formed gangs and dominated the rest of the camp.

Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) was born in Vologda in western Russia to a Russian Orthodox priest and his wife. Shalamov worked as a journalist in Moscow before increasingly turning to fiction and poetry following his first arrest and three-year sentence in 1929. Following a 15-year stretch between Russian Gulags from 1936 to 1951, Shalamov returned to Moscow and began writing what would become the Kolyma Stories. He also wrote many volumes of poetry, including Ognivo (1961) and Moskovskiye oblaka (1972). He died of pneumonia in 1982.

In English