Varlam Shalamov (1907-1-982)
In the mid-1960s the editor of these pages met Varlam Shalamov several times a week at the kitchen table of Nadezhda Mandelstam (see p. 387). There, too, he read some of the most remarkable Russian prose of this century—Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, which existed then only in typed copies, clan-destinely circulated. They have now been published in the United States in two volumes, skillfully translated by John Glad: Kolyma Tales (1980) and Graphite (1981).
These volumes have only recently appeared in what was the Soviet Union, for even Solzhenitsyn (see p. 419) agrees that Shalamov is the most powerful witness to the extermination by Stalin of many millions of human lives. Kolyma is a region in northeastern Siberia that is over five times the size of France; it registers the lowest temperatures of any inhabited area in the Northern Hemisphere. It has abundant mineral deposits, the most valuable being gold. Under the oddest, most schizoid, and most self-defeating management policy ever conceived, the work force had the dual assignment to mine much-needed gold and die miserably in the process. When millions of men whose replacements are assured are thrown at a simple physical task, only a small percentage need survive and function for a reasonable time. The Soviet government always had an urgent need for the wealth buried in its remote eastern regions, and an equally urgent need to rid itself of those deemed to be a threat to its existence. Kolyma was the answer, and Shalamov was its poet.
In 1937 Shalamov was informed on by someone who overheard him express the opinion that Ivan Bunin (see p. 58) was a classical Russian author. For this crime he spent seventeen years in Kolyma. Hitler acknowledged the Bolsheviks as his teachers in certain techniques of population control, but his preferred instrument was fire. Stalin used ice.
In his person, Shalamov rather resembled a prehistoric creature discovered intact in a glacier and revived, though his terrifying exhumed appearance was no guide at all to his remarkably courteous and good-humored nature. Gorky’s marvelous description of Tolstoy’s hands (see p. 31) could be applied word for word to the immense, restless hands of Shalamov.
His prose has what can only be described as a rough-hewn finish, and the stories themselves—which are by no means all “stories” in the traditional sense—seem to have been put together out of whatever materials and primitive tools came to hand. Shalamov makes no distinction between what he witnessed and what he imagined (the account of the death of Osip Mandelstam, for instance, is sheer invention, as Shalamov himself told me, to comment obliquely on our ignorance of what actually became of him).
This description of his work would hardly seem to promise the reader the experience of a work of art, and it is true that some of the prose pieces, taken individually, have an unfinished and haphazard air. The cumulative effect, however, is that of a masterfully planned and executed replica of life so near the edge of madness, exhaustion, and death that it seems at times hallucinated, with gaps in consciousness. Shalamov is the least rhetorical and most impersonal of modem Russian writers. He presents without comment.