Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) [Paperback]

Varlam Shalamov (Author), John Glad (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: February 1, 1995 | Series: Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the north-eastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, their hopes and plans extending no further than a few hours.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (February 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140186956
• ISBN-13: 978-0140186956
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.9 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #119,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 96 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I Stand as Witness to the Common Lot, February 10, 2005

By Leonard Fleisig TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Survivor of that time, that place." Anna Akhmatova, Requiem.

Varlam Shalamov was a survivor of 17 years in the work camps of that time and that place known as Kolyma. Upon his return to Moscow Shalamov crafted a series of short stories that memorialized his time in Stalin's labor camps. Those 54 stories were not published in the USSR but were circulated widely in samizdat form. They were publshed in the west as The Kolyma Tales. They are exquisitely well crafted, powerful, and moving.

Shalamov's prose style is sparse and to the point. The dry recounting of horror after horror has quite an impact on the reader. In fact, the level of passion in Shalamov's writing seems inversely proportional to the nature of the scenes he paints; the more horrific the tale the less emotional the writing. This is certainly an effective style. Some facts do not need embellishment. The stories speak for themselves.

Shalamov also does not tell the reader how to interpret a story. He simply tells a tale. Unlike Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, who had a tendency to tell a story and then advise the reader what lessons should be drawn from it, Shalamov simply tells a story. In that sense his stories can be compared to Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel.

It would be impossible to summarize each individual story in a short review. However, each was compelling in its own way. I was particularly struck by a few of them. The story "In the Night" concerns two men who sneak out of their barracks at night to dig up the grave of a newly deceased fellow prisoner. Why? Because the wanted to steal his relatively new underwear so they could trade it in for bread and tobacco and perhaps live an extra day longer. In Procurator of Judea a military doctor (not a prisoner) transferred from the front lines to Kolyma in order to accelerate his pension. The stark, dry picture of surgeons performing dozens of amputations of the frostbitten limbs of prisoners arriving on a squalid vessel is only a page or two long. It skips forward 17 years and notes that the doctor could remember the names of his orderlies but could not remember the names of the ship or any of its prisoners. The story simply concludes by noting an Anatole France story. Procurator of Judea. In which "after seventeen years, Pontius Pilate cannot remember Christ." Simple words simply spoken speak volumes.

I could not help but think as I read these stories about the use of literature, of art, as a means of providing permanent testimony to man's inhumanity to man in a century that has witnessed more than its share of horrors. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of a different horror once wrote that "rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving not only to survive, but to testify". Varlam Shalamov not only survived but testified and in so doing left a beautifully conceived and executed testament to the lives of those men and women who never made it back home.

This is a book that should be read, and read again.

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Torture does not purify me, it destroys me. September 26, 2004

By C. B Collins Jr. TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Varlam Shalamov's style is minimal, brutal, and straight-forward. He does not preach to his reader about terror, torture, death, and injustice. Rather, he describes the horrible experiences he endured in short stories that are far more like eye witness narratives than the typical short story. He does not need to tell you that cutting off a man's hands is a terrible crime, he just describes the actions and allows the reader to absorb the impact as they read the cold, hard narrative. Life in Kolyma had no frills and lace, and neither does Shalamov's narrative style.

I think this book would make excellent classroom reading and discussion for high school seniors. I say this primarily because of the exposure to the Soviet system of social control, especially between 1936-1956. Understanding totalitarianism and social control should be part of our education of our youth. I also think that Shalamov counters the concept that suffering is redemptive. Rather, Shalamov indicates that extreme hunger, torture, work, beatings, exhaustion, cold, and experience of arbitrary death and injustice gradually destroys any human being, depriving them of uplifting emotions, imagination, creativity, and finally empathy and a sense of self survival.

Shalamov carefully demonstrates this loss of our humanity under conditions of extreme torture, exhaustion, hunger and cold by showing character after character disintegrating in unique but common ways. In general, empathy and sympathy are gradually dissolved in the horror of their experiences and are replaced by a depressed apathy. Rarely does he show the downward spiral to go from nobility to criminal cruelty. Rather, his characters become devoid of emotions, both positive and eventually even negative, before they give up.

In the story "Condensed Milk" one prisoner trys to get other prisoners to attempt escape so he can inform on them and get special treatment from the guards. In "Shock Therapy" a disgusting young egg-head physician trys to identify "fakers" in the first aid clinic with electric shock. In "The Lawyers' Plot" a Soviet official trys to arrest a whole social network of law students based on social contacts rather than evidence and eventually is arrested himself. "Typhoid Quarantine" was my favorite story. A man who has survived the gold mines is returned to camp dkuring a typhoid quarantine. Through some basic reasoning and knowledge of the Kolyma "system", he is able to survive in the camps and at least temporarily avoid the killing gold mines. In "The Lepers", persons who have leprosy are able to hide amongst the frost bite victims and victims of Warld War II injuries. In "Committees of the Poor" a great description of the social norms amongh the prisoners is described. In "Major Pugachov's Last Battle" a daring escape from the camps is told. In "Lend Lease" a terrible tale is told of American bull dozers being used to dig mass graves for the millions of frozen dead laborers. In "An Epitaph" Shalamov writes short paragraphs about people who may not need a whole short story for their tale of horror and death, but none-the-less needed to be related in a stream of consciousness account of misery of the common prisoner. In "In the Bathhouse" we learn that efforts to control lice and parasites are totally ineffective and are actually demeaning totures for the inmates.

We will never know the exact number of persons who died under Stalin's Soviet experiment. Conservative figures reach 22 million citizens of his own country. Shalamov at least gives us a true accouting of his horror and allows many of the dead to at least be enobled through a story. This book should make us sad at the true nature of human existence and how a social system can be designed to make our darker nature the dominant feature. Knowing this fact, and knowing that we can not change human nature, we are compelled to design social and political systems of public discourse that do not allow this horror to erupt and overtake us.

49 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars MAGNIFICENT January 27, 2001

By S. F Gulvezan

Format:Paperback

Another reviewer has written that the English translation of these stories pales besides the Russian original. If that is so, I wish I could read Russian, because the stories in the English translation are among the best I have ever read. This book, tales of life in the Soviet GULAG, stands shoulder to shoulder with Tadeusz Borowski's THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, which is composed of tales of life in Auschwitz, as the finest examples I have read of stories of man's inhumanity to man told in such an understated fashion that, once read, they are unforgettable. Shalamov was a genius.