Kolyma Tales

"Kolyma Tales," which Shalamov began working on immediately after his return from Stalinist camps and labored on for almost twenty years, from 1954 to 1973, is an astonishing artistic-documentary testimony to one of the most horrific tragedies of the 20th century. All the novellas of the Kolyma epic—about 140 in total—were divided by the writer into six cycles-collections, the first of which, consisting of 33 novellas, he named "Kolyma Tales." At the publishing house "Soviet Writer," to which Shalamov submitted this collection in 1962, it was rejected with the phrasing: "The heroes of your tales are devoid of all humanity, and the author's position is anti-humanistic." As a result, "Kolyma Tales" was published in our country only in the late 1980s by I.P. Sirotinskaya (according to the manuscripts in the writer's archive). The "Planet Kolyma" depicted by Shalamov is a world where Dante's "Hell" appears as an innocent joke. There is no way out from there. It seems that there is no hope either. But Shalamov himself—the first existentialist writer in Russian literature—emphasized that within the camp, one can find the possibility to "lean on other forces than hope." The modern reader, familiar with numerous works of "camp" literature and free from politicized stereotypes, can truly appreciate the profound artistic originality of Shalamov's stories.