VARLAM TIKHONOVICH SHALAMOV (1907-1982) was a Russian writer, journalist and poet. Although he never enjoyed the popular success or level of celebrity achieved by Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov is arguably the most powerful writer to emerge from the Stalinist Gulag. He spent seventeen years in the forced-labor camps of the Far East of Siberia, sentenced for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity".
Shalamov’s most celebrated work are the six collections of KOLYMA STORIES, written over twenty years following his return to Moscow after Stalin’s death. The manuscripts were smuggled abroad, distributed via samizdat, and published in the West in 1966. The complete Russian-language edition was published in London in 1978.
The stories offer intense, unforgettable snapshots of the brutal world of Kolyma, the distant Gulag outpost where appalling conditions and the most severe climate under human habitation cut short thousands of lives. There is no consolation, no faith in Providence or humanity, despite the isolated incidences of kindness he encountered in the Gulag. The line between autobiography and fiction is very fuzzy: virtually everything in these stories was experienced or witnessed by Shalamov. His work is full of many real names of prisoners and their oppressors. For Soviet scholar David Satter, "Shalamov's short stories are the definitive chronicle of those camps" and considered to be one of the great Russian collections of short stories of the twentieth century.
The following books are in ePUB or PDF format as noted:
* Graphite (Norton, 1981). Translated by John Glad. -- PDF
* Kolyma Stories (NYRB, 2018). Translated by Donald Rayfield. -- ePUB
* Kolyma Tales (Penguin, 1994). Translated by John Glad. -- ePUB
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