Varlan Shalanov

Kolyma Tales or Kolyma Stories is the name given to six collections of short stories by Russian author Varlam Shalamov, about labour camp life in the Soviet Union. He began working on this book in 1954 and continued until 1973.
Originally published: New York; London: Norton, 1980.

Kolyma Tales

Bryan Alexander

All human emotions - love, friendship, envy, concern for one's fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty - had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during their long fasts. (56)
How to introduce this book?

I thought about giving it the basic back cover description: short stories about horrible experiences in Soviet labor campus. That's too try, if accurate. How about: explorations of the GULAG if you thought Solzhenitsyn wasn't dark enough? Or: Chekhovian short stories, written from the depths of human wretchedness? Or: imagine Kafka if he went through Stalin's labor camps.

Kolyma Tales is all of these, and yet the phrases miss the mark, because Shalamov definitely has his own voice.

To back up: this is a short story collection set in Stalinist labor camps in the Soviet far east. Each tale traces a small if often powerful event in the lives of some inmates, from being sent to fell trees to participating escape plans, non-criminals coping with professionals, and changes in camp operations. 

Across all of these is a portrait of a hellish life, scored by brutality: murder casual or systematic, continuous starvation, exhaustion to the point of death, beatings, illness, injury, terrible cold (-60 F), isolation... Psychological degradation runs alongside the physical, adding to its miseries betrayals, suspicion, exploitation, thievery, self-mutilation, suicide, and plenty of desperate, often doomed scheming. These are stories of psychological ruination for the survivors and physical extremity. This short reflection will give you a sense of conditions and their effects.

The historical status of these stories is a bit slippery. Narrators sometimes speak in a documentary way - this is the way things were - but also relay narratives from others, and trustworthiness is in short supply. Some are told in third person, without narrators.

As stories, each one is a pointed gem. They depict one action, although the action's shape isn't clear until its end. Shalamov presents a rich variety of story structures, from flashbacks to travelogues, at times cross-cut with fantasies and introspection.

These stories are themselves very concerned with storytelling in a meta direction. One is about a convict telling a story to another, in several versions. The listener doesn't like one version, so the letter offers another, and then another. In a different tale the narrator describes a setting, then mentions using a scene in another story.

At times Kolyma Tales resonated with Kafka for me. The camps - and, by extension, the Soviet Union - have a layer of insane yet brutal bureaucracy which traps, confuses, and kills. There is that sense of cryptic communications suggestive of meaning, ultimately indecipherable, and sometimes life-changing.

This is a collection to read slowly, each story a bracing plummet.

Note: this is John Glad's 1980 translation. I haven't read the Russian original, but would like to.

Kolyma Tales

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