What unites Shalamov’s Kolyma stories? Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov Kolyma stories structure of Kolyma stories

2. Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants

According to E.A. Shklovsky: “It is difficult to write about the work of Varlam Shalamov. It is difficult, first of all, because his tragic fate, which is largely reflected in the famous “Kolyma Stories” and many poems, seems to require commensurate experience. An experience that even your enemy will not regret." Almost twenty years of prison, camps, exile, loneliness and neglect in the last years of his life, a miserable nursing home and, ultimately, death in a psychiatric hospital, where the writer was forcibly transported to soon die from pneumonia. In the person of V. Shalamov, in his gift as a great writer, a national tragedy is shown, which received its witness-martyr with his own soul and paid with blood for terrible knowledge.

Kolyma Stories is the first collection of stories by Varlam Shalamov, which reflects the life of Gulag prisoners. Gulag - the main directorate of the camps, as well as an extensive network of concentration camps during mass repressions. The collection was created from 1954 to 1962, after Shalamov returned from Kolyma. Kolyma stories are an artistic interpretation of everything Shalamov saw and experienced during the 13 years he spent in prison in Kolyma (1938-1951).

V.T. Shalamov formulated the problems of his work as follows: ““Kolyma Tales” is an attempt to pose and solve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. The ability to rely on forces other than hope."

As G.L. Nefagina wrote: “Realistic works about the Gulag system were devoted, as a rule, to the lives of political prisoners. They depicted camp horrors, torture, and abuse. But in such works (A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko) the victory of the human spirit over evil was demonstrated.”

Today it is becoming more and more obvious that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox, symbolism, a brilliant mastery of the word in its semantic, sound form, a subtle strategy of the master.

The Kolyma wound constantly bled, and while working on stories, Shalamov “screamed, threatened, cried” - and wiped away his tears only after the story was finished. But at the same time, he never tired of repeating that “the work of an artist is precisely the form,” working with words.

Shalamovskaya Kolyma is a set of island camps. It was Shalamov, as Timofeev claimed, who found this metaphor - “camp-island”. Already in the story “The Snake Charmer,” the prisoner Platonov, “a film scriptwriter in his first life,” speaks with bitter sarcasm about the sophistication of the human mind, which came up with “such things as our islands with all the improbability of their life.” And in the story “The Man from the Steamboat,” the camp doctor, a man of a sharp sardonic mind, expresses a secret dream to his listener: “...If only our islands - would you understand me? “Our islands have sunk through the ground.”

Islands, an archipelago of islands, are a precise and highly expressive image. He “captured” the forced isolation and at the same time the connection by a single slave regime of all these prisons, camps, settlements, “business trips” that were part of the GULAG system. An archipelago is a group of sea islands located close to each other. But for Solzhenitsyn, “archipelago,” as Nefagina argued, is primarily a conventional term-metaphor denoting the object of research. For Shalamov, “our islands” are a huge holistic image. He is not subject to the narrator, he has epic self-development, he absorbs and subordinates to his ominous whirlwind, his “plot” everything, absolutely everything - the sky, snow, trees, faces, destinies, thoughts, executions...

There is nothing else that would be located outside of “our islands” in “Kolyma Tales”. That pre-camp, free life is called the “first life”; it ended, disappeared, melted, it no longer exists. And did she exist? The prisoners of “our islands” themselves think of it as a fabulous, unrealizable land that lies somewhere “beyond the blue seas, behind the high mountains,” as, for example, in “The Snake Charmer.” The camp swallowed up any other existence. He subjected everything and everyone to the ruthless dictates of his prison rules. Having grown limitlessly, it became an entire country. The concept of “the country of Kolyma” is directly stated in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “In this country of hopes, and therefore, the country of rumors, guesses, assumptions, hypotheses.”

A concentration camp that has replaced the entire country, a country turned into a huge archipelago of camps—this is the grotesque-monumental image of the world that is formed from the mosaic of “Kolyma Tales.” It is orderly and expedient in its own way, this world. This is what the prison camp looks like in the “Golden Taiga”: “The small zone is a transfer. A large zone - a camp for the mining department - endless barracks, prison streets, a triple fence of barbed wire, winter-style guard towers that look like birdhouses.” And then it follows: “The architecture of the Small Zone is ideal.” It turns out that this is a whole city, built in full accordance with its purpose. And there is architecture here, and even one to which the highest aesthetic criteria are applicable. In a word, everything is as it should be, everything is “like with people.”

Brewer M. reports: “This is the space of the “country of Kolyma.” The laws of time also apply here. True, in contrast to the hidden sarcasm in the depiction of the seemingly normal and expedient camp space, camp time is openly taken outside the framework of the natural course, it is a strange, abnormal time.”

“Months in the Far North are considered years - so great is the experience, the human experience acquired there.” This generalization belongs to the impersonal narrator from the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev.” But here is the subjective, personal perception of time by one of the prisoners, the former doctor Glebov, in the story “At Night”: “The minute, the hour, the day from getting up to lights out was real - he didn’t guess further and didn’t find the strength to guess. Like all" .

In this space and in this time, the life of a prisoner passes for years. It has its own way of life, its own rules, its own scale of values, its own social hierarchy. Shalamov describes this way of life with the meticulousness of an ethnographer. Here are the details of everyday life: how, for example, a camp barracks are built (“a sparse fence in two rows, the gap is filled with pieces of frosty moss and peat”), how the stove in the barracks is heated, what a homemade camp lamp is like - a gasoline “kolyma” ... The social structure of the camp is also the subject of careful description. Two poles: “blatars”, they are “friends of the people” - on one, and on the other - political prisoners, they are “enemies of the people”. Union of thieves' laws and government regulations. The vile power of all these Fedechkas, Senechkas, served by a motley crew of “masks”, “crows”, “heel scratchers”. And no less merciless oppression of a whole pyramid of official bosses: foremen, accountants, supervisors, guards...

This is the established and established order of life on “our islands.” In a different regime, the GULAG would not be able to fulfill its function: to absorb millions of people, and in return “give out” gold and timber. But why do all these Shalamov “ethnographies” and “physiologies” evoke a feeling of apocalyptic horror? Just recently, one of the former Kolyma prisoners reassuringly said that “the winter there, in general, is a little colder than Leningrad” and that on Butugychag, for example, “mortality was actually insignificant,” and appropriate treatment and preventive measures were carried out to combat scurvy , like forced drinking of dwarf extract, etc.

And Shalamov has information about this extract and much more. But he does not write ethnographic essays about Kolyma, he creates the image of Kolyma as the embodiment of an entire country turned into a Gulag. The apparent outline is only the “first layer” of the image. Shalamov goes through “ethnography” to the spiritual essence of Kolyma; he looks for this essence in the aesthetic core of real facts and events.

In the anti-world of Kolyma, where everything is aimed at trampling and trampling the dignity of the prisoner, the liquidation of personality occurs. Among the “Kolyma Stories” there are those that describe the behavior of creatures that have descended to almost complete loss of human consciousness. Here is the short story “At Night”. Former doctor Glebov and his partner Bagretsov commit what, according to generally accepted moral standards, has always been considered extreme blasphemy: they tear up the grave, undress the corpse of their partner in order to then exchange his pathetic underwear for bread. This is already beyond the limit: the personality is no longer there, only a purely animal vital reflex remains.

However, in the anti-world of Kolyma, not only is mental strength exhausted, not only is reason extinguished, but such a final phase begins when the very reflex of life disappears: a person no longer cares about his own death. This state is described in the story “Single Measurement”. Student Dugaev, still very young - twenty-three years old, is so crushed by the camp that he no longer even has the strength to suffer. All that remains is - before the execution - a dull regret, “that I worked in vain, suffered this last day in vain.”

As Nefagina G.L. points out: “Shalamov writes brutally and harshly about the dehumanization of man by the Gulag system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Shalamov’s sixty Kolyma stories and his “Sketches of the Underworld,” noted: “Shalamov’s camp experience was worse and longer than mine, and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not I, who got to touch that bottom of brutality and despair, to which the whole camp life pulled us."

In “Kolyma Tales” the object of comprehension is not the System, but a person in the millstones of the System. Shalamov is not interested in how the repressive machine of the Gulag works, but in how the human soul “works,” which this machine is trying to crush and grind. And what dominates in “Kolyma Stories” is not the logic of the concatenation of judgments, but the logic of the concatenation of images - the primordial artistic logic. All this is directly related not only to the dispute about the “image of the uprising,” but much more broadly to the problem of adequate reading of the “Kolyma Tales”, in accordance with their own nature and the creative principles that guided their author.

Of course, everything humane is extremely dear to Shalamov. He sometimes even with tenderness “extracts” from the gloomy chaos of Kolyma the most microscopic evidence that the System was not able to completely freeze out in human souls - that primary moral feeling, which is called the ability to compassion.

When the doctor Lidia Ivanovna in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” in her quiet voice confronts the paramedic for yelling at Andreev, he remembered her “for the rest of his life” - “for the kind word spoken on time.” When an elderly tool maker in the story “Carpenters” covers for two incompetent intellectuals who called themselves carpenters, just to spend at least a day in the warmth of a carpentry workshop, and gives them his own turned ax handles. When the bakers from the bakery in the story “Bread” try first of all to feed the camp goons sent to them. When the prisoners, embittered by fate and the struggle for survival, in the story “The Apostle Paul” burn a letter and a statement from the old carpenter’s only daughter renouncing her father, then all these seemingly insignificant actions appear as acts of high humanity. And what the investigator does in the story “Handwriting” - he throws into the oven the case of Christ, who was included in the next list of those sentenced to death - this is, by existing standards, a desperate act, a real feat of compassion.

So, a normal “average” person in completely abnormal, absolutely inhuman circumstances. Shalamov explores the process of interaction of the Kolyma prisoner with the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious, on that border strip where the Gulag winepress pushed a person - on the precarious line between a person who still retains the ability to think and suffer , and that impersonal being who no longer controls himself and begins to live by the most primitive reflexes.

Among the literary figures discovered by the era of glasnost, the name of Varlam Shalamov, in my opinion, is one of the most tragic names in Russian literature. This writer left his descendants a legacy of amazing artistic depth - “Kolyma Tales,” a work about life and human destinies in the Stalinist Gulag. Although the word “life” is inappropriate when talking about pictures of human existence depicted by Shalamov.

It is often said that “Kolyma Stories” is the writer’s attempt to raise and resolve the most important moral questions of the time: the question of the legitimacy of a person’s struggle with the state machine, the ability to actively influence one’s destiny, and the ways to preserve human dignity in inhuman conditions. I see the task of a writer depicting hell on earth called “GULAG” differently.

I think Shalamov’s work is a slap in the face to the society that allowed this to happen. “Kolyma Tales” is a spit in the face of the Stalinist regime and everything that personifies this bloody era. What ways of preserving human dignity, which Shalamov allegedly talks about in “Kolyma Stories,” can we talk about in this material, if the writer himself calmly states the fact that all human concepts - love, respect, compassion, mutual assistance - seemed to the prisoners “comic concepts” " He is not looking for ways to preserve this very dignity; the prisoners simply did not think about it, did not ask such questions. One can only be amazed at how inhumane the conditions were in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people found themselves, if every minute of “that” life was filled with thoughts of food, clothing that could be obtained by taking it off a recently deceased person.

I think that the issues of a person controlling his own destiny and preserving his dignity are more applicable to the work of Solzhenitsyn, who also wrote about Stalin’s camps. In Solzhenitsyn's works, the characters really reflect on moral issues. Alexander Isaevich himself said that his heroes were placed in milder conditions than Shalamov’s heroes, and explained this by the different conditions of imprisonment in which they, the author-eyewitnesses, found themselves.

It is difficult to imagine how much emotional stress these stories cost Shalamov. I would like to dwell on the compositional features of “Kolyma Tales”. The plots of the stories at first glance are unrelated to each other, however, they are compositionally integral. “Kolyma Stories” consists of 6 books, the first of which is called “Kolyma Stories”, followed by the books “Left Bank”, “Shovel Artist”, “Sketches of the Underworld”, “Resurrection of the Larch”, “The Glove, or KR” -2".

The book “Kolyma Stories” includes 33 stories, arranged in a strictly defined order, but not tied to chronology. This construction is aimed at depicting Stalin's camps in history and development. Thus, Shalamov’s work is nothing more than a novel in short stories, despite the fact that the author has repeatedly declared the death of the novel as a literary genre in the 20th century.

The stories are narrated in third person. The main characters of the stories are different people (Golubev, Andreev, Krist), but they are all extremely close to the author, since they are directly involved in what is happening. Each of the stories resembles the confession of a hero. If we talk about the skill of Shalamov the artist, about his style of presentation, then it should be noted that the language of his prose is simple, extremely precise. The intonation of the narration is calm, without strain. Severely, laconically, without any attempts at psychological analysis, the writer even talks about what is happening somewhere documented. I think Shalamov achieves a stunning effect on the reader by contrasting the calmness of the author’s unhurried, calm narrative and the explosive, terrifying content.

The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as absolute evil. “The camp is hell” is a constant association that comes to mind while reading “Kolyma Tales.” This association arises not even because you are constantly faced with the inhuman torment of prisoners, but also because the camp seems to be the kingdom of the dead. Thus, the story “Funeral Word” begins with the words: “Everyone died...” On every page you encounter death, which here can be named among the main characters. All heroes, if we consider them in connection with the prospect of death in the camp, can be divided into three groups: the first - heroes who have already died, and the writer remembers them; the second - those who will almost certainly die; and the third group are those who may be lucky, but this is not certain. This statement becomes most obvious if we remember that the writer in most cases talks about those whom he met and whom he experienced in the camp: a man who was shot for failure to carry out the plan by his site, his classmate, whom he met 10 years later in the Butyrskaya cell prison, a French communist whom the foreman killed with one blow of his fist...

But death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person in the camp. More often it becomes a salvation from torment for the one who died, and an opportunity to gain some benefit if another died. Here it is worth turning again to the episode of the camp workers digging up a freshly buried corpse from the frozen ground: all that the heroes experience is the joy that the dead man’s linen can be exchanged tomorrow for bread and tobacco (“Night”),

The main feeling that pushes the heroes to do terrible things is the feeling of constant hunger. This feeling is the most powerful of all feelings. Food is what sustains life, so the writer describes in detail the process of eating: the prisoners eat very quickly, without spoons, over the side of the plate, licking the bottom clean with their tongue. In the story “Domino,” Shalamov portrays a young man who ate the meat of human corpses from the morgue, cutting out “non-fat” pieces of human flesh.

Shalamov depicts the life of prisoners - another circle of hell. The prisoners' housing is huge barracks with multi-story bunks, where 500-600 people are accommodated. Prisoners sleep on mattresses stuffed with dry branches. Everywhere there is complete unsanitary conditions and, as a result, diseases.

Shalamova views the Gulag as an exact copy of the model of Stalin’s totalitarian society: “...The camp is not a contrast between hell and heaven. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like.”

In one of his diary notebooks from 1966, Shalamov explains the task he set in “Kolyma Stories”: “I am not writing so that what is described will not be repeated. It doesn’t happen like that... I write so that people know that such stories are being written, and they themselves decide to do some worthy act...”

From Kolyma.

Kolyma stories introduce the reader to the life of Gulag prisoners and are an artistic interpretation of everything Shalamov saw and experienced during the 13 years he spent in prison in Kolyma (1938-1951).

Features of the genre and issues

Shalamov, not accepting the classical tradition of constructing a story, established a new genre, the cornerstone of which was documentary evidence. Combining documentary and artistic expression.

“Kolyma Stories” is a search for a new expression, and thereby new content. A new, unusual form for recording an exceptional state, exceptional circumstances, which, it turns out, can exist both in history and in the human soul. The human soul, its limits, its moral boundaries are stretched limitlessly - historical experience cannot help here.

Only people who have personal experience can have the right to record this exceptional experience, this exceptional moral state.

The result - “Kolyma Tales” - is not a fiction, not a screening of something random - this screening was done in the brain, as if before, automatically. The brain produces, cannot help but produce phrases prepared by personal experience somewhere earlier. There is no cleaning, no editing, no finishing - everything is written clean. Drafts - if they exist - are deep in the brain, and the consciousness does not sort out options there, like the color of Katyusha Maslova's eyes - in my understanding of art - absolute anti-art. Is there really an eye color for any hero of “Kolyma Tales” - if they exist there? There were no people in Kolyma who had the same eye color, and this is not an aberration of my memory, but the essence of life at that time.

V. Shalamov formulated the problematics of his work as follows: Beginning of quotation

“Kolyma Stories is an attempt to raise and resolve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. An opportunity to rely on forces other than hope.” End of quote

Circumstances of publication

For the first time, four “Kolyma Stories” were published in Russian in the New York “New Journal” in 1966.

Later, 26 stories by Shalamov, mainly from the collection “Kolyma Stories”, were published in 1967 in Cologne (Germany) in German, under the title “Stories of the Prisoner Shala” n ova." Two years later, a translation of the publication of the same name from German appeared in France. Later, the number of publications of “Kolyma Stories”, with the author’s surname corrected, increased.

Shalamov rejected, in his opinion, the strategy of the Soviet dissident movement, oriented towards the support of Western intelligence services, calling the situation in which it operates a “win-win sports lottery of American intelligence”; he did not seek to publish abroad; his main goal was always publication in his homeland. The publication of “Kolyma Stories” against the will of their author in the West, cutting off the opportunity to be published in his homeland, was hard for Shalamov to bear. Here's what his friend I. P. Sirotinskaya recalled about it:

The book “Moscow Clouds” was never put into print. Varlam Tikhonovich ran and consulted in “Yunost” - with B. Polevoy and N. Zlotnikov, in “Literary Newspaper” with N. Marmerstein, in “Soviet Writer” - with V. Fogelson. He came twitched, angry and desperate. “I'm on the list. I need to write a letter." I said: “No need. This is losing face. No need. I feel with all my soul - it’s not necessary.”

- You Little Red Riding Hood, you don’t know this world of wolves. I'm saving my book. These bastards there in the West put a story on the show. I didn’t give my stories to any “Poseva” or “Voices”.

He was almost hysterical, rushing around the room. “PCH” also got it:

- Let them jump into this pit themselves, and then write petitions. Yes Yes! Jump yourself, don't force others to jump.

As a result, in 1972, Shalamov was forced to resort to writing a letter of protest, which was perceived by many as a sign of the author’s civic weakness and his renunciation of “Kolyma Tales.” Meanwhile, archival data, memories of loved ones, correspondence and modern research allow us to judge that Shalamov was consistent and absolutely sincere in his appeal to the editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta.

During Shalamov’s lifetime, not a single story about the Gulag was published in the USSR. In 1988, at the height of perestroika, “Kolyma Stories” began to appear in magazines, and their first separate edition was published only in 1989, 7 years after the writer’s death.

1. In the snow

1. At night

1. Single metering

1. Rain

1. Dry rations

1. Apostle Paul

1. Bitch Tamara

1. Baby pictures

1. Tatar mullah and clean air

1. Aunt Polya

1. Taiga golden

1. Seraphim

1. Domino

1. Shock therapy

1. Red Cross

1. Typhoid quarantine

Characters

All murderers in Shalamov's stories are given a real last name.

Epigraph for the lesson: Humanity cannot exist otherwise than by solving the great mysteries of great artists. And we cannot understand our own life, which seems to be far from the Kolyma reality - we cannot understand it without solving the riddle of Shalamov’s texts. (Lev Timofeev)

During the classes

Teacher's word

We have an unusual lesson today. It is dedicated to the amazing man-writer Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, who went through the hell of Stalin’s camps. He spent 20 years in the Gulag camps, survived and found the strength to write about it in “Kolyma Stories.” The lesson is dedicated to the victims of Stalin's repressions, as well as Shalamov's stories, which the writer himself called “new prose.”

I want to start the lesson with a letter from Varlam Tikhonovich’s contemporary Frida Vigdorova, in which she addresses the writer with the following words: “I read your stories. They are the most brutal I have ever read. The most merciless. There are people there without a past, without a biography, without memories. It says that trouble does not unite people, that a person thinks only about himself, about surviving. But why do you close the manuscript with faith in honor, goodness and human dignity? It’s mysterious, I can’t explain it, I don’t know how it happens. But it is so".

What is the mystery of “Kolyma Tales”? This is what we will try to find out today by turning to the analysis of the work. But in order to understand Shalamov’s prose, one must have a good understanding of the historical events of those years. Let's look at the historical background.

(The student’s message follows; the teacher organizes the work using terms and concepts.)

Teacher: Now you see what the situation was in the country in the 1930s, but no one better than an eyewitness and writer can convey the picture of those terrible years. What does V. T. Shalamov himself say about his stories? Here are the writer’s words: ““Kolyma Stories” is an attempt to raise and resolve some important moral questions of the time, questions that cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. An opportunity to rely on forces other than hope.”

Was there such an opportunity there in the camp? Where the possibility of looting - taking off a dead man's clothes and exchanging them for bread - was considered good luck? The one in the grave is a dead man, but aren't the marauders dead? Isn’t a person without moral principles, without memory, without will, a dead person? In the story “Two Meetings,” Shalamov writes: “I gave my word a long time ago that if they hit me, that would be the end of my life. I would hit the boss and they would shoot me. Alas, I was a naive boy, when I became weak, so did my will, my reason. I persuaded myself to endure it and did not find the mental strength to retaliate, to commit suicide, to protest. I was an ordinary goner and lived according to the laws of the psyche of goons.

What moral questions can be resolved by describing this closed grave space, this stopped time, talking about beatings, about hunger, about dystrophy, about the cold that deprives one of their minds, about people who have forgotten not only the name of their wife, but who have lost their own past, and again about beatings, executions, which are spoken of as liberation - the sooner the better. Why do we need to know all this? Don’t we remember the words of Shalamov himself about the hero of the story “Typhoid Quarantine”: “Andreev was a representative of the dead. And his knowledge, the knowledge of a “dead” person, could not be useful to them, while still alive.”

Shalamov is an amazing artist. Instead of showing the reader direct answers, ways out of the abyss of evil, he places us deeper and deeper into this closed world, into this

death and does not promise quick release. But we no longer have life without a solution. Stalin and Beria may no longer be there, but the stories live on, and we live in them along with the characters. Therefore, the epigraph to our lesson is the words of Lev Timofeev “Man cannot exist otherwise than by solving the great mysteries of great artists. And we cannot understand our own life, which seems to be far from the Kolyma reality, without solving the riddle of Shalamov’s texts.” To get closer to this solution, let’s imagine that the writer himself, Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, came to us. What questions would you ask? asked him?

Question: Why were you arrested and convicted?

Answer: I was arrested for distributing V.I. Lenin’s letter to the congress (the so-called Lenin’s will), in which Vladimir Ilyich named Trotsky, not Stalin, as his successor. I was arrested in 1928 for 3 years, then again in 1937 for 5 years, then the sentence was extended for calling Bunin a Russian classic. In total, I spent about 20 years in the camps (until 1953).

Question: From your biography it is known that you stood up for the prisoner Pyotr Zayets, who was beaten by the guards. Why did you do this, because you could have been killed?

Answer: I realized that if I don’t do this, I will stop respecting myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I was no worse than the heroes from the past of Russian history. The guards forced me to stand barefoot in the cold overnight.

Question: Were there people in the camp who helped you survive this hell?

Answer: Yes, it was a doctor, Andrei Mikhailovich Pantyukhov. He treated me, helped me become a paramedic, thus saving my life. I wrote about this in the story "Domino".

Question: What was your salvation in the camp?

Answer: In a letter to Boris Pasternak, I wrote about it this way: “A stranger to everyone around me, lost in winter, which doesn’t care about people at all, I tried, either timidly or in despair, with poetry to save myself from the overwhelming and soul-corrupting power of this world.” My law in the camps: act only according to your conscience.

Question: Why did you decide to talk about this time in your “Kolyma Stories”?

Answer: People should remember that time. We cannot forget those who died in the camps. The executioners must be condemned. We must ensure that the evil of the Gulag never happens again.

Teacher: Thank you, Varlam Tikhonovich. Guys, now I’ll read a poem by Eduard Golderness, and you can tell me how it relates to the topic of our lesson:

The purpose of life is life. And if you live
You must be a fighter for life
Serve love, art or the Fatherland,
You will still come to this path
An example of love between Farhad and Shirin
Who wouldn't get more strength for life?
Immortal graves gave birth to life
The fatherland of those who saved in the days of hard times

They can give you strength in the struggle for life
Peace and will, strength and perseverance.
But thrice happy is he who is in martial arts
Entered death to conquer
He was given immortality to know,
You can give your life for this happiness!

Students: The writer enters into a duel with death.

Teacher: Guys, let's turn to the “Kolyma Stories”, which made the writer’s name immortal, and try to understand what their secret is. The first story we will talk about is “Berry”. Briefly retell the plot of the story “Berry”.

What is the meaning of the title of the story? Why did the guard kill the prisoner?

Student: Because he was picking berries. Teacher (organizes a conversation on the content of the story “Berry”):

“Like any short story writer, I attach extreme importance to the first and last phrase,” wrote Shaliamov. Reread the first and last sentences of “Berry.” Why does the author close the beginning and the end here?

Has anything changed in the narrator’s position after Rybakov’s death? What is the landscape like in the story? Is this a depiction of nature or death? How do you feel about the narrator’s action in picking up Rybakov’s jar? Which of the guards - Fadeev or Seroshapka - is more unpleasant to the narrator and why? How do you understand the words: “Impunity for beatings - like impunity for murders - corrupts and corrupts the souls of people?” What will destroy a person faster: the position of a prisoner or power over one’s own kind?

(Students give answers to the questions posed.)

Teacher: Guys, let's turn to the next story "To the show"

(The teacher organizes a conversation on the content of the story “To the Show”)

How does the story describe the life of another group of people in the camp - the thieves? What is your attitude towards Sevochka, his servants, and the horse thief Naumov? How is this read into the story? Compare the vocabulary and intonation of the story about the thieves with the story about the engineer Garkunov:

Sevochka:

Thin, white, non-working fingers... Sleek, sticky, dirty blond hair, low forehead, yellow eyebrow bushes, bow-shaped mouth... however, how old is Sevochka - twenty, thirty, forty?..

Sevochka muttered through his teeth with endless contempt.

Sevochka said firmly.

Naumov:

A black-haired fellow with such a pained expression in his black, deeply sunken eyes... that I would have taken him for a wanderer.

Naumov said hoarsely...

Naumov shouted...

He said ingratiatingly...

Teacher: The plot of the story is characterized by the tension of the beginning, its rapid transition to the climax and the terrible denouement that stuns the reader.

How can we explain the metamorphosis that occurred with Naumov, who had just humiliatingly curry favor with Sevochka, and now he is humiliating Garkunov?

Where did a retired textile engineer who ended up in Kolyma under Article 58 as an “enemy of the people” come from so much determination (“I won’t take him down,” Garkunov said hoarsely. “Only with skin”)?

Can we speak of human confrontation in these brief moments of action reaching its climax? What does a sweater mean to him?

What drama reveals itself to us behind the words: “his face turned white”, “this was the last transmission from his wife before setting off on a long journey”, “I knew how Garkunov took care of him, not letting him out of my hands for a minute”?

(Students give their answers.)

Teacher: Speaking about the moral problems in the story, we can draw a conclusion about the skill of the writer. In a small paragraph - the fate of a person, the past, present and future compressed into a moment: after all, a sweater is a thread connecting with a former life, it contains hope of survival. The thread turned out to be thin, human life is defenseless and fragile, a toy in the hands of non-humans...

Garkunov was killed. But were the killers afraid? Will they be punished? Let's return to the beginning and end of the story. “We played cards at Naumov’s horse-driver’s. The guards on duty never looked into the barracks of the horsemen,” - this is how the story begins. And at the end - Sevochka carefully folds the sweater into her suitcase... The narrator is concerned that he needs to look for another partner for sawing wood.

What is revealed to us behind this? What reality? How does the tomorrow of those Shalamov told us about appear in our imagination? The story “To the Presentation” is about the power of thieves in the camp over the enemies of the people.” The state entrusted the “friends” of the people with the re-education of those who ended up in Kolyma under Article 58.

Teacher: Let's turn to the following story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev" (The teacher organizes a conversation on the following questions):

1. What is this story about?
2. Why does the author compare the arrests of the 1930s and 1940s at the beginning of the story? How were former front-line soldiers different from other prisoners?
3. How do you understand Shalamov’s words: “The reprisal of millions of people with impunity was a success because they were innocent people, they were martyrs, not heroes.”

Tell us about the fate of Major Pugachev. What is the fate of his comrades? How did the war experience affect them?

How did the prisoners behave during the escape?

Why were there no wounded prisoners in the hospital?

Why was Soldatov treated?

1. What was Pugachev thinking about before his death? Find this episode.
2. Why does the story end with the death of Pugachev?
3. What feeling remains after reading the story? What is the author's attitude towards the characters? Why did Shalamov, who claimed that there could be no successful escapes, glorify Major Pugachev?
4. Let us turn to the story that concludes the collection “Kolyma Stories”. This is “Sentence”. The story “Sentence” is one of the most mysterious works of Varlam Shalamov. By the will of the author himself, it was placed last in the corpus of books “Left Bank”, which, in turn, generally completes the trilogy of “Kolyma Tales”. This story is, in fact, the ending. As it happens in a symphony or a novel, where only the ending finally harmonizes the entire previous text, so here only the last story gives the final meaning to the entire narrative.
5. What is a maxim? Why is the story named this way? A maxim is a moralizing saying, a word that the hero of the story remembered.
6. -Match the beginning and ending of the story. What is unusual about the ending?
7. -Choose synonyms for the word “non-existence.” What is its significance in the story?

How does the narrator feel about his own and other people’s death, which seems inevitable for a goner who exists beyond the boundaries of the human world?

Follow the stages of the process of awakening the narrator's memory: from “anger - the last of human feelings,” through semi-consciousness, to fear that the delay in death will be short, and envy of the dead, finally to pity for animals, but not for

to people. This whole range of feelings is connected with the physical state of the hero. This is not a spiritual awakening, but a physical awakening. And only after a person again, as if in the process of evolution, goes through the path from the simplest emotions to more complex experiences, does reason awaken in him.

How does this happen?

How does this affect the meaning of the story?

Teacher: The tragedy of “Kolyma Tales” ends not with an accusatory maxim, not with a call for revenge, not with a formulation of the historical meaning of the horror experienced, but with hoarse music, a random gramophone on a larch stump; a gramophone that “... played, overcoming the hiss of a needle, played some kind of symphonic music. And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves, foremen and hard workers. And the boss stood nearby. And his face looked as if he himself wrote this music | for us, for our remote taiga business trip. The shellac record was spinning and the stump itself, wound up in all its three hundred circles, hissed and spun, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years..."

1. What is emphasized by this ending: an accident or a pattern of returning to life?
2. Why does the harmony of music arise in the world of death?
3. Has the writer himself returned to life?
4. What is the relationship between the logic of life and the harmony of the world?
5. The basis of the harmony of the world includes such eternal concepts as TRUTH, GOOD, BEAUTY. They are inseparable. Can we talk about them while reading “Kolyma Tales”?

Teacher: Try to express your thoughts on the topic of our lesson in a short poem - a cinquain. Topics: V.Shalamov. Kolyma. Kolyma stories. Human. (Work in groups.)

KOLYMA.
Cold, scary.
Tortures, freezes, kills.
Kolyma is a scary place.
DEATH.

KOLYMA STORIES.
Cruel, truthful.
They tell, remind, shout.
Kolyma stories - pages of history.
TRUE.

HUMAN.
Strong, strong-willed.
He fights, he works, he doesn’t give up.
Man is not afraid of death.
GOOD.

VARLAM SHALAMOV.
Wise, strong.
Works, struggles, writes.
Shalamov is a talented writer.
SKILLED MASTER (BEAUTY).

Your syncwines contain the key words of our lesson. So we came to the conclusion about the immortality of art, about the power of harmony in the human world. And they saw what a violation of this harmony could lead to - death. This is what Shalamov strives to tell in his stories, this is their secret. The life and work of the writer Shalamov is his atoning sacrifice. And he was close to the truth when he wrote: “In the world there are thousands of truths and truths, and there is only one truth of talent. Just as there is one kind of immortality - art." This is the solution to the mystery of Shalamov’s creativity. The mystery to which the writer introduces us is art. Vigdorova, whose letter we read at the beginning of the lesson, was right: no one can fully comprehend this art. But the reader is given something else: when joining the sacrament, he strives to understand himself. And this is possible, since not only the events of history, but all of us are characters in Shalamov’s stories, inhabitants of his mysterious world. Let's take a closer look at ourselves there. Where are we there? Where is our place? Finding one's own by a common man I in the radiance of art it is like the materialization of sunlight. This miracle is given to us by V. Shalamov’s books - the spiritual treasure of Russia...

(The teacher sums up the lesson and discusses grades with the students.)

Homework: Essay “What is the mystery of V. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales?”

The article is posted on a little-known Internet resource in the pdf extension, duplicated here.
The camp is like the Devil, the camp is like the Absolute World Evil.

Poetics of “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov

Having written six artistic and prose cycles of “Kolyma Stories” (1954-1974), Shalamov came to a paradoxical conclusion: “The undescribed, unfulfilled part of my work is huge... and the best Kolyma Stories are all just the surface, precisely because it is clearly described.” (6:58). Imaginary simplicity and accessibility is a misconception about the author’s philosophical prose. Varlam Shalamov is not only a writer who testified to a crime against a person, but he is also a talented writer with a special style, with “a unique rhythm of prose, with innovative novelism, with pervasive paradox, with ambivalent symbolism and brilliant mastery of the word in its semantic, sound form and even in a descriptive configuration” (1:3).

In this regard, the simplicity and clarity of V. T. Shalamov’s words, his style and the terrible world of Kolyma he recreates is indicative, a world, according to M. Zolotonosov, “presented as such, without an artistic lens” (3:183) N. K. Gay notes that a work of art “is not reducible to logically complete interpretations” (1:97)
Exploring the types of verbal images in V. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” such as: LEXICAL (word-image), SUBJECT (detail), CHARACTER (image-character), let us present the WORK AS “IMAGE OF THE WORLD”, because the images of each subsequent level arise on the basis images of previous levels. V.T. Shalamov himself wrote this: “The prose of the future seems to me to be simple prose, where there is no ornateness, with precise language, where only from time to time a new thing appears - seen for the first time - a detail or detail described vividly. The reader should be surprised by these details and believe the whole story” (5:66). The expressiveness and accuracy of everyday relief in the writer’s stories earned him fame as a documentarian of Kolyma. The text contains a lot of such details, for example, the story “The Carpenters,” which talks about the harsh reality of camp life, when prisoners were forced to work even in the most severe frosts. “We had to go to work at any temperature. In addition, the old-timers almost accurately determined the frost without a thermometer: if there is frosty fog, it means that it is forty degrees below zero outside; if the air comes out with noise when breathing, but it is still not difficult to breathe, it means forty-five degrees; if breathing is noisy and shortness of breath is noticeable - fifty degrees. Above fifty-five degrees - the spit freezes in mid-flight. The spittle had been freezing on the fly for two weeks” (5:23). Thus, one artistic detail “the spit freezes on the fly” speaks volumes: about the inhuman conditions of existence, about the hopelessness and despair of a person who finds himself in the extremely cruel world of the Kolyma camps. Or another story, “Sherry Brandy,” in which the author seems to dispassionately describe the poet’s slow death from hunger: “Life came in and out of him, and he died ... By evening he died.” (5:75) Only at the very end of the work does one eloquent detail appear, when the inventive neighbors write him off two days later in order to receive bread for him as if he were alive “... the dead man raised his hand like a puppet doll” (5:76) This detail further emphasizes the absurdity of human existence in a camp. E. Shklovsky wrote that in “Vishera” the detail had a partly “memory” character, but in “Kolyma Stories” it becomes “block” (7:64). It seems that the absurdity and paradoxicality of what is happening is increasing from page to page. In the story “In the Bath,” the author notes with bitter irony: “The dream of washing in a bath is an impossible dream” (5:80) and at the same time uses details that convincingly speak about this, because after washing everyone is “slippery, dirty, smelly” (5:85).
V. T. Shalamov denied detailed descriptiveness and traditional creation of characters. Instead, there are precisely selected details that create a multidimensional psychological atmosphere that envelops the entire story. Or one or two details given in close-up. Or symbolic details dissolved in the text, presented without intrusive fixation. This is how Garkunov’s red sweater is remembered, on which the blood of the murdered man is not visible (“To the performance”); a blue cloud above the white shiny snow, which hangs after the person trampling the road has moved on (“Across the Snow”); a white pillowcase on a feather pillow, which the doctor crumples with his hands, which gives “physical pleasure” to the narrator, who had neither linen, nor such a pillow, nor a pillowcase (“Domino”); the ending of the story “Single Freeze,” when Dugaev realized that he would be shot, and “regretted that he had worked in vain, that he had suffered this last day in vain.” In Varlam Shalamov, almost every detail is based on either hyperbole, comparison, or grotesquery: “The screams of the guards encouraged us like whips” (“How it started”); “Unheated, damp barracks, where thick ice froze in all the cracks from the inside, as if some huge stearine candle had floated in the corner of the barracks” (“Tatar Mullah and Fresh Air”); “The bodies of people on the bunks seemed like growths, the humps of a tree, a bent board” (“Typhoid Quarantine”); “We followed the tractor tracks as if we were following the tracks of some prehistoric animal” (“Dry rations”).
The world of the Gulag is antagonistic, truth is dialectical, in this context the writer’s use of contrast and opposition becomes one of the leading techniques. This is a way of approaching a difficult truth. The use of contrast in details makes a lasting impression and enhances the effect of the absurdity of what is happening. Thus, in the story “Domino,” tank lieutenant Svechnikov eats the meat of people’s corpses from the morgue, but at the same time he is “a gentle, rosy-cheeked youth” (5:101), the camp horse driver Glebov in another story forgot the name of his wife, and “in his former free life he was professor of philosophy" (6:110), the communist Dutchman Fritz David in the story "Marcel Proust" is sent from home "velvet trousers and a silk scarf" (5:121), and he dies of hunger in these clothes.
The contrast in details becomes an expression of Shalamov’s conviction that a normal person is not able to withstand the hell of the Gulag.
Thus, the artistic detail in “Kolyma Stories”, distinguished by its descriptive brightness, often paradoxical, causes an aesthetic shock, an explosion and once again testifies to the fact that “there is no life and cannot be in camp conditions.”
Israeli researcher Leona Toker wrote about the presence of elements of medieval consciousness in Shalamov’s work. Let's look at how the Devil appears on the pages of Kolyma Tales. Here is an excerpt from the description of a criminal card fight in the story “To the Presentation”: “A brand new deck of cards lay on the pillow, and one of the players patted it with a dirty hand with thin white non-working fingers. The nail of the little finger was of supernatural length... The sleek yellow nail glittered like a precious stone.” (5:129) This physiological oddity also has an everyday intra-camp explanation - just below the narrator adds that such nails were prescribed by the criminal fashion of that time. One might consider this semantic connection to be accidental, but the criminal’s claw, polished to a shine, does not disappear from the pages of the story.
Further, as the action develops, this image is further saturated with elements of fantasy: “Sevochka’s nail drew intricate patterns in the air. The cards then disappeared in his palm, then appeared again...” (5:145). Let's also not forget about the inevitable associations associated with the theme of the card game. A game of cards with the devil as a partner is a “vagrant” plot characteristic of European folklore and often found in literature. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that the cards themselves were the invention of the Devil. At the pre-climax of the story “At the Show,” the enemy of the clawed Sevochka bets and loses “... some kind of Ukrainian towel with roosters, some kind of cigarette case with an embossed portrait of Gogol” (5:147). This direct appeal to the Ukrainian period of Gogol’s work connects “To the Presentation” with “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, saturated with the most incredible devilry. So in one of the stories in this collection, “The Missing Letter,” a Cossack is forced to play cards for his soul with witches and devils. Thus, references to folklore sources and literary works introduce the gambler into the infernal associative series. In the above-mentioned story, diabolism seems to emerge from camp life and appears to the reader as a natural property of the local universe. The devil of the Kolyma stories is an indisputable element of the universe, so not isolated from the environment that his active presence is revealed only at the kinks, at the junctions of metaphors.
“Golden slaughter made healthy people disabled in three weeks: hunger, lack of sleep, long hours of hard work, beatings. New people were included in the brigade, and Moloch chewed” (5:23).
Let us note that the word “Moloch” is used by the narrator not as a proper name, but as a common noun; intonationally it is not isolated from the text in any way, as if it were not a metaphor, but the name of some really existing camp mechanism or institution. Let us recall the work “Moloch” by A. I. Kuprin, where the bloodthirsty creature is written with a capital letter and is used as a proper name. The camp world is identified not only with the domain of the Devil, but also with the Devil himself.
One more important feature should be noted: the camp of “Kolyma Tales” is hell, nothingness, the undivided kingdom of the devil as if in itself - its infernal properties are not directly dependent on the ideology of its creators or the preceding wave of social upheaval. Shalamov does not describe the genesis of the camp system. The camp appears instantly, suddenly, out of nothing, and even with physical memory, even pain in the bones, it is no longer possible to determine “... on which of the winter days the wind changed and everything became too scary...” (5:149). The camp of “Kolyma Stories” is united, whole, eternal, self-sufficient, indestructible - for once we have sailed to these hitherto unknown shores, having plotted their outlines on the map, we are no longer able to erase them either from memory or from the surface of the planet - and combines traditional functions of hell and the devil: passive and active evil principles.
The devil arose in medieval mentality as the personification of the forces of evil. Introducing the image of the devil into “Kolyma Tales,” Shalamov used this medieval metaphor for its intended purpose. He did not simply declare the camp to be evil, but affirmed the fact of the existence of evil, an autonomous evil inherent in human nature. Black-and-white apocalyptic medieval thinking operated with categories with the help of which the author of “Kolyma Tales” could realize and describe “a grandiose spill of evil hitherto unseen in centuries and millennia” (4:182). Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov himself, in one of the program poems, identifies himself with Archpriest Avvakum, whose image has long become in Russian culture both a symbol of the Middle Ages, the archaic, and a symbol of unyielding opposition to evil.
Thus, the camp in the view of Varlam Shalamov is not evil and not even unambiguous unalloyed evil, but the embodiment of Absolute World Evil, that degree of evil, for the reproduction of which it was necessary to evoke the image of the medieval devil on the pages of “Kolyma Tales”, because it could not be described in others categories.
The creative manner of a writer involves a process of spontaneous crystallization of metaphors. The author does not deafen the reader with the statement that the action takes place in hell, but unobtrusively, detail by detail, builds an associative series where the appearance of Dante’s shadow looks natural, even self-evident. Such cumulative meaning formation is one of the supporting characteristics of Shalamov’s artistic style. The narrator accurately describes the details of camp life; each word has a rigid, fixed meaning, as if embedded in the camp context. The sequential listing of documentary details forms a coherent plot. However, the text very quickly enters the stage of oversaturation, when seemingly unrelated and completely independent details begin to form complex, unexpected connections on their own, which in turn form a powerful associative flow parallel to the literal meaning of the text. In this flow, everything: objects, events, connections between them - changes at the very moment of its appearance on the pages of the story, turning into something different, multi-valued, often alien to natural human experience. The “Big Bang effect” (7:64) arises when subtext and associations are continuously formed, when new meanings crystallize, where the formation of galaxies seems involuntary, and the semantic continuum is limited only by the volume of associations possible for the reader-interpreter. V. Shalamov himself set himself very difficult tasks: to return the experienced feeling, but at the same time - not to be at the mercy of the material and the assessments dictated by it, to hear “a thousand truths” (4:182) with the supremacy of one truth of talent.

References

Volkova, E.: Varlam Shalamov: a duel between words and absurdity. In: Questions of Literature 1997, No. 2, p. 3.
Gay, N.: The relationship between fact and idea as a problem of style. In: Theory of literary styles. M., 1978. P. 97.
Zolotonosov, M.: Consequences of Shalamov. In: Shalamov collection 1994, No. 1, p. 183.
Timofeev, L.: Poetics of camp prose. In: October 1991, no. 3, p. 182.
Shalamov, V.: Favorites. "ABC-classics", St. Petersburg. 2002. pp. 23, 75, 80, 85, 101, 110, 121, 129, 145, 150.
Shalamov, V.: About my prose. In: New World 1989, No. 12, p. 58, 66.
Shklovsky, E.: Varlam Shalamov. M., 1991. P. 64.

Elena Frolova, Russia, Perm