Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov (born June 18 [July 1, New Style], 1907, Vologda, Russia—died Jan. 17, 1982, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) was a Russian writer best known for a series of short stories about imprisonment in Soviet labour camps.

In 1922 Shalamov went to Moscow and worked in a factory. Accused of counterrevolutionary activities while a law student at Moscow State University, Shalamov served two years at hard labour in the Urals. He returned to Moscow in 1932 and became a published writer, journalist, and critic. Rearrested in 1937, supposedly in part because of his public approval of Soviet émigré writer and 1933 Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, Shalamov spent the next 17 years in the extremely harsh labour camps of the Kolyma River basin in the Soviet Far East. He was released in the 1950s and was allowed to publish some of his poetry, including the collections Ognivo (1961; “Flint”), Doroga i sudba (1967; “Journey and Destiny”), and Moskovskiye oblaka (1972; “Moscow Clouds”). In the early 1970s Shalamov, by then broken, ill, and dependent on the Soviet Writers’ Union for publication and money, was forced to write a public letter denouncing publication of his work abroad.

In 1978 a Russian edition of Shalamov’s Kolymskiye rasskazy (1978; “Kolyma Stories”) was published in England. This collection of 103 brief sketches, vignettes, and short stories chronicles the degradation and dehumanization of prison-camp life. Written in understated and straightforward documentary style, the tales contain almost no philosophical or political nuances. Publication was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.

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Among the collections of his poetry that were posthumously published are Stikhotvoreniya (1988; “Poems”) and Kolymskiye tetradi (1994; “The Kolyma Notebooks”). Complete editions of Shalamov’s works were released in Moscow in 1992. Selected tales from the collection were published in English in two volumes, Kolyma Tales (1980) and Graphite (1981).