Kolyma Tales
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov
PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
KOLYMA TALES
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born in 1907. A prose writer and poet, he has become known chiefly for his Kolyma Tales, in which he describes life in the Soviet forced-labour camps in north eastern Siberia. It is a theme he returns to in a second collection of stories, Graphite.
Shalamov was arrested for some unknown ‘crime’ in 1929 when he was only twenty-two and a student at the law school of Moscow University. He was sentenced to three years in Solovki, a former monastery that had been confiscated from the Church and converted into a concentration camp. In 1937 he was arrested again and sentenced to five years in Kolyma. In 1942 his sentence was extended ‘till the end of the war’; in 1943 he received an additional ten-year sentence for having praised the effectiveness of the German army and having described Ivan Bunin, the Nobel laureate, as a ‘classic Russian writer’. He appears to have spent a total of seventeen years in Kolyma.
Shalamov did manage to smuggle Kolyma Tales out to the West, and they were published in German and French (and only much later in English). The Soviet authorities then forced him to sign a statement, published in Literaturnaya gazeta in 1972, in which he stated that the topic of Kolyma Tales was no longer relevant after the Twentieth Party Congress, ‘that he had never sent out any manuscripts, and that he was a loyal Soviet citizen’. Once Shalamov had renounced Kolyma Tales, he was permitted to publish his poems in the Soviet Union, and these began to appear in literary journals in 1956. Four small collections were published between 1961 and 1972. When he first came across an anthology of Shalamov’s poetry, Solzhenitsyn said that he ‘trembled as if he were meeting a brother’. Varlam Shalamov died in 1982.
John Glad is an associate professor in the department of Slavic Studies at the University of Maryland. His translation of Kolyma Tales was nominated for the American Book Award.
Kolyma Tales
VARLAM SHALAMOV
Translated from the Russian by JOHN GLAD
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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The following stories in this collection were first published in 1980 in the USA by W. W. Norton & Company, ©John Glad 1980, under the title Kolyma Tales. On Tick, In the Night, Dry Rations, A Child’s Drawings, Condensed Milk, The Snake Charmer, Shock Therapy, The Lawyers’ Plot, Magic, A Piece of Meat, Major Pugachov’s Last Battle, The Used-Book Dealer, Lend-Lease, Sententious, The Train and Quiet. Other stories in this collection, as follows, were first published in 1981 in the USA by W. W. Norton & Company, © John Glad 1981, under the title Graphite. Through the Snow, An Individual Assignment, The Apostle Paul, Berries, Tamara the Bitch, Cherry Brandy, The Golden Taiga, A Day Off, Dominoes, Typhoid Quarantine, The Procurator of Judea, The Lepers, Descendant of a Decembrist, Committees for the Poor, The Seizure, An Epitaph, Handwriting, Captain Tolly’s Love, The Green Procurator, The Red Cross, Women in the Criminal World, Grisbka Logun’s Thermometer, The Life of Engineer Kipreev, Mr Popp’s Visit, The Letter, Fire and Water and Graphite.
This collection published in Penguin Books 1994
Original stories copyright © Iraida Pavlovna Sirotinskaya, 1980
Translation copyright © John Glad, 1980, 1981, 1994
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196195-8
Contents
Foreword
Kolyma Tales
Through the Snow
On Tick
In the Night
Carpenters
An Individual Assignment
A ‘Pushover’ Job
Dry Rations
The Injector
The Apostle Paul
Berries
Tamara the Bitch
Cherry Brandy
A Child’s Drawings
Condensed Milk
The Snake Charmer
The Golden Taiga
Vaska Denisov, Kidnapper of Pigs
A Day Off
Dominoes
Shock Therapy
The Lawyers’ Plot
Typhoid Quarantine
The Left Bank
The Procurator of Judea
The Lepers
Descendant of a Decembrist
Committees for the Poor
Magic
A Piece of Meat
Esperanto
Major Pugachov’s Last Battle
The Used-Book Dealer
Lend-Lease
Sententious
The Virtuoso Shovelman
The Seizure
An Epitaph
Handwriting
The Businessman
Captain Tolly’s Love
In the Bathhouse
The Green Procurator
My First Tooth
Prosthetic Appliances
The Train
Essays on the Criminal World
The Red Cross
Women in the Criminal World
Resurrection of the Larch
Quiet
Grishka Logun’s Thermometer
Chief of Political Control
The Life of Engineer Kipreev
Mister Popp’s Visit
The Theft
The Letter
Fire and Water
Graphite
Foreword
In our positivistic civilization, one of the inappropriate compliments sometimes paid to literature is to reduce it to ‘artistic knowledge’. Not that such cognizance does not exist, but art is both more and less than knowledge. It is unique, sui generis, a thing in and of itself. And its experience is one of the precious justifications for our own existence.
While the work of art ‘enriches’ (another unsuitable analogy), at the same time it creates a postpartum sense of loss: the first experience is unique, an act never to be repeated – no matter how great the understanding and appreciation later achieved through the most intent study. If only we could erase from our minds the memory of our favorite books and return to the still unsuspected wonder contained in those works! When we recommend them to our friends, we do so in envy – that we cannot recreate that initial magic for ourselves. And the more we love a book, the greater is our own wistfulness. We cannot step into the same river twice, not so much because the river is different, but because we ourselves are in flux.
If you are about to read the stories of Varlam Shalamov for the first time, you are a person to be envied, a person whose life is about to be changed, a person who will envy others once you yourself h
ave forded these waters.
Kolyma Tales tell of life in the Soviet forced-labor camps and the stories are regarded by historians as important documentary materials. Nevertheless, the Gulag has many chroniclers, but only one Varlam Shalamov. This book can be profitably read as fictionalized history; the phrase ‘historical novel’ is itself a ‘historical accident’; history in literature is not limited to the larger genres. But Kolyma Tales is much more than that. If the camps had never existed, this volume, one of the great books of world literature, would be only the more astounding as a creation of the imagination.
Separated from Alaska by the 55-mile wide Bering Strait, Kolyma was first used as a place of exile and a source of gold under the Czars. In 1853, for example, the Czarist official Muraviov-Amurski was able to send to St Petersburg three tons of gold mined by convict labor. Over half a century later the Soviet Union, the world’s second largest gold producer, also exploited Kolyma as an enormous prison, where the principal occupation was gold-mining.
It is extraordinarily difficult to come up with a reliable estimate of the total number of political victims during the Soviet period. On 6 April 1990 the Soviet general and historian Dmitry Volkogonov, during a lecture delivered at the Pentagon, gave a preliminary estimate of the total number of ‘repressed persons’ (those imprisoned and/or murdered): 22.5 million. The estimates of some non-Soviet historians run considerably higher. If we speak only of Kolyma, there is a 1949 estimate by the Polish historian Kazimierz Zamorski of 3 million people exiled there, not more than 500,000 of whom supposedly survived.1 In 1978 Robert Conquest estimated that 3 million people met their deaths in Kolyma – certainly not fewer than 2 million.2 It is hard to grasp such figures.
The years 1937–9 were the period of the Great Purges. Millions of people were arrested, held for months in appalling prison conditions, tried on trumped-up charges and either executed or shipped to Siberia. Emaciated as a result of a hopelessly inadequate diet, denied even sufficient drinking water and toilet facilities, freezing from the cold, they would arrive at the Siberian ports of Vladivostok, Vanino or Nakhodka after a rail trip that lasted between thirty and forty days. There they were held in transit camps for varying periods of time.
Typhus epidemics killed many. Those who survived were sent by ship from the ‘mainland’, for the transit camps served as slave markets for the mining operations in Kolyma. Some of the mines employed agents to identify those prisoners most capable of work. Other mines simply had standing orders for a fixed number of new prisoners each year. The high mortality rate in Kolyma made for a constant shortage of manpower.
The ships used to transport prisoners to Kolyma were purchased in England, Holland and Sweden and formerly bore names such as the Puget Sound and the Commercial Quaker. Their builders had never intended them to carry passengers, but their Soviet purchasers found their capacious holds ideally suited for human cargo. In the freezing weather prisoners could easily be controlled by the use of fire pumps.
In 1931 a Soviet trust bearing the name Far Northern Construction was established to take charge of all forced-labor projects in north-eastern Siberia. With headquarters in the city of Magadan, Far Northern controlled all of Kolyma, an enormous natural prison bounded by the Pacific on the east, the Arctic Circle on the north and impassable mountains on the third side of the triangle. Gradually Far Northern increased its jurisdiction westward toward the Lena River and southward to the Aldan – a territory four times the size of France. Its domain may even have extended as far west as the Yenisei River. If this is true, Far Northern’s authority would have extended over a territory as large as all of Western Europe.
Reingold Berzin, a Latvian communist, was in charge of the trust from 1932 to 1937. During this period conditions are reported to have been relatively tolerable: prisoners received adequate food and clothing, were given manageable work assignments and could shorten their sentences by hard work. In 1937 Berzin, his deputy I. G. Filippov and a number of others were arrested and shot as Japanese spies. Management of Far Northern was handed over to K. A. Pavlov and a pathological murderer, Major Garanin (who himself was executed in 1939). The changes in leadership were signaled by Stalin in a 1937 speech in which he criticized the ‘coddling’ of prisoners.
Under Pavlov and Garanin food rations were reduced to the point where most prisoners could not hope to survive: clothing and rations were insufficient for the harsh climate, and prisoners were sent to work in temperatures as cold as – 60°F.
The camps were arranged in a hierarchy that provided virtually unlimited power and privilege for the senior bureaucrats. At the bottom of the non-convict pecking order were soldiers and former convicts who had been released but were not allowed to leave. Their living conditions were only slightly better than those of the prisoners.
Whenever possible, common criminals received trustee positions. Accustomed to violence, they easily controlled the political prisoners, even though the latter outnumbered them. In general, one of the worst features of the camps was that political prisoners were constantly brutalized and murdered by professional criminals.
With the onset of the Second World War the official workday was extended from ten to twelve hours (although unofficially it was often sixteen), and the bread ration was cut to a little over one pound per day. When the war came to a close, conditions improved, and a general amnesty was declared immediately after Stalin’s death for all prisoners with less than a five-year sentence. Unfortunately, only common criminals had received such light sentences.
During the Khrushchev period the politicals were released and ‘rehabilitated’, meaning the government admitted that they had been innocent all along.
Several Soviet books on Kolyma were published in the pre-Gorbachev era. One is Viktor Urin’s Along the Kolyma Highway to the Pole of Cold, published in 1959. A sort of tourist’s notebook of travel impressions, the book has a number of pictures – including some of women in bathing suits – and the effect is somewhat similar to that of an early National Geographic. Urin intersperses his travel descriptions with his own poetry. Andrei Zimkin, whose 1963 volume At the Headwaters of the Kolyma River makes no mention of convicts, spent from 1933 to 1961 in Kolyma. It is not clear whether he himself was a convict or a civilian employee of the camps.
Varlam Shalamov’s story is, by contrast, all too clear. A priest’s son, he joined a group of youthful Trotskyites in 1927, when he was a twenty-year-old law student at Moscow University. In 1929 he was picked up in a police trap when he came to collect some illegally printed materials. He refused to testify at his trial, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor and was granted an early release in 1932; sentences were still comparatively mild at the time.
By then Shalamov had already begun to write both fiction and verse, although life in the camps was a topic he would take up only later. Disappointed by lack of support from his arrested friends, he decided to disengage himself from politics, but the net of state terror ensnared him, along with millions of others.
In 1937 he was rearrested and sentenced to five years’ hard labor for ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities’. Retried in 1943 for having praised the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin and called him a ‘classic Russian writer’, he was condemned to remain in the camps until the end of the war. Curiously, the new sentence turned out to be a blessing in disguise. His crime of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was viewed as trivial compared to the former ‘Trotskyite activities’. Until then he had been held in a virtual death camp, where – at nearly six feet tall – his weight had dropped to 90 pounds. With the new sentence he was transferred to a prison hospital and managed to regain his weight. Gold mining once more emaciated him, and he was returned to the hospital. After that he was sent to a logging camp where the convicts were simply not fed if they did not fulfill their work norms. Captured during an escape attempt, he was dispatched to a penal zone where, if they could not work, prisoners were thrown off a mountain or tied to a horse and dragged to their deaths. C
hance came to his aid when a group of Italian prisoners were delivered to the site, replacing the Soviet convicts. It was at that point that a physician took an interest in him and managed to have him assigned to paramedical courses – a second fortunate twist of fate that literally saved his life.
In 1951 Shalamov was released from the camps, and in 1953 he was permitted to leave Magadan, though not to reside in a large city. It was after this, his final release, that he began to write Kolyma Tales. On 18 July 1956 he was formally ‘rehabilitated’ by the Soviet government and permitted to return to Moscow, where he worked as a journalist and, in 1961, began publishing his poetry. In all, he published five slender collections. Shalamov’s verse is intimately bound up with his experiences in Kolyma, a circumstance that could not be mentioned at the time in the collections themselves. But his true talent was as a prose writer, and his poetry did not bring him the recognition he had hoped for.
The manuscript of Kolyma Tales was brought to the United States in 1966 by Professor Clarence Brown of Princeton University. From 1970 to 1976 Roman Goul, editor of the New York Russian émigré quarterly the New Review, published one or two of the Kolyma Tales in most issues of his journal. Others appeared in the émigré journal Grani, published in Frankfurt-am-Main. The full Russian language version did not appear until 1978, when it was brought out by Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd in London. To protect Shalamov from reprisals the editors always placed a note to the effect that the stories were being published without the knowledge and consent of the author.
Although Shalamov had, in fact, consented to publication, he became angry with Goul for editing the stories and for failing to publish a separate collection. On the pages of Literaturnaya gazeta Shalamov published a statement claiming that the topic of Kolyma Tales was no longer relevant after Khrushchev’s famous de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, that he had never sent any manuscript abroad for publication and that he was a loyal Soviet citizen. He inveighed against everyone previously involved in the publication of his stories in the West, shocking his former admirers so deeply that some literally removed his portrait from their homes. But even having betrayed his own major achievement, Kolyma Tales, he continued to write them.
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