Kolyma Tales Read online

  VARLAM SHALAMOV (1907–1982) was born in Vologda in western Russia to a Russian Orthodox priest and his wife. After being expelled from law school for his political beliefs, Shalamov worked as a journalist in Moscow. In 1929, he was arrested at an underground printshop and sentenced to three years’ hard labor in the Ural Mountains, where he met his first wife, Galina Gudz. The two returned to Moscow after Shalamov’s release in 1931; they were married in 1934 and had a daughter, Elena, in 1935. Shalamov resumed work as a journalist and writer, publishing his first short story, “The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino,” in 1936. The following year, he was arrested again for counterrevolutionary activities and shipped to the Far Northeast of the Kolyma basin. Over the next fifteen years, he was moved from labor camp to labor camp; imprisoned many times for anti-Soviet propaganda; forced to mine gold and coal; quarantined for typhus; and, finally, assigned to work as a paramedic. Upon his release in 1951, he made his way back to Moscow where he divorced his wife and began writing what would become the Kolyma Stories. He also wrote many volumes of poetry, including Ognivo (Flint, 1961) and Moskovskiye oblaka (Moscow Clouds, 1972). Severely weakened by his years in the camps, in 1979 Shalamov was committed to a decrepit nursing home north of Moscow. In 1981, he was awarded the French PEN Club’s Liberty Prize; he died of pneumonia in 1982.

  DONALD RAYFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. As well as books and articles on Russian literature (notably A Life of Anton Chekhov), he is the author of many articles on Georgian writers and of a history of Georgian literature. In 2012 he published Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, which has recently come out in an expanded Russian edition, as have his Life of Chekhov and Stalin and His Hangmen. He was the chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. He has translated several novels, including Hamid Ismailov’s Devils’ Dance from the Uzbek, and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (an NYRB Classic).

  A manuscript page from Shalamov’s story “The Apostle Paul”

  KOLYMA STORIES

  Volume One

  VARLAM SHALAMOV

  Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by

  DONALD RAYFIELD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Alexander Rigosik

  Translation and introduction copyright © 2018 by Donald Rayfield

  All rights reserved.

  English publishing rights acquired via FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia in 2015.

  Originally published in Russian in Sobranie sochineniĭ v 6 + 1 tomakh (Collected Works, vols. 1–7) by TERRA-Knizhnyĭ klub in 2013.

  The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.

  Cover image: Emil Gataullin, from Kolyma, In the Shadow of Time, 2014; © Emil

  Gataullin/Edition Lammerhuber

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shalamov, Varlam, author. | Rayfield, Donald, 1942– translator, writer of introduction.

  Title: Kolyma stories / by Varlam Shalamov ; translated and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield.

  Other titles: Kolymskie rasskazy. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017046693 (print) | LCCN 2017049306 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372150 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372143 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Political prisoners—Soviet Union—Fiction. | Kolyma (Concentration camp)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG3487.A592 (ebook) | LCC PG3487.A592 K6413 2018 (print) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046693

  ISBN 978-1-68137-215-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  BOOK ONE: KOLYMA STORIES

  Trampling the Snow

  On the Slate

  At Night

  Carpenters

  A Personal Quota

  The Parcel

  Rain

  Pushover

  Field Rations

  The Injector

  The Apostle Paul

  Berries

  Tamara the Bitch

  Cherry Brandy

  Children’s Pictures

  Condensed Milk

  Bread

  The Snake Charmer

  The Tatar Mullah and Clean Air

  My First Death

  Auntie Polia

  The Necktie

  The Golden Taiga

  Vaska Denisov, Pig Rustler

  Serafim

  A Day Off

  Dominoes

  Hercules

  Shock Therapy

  The Dwarf Pine

  The Red Cross

  The Lawyers’ Conspiracy

  The Typhus Quarantine

  BOOK TWO: THE LEFT BANK

  The Procurator of Judea

  Lepers

  In the Admissions Room

  The Geologists

  Bears

  Princess Gagarina’s Necklace

  Ivan Fiodorovich

  The Academician

  The Diamonds Map

  Unconverted

  The Highest Praise

  The Descendant of a Decembrist

  Poorcoms

  Magic

  Lida

  Aortic Aneurysm

  A Piece of Flesh

  My Trial

  Esperanto

  Special Order

  Major Pugachiov’s Last Battle

  The Hospital Chief

  The Secondhand Book Dealer

  On Lend-Lease

  Maxim

  BOOK THREE: THE SPADE ARTIST

  A Heart Attack

  A Funeral Speech

  How It Began

  Handwriting

  The Duck

  The Businessman

  Caligula

  The Spade Artist

  RUR

  Bogdanov

  The Engineer Kiseliov

  Captain Tolly’s Love

  The Cross

  Courses: First Things First

  The First Secret Policeman

  The Geneticist

  To the Hospital

  June

  May

  In the Bathhouse

  Diamond Spring

  The Green Prosecutor

  The First Tooth

  An Echo in the Mountains

  AKA Berdy

  Artificial Limbs, Etc.

  Chasing the Locomotive’s Smoke

  The Train

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  VARLAM SHALAMOV (1907–1982) was one of the rare survivors of fifteen years in the worst of Stalin’s Gulag, spending six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on earth, before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He had written a few prose pieces and some verse before these years of imprisonment, but his seven volumes of prose, verse, and drama stem almost entirely from the years after Stalin’s death in 1953 to Shalamov’s own physical and mental decline in the late 1970s.

  What we have collected and translated are the six books of short stories, to be published in two volumes of three books each, mostly about his period in Kolyma but including a few about an early spell from 1929 to 1931 of “co
rrective labor” in camps in the northern Urals, and one or two that recall his youth in Vologda. 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. He himself appears simply as “I” or “Shalamov,” sometimes under pseudonyms, such as Andreyev or Krist. A reading of the stories thus provides us with a biography of the first fifty years of his life.

  Born in Vologda, a northern town that since medieval times has been a place for political exiles, Shalamov as a small boy might well have crossed paths with his nemesis Joseph Stalin, who in 1911 and 1912 regularly walked from his lodgings in Vologda to its excellent public library. The son of a priest, Shalamov (like Anton Chekhov) was saturated in religious imagery and language, but rejected all faith from an early age. He inherited from his father (an extraordinary man who had been a missionary in the Aleutian Islands, who sympathized with political liberalism, who preached tolerance of other religions, but who tyrannized his family) an intractable stubbornness and resistance to authority. Shalamov’s father went blind after refusing a simple operation; he also would not let Shalamov have a much-needed nasal operation, which deprived his son of a sense of smell and may have contributed to the Ménière’s disease that incapacitated him in old age.

  Vologda was the scene of appalling atrocities during the Russian Civil War, particularly in 1918, when the psychopath Mikhail Kedrov shot civilian hostages, including Shalamov’s chemistry teacher. Nevertheless, Shalamov sympathized with the revolution, particularly the Trotskyist factions, even though, as the son of a priest, he was excluded by the Communists from higher education. His parents, now expelled from church premises, lived in extreme poverty (see the story “The Cross”), which Shalamov’s casual earnings were too small to alleviate. By working in a leather factory and achieving high marks in mathematics and physics, he was eventually allowed to enroll at Moscow University (to study Soviet law), but a fellow student denounced him for “concealing his social origins,” and he was expelled. He then earned a precarious living by journalism, and was arrested for the first time for participating in a student movement that demanded (as did many Trotskyists) the publication of Lenin’s Testament, a document that named Stalin as too rude and power-hungry to be appointed as secretary-general of the party.

  Shalamov spent three years at a chemical construction site in conditions that were made to seem tolerable only by comparison to Kolyma. In 1931 he was released against the wishes of OGPU, as the secret police was then called, but was able to live and work in Moscow without harassment. In 1934 he married Galina Gudz; a daughter, Elena, was born in 1935. Galina’s brother, Boris Gudz, an OGPU agent, was horrified by this connection. He pressed Shalamov to write to the secret police, by now the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). The result was disastrous: Shalamov was arrested and given an initial five-year sentence in Kolyma for counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity, just when the Great Terror was ensuring that most “Trotskyists” were to be shot. (The Gudz family did not escape repression: Shalamov’s wife and daughter were exiled to Turkmenistan; Boris Gudz was dismissed from the secret police and became a bus driver, while his oldest sister, Aleksandra, was also repressed.)

  In his prose, Shalamov avoided all mention of his marital troubles. His Kolyma experiences and the miracle of his survival are graphically documented in the stories. His biography on his release and after his “rehabilitation” (an admission by the authorities of his innocence and two months’ salary) has, however, to be reconstructed from records of conversations and a few surviving letters. His marriage soon collapsed. His daughter, as a conventionally brought up Stalinist, preferred to think of him as dead or as a criminal. Two years later, Shalamov married Olga Nekliudova. The marriage lasted until 1966 but was never a happy one. Shalamov, like many former Gulag prisoners, stuck to the principle of speaking as little as possible, and never when a third person (who might be an informant) was present; in any case, like his father, he took a patriarchal view of women.

  Shalamov initially had high hopes of a literary career. Boris Pasternak greatly praised his poetic talents, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had shown in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that it was possible to write about the camps. But Pasternak, hounded by the Soviet authorities for publishing Doctor Zhivago abroad, died in 1960, and it became clear that Solzhenitsyn could publish—and then just for a few years—only because he had won the favor of Nikita Khrushchev, now the party’s leader, and of Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of the influential journal New World. Shalamov’s initial idolization of Solzhenitsyn was met with a friendly response, even an invitation to collaborate on the compilation of The Gulag Archipelago. But, like nearly all of Shalamov’s contacts, relations rapidly soured: Shalamov clearly disapproved of Solzhenitsyn’s adherence to some of the Christian values of the nineteenth century and to some of the ethics of Soviet society, particularly the faith in the redemptive power of manual work. Whereas Solzhenitsyn moved from writing short stories to colossal novels, Shalamov disapproved of novels as elaborate structures that falsified their material. (His memoir of corrective labor in the Urals is entitled Vishera: An Antinovel.) Shalamov distanced himself from other survivors of the Gulag, such as Yevgeniya Ginzburg, accusing them of being too soft on the villains who had caused their suffering. Shalamov was initially close to Nadezhda, the widow of Osip Mandelstam—he dedicated two of his best stories to both her and the poet—but was alienated by her role as queen bee, surrounded by admirers and dissidents.

  Despite this isolation, and the hostile attentions of the KGB, Shalamov managed to publish four books of poetry. While his poetry, strongly reminiscent in its techniques and subjects of the symbolist school of prerevolutionary Russia, aroused no official antagonism, publishing his stories in the USSR proved impossible, except for one in 1965, the least controversial, “The Dwarf Pine,” and even that caused the editorial board of Country Youth to be dismissed. In 1968—whether with Shalamov’s complicity or against his will is not certain—individual stories, and then the whole of the first book, Kolyma Stories, were leaked in the West and were published, first in émigré Russian journals, and then in German and French translation under the name Shalanov. Shalamov protested privately (though asking for copies and payment), and then, evidently acting under compulsion, publicly in the official Literary Newspaper. For his condemnation of “anti-Soviet” émigré and Western publishers, he was rewarded with belated admission to the Union of Writers, without whose membership no Soviet writer could hope to make a living.

  At the end of the 1960s Shalamov was befriended by Irina Sirotinskaya, who deposited his manuscripts with the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Sirotinskaya has given a detailed account of a relationship based on mutual affection and respect. Certainly, Shalamov’s work might have met the same fate of destruction as that of other dissident writers had it not been for Sirotinskaya’s intervention. More skeptical friends of Shalamov, particularly those who were dissidents or ex-prisoners, or both, had their doubts about this friendship: all state archivists in the USSR were subordinate to the KGB, and the transfer of a writer’s work to the archives during his lifetime could be seen as sequestration as well as preservation. But in my own work in the Soviet archives, I found that there were archivists who despite their “security clearance” were genuinely devoted to the literature to which they controlled access. There is no doubt that Sirotinskaya played a major part in helping Shalamov at least to publish his poetry.

  In the late 1970s, Shalamov, homeless and increasingly ill, disappeared from view into a home for the elderly. Conditions there were truly appalling—ironically, as bad as the worst institutions in the Gulag. When friends, including the granddaughter of one of the imprisoned professors who had trained Shalamov as a paramedic in Kolyma, discovered him, they were allowed to alleviate his conditions slightly but were hindered by the attentions of the KGB and the indi
fference of the “medical” staff. By now Sirotinskaya, a married woman who felt her relationship with Shalamov had to be subordinated to her family’s interests, seems to have distanced herself from the writer. In January 1982, a psychiatric commission diagnosed Shalamov’s condition—extreme deafness, loss of muscular control, and acute suspicion of strangers—as dementia, and he was moved, almost naked in the freezing cold, to a “psychiatric hospital” to which visitors had almost no access. In a few days he died of pneumonia. In her memoir, Sirotinskaya states that she visited him just before his death and that he dictated to her the text of a collection of poems. Shalamov also wrote a will naming her as his heir, and dedicated two of his unpublished collections of stories to her. The authenticity of these last dispositions has been disputed by Shalamov’s dissident associates, notably Sergei Grigoriants. Again, because Shalamov disliked speaking in the presence of a third party (an old camp habit), none of his reported conversations can be corroborated.

  On the grounds that Shalamov, as the son of a priest, had been baptized, friends and people from the world of Soviet literature organized a church funeral and burial.

  •

  Once perestroika was firmly established, in 1988–89, Sirotinskaya prepared Shalamov’s manuscripts—he had a calligraphic hand and there were no problems of decipherment—and organized their publication. No editing, however, was carried out, and readers will notice that in the later books themes, incidents, and characters sometimes recur, and there are even contradictions and similarities in name between disparate characters. Nevertheless, the relentless power of these works, in which the author refuses to soften or mitigate anything, including his own misjudgments, and which show an extraordinary memory, visual and oral, make them unique in the record of twentieth-century horrors, whether Nazi or Soviet. There is no consolation, no faith in Providence or humanity, despite the isolated incidences of kindness he encountered in the Gulag. Only animals behave chivalrously—the male bear and the bullfinch who draw the hunter’s fire so that their mates can escape, the husky that trusted prisoners and growled at guards, or the cat that helps a prisoner catch fish.