The Spade Artist

Varlam Shalamov began writing his stories in 1954, when he returned to the Moscow region after 17 years in Kolyma labor camps and lived in a remote workers’ settlement. Even earlier, working as a camp medic in the taiga, he began to write poems. Neither could then be printed, and both circulated among close people.

In one of Shalamov’s letters to B. Pasternak, there are notable lines: “The question of ‘to publish or not to publish’ is an important one for me, but it is by no means the primary one. There are a number of moral barriers that I cannot cross.” The writer rejects the very principle of adapting to censorship—he initially orients himself toward truth as the norm of literature and the norm of existence. Behind this lies his immense faith in the invincibility of absolute human values, which, sooner or later, will return to his country.

Shalamov’s own life— and the fact that he managed to cross the threshold of seventy years—can be considered a miracle, especially considering that we’re talking about the personality of a man of unshakable principles. A long life of a person who refuses to kneel in a world where even trees bend in an attempt to survive the harsh climate is something astonishing and hard to explain. Even more difficult is to understand how this man, who passed through the camps, after endless years of imprisonment, deprivation, and torment, was able not only to survive, but also to write his stories. And most astonishing of all is that these stories, in their force like a slap to executioners, serve—perhaps—the brightest, most convincing, and weighty argument against the horror of labor camps.