Kolyma Tales Read online

  Apart from their artistic power, Shalamov’s stories are a shocking testimony. One of the many examples is the way which, from 1942 to 1945, American lend-lease sent bulldozers to Kolyma to dig the mass graves, trucks to carry the gold ore, spades and pickaxes for the slaves to use, and food and clothes for the guards. As one of Shalamov’s fellow prisoners put it, Kolyma was “Auschwitz without the ovens.”

  In some ways, Shalamov could be accused of complicity: he himself shows admiration for the Red heroes of the Civil War who perpetrated acts of cruelty as ruthless as their Stalinist successors. “The Gold Medal,”[1] one of his longest stories, almost deifies the Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Nadia Klimova. For all that Shalamov suffered, he never renounced revolutionary killers when they were prompted by idealism and prepared to pay with their own death. And although he declared that he would never accept a post in which he collaborated with the system of forced labor, once he was a paramedic, he was, as he recounts in “Permafrost,”[2] responsible for the suicide of a young man whom he refused to allow to go on washing floors in the hospital and dispatched to hard labor back in the mines.

  Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything from Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us rather more:

  WHAT I SAW AND UNDERSTOOD IN THE CAMPS

  The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

  The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there.

  I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

  I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

  I realized that Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent—an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

  I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal: no horse can survive work in the Far North.

  I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.

  Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.

  I saw what a weighty argument for the intellectual is the most ordinary slap in the face.

  Ordinary people distinguish their bosses by how hard their bosses hit them, how enthusiastically their bosses beat them.

  Beatings are almost totally effective as an argument (method number three).[3]

  I discovered from experts the truth about how mysterious show trials are set up.

  I understood why prisoners hear political news (arrests, etc.) before the outside world does.

  I found out that the prison (and camp) “grapevine” is never just a “grapevine.”

  I realized that one can live on anger.

  I realized that one can live on indifference.

  I understood why people do not live on hope—there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will—what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

  I am proud to have decided right at the beginning, in 1937, that I would never be a foreman if my freedom could lead to another man’s death, if my freedom had to serve the bosses by oppressing other people, prisoners like myself.

  Both my physical and my spiritual strength turned out to be stronger than I thought in this great test, and I am proud that I never sold anyone, never sent anyone to their death or to another sentence, and never denounced anyone.

  I am proud that I never wrote an official request until 1955.[4]

  I saw the so-called Beria amnesty where it took place, and it was a sight worth seeing.

  I saw that women are more decent and self-sacrificing than men: in Kolyma there were no cases of a husband following his wife. But wives would come, many of them (Faina Rabinovich, Krivoshei’s wife).[5]

  I saw amazing northern families (free-contract workers and former prisoners) with letters “to legitimate husbands and wives,” etc.

  I saw “the first Rockefellers,” the underworld millionaires. I heard their confessions.

  I saw men doing penal servitude, as well as numerous people of “contingents” D, B, etc., “Berlag.”[6]

  I realized that you can achieve a great deal—time in the hospital, a transfer—but only by risking your life, taking beatings, enduring solitary confinement in ice.

  I saw solitary confinement in ice, hacked out of a rock, and spent a night in it myself.

  The passion for power, to be able to kill at will, is great—from top bosses to the rank-and-file guards (Seroshapka [7] and similar men).

  Russians’ uncontrollable urge to denounce and complain.

  I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

  I am convinced that the camps—all of them—are a negative school; you can’t even spend an hour in one without being depraved. The camps never gave, and never could give, anyone anything positive. The camps act by depraving everyone, prisoners and free-contract workers alike.

  Every province had its own camps, at every construction site. Millions, tens of millions of prisoners.

  Repressions affected not just the top layer but every layer of society—in any village, at any factory, in any family there were either relatives or friends who were repressed.

  I consider the best period of my life the months I spent in a cell in Butyrki prison, where I managed to strengthen the spirit of the weak, and where everyone spoke freely.

  I learned to “plan” my life one day ahead, no more.

  I realized that the thieves were not human.

  I realized that there were no criminals in the camps, that the people next to you (and who would be next to you tomorrow) were within the boundaries of the law and had not trespassed them.

  I realized what a terrible thing is the self-esteem of a boy or a youth: it’s better to steal than to ask. That self-esteem and boastfulness are what make boys sink to the bottom.

  In my life women have not played a major part: the camp is the reason.

  Knowing people is useless, for I am unable to change my attitude toward any scoundrel.

  The people whom everyone—guards, fellow prisoners—hates are the last in the ranks, those who lag behind, those who are sick, weak, those who can’t run when the temperature is below zero.

  I understood what power is and what a man with a rifle is.

  I understood that the scales had been displaced and that this displacement was what was most typical of the camps.

  I understood that moving from the condition of a prisoner to the condition of a free man is very difficult, almost impossible without a long period of amortization.

  I understood that a writer has to be a foreigner in the questions he is dealing with, and if he knows his material well, he will write in such a way that nobody will understand him.

  •

  It was only in 2013 that a reasonably complete collection of Shalamov’s work appeared (in seven volumes) in Russia. Abroad, he became most widely known in Germany, where four of the six books translated here, and in the forthcoming volume, have been published. The first reliable English translation of a selection of the Kolyma stories appeared in 1980 as Kolyma Tales, translated by John Glad; in 1994 a handful of other stories from the later books was added to Kolyma Tales. The present volume and its companion will more than double the amount of Shalamov’s work a
vailable in English. Unfortunately, there is as yet no biography of Shalamov or study of his work in English. Those who read German will enjoy Wilfried F. Schoeller’s Leben oder Schreiben: Der Erzähler Warlam Schalamow.[8]

  On the one hand, translating Shalamov is straightforward. He avoids any stylistic effects; most stories are deliberately written “roughly,” without fear of repeating the same adjective, with a minimum of metaphor. One aspect, however, must defeat the translator, and that is the language, fenia or blatnoi yazyk, of the gangsters, the hereditary and professional thieves and murderers who made the life of political prisoners even more hellish. Fenia is a dialect that draws on Odessa Yiddish, on various Slavic and even Turkic sources, and has been stable for perhaps two hundred years. Criminal jargons in English, however, vary with each decade and every city. Only in eighteenth-century London was there a stable criminal language, and just a few specialists today would understand it. For that reason, in this English version Shalamov’s gangsters talk like anyone else, with just a few well-known slang terms. Interestingly, Shalamov wrote only one prose work while in Kolyma: a 600-word dictionary of gangster language for Podosionov, an imprisoned engineer who was in charge of a chemical laboratory (see the story “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” in the forthcoming volume). Podosionov was killed by a passing truck, and the manuscript of this dictionary was lost—which has not made the interpretation of gangster language any easier, despite the proliferation in Russia of dictionaries of criminal slang.

  I am immensely grateful to my wife, Anna Pilkington, for reading the first version of these translations and saving me from a number of blunders, infelicities, and omissions. The task was especially difficult for her, given that her father, Dmitri Vitkovsky, like Shalamov, spent half his life in the Gulag. I also want to thank Susan Barba for her tactful but meticulous editing, and Natalia Efimova of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art for checking Shalamov’s manuscripts when I (wrongly) suspected a misprint in the published text.

  Despite his own assertion in the last point of “What I Saw and Understood in the Camps,” Shalamov knew his material perfectly, and he wrote in a way that everyone can understand.

  —DONALD RAYFIELD

  BOOK ONE

  Kolyma Stories

  TRAMPLING THE SNOW

  HOW DO you trample a road through virgin snow? One man walks ahead, sweating and cursing, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, getting stuck every minute in the deep, porous snow. This man goes a long way ahead, leaving a trail of uneven black holes. He gets tired, lies down in the snow, lights a cigarette, and the tobacco smoke forms a blue cloud over the brilliant white snow. Even when he has moved on, the smoke cloud still hovers over his resting place. The air is almost motionless. Roads are always made on calm days, so that human labor is not swept away by wind. A man makes his own landmarks in this unbounded snowy waste: a rock, a tall tree. He steers his body through the snow like a helmsman steering a boat along a river, from one bend to the next.

  The narrow, uncertain footprints he leaves are followed by five or six men walking shoulder to shoulder. They step around the footprints, not in them. When they reach a point agreed on in advance, they turn around and walk back so as to trample down this virgin snow where no human foot has trodden. And so a trail is blazed. People, convoys of sleds, tractors can use it. If they had walked in single file, there would have been a barely passable narrow trail, a path, not a road: a series of holes that would be harder to walk over than virgin snow. The first man has the hardest job, and when he is completely exhausted, another man from this pioneer group of five steps forward. Of all the men following the trailblazer, even the smallest, the weakest must not just follow someone else’s footprints but must walk a stretch of virgin snow himself. As for riding tractors or horses, that is the privilege of the bosses, not the underlings.

  1956

  ON THE SLATE

  THE HORSE herder Naumov was hosting a card game. The duty guards never even poked their heads into the horse herders’ barracks, since they quite rightly considered their main job to be watching prisoners convicted under article 58. In any case, counterrevolutionaries were not generally allowed to look after horses. The more pragmatic bosses did, admittedly, quietly grumble that this rule deprived them of the best and most conscientious workmen, but their instructions on this question were unambiguously strict. So the horse herders’ barracks was the safest place to be, and every night the gangsters gathered there to fight it out over a game of cards.

  The bottom bunks in the right-hand corner of the barracks were covered with quilts of various colors. A twist of wire held an improvised Kolyma lamp, fueled by kerosene fumes, to the corner pillar. Three or four lengths of copper pipe were soldered onto a jam-jar lid—that was all you needed to make the lamp—and to light it a burning coal was put on the lid; it heated the gas, so that the fumes rose up the pipes and could be lit by a match.

  A filthy down pillow was placed on the quilts. The pair of cardplayers sat on either side of the pillow, their legs beneath them Mongol-style. This was the classic setup for a prison card duel. A fresh pack of cards was put on the pillow. They were no ordinary cards; the pack was cobbled together with amazing speed in the prison by highly skilled men. To do this they needed paper (any book), a piece of bread (chewed and then filtered through a rag to make starch to stick the paper together), the stub of an indelible pencil (a substitute for printer’s ink), and a knife (to cut out the cards and to make stencils for the diamonds, spades, etc.).

  The cards this time had just been made from a volume of Victor Hugo that someone had forgotten to take home from the office. The paper was nice and thick, so there was no need to stick sheets together, as one had to when the paper was too thin. Whenever a search was carried out in the camp, all the indelible pencils were confiscated without fail. They were even removed when prisoners’ parcels were delivered. The reason for this was not only to prevent documents and official stamps from being forged (and there were a lot of talented prisoners who did that sort of thing) but to eliminate anything that might infringe the state’s monopoly on playing cards. Indelible pencils were used to make ink and, by using stencils, the ink was used to make patterns on the cards: queens, jacks, tens in all suits. Prison cards were all the same color; no player needed to have both red and black. The jack of spades, for instance, could be recognized by the spades on two opposite corners of the card. The layout and shape of the patterns had not changed for centuries, and knowing how to make cards yourself was part of the “courtly” training of any young gangster.

  The new pack of cards lay there on the pillow. One of the players would clap his filthy hand on it—but his fine, white fingers showed he had never done any dirty work. The nail of his little finger was unnaturally long, another sign of gangster chic, just like his fixes—gold, or actually bronze, veneers stuck onto perfectly healthy teeth. There were even craftsmen, self-taught dental technicians, who earned a good living making these crowns, for which there was a constant demand. As for fingernails, there would certainly have been a fashion for varnishing them, if only prison conditions had allowed the import of lacquer. The carefully burnished yellow fingernail shone like a jewel. The owner of the fingernail ran his left hand through his sticky, dirty fair hair. He had a very professional army-style crew cut. His brow was low, free of wrinkles, with bushy yellow eyebrows, and his mouth was sharply defined, like a woman’s, and this gave his face a quality sought after by thieves: he was unremarkable. His was a face you could never remember. You would forget him a moment after you looked at him; all his features vanished and when you next met him, you wouldn’t recognize him. This man was Sevochka, famous for his skill at terzo (a prison version of bezique), shtoss, and various kinds of bura (thirty-one), and he was a genius at expounding the thousands of rules of these games, rules that had to be strictly observed in the battle to come. People said of Sevochka that he was really good at “laying it down,” in other words he had the knowledge and
deftness of a cardsharp. He was, of course, a cardsharp, for an honest game among thieves is a game of deception; you have the right to watch and catch out your partner, and you have to be just as good as he is at cheating and at holding on to your dubious winnings.

  The game was always a duel between two players. None of the professionals would lower himself by taking part in games for more players, such as Russian blackjack. They never hesitated to play against someone who could “lay it down,” just as a real chess player always looks for the strongest opponent he can find.

  Sevochka’s partner was Naumov, the foreman of the horse herders. He was older (not that anyone knew Sevochka’s age—twenty, thirty, forty?), a dark-haired fellow whose sunken black eyes had such a long-suffering expression that, had I not known Naumov to be a railway thief from the Kuban, I might have taken him to be a wandering monk or a member of the “trust in God alone” sect, such as you could come across over the last few decades in the camps. This impression was heightened by the pewter cross hanging from a chain around his neck, his shirt open to reveal it. The cross was not a blasphemous joke nor a passing whim. In those days all the gangsters wore aluminum crosses, as much an indication of their profession as a tattoo.

  In the 1920s gangsters liked to wear workmen’s caps; before that they wore naval officers’ caps. In the 1940s they wore flat round cossack caps, turned down the tops of their felt boots, and hung crosses around their necks. The cross was usually plain, but any available artist could be made to use a needle to scratch the criminals’ favorite patterns: a heart, a card, a naked woman. . . . Naumov’s cross was plain. It hung on his dark, bare chest, and it was hard to read his blue tattoo, a quotation from Yesenin, the only poet recognized and canonized by the criminal world:

  How few the roads I have trodden,