The Kolyma Tales

Last updated February 27, 2019

Kolyma Tales (Russian : Колымские рассказы, Kolymskiye rasskazy) is the name given to six collections of short stories by Russian author Varlam Shalamov, about labour camp life in the Soviet Union. He began working on this book in 1954 and continued until 1973.

Russian is an East Slavic language, which is official in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 25 December 1991. Although, nowadays, nearly three decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian is used in official capacity or in public life in all the post-Soviet nation-states, as well as in Israel and Mongolia, the rise of state-specific varieties of this language tends to be strongly denied in Russia, in line with the Russian World ideology.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor. He spent much of the period from 1937 to 1951 imprisoned in forced-labor camps in the arctic region of Kolyma, due in part to his having supported Leon Trotsky and praised the anti-Soviet writer Ivan Bunin. In 1946, near death, he became a medical assistant while still a prisoner. He remained in that role for the duration of his sentence, then for another two years after being released, until 1953. From 1954 to 1978, he wrote a set of short stories about his experiences in the labor camps, which were collected and published in six volumes, collectively known as The Kolyma Tales. These books were initially published in the West, in English translation, starting in the 1960s; they were eventually published in the original Russian, but only became officially available in the Soviet Union in 1987, in the post-glasnost era. The Kolyma Tales are considered Shalamov's masterpiece, and "the definitive chronicle" of life in the labor camps.

The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 30 December 1922 to 26 December 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk.

Background

Shalamov was born in 1907 and was arrested in 1929 while he was a student at Moscow University for attempting to publish Lenin's Testament. He was sentenced to three years in Vishera, a satellite of the extensive labour camp system centered on a former monastery on Solovki. He was arrested again in 1937 and sentenced to five years in Kolyma, northeastern Siberia. His sentence was extended in 1942 until the end of the war and then in 1943 he was sentenced to another 10 years for describing Ivan Bunin as a great Russian writer. In total Shalamov spent around 17 years in the camps.

Lenin's Testament (zaveshchanie) is the name given to a document purportedly dictated by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. The authenticity of the document has not been validly proven. There is much scholarship that reports it to have been dictated by Lenin himself although this has been contested by other credible sources as well. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. Sensing his impending death, he also gave criticism of Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev, Kamanev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Pyatakov and Stalin. He warned of the possibility of a split developing in the party leadership between Trotsky and Stalin if proper measures were not taken to prevent it. In a post-script he also suggested Joseph Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party's Central Committee. Trotskyist historian Isaac Deutscher, claims "The whole testament breathed uncertainty".

The Solovetsky Islands, or Solovki (Соловки́), are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia.

Kolyma is a region located in the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range, parts of which were not discovered until 1926. Today the region consists roughly of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast.

He began to write Kolyma Tales after he was released but it was not to be published in the Soviet Union until after his death in 1982. He was able to publish five collections of poetry during his lifetime, and was well known as a poet before "Kolyma Tales" established his reputation as a Gulag writer. In 2013 the Soviet scholar David Satter wrote that "Shalamov's short stories are the definitive chronicle of those camps".^[1]

The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labor camp-system that was set up under Vladimir Lenin and reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag to refer to any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union, including camps which existed in post-Stalin times. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as by NKVD troikas or by other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.

David A. Satter is an American journalist who writes about Russia and the Soviet Union. He has authored books and articles about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-Soviet Russia. Satter was expelled from Russia by the government in 2013. He is perhaps best known for claiming that Vladimir Putin and Russia's Federal Security Service were behind the 1999 Russian apartment bombings and is particularly critical of Putin's rise to the Russian presidency.

The stories

The complete set of Kolyma Tales is based on two areas: personal experiences and fictional accounts of stories heard. He attempted to mix fact and fiction, which leads to the book being something of a historical novel. The style used is similar to Chekhov's, in which a story is told objectively and leaves the readers to make their own interpretations. Often brutal and shocking, the matter-of-fact style makes them appear more hard-hitting than using a sensationalist style. The stories are based around the life of the prisoners (political or professional) in the camp and their relations with the officials. We find accounts of prisoners who have become totally dispassionate, insane under the barbaric conditions, unemotionally murderous and suicidal.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."

Despite being written about imprisonment under the Stalinist regime, Shalamov made only one mention of Joseph Stalin in the book, a brief comment on a large portrait of Stalin in an administrator's office.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician. He led the Soviet Union from the mid–1920s until 1953 as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Premier (1941–1953). While initially presiding over a collective leadership as first among equals, he ultimately consolidated enough power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin helped to formalise these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies became known as Stalinism.

Publication

The original manuscript of Kolyma Tales was taken to the United States in 1966. Individual tales were published in the New Review between 1970 and 1976. The Russian version appeared in print only in 1978 by Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd in London. They could only be printed with a note claiming that they were being published without the author's consent in order to protect Shalamov. In 1980 John Glad had Kolyma Tales published from his own translations, which featured a selection of the stories. The follow-up book, Graphite, offers further stories from Kolyma Tales.

John Glad was an American academic who specialized in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature. He also wrote about, and advocated for, eugenics.

The book first appeared in the Soviet Union in 1989 and it was bought in bulk by queues of Soviet people.

In 2018, the first part of the first complete English edition of the book containing the first three sets of stories was published by New York Review Books with translation by Donald Rayfield.^[2] The three remaining sets of stories are scheduled to be published in 2019.

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References

↑ Satter, David (May 3, 2013). "David Satter on life in the Soviet police state". The Wall Street Journal.
↑ Shalamov, Varlam (2018). Kolyma stories. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9781681372143.

Golden, Nathaniel (2004) Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma tales : a formalist analysis, Studies in Slavic literature and poetics, 41, Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 193 p., ISBN 90-420-1198-X
Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich (1994) Kolyma tales [Kolymskie rasskazy], Glad, John (transl.), Penguin twentieth-century classics, Harmondsworth : Penguin, ISBN 0-14-018695-6
Shalamov, Varlam. What I've seen and learned at Kolyma camps.
Russian series "Lenin's Testament", based on Kolyma Tales (online)

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[1] Satter, David (May 3, 2013). "David Satter on life in the Soviet police state". The Wall Street Journal.

[2] Shalamov, Varlam (2018). Kolyma stories. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9781681372143.