The Kolyma Tales

I am currently reading The Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov. The book consists of short stories about the author's experiences of the Kolyma prison camp (located in north-east Sibiria), where he was imprisoned from 1937 to 1951. In his short stories, Shalamov writes about the people he met at the camp: other prisoners ("political" and "other" criminals), guards, doctors. His account of life in the prison camp of Kolyma is uncompromising. In several places, he returns to one theme: the prison camps destroyed people, there was nothing good to be found there at all. Even friendship was, he writes, impossible in the camp: at most, relations to others were bearable - enduring the other's stories, sharing the same barrack-bed, selling and buying stuff. One way to interpret this is that he points out how the prisoners' lives were transformed into, as he says, "human stumps". The form of existence he describes is numb, empty and, above all, predicated on the contingencies of life and death, where any small "offence" or "mishap" could have deadly consequences.

But while his stories also convey differences among the prisoners, he does not moralize or pass judgements on others. His depiction of the people he encountered at the camp is, however honest and brutal, characterized by humility. He describes many forms of demoralization at the camps, greed and exploitation, but there is no trace whatsoever of mockery or self-rigtheousness in his writing. He doesn't agitate, he doesn't preach - he simply talks about what it is to survive in impossible circumstances where the odds of survival are next to null.

Shalamov worked in the mines, but after many years he was granted a position as a camp hospital attendant. Many of the stories depict the routines of the camp. Getting up in the morning, being shovelled off to work. He describes work in the mines as a sanctuary; the prisoners performed work under impossible conditions that exceded their strenghts, but at work they were usually left alone by the guards (the worst punishments at the camp were applied when a prisoner failed to drag himself to work). But what he talks about is, of course, a very grim version of "sanctuary". He writes: "Work and death are synonymous, synonymous not only in the world of the prisoners, for those classified as enemies of the people. Work and death are synonymous also for the directors of the camp and for Moscow, otherwise they would not have written what they did in their special instructions, in the tickets to death: 'only for usage in heavy, physical labour'." (In "RUR", my translation of the Swedish tr.)

Shalamov's book contains many detailed descriptions of the Kolyma existence: sleeping, eating, fighting, freezing. Having one's belongings stolen. His book is the story of how he managed to stay alive in the camp, while witnessing the death and decay of so many others.