Varlam Shalamov and the Secrets of the Gulag

There are as many different attitudes towards the author as there are readers, or at the very least, as there are critics. Some people can’t stand it when a writer intervenes to let us know that a given act was moral or immoral, or to preach a little bit upon a topic close to their heart. But others can’t wait for the author to materialise, as though reading is more about having a self-help guru and guide than a place to go to get away. Intervention usually takes us out of the story, because even if the ‘wise’ words come from a character, often it’s easy to see the way they seem to stand up straighter, possessed as they suddenly are by the ghost of their writer’s convictions. In many cases, our attitude towards this all depends as much on the author in question as on everything else. When it comes to the Russians many of us are happy to sit through one of Dostoevsky’s sermons to get to the action on the other side, whereas when Tolstoy starts telling us what’s what in the study of history in the epilogue of War and Peace, most people throw the book across the room.

The more serious the subject matter, the more we expect authorial intervention, as though experience and suffering and the thematic ambition of a work has somehow entitled the writer to preach upon the topic with authority. It makes sense – the more serious the questions that the work is raising or attempting to solve – the more important the opinion of the author will be to them, and the greater will be their desire to share it with us. It is precisely the lack of all this in the Kolyma Tales that comes as such a relief. Here, the seriousness of the subject matter – life in the Gulag at the height of Stalinism – is accompanied instead by a seriousness of authorial silence. Brutality, cruelty, fear, and death pass with nary a comment, so that the silence of the work becomes as much a statement as any tract, and the reader is left to decide for themselves what, if anything, there is to take away from all this.

Here is my review of Kolymskie Rasskazi, or the Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov. I have to say I am absolutely in awe of these little stories, most of which are only a few pages long. Though I have been to the Gulag Museum in Moscow, (and thoroughly recommend it), Shalamov himself was imprisoned in the zone for fifteen whole years! Some of his sentences were for crimes as petty as suggesting that the first Russian Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Bunin, was actually pretty good – as a noble who departed after the Revolution, Bunin was very much unacceptable within the USSR in either spirit or person. For much of this time Shalamov was made to work at the Gulag camps in Kolyma, a region in the far North East of Russia to the north of the sea of Okhotsk. Apart from gold and other metals, the area is a sparsely populated wasteland, where nature is as much of an enemy as one’s fellow man. And it was to here, in the height of Stalin’s power and paranoia, that many prisoners were sent, their duty being the harvesting of resources, whatever the cost. In such a place, a life loses its value. Yet Shalamov survived all this, managing to return home when his sentence was done and pass away, aged 74, in 1982. He published some poetry while alive, but as for his prose none of these tales were published within the USSR during his lifetime – they went too far, their implied criticism of the regime’s actions went too deep. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who ultimately had contacts who could help him in getting his works out, Shalamov shunned acquaintances who could be of use to him, including Solzhenitsyn himself. After the camps he wasn’t exactly one for trusting.

These stories, both fiction and non-fiction and almost impossible to tell between the two, are his record of that life. They are written in a style reminiscent of Chekhov. The narrator describes the build up to an event, its climax, and then the story ends without any kind of moral tying together of its strands. The reader is left entirely to come to their own conclusions. The style is matter-of-fact, unadorned with much by way of metaphor. The only colour comes from the occasional descriptions of the barren but simultaneously strikingly beautiful nature, and the “fenia”, or prison slang, of the convicts. I’ve been reading the translation by Donald Rayfield for the moment, but I will be going back and rereading in the original in the coming weeks, and not only because I’ll be writing essays on it.

The first story, “Trampling the snow” in Rayfield’s translation, “Po Snegu” in the original, describes the process of creating a road through the snow by the prisoners. It is barely more than a page long, and describes a process rather than a single event as do most of the other stories, but there is much here that prefigures the rest of the work. The warfare between man – and here it is a man’s world only – and nature, is indicated first by the sentence: “Roads are always made on calm days, so that human labor is not swept away by wind”. But here also are hints of the state that humanity is reduced to – in both the original and the translation, the word “human” is a mere adjective describing their work. It hints, I think, subtly at the fact that human lives are secondary here to their productivity, at least in the eyes of the camp organisers. At the end of the first paragraph there is also a description of a man who “steers his body through the snow like a helmsman steering a boat along a river, from one bend to the next”. It is a striking image because of the sheer dislocation between mind and body that it implies – all the result of the degrading conditions of the camp.  

Throughout the stories there are attempts to show how it is that people survive so far away from comfort and safety. Solzhenitsyn liked to stress the redemptive power of manual work, but Shalamov had no such convictions. At the end of “trampling the snow” we find that every member of a group must bear responsibility for setting down part of the trail, no matter their physical state – the implications of this only becomes fully clear once the descriptions of starvation and suffering pile up as the stories run on. There is little kindness or communal spirit, no sense of lightening the load for others if it is within our power. In “Condensed Milk” the narrator receives two whole tins filled with condensed milk and eats them with a large audience, but doesn’t think of sharing. In “Field rations” the he comments that nobody can have friends out here. Instead, prisoners are shown to be extremely resourceful as individuals. “On the Slate” describes the skills by which they assemble a pack of cards from paper, bread reduced to starch, and indelible pencil.

In the introduction to Rayfield’s translation there is added a small note by Shalamov, not intended for publication, called “What I Saw and Understood in the Camps.”. It contains in essence all of his “truths” that he dramatizes and demonstrates over the course of the collection. Here are a number of examples from it: “I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions”. “The main means for depraving the soul is the cold”. “I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal”. “I understood why people do not live on hope – there isn’t any hope… They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal”. By some accounts, the number killed in Kolyma alone was close to 3 million. Simply from the tone of his words, you can tell, I think, just how hard it was to live there. Food and warmth are the only things that seem to have any value at all – after all, they are all one needs to keep going.

“Field Rations” is probably among the heaviest stories that I’ve read in the book, and my favourite. The narrator and three other men are sent to create a clearing in the forest at a place called Duskania spring. They were expected to be there for ten days, and had been given, as a result, some rations. For them, after being in a constant state of starvation, the amount of food they suddenly had is breath-taking. “Rations meant to last ten days looked intimidating”, the narrator says. There is responsibility in food. And the men are starving. The narrator writes that “any human feelings – love, friendship, envy, charity, mercy, ambition, decency – had vanished along with the flesh we had lost during our prolonged starvation”, so that all that remains is “resentful anger, the most lasting of human feelings”. This fact, that anger trumps all else, is another one of Shalamov’s key ideas. The narrator continues describing the state of mind that people in the camps find themselves in, with death never far off. “We realized that death was no worse than life and we were afraid of neither. We were in thrall to total indifference.” Dehumanization comes not through insults and beatings, but simply through starvation and an atmosphere which says life doesn’t matter. Suicide, a word not spoken directly, but rather in a round-about way, is said to be stopped merely by “some trivial thing that was part of life”, like a slightly bigger portion in the mess hall. Here in the wilderness nature and its continued struggling to carry on becomes an example to the men. They are in awe of the trees, which manage to survive in the far north. Trees that die lying down, just like them. The narrator then describes his fellow workers in the clearing, as they get ready to eat their evening meal – who they are, and why they are here. One person was in the camps on the basis simply of letters to their fiancée – but Shalamov doesn’t dwell on questions of whether this is valid justification. That is the reader’s job. In much the same way, Stalin is only mentioned once in the whole collection – in a description of his portrait.

After a few days a guard arrives with additional supplies for them, but he warns them that their work is insufficient for them to be able to stay in the clearing, a heavy blow because here the work is easier than back at the camp. He says that they have only done ten per cent of the norm. A few days later a sergeant comes and confirms that they should return to the camp the next morning. Perhaps as a result of that during the night one of the men hangs themselves. The narrator and one of the others strip him of what they can get, but the third remaining man grabs an axe and uses it to hack his own fingers off in delirium, to save himself from working. The story ends with the narrator back at the camp, where he mentions simply that the third man is now being prosecuted for malicious self-harm.

This kind of ending is pretty typical of Shalamov. Death happens in a matter of fact way that is startling and leaves you feeling uneasy, and nothing seems to end well. A good ending here is simply an ending where nothing changes. But this story is enjoyable, and probably the best introduction to Shalamov’s writing that I’ve yet read. It has his ideas of human nature, it has a build up and climax, it has some characters and their interactions, and finally it has a sense of adventure and nature. It sounds bad, but these stories are a sort of escapism, a sort of fodder for the imagination, of the sort that science fiction is to many others. Shalamov’s world is so far removed from our own, but it is beautiful at times too – we are made to acknowledge the beauty of survival – and because Shalamov is writing from experience, everything seems to acquire an extra layer of clarity. Images seem sharper in my own head. It is exciting. But there are problems inherent in this too. Shalamov doesn’t just write about his own experience. “Cherry Brandy”, describing the death of the poet Osip Mandel’shtam, feels immediately less engaging by contrast to the majority of the other stories precisely because we are aware that Shalamov is describing something neither he nor anyone else knows the truth of. A commitment to an autobiographical style is also, accidentally even, a concomitant devaluation of non autobiographical descriptions within the confines of the same work. At least, it seemed so to me.

With their short lengths, these stories seem consciously designed to be snapshots of a world, instead of its encompassing it, as is the case with Solzhenitsyn’s gigantic tomes. They are, in a sense, humble, and aware of their own limitations. But I cannot stress enough how exciting they are too – in Shalamov’s writings we are thrown into a world where we do not know what could possibly happen next because the experience of the GULAG is so far away from our own lives, not just geographically, but also morally and socially. And though they are depressing and leaden with pessimism, at the same time these stories showcase the human will to survive, whatever the conditions, and whatever the cost. They set our imagination alight with just what we are capable of. So have a read – they’re short so there’s scarcely a commitment – and see what you think yourselves.

Another interesting Soviet writer is Andrei Platonov. Unlike Shalamov he was never imprisoned, but his writings demonstrate a man very much on the edge where official approval becomes hostility. Check out my review of his Soul and Other Stories here

Picture of the Kolyma Basin by Kmusser [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons

Picture of Landscape in Kolyma byAnatoly V. Lozhkin (Northeast Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Branch) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons