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Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was born in Vologda, a small city outside of Moscow, to a teacher and a Russian Orthodox priest. Shalamov attended the Moscow State University in the Department of Soviet Law, and during his years as a student joined a group of Trotskyites. In 1929, he was arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labor and sent to a camp north of the Ural Mountains. After his release, he returned to Moscow, where he married, had a daughter, and worked as a journalist, and wrote poetry and short stories. In 1937, Shalamov was arrested again and spent the next seventeen years in the labor camps of the Kolyma River basin, a period that he would describe in his Kolyma Stories. He was released in the 1950s and allowed publish some of his poetry, though in the 1970s, when he was dependent on the Soviet Writers' Union for money, was forced to denounce his work abroad in a public letter. Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. He introduced and translated Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls from the Russian for NYRB Classics.
Sharply observed stories, from the thin line between autobiography and fiction, of life inside the Gulag...Available only for the last five years in Russia itself, a searing document, worthy of shelving alongside Solzhenitsyn. --Kirkus starred review Suffering--elemental suffering--can never be told. It cannot be explained, painted, can't be turned into music, can't even be written about, because then it will be only painted, sung, or written suffering. There is no other state--only that of suffering--where the distance between a narration merely truthful and a narration that is truth itself creates such an achingly unfathomable abyss. It is this that elevates the work of Varlam Shalamov. His torturous secret resides in how the focus of his attention is turned only toward the frozen crenellation of palpable concrete details. What he knew about the human being was appalling. And although none of this can be transmitted--nonetheless, he transmits it to us. To us, who will never realize what we have received from him. --Laszlo Krasznahorkai Like the landscape gardeners of the late 18th century, Shalamov builds ruins. The sketches remain fragments because they are about fragments--of men, of society, of dreams. --Jay Martin, The New York Times Book Review 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 A numbness of sorts pervades the tales as a whole, as if the accumulation of horrors could not be related or understood except under very heavy sedation. In Andrei Sinyavsky's apt characterization of Varlam Shalamov: ' He writes as if he were dead.' --Maurice Friedberg, Commentary Suffering--elemental suffering--can never be told. It cannot be explained, painted, can't be turned into music, can't even be written about, because then it will be only painted, sung, or written suffering. There is no other state--only that of suffering--where the distance between a narration merely truthful and a narration that is truth itself creates such an achingly unfathomable abyss. It is this that elevates the work of Varlam Shalamov. His torturous secret resides in how the focus of his attention is turned only toward the frozen crenellation of palpable concrete details. What he knew about the human being was appalling. And although none of this can be transmitted--nonetheless, he transmits it to us. To us, who will never realize what we have received from him. --Laszlo Krasznahorkai Like the landscape gardeners of the late 18th century, Shalamov builds ruins. The sketches remain fragments because they are about fragments--of men, of society, of dreams. --Jay Martin, The New York Times Book Review 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 A numbness of sorts pervades the tales as a whole, as if the accumulation of horrors could not be related or understood except under very heavy sedation. In Andrei Sinyavsky's apt characterization of Varlam Shalamov: ' He writes as if he were dead.' --Maurice Friedberg, Commentary Like the landscape gardeners of the late 18th century, Shalamov builds ruins. The sketches remain fragments because they are about fragments--of men, of society, of dreams. --Jay Martin, The New York Times Book Review 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 A numbness of sorts pervades the tales as a whole, as if the accumulation of horrors could not be related or understood except under very heavy sedation. In Andrei Sinyavsky's apt characterization of Varlam Shalamov: ' He writes as if he were dead.' --Maurice Friedberg, Commentary
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