Review: Polina Barskova on Varlam Shalamov
Who was going to read this strange prose, so weightless that it seemed about to fly away into space…? —Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Shalamov ought to be considered one of the most important writers of the Soviet century—and also one of the most contested, to this day inviting polarized opinions and interpretations. On the one hand his magnum opus, Kolyma Stories, an epic cycle of brief novellas narrating his experience in Stalin’s death camps, is widely known and accepted as one of the most striking texts of witness to this historical crime and tragedy. On the other hand, from its very conception, Shalamov’s prose was treated by many, its foes and also its adherents, as something too raw and too painful—the unprocessed material of human suffering, perhaps, rather than the makings of a work of art.
For decades Shalamov has been losing in a game of literary success to the other significant Russian chronicler of the Gulag—Nobel Prize-winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My opinion of why this might be the case can be drawn even from Solzhenitsyn's shortest and most famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the publication of which, in the influential Novy Mir [New World] journal in 1962, was a landmark of the short-lived Soviet Thaw. In his novella, Solzhenitsyn followed Tolstoyan traditions into the twentieth century, focusing on the difficult life of a Russian peasant, who, in spite of his abysmal situation, being exiled to a labor camp, manages to make sense of his existence there—even, it may be, to make peace with it.
Shalamov, by contrast, denies that camp existence makes any sense. He questions Solzhenitsyn’s impulse to describe the camp as the locale of anything human or humane, any comfort, any consolation. In a letter to Solzhenitsyn he asked what kind of camp might have a cat in it—obviously not one of the camps where Shalamov spent fifteen years. There, he insists, the cat would be immediately eaten by the starving inmates.
