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
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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 have 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.