Sketches of the Criminal World

Varlam Shalamov began writing his stories in 1954, when he returned after 17 years in the Kolyma camps to the Moscow Region and lived in a remote working settlement. Even earlier, working as a camp feldsher in the taiga, he began writing poems. Neither could then be printed; both circulated only among close people. In one of Shalamov’s letters to B. Pasternak, there are telling lines: “The question ‘to get published or not to get published’ is an important one for me, but by no means the first.” The writer rejects the very principle of adapting to censorship—he from the start orients himself toward truth as the norm of literature and the norm of existence. Behind this is his immense faith in the irreducibility of absolute human values, which, sooner or later, will return to his country.

The life of Varlam Shalamov himself—and the fact that he managed to cross the threshold of seventy years—can be considered a miracle, especially considering it was a person of firm, unshakable principles. A long life for a man who refuses to kneel in a world where even trees bend in an attempt to survive in harsh climate is something astonishing, difficult to explain. Even harder is to understand how, after passing through the camps, after endless years of imprisonment, deprivation, and torment, this man not only survived but also wrote his stories. And especially astonishing is that these stories, in their force, resemble a slap to executioners, serving, perhaps, as the most vivid, convincing, and weighty argument against the horror of labor camps.