The theme of the tragic fate of a person in a totalitarian state in “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov

I've been living in a cave for twenty years,

Burning with the only dream that

breaking free and moving

shoulders like Samson, I will collapse

stone vaults For many years

this dream.

V. Shalamov

The Stalin years are one of the tragic periods in the history of Russia. Numerous repressions, denunciations, executions, a heavy, oppressive atmosphere of lack of freedom - these are just some of the signs of life in a totalitarian state. The terrible, cruel machine of authoritarianism ruined the destinies of millions of people, their relatives and friends.

V. Shalamov is a witness and participant in the terrible events that the totalitarian country experienced. He went through both exile and Stalin's camps. Dissent was brutally persecuted by the authorities, and the writer had to pay too high a price for his desire to tell the truth. Varlam Tikhonovich summarized the experience gained from the camps in the collection “Kolyma Stories.” “Kolyma Tales” is a monument to those whose lives were ruined for the sake of the cult of personality.

Showing in his stories images of those convicted under the fifty-eighth, “political” article and images of criminals also serving sentences in camps, Shalamov reveals many moral problems. Finding themselves in a critical life situation, people showed their true selves. Among the prisoners there were traitors, cowards, scoundrels, those who were “broken” by the new circumstances of life, and those who managed to preserve the human in themselves under inhuman conditions. There were fewer of the latter.

The most terrible enemies, “enemies of the people,” for the authorities were political prisoners. They were the ones who were in the camp under the most severe conditions. Criminals - thieves, murderers, robbers, whom the narrator ironically calls “friends of the people”, paradoxically, aroused much more sympathy among the camp authorities. They had various concessions and did not have to go to work. They got away with a lot.

In the story “To the Show,” Shalamov shows a card game in which the winnings are the prisoners’ personal belongings. The author draws images of the criminals Naumov and Sevochka, for whom human life is worthless and who kill engineer Garkunov for a woolen sweater. The author's calm intonation with which he completes his story suggests that such scenes for the camp are a common, everyday occurrence.

The story “At Night” shows how people blurred the lines between good and bad, how the main goal became to survive, no matter what the cost. Glebov and Bagretsov take off the dead man’s clothes at night with the intention of getting bread and tobacco for themselves instead. In another story, the condemned Denisov takes pleasure in pulling off the footcloths from his dying but still living comrade.

The life of the prisoners was unbearable; it was especially difficult for them in the severe frosts. The heroes of the story “The Carpenters” Grigoriev and Potashnikov, intelligent people, in order to save their own lives, in order to spend at least one day in the warmth, resort to deception. They go to work as carpenters, not knowing how to do it, which saves them from the severe frost, gets a piece of bread and the right to warm themselves by the stove.

The hero of the story “Single Measurement,” a recent university student, exhausted by hunger, receives a single measurement. He is unable to complete this task completely, and his punishment for this is execution. The heroes of the story “Tombstone Sermon” were also severely punished. Weakened by hunger, they were forced to do backbreaking labor. For Brigadier Dyukov’s request to improve food, the entire brigade was shot along with him.

The destructive influence of the totalitarian system on the human personality is very clearly demonstrated in the story “The Parcel”. Very rarely do political prisoners receive parcels. This is a great joy for each of them. But hunger and cold kill the humanity in a person. Prisoners are robbing each other! “From hunger our envy was dull and powerless,” says the story “Condensed Milk.”

The author also shows the brutality of the guards, who, having no sympathy for their neighbors, destroy miserable pieces of prisoners, break their bowlers, and beat the convicted Efremov to death for stealing firewood.

The story “Rain” shows that the work of the “enemies of the people” takes place in unbearable conditions: waist-deep in the ground and under incessant rain. For the slightest mistake, each of them will die. It will be a great joy if someone injures himself, and then, perhaps, he will be able to avoid hellish work.

The prisoners live in inhumane conditions: “In a barracks filled with people, it was so cramped that one could sleep standing up... The space under the bunks was filled to capacity with people, you had to wait to sit down, squat down, then lean somewhere against a bunk, against a post, against someone else’s body - and fall asleep...”

Crippled souls, crippled destinies... “Everything inside was burned out, devastated, we didn’t care,” sounds in the story “Condensed Milk.” In this story, the image of the “informer” Shestakov arises, who, hoping to attract the narrator with a bank of condensed milk, hopes to persuade him to escape, and then report this and receive a “reward.” Despite extreme physical and moral exhaustion, the narrator finds the strength to see through Shestakov’s plan and deceive him. Not everyone, unfortunately, turned out to be so quick-witted. “They fled a week later, two were killed near the Black Keys, three were tried a month later.”

In the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev,” the author shows people whose spirit was not broken by either the fascist concentration camps or Stalin’s. “These were people with different skills, habits acquired during the war - with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and intelligence officers,” the writer says about them. They make a daring and brave attempt to escape from the camp. The heroes understand that their salvation is impossible. But for a breath of freedom they agree to give their lives.

“The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” clearly shows how the Motherland treated people who fought for it and whose only fault was that, by the will of fate, they ended up in German captivity.

Varlam Shalamov is a chronicler of the Kolyma camps. In 1962, he wrote to A.I. Solzhenitsyn: “Remember the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. The person - neither the boss nor the prisoner - does not need to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. For my part, I decided long ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this truth.”

Shalamov was true to his words. “Kolyma Tales” became the pinnacle of his work.

The plot of V. Shalamov’s stories is a painful description of the prison and camp life of prisoners of the Soviet Gulag, their similar tragic destinies, in which chance, merciless or merciful, an assistant or a murderer, the tyranny of bosses and thieves rule. Hunger and its convulsive saturation, exhaustion, painful dying, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the focus of the writer’s attention.

Funeral word

The author remembers his camp comrades by name. Evoking the mournful martyrology, he tells who died and how, who suffered and how, who hoped for what, who and how behaved in this Auschwitz without ovens, as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, few managed to survive and remain morally unbroken.

Life of engineer Kipreev

Having not betrayed or sold out to anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for actively defending his existence: a person can only consider himself human and survive if at any moment he is ready to commit suicide, ready to die. However, later he realizes that he only built himself a comfortable shelter, because it is unknown what you will be like at the decisive moment, whether you simply have enough physical strength, and not just mental strength. Engineer-physicist Kipreev, arrested in 1938, not only withstood a beating during interrogation, but even rushed at the investigator, after which he was put in a punishment cell. However, they still force him to sign false testimony, threatening him with the arrest of his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continued to prove to himself and others that he was a man and not a slave, like all prisoners. Thanks to his talent (he invented a way to restore burnt-out light bulbs, repaired an X-ray machine), he manages to avoid the most difficult work, but not always. He miraculously survives, but the moral shock remains in him forever.

To the show

Camp molestation, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and occurred in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is lost to the nines and asks you to play for “representation”, that is, in debt. At some point, excited by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, who happened to be among the spectators of their game, to give him a woolen sweater. He refuses, and then one of the thieves “finishes” him, but the sweater still goes to the thieves.

At night

Two prisoners sneak to the grave where the body of their deceased comrade was buried in the morning, and remove the dead man’s underwear to sell or exchange for bread or tobacco the next day. The initial disgust at taking off their clothes gives way to the pleasant thought that tomorrow they might be able to eat a little more and even smoke.

Single metering

Camp labor, which Shalamov clearly defines as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. The poor prisoner is not able to give the percentage, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand a sixteen-hour working day. He drives, picks, pours, carries again and picks again, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures what Dugaev has done with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems very high to Dugaev, his calves ache, his arms, shoulders, head hurt unbearably, he even lost the feeling of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. And a day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the whirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev realizes why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he only regrets that he suffered the last day in vain.

Rain

Sherry Brandy

A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He takes a long time to die. Sometimes some thought comes - for example, that the bread that he put under his head was stolen from him, and it is so scary that he is ready to swear, fight, search... But he no longer has the strength for this, and the thought of bread also weakens. When the daily ration is placed in his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his might, sucks it, tries to tear it and gnaw it with his scurvy, loose teeth. When he dies, he is not written off for another two days, and inventive neighbors manage to distribute bread for the dead man as if for a living one: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself in general labor and feels that he is gradually giving up. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by his guards, and they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed and the rib has healed, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for examination. He has a chance to be activated, that is, released due to illness. Remembering the mine, the pinching cold, the empty bowl of soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be caught in deception and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a former prisoner, was not a mistake. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing malingerers. This pleases his pride: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite a year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a malingerer, and anticipates the theatrical effect of the new revelation. First, the doctor gives him Rausch anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov’s body can be straightened, and a week later he undergoes the so-called shock therapy procedure, the effect of which is similar to an attack of violent madness or an epileptic seizure. After this, the prisoner himself asks to be released.

Typhoid quarantine

Prisoner Andreev, having fallen ill with typhus, is quarantined. Compared to general work in the mines, the position of the patient gives a chance to survive, which the hero almost no longer hoped for. And then he decides, by hook or by crook, to stay here as long as possible, in the transit train, and then, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where there is hunger, beatings and death. At the roll call before the next sending to work of those who are considered recovered, Andreev does not respond, and thus he manages to hide for quite a long time. The transit is gradually emptying, and Andreev’s turn finally reaches. But now it seems to him that he has won his battle for life, that now the taiga is saturated and if there are any dispatches, it will be only for short-term, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners, who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms, passes the line separating short-term missions from distant ones, he realizes with an internal shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.

Aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “gone” prisoners is quite equivalent to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Prisoner Ekaterina Glovatskaya is admitted to the hospital. A beauty, she immediately attracted the attention of the doctor on duty Zaitsev, and although he knows that she is on close terms with his acquaintance, prisoner Podshivalov, the head of an amateur art group (“serf theater,” as the head of the hospital jokes), nothing prevents him in turn try your luck. He begins, as usual, with a medical examination of Glowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest quickly gives way to purely medical concern. He finds that Glowacka has an aortic aneurysm, a disease in which any careless movement can cause death. The authorities, who have made it an unwritten rule to separate lovers, have already once sent Glovatskaya to a penal women's mine. And now, after the doctor’s report about the prisoner’s dangerous illness, the head of the hospital is sure that this is nothing more than the machinations of the same Podshivalov, trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but as soon as she is loaded into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

The last battle of Major Pugachev

Among the heroes of Shalamov’s prose there are those who not only strive to survive at any cost, but are also able to intervene in the course of circumstances, stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941–1945. Prisoners who fought and were captured by Germans began to arrive in the northeastern camps. These are people of a different temperament, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and intelligence officers..." But most importantly, they had an instinct for freedom, which the war awakened in them. They shed their blood, sacrificed their lives, saw death face to face. They were not corrupted by camp slavery and were not yet exhausted to the point of losing strength and will. Their “fault” was that they were surrounded or captured. And Major Pugachev, one of these not yet broken people, is clear: “they were brought to their death - to replace these living dead” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers equally determined and strong prisoners to match himself, ready to either die or become free. Their group included pilots, a reconnaissance officer, a paramedic, and a tankman. They realized that they were innocently doomed to death and that they had nothing to lose. They've been preparing their escape all winter. Pugachev realized that only those who avoid general work could survive the winter and then escape. And the participants in the conspiracy, one after another, are promoted to servants: someone becomes a cook, someone a cult leader, someone who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But then spring comes, and with it the planned day.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The duty officer lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who has come, as usual, to get the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the guard on duty finds himself strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens to the other duty officer who returned a little later. Then everything goes according to Pugachev’s plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the duty officer, take possession of the weapon. Holding the suddenly awakened soldiers at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Having left the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, drop off the driver and continue the journey in the car until the gas runs out. After that they go into the taiga. At night - the first night of freedom after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, remembers his escape from a German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, being accused of espionage and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He also remembers the visits of General Vlasov’s emissaries to the German camp, recruiting Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet regime, all of them who were captured were traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He looks lovingly at his sleeping comrades who believed in him and stretched out their hands to freedom; he knows that they are “the best, the most worthy of all.” And a little later a battle breaks out, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in the bear’s den, that they will find him anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

Retold

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Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus

Educational institution

"Gomel State University

named after Francysk Skaryna"

Faculty of Philology

Department of Russian and World Literature

Course work

MORAL ISSUES

“KOLYMA STORIES” by V.T.SHALAMOVA

Executor

student of group RF-22 A.N. Solution

Scientific director

senior teacher I.B. Azarova

Gomel 2016

Key words: anti-world, antithesis, archipelago, fiction, memories, ascent, Gulag, humanity, detail, documentary, prisoner, concentration camp, inhuman conditions, descent, morality, inhabitants, images-symbols, chronotope.

The object of research in this course work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.

As a result of the study, it was concluded that “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov was written on an autobiographical basis, raises moral questions of time, choice, duty, honor, nobility, friendship and love and is a significant event in camp prose.

The scientific novelty of this work lies in the fact that “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamov are considered on the basis of the writer’s documentary experience. The stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov are systematized according to moral issues, according to the system of images and historiography, etc.

As for the scope of application of this course work, it can be used not only for writing other coursework and dissertations, but also in preparation for practical and seminar classes.

Introduction

1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary in the works of V.T. Shalamova

2.2 The rise of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova

3. Figurative concepts of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova

Conclusion

List of sources used

Application

Introduction

Readers met Shalamov the poet in the late 50s. And the meeting with Shalamov the prose writer took place only in the late 80s. To talk about the prose of Varlam Shalamov means to talk about the artistic and philosophical meaning of non-existence, about death as the compositional basis of the work. It would seem that there is something new: even before, before Shalamov, death, its threat, expectation and approach were often the main driving force of the plot, and the fact of death itself served as the denouement... But in “Kolyma Tales” it is different. No threats, no waiting. Here death, non-existence is the artistic world in which the plot usually unfolds. The fact of death precedes the beginning of the plot.

By the end of 1989, about a hundred stories about Kolyma had been published. Now everyone reads Shalamov - from students to prime ministers. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose seems to be dissolved in a huge wave of documentaries - memories, notes, diaries about the era of Stalinism. In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Tales” became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of an original aesthetics based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world.

Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. V.T. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox and symbolism.

The camp theme is growing into a large and very important phenomenon, within the framework of which writers strive to fully comprehend the terrible experience of Stalinism and at the same time not forget that behind the dark curtain of decades it is necessary to discern a person.

True poetry, according to Shalamov, is original poetry, where each line is provided with the talent of a lonely soul that has suffered a lot. She is waiting for her reader.

In the prose of V.T. Shalamov, not only the Kolyma camps are depicted, fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which free people live, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where those living in it are doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.

There is a large amount of literature dedicated to V.T. Shalamov and his work. The subject of research of this course work is the moral issues of “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, therefore the main source of information is the monograph by N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky (“In a blizzard freezing age”: About “Kolyma Stories”), which tells about the established way of life, about the order, scale of values and social hierarchy of the country “Kolyma”, and also shows the symbolism that the author finds in the everyday realities of prison life. Particular importance was attached to various articles in journals. Researcher M. Mikheev (“On the “new” prose of Varlam Shalamov”) in his work showed that every detail in Shalamov, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and high, naturalistically rough and spiritual, and also described the laws of time, which are taken beyond the natural course. I. Nichiporov (“Prose, suffered as a document: V. Shalamov’s Kolyma epic”) expresses his opinion on the documentary basis of stories about Kolyma, using the works of V. T. Shalamov himself. But G. Nefagina (“The Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants”) in her work pays attention to the spiritual and psychological side of the stories, showing the choice of a person in unnatural conditions. Researcher E. Shklovsky (“About Varlam Shalamov”) examines the denial of traditional fiction in “Kolyma Tales” in the author’s desire to achieve something unattainable, to explore the material from the point of view of the biography of V.T. Shalamov. Great assistance in writing this course work was also provided by the scientific publications of L. Timofeev (“Poetics of camp prose”), in which the researcher compares the stories of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko to identify similarities and differences in the poetics of camp prose from various authors of the 20th century; and E. Volkova (“Varlam Shalamov: The Duel of the Word with the Absurd”), who drew attention to the phobias and feelings of prisoners in the story “Sentence.”

When revealing the theoretical part of the course project, various information from history was drawn upon, and considerable attention was also paid to information gleaned from various encyclopedias and dictionaries (dictionary by S.I. Ozhegov, “Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary” edited by V.M. Kozhevnikova).

The topic of this course work is relevant because it is always interesting to return to that era, which shows the events of Stalinism, the problems of human relationships and the psychology of an individual in concentration camps, in order to prevent the repetition of the terrible stories of those years. This work takes on particular urgency in the present time, in an era of people’s lack of spirituality, misunderstanding, disinterest, indifference to each other, and unwillingness to come to the aid of a person. The same problems remain in the world as in Shalamov’s works: the same heartlessness towards each other, sometimes hatred, spiritual hunger, etc.

The novelty of the work is that the gallery of images is systematized, moral issues are identified and the historiography of the issue is presented. The consideration of stories on a documentary basis gives a special uniqueness.

This course project aims to study the originality of V.T. Shalamov’s prose using the example of “Kolyma Tales”, to reveal the ideological content and artistic features of V.T. Shalamov’s stories, and also to expose acute moral problems in concentration camps in his works.

The object of research in the work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.

Some individual stories were also subjected to literary criticism.

The objectives of this course project are:

1) study of the historiography of the issue;

2) research of literary critical materials about the creativity and fate of the writer;

3) consideration of the features of the categories “space” and “time” in Shalamov’s stories about Kolyma;

4) identifying the specifics of the implementation of images-symbols in “Kolyma Stories”;

When writing the work, comparative historical and systematic methods were used.

The course work has the following architecture: introduction, main part, conclusion and list of sources used, appendix.

The introduction outlines the relevance of the problem, historiography, discusses discussions on this topic, defines the goals, object, subject, novelty and objectives of the course work.

The main part consists of 3 sections. The first section examines the documentary basis of the stories, as well as the denial of traditional fiction by V.T. Shalamov in “Kolyma Stories”. The second section examines the Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants: a definition of the term “country of Kolyma” is given, the low and high in the stories are considered, and a parallel is drawn with other authors who created camp prose. The third section studies figurative concepts in “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, namely the antitheses of image-symbols, the religious and psychological side of the stories.

The conclusion summarizes the work done on the stated topic.

The list of sources used contains the literature on which the author of the course project relied in his work.

1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary

in the works of V.T. Shalamova

In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Stories” (1954 - 1982) by V.T. Shalamov became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of an original aesthetics based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world, opening the way to a generalizing comprehension of man in inhuman circumstances, to the understanding of the camp as a model of historical, social existence, and the world order as a whole. Shalamov informs readers: “The camp is world-like. There is nothing in it that would not exist in the wild, in its structure, social and spiritual.” The fundamental postulates of the aesthetics of artistic documentaryism are formulated by Shalamov in the essay “On Prose,” which serves as the key to the interpretation of his stories. The starting point here is the judgment that in the modern literary situation “the need for the art of the writer has been preserved, but trust in fiction has been undermined.” The Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following definition of fiction. Fiction - (from the French belles lettres - elegant literature) fiction. The willfulness of creative fiction must give way to a memoir, a documentary in its essence, recreation of the artist’s personal experience, for “today’s reader argues only with the document and is convinced only by the document.” Shalamov substantiates the idea of “literature of fact” in a new way, believing that “it is necessary and possible to write a story that is indistinguishable from a document,” which will become a living “document about the author,” “a document of the soul” and will present the writer “not as an observer, not as a spectator, but a participant in the drama of life."

Here is Shalamov’s famous programmatic opposition to 1) a report of events and 2) their description - 3) the events themselves. This is how the author himself speaks about his prose: “New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description. That is, a document, the direct participation of the author in life events. Prose experienced as a document." Judging by this and the previously quoted statements, Shalamov’s understanding of the document itself, of course, was not entirely traditional. Rather, it is some kind of volitional act or action. In the essay “On Prose,” Shalamov informs his reader: “When people ask me what I write, I answer: I don’t write memoirs. There are no memories in Kolyma Tales. I don’t write stories either - or rather, I try to write not a story, but something that would not be literature. Not the prose of a document, but the prose labored through as a document.”

Here are more fragments reflecting Shalamov’s original, but very paradoxical views on “new prose”, with the denial of traditional fiction - in an effort to achieve something seemingly unattainable.

The writer’s desire to “explore his material with his own skin” leads to the establishment of his special aesthetic relationship with the reader, who will believe in the story “not as information, but as an open heart wound.” Approaching the definition of his own creative experience, Shalamov emphasizes the intention to create “something that would not be literature,” since his “Kolyma Stories” “offers new prose, the prose of living life, which at the same time is a transformed reality, a transformed document.” In the “prose that the writer seeks, labored through as a document,” there is no room left for descriptiveness in the spirit of Tolstoy’s “writing commandments.” Here the need for capacious symbolization, intensely affecting the reader’s detailing, increases, and “details that do not contain a symbol seem superfluous in the artistic fabric of the new prose.” At the level of creative practice, the identified principles of artistic writing receive multifaceted expression from Shalamov. The integration of document and image takes on various forms and has a complex impact on the poetics of “Kolyma Tales”. Shalamov’s method of in-depth knowledge of camp life and the psychology of a prisoner is sometimes the introduction of a private human document into the discursive space.

In the story “Dry Rations”, the narrator’s intense psychological observations about the “great indifference” that “possessed us”, about how “only anger was housed in an insignificant muscular layer ...”, turn into a portrait of Fedya Shchapov - the “Altai teenager”, “ the widow’s only son,” who was “tried for illegal slaughter of livestock.” His contradictory position as a “goneer”, who, however, retains a “healthy peasant beginning” and is alien to the general camp fatalism, is concentratedly revealed in the final psychological touch to the incomprehensible paradoxes of camp life and consciousness. This is a compositionally isolated fragment of a human document, snatched from the stream of oblivion, which captures - more clearly than any external characteristics - a desperate attempt at physical and moral stability: “Mom,” Fedya wrote, “Mom, I live well. Mom, I’m dressed for the season...” As Shklovsky E.A. believes: “Shalamov’s story sometimes appears as an invariant of the writer’s manifesto, becoming “documentary” evidence of the hidden facets of the creative process.”

In the story “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova”, noteworthy is the flashing auto-commentary that in “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” “every letter is documented.” In the story “Tie”, a scrupulous reconstruction of the life paths of Marusya Kryukova, who was arrested upon returning from Japanese emigration, the artist Shukhaev, who was broken by the camp and capitulated to the regime, commenting on the slogan “Work is a matter of honor…” posted on the gates of the camp - allow both the biography of the characters and creative production Shukhaev, and present the various signs of the camp as components of a holistic documentary discourse. Shklovsky E.A. states: “The core of this multi-level human document becomes the author’s creative self-reflection, implanted into the narrative series, about his search for “a special kind of truth,” about the desire to make this story “a thing of prose of the future,” about the fact that future writers are not writers, but truly “people of the profession” who know their environment will “tell only about what they know and have seen. Authenticity is the strength of the literature of the future."

The author's references to his own experience throughout Kolyma prose emphasize his role not just as an artist, but as a documentary witness. In the story “Lepers,” these signs of direct authorial presence perform an expositional function in relation to both the main action and individual links in the series of events: “Immediately after the war, another drama was played before my eyes in the hospital”; “I also walked in this group, slightly bent over, along the high basement of the hospital...”. The author sometimes appears in “Kolyma Tales” as a “witness” of the historical process, its bizarre and tragic turns. The story “The Best Praise” is based on a historical excursion, in which the origins and motivations of Russian revolutionary terror are artistically comprehended, portraits of revolutionaries are drawn that “lived heroically and died heroically.” The vivid impressions of the narrator’s communication with his acquaintance from Butyrskaya prison, Alexander Andreev, a former Socialist-Revolutionary and general secretary of the society of political prisoners, turn in the final part into a strictly documentary recording of information about the historical figure, her revolutionary and prison path - in the form of a “certificate from the magazine “Katorga and exile” . Such a juxtaposition reveals the mysterious depths of a documentary text about private human existence, revealing irrational twists of fate behind formalized biographical data.

In the story “Gold Medal,” significant layers of historical memory are reconstructed through symbolically rich fragments of St. Petersburg and Moscow “texts.” The fate of the revolutionary Natalya Klimova and her daughter, who passed through the Soviet camps, becomes in the artistic whole of the story the starting point of the historical narrative about the trials of revolutionary terrorists at the beginning of the century, about their “sacrifice, self-denial to the point of namelessness,” their readiness to “seek the meaning of life passionately, selflessly ". The narrator acts here as a documentary researcher who “held in his hands” the verdict of members of a secret revolutionary organization, noting in its text indicative “literary errors”, and personal letters from Natalya Klimova “after the bloody iron broom of the thirties.” Here there is a deep feeling for the very “matter” of a human document, where the features of handwriting and punctuation recreate the “manner of conversation” and indicate the vicissitudes of the relationship of the individual with the rhythms of history. The narrator comes to an aesthetic generalization about the story as a kind of material document, “a living, not yet dead thing that saw the hero,” for “writing a story is a search, and the smell of a scarf, a scarf, lost by the hero or heroine must enter into the vague consciousness of the brain.” .

In private documentary observations, the author’s historiosophical intuition crystallizes about how, in social upheavals, “the best people of the Russian revolution” were torn apart, as a result of which “there were no people left to lead Russia” and a “crack was formed along which time split - not only Russia , but a world where on one side is all the humanism of the nineteenth century, its sacrifice, its moral climate, its literature and art, and on the other - Hiroshima, the bloody war and concentration camps." The combination of the “documentary” biography of the hero with large-scale historical generalizations is also achieved in the story “The Green Prosecutor”. The “text” of the camp fate of Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshey, a non-party engineer, collector of antiques, convicted of embezzling government funds and managing to escape from Kolyma, leads the narrator to a “documentary” reconstruction of the history of Soviet camps from the point of view of those changes in attitude towards fugitives, in the prism of which are drawn internal transformations of the punitive system.

Sharing his experience of “literary” development of this topic (“in my early youth I had the opportunity to read about Kropotkin’s escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress”), the narrator establishes areas of inconsistency between literature and camp reality, creates his own “chronicle of escapes,” scrupulously tracing how by the end of the 30s x years “Kolyma was turned into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyists,” and if earlier “no sentence was given for escape,” then from now on “escape was punishable by three years.” Many stories from the Kolyma cycle are characterized by the special quality of Shalamov’s artistry observed in “The Green Prosecutor,” based primarily not on the modeling of a fictional reality, but on figurative generalizations that grow on the basis of documentary observations, sketch narration about various spheres of prison life, and specific social-hierarchical relations among prisoners (“Kombedy”, “Bathhouse”, etc.). The text of an official document in Shalamov’s story can act as a constructively significant element of the narrative. In “The Red Cross”, the prerequisite for artistic generalizations about camp life is the narrator’s appeal to the absurdist “large printed notices” on the walls of the barracks called “Rights and Responsibilities of a Prisoner,” where it is fatal “many responsibilities and few rights.” The prisoner’s “right” to medical care, declared by them, leads the narrator to think about the saving mission of medicine and the doctor as the “sole defender of the prisoner” in the camp. Relying on the “documented” recorded, personally suffered experience (“for many years I took stages in a large camp hospital”), the narrator resurrects the tragic stories of the destinies of camp doctors and comes to generalizations about the camp, honed to the point of aphorisms, as if snatched from a diary: “ negative school of life entirely and completely”, that “every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.” The story “Injector” is based on the reproduction of a small fragment of intra-camp official correspondence, where the author’s word is completely reduced, with the exception of a brief remark about the “clear handwriting” of the resolution imposed by the head of the mine on the report of the head of the site. The report on “poor performance of the injector” in the Kolyma frosts “over fifty degrees”” evokes an absurd, but at the same time formally rational and systemic resolution on the need to “transfer the case to the investigative authorities in order to bring the Injector to legal responsibility.” Through the suffocating network of official words placed in the service of repressive paperwork, one can see the fusion of the fantastic grotesque and reality, as well as the total violation of common sense, which allows the camp’s all-suppression to extend its influence even to the inanimate world of technology.

In Shalamov’s depiction, the relationship between a living person and an official document appears full of dark collisions. In the story “Echo in the Mountains,” where a “documentary” reconstruction of the biography of the central character, clerk Mikhail Stepanov, takes place, it is on such collisions that the plot outline is tied. The profile of Stepanov, who was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1905, his “delicate case in a green cover,” which included information about how, when he was the commander of a detachment of armored trains, he released from custody Antonov, with whom he was once imprisoned in Shlisselburg, - make a decisive revolution in his subsequent “Solovetsky” fate. The milestones of history aggressively invade the individual biography here, giving rise to a vicious circle of destructive relationships between the individual and historical time. Man as a powerless hostage of an official document also appears in the story “The Birds of Onge.” The “typist’s mistake,” who “numbered” the prisoner’s criminal nickname (aka Berdy) as the name of another person, forces the authorities to declare the random Turkmen Toshaev a “fugitive” Onzhe Berdy and doom him to camp hopelessness, to being “listed in the group” for life “unaccounted persons” - persons imprisoned without documents." In this, according to the author’s definition, “an anecdote that has turned into a mystical symbol,” the position of the prisoner - the bearer of the notorious nickname - is noteworthy. While “having fun” with the game of prison paperwork, he concealed the identity of the nickname, since “everyone is happy about the embarrassment and panic in the ranks of the authorities.”

In Kolyma Stories, the sphere of everyday detail is often used as a means of documentary and artistic capturing of reality. In the story “Graphite”, through the title subject image, the entire picture of the world created here is symbolized, and the discovery of ontological depth in it is outlined. As the narrator records, for documents and tags for the deceased, “only a black pencil, simple graphite is allowed”; not a chemical pencil, but certainly graphite, “which can write down everything that he knew and saw.” Thus, wittingly or unwittingly, the camp system preserves itself for the subsequent judgment of history, for “graphite is nature”, “graphite is eternity”, “neither rain nor underground springs will wash away the personal file number”, and with the awakening of historical memory among the people the realization will also come that “all guests of the permafrost are immortal and are ready to return to us.” Bitter irony permeates the narrator’s words that “a tag on the leg is a sign of culture” - in the sense that “a tag with a personal file number stores not only the place of death, but also the secret of death. This number on the tag is written in graphite." Even the physical state of a former prisoner can become a “document” opposing unconsciousness, especially actualized when “the documents of our past are destroyed, the guard towers are cut down.” With pellagra, a common disease among camp inmates, the skin peels off the hand, forming a kind of “glove,” which more than eloquently acts, according to Shalamov, as “prose, accusation, protocol,” “a living exhibit for the museum of the history of the region.”

The author emphasizes that “if the artistic and historical consciousness of the 19th century. characterized by a tendency to “interpret an event”, “a thirst for an explanation of the inexplicable”, then in the half of the twentieth century the document would have supplanted everything. And they would only believe the document."

I saw everything: sand and snow,

Blizzard and heat.

What can a person endure...

I have experienced everything.

And the butt broke my bones,

Someone else's boot.

And I bet

That God will not help.

After all, God, God, why?

Galley slave?

And nothing can help him,

He is exhausted and weak.

I lost my bet

Risking my head.

Today - whatever you say,

I am with you - and alive.

Thus, the synthesis of artistic thinking and documentary is the main “nerve” of the aesthetic system of the author of “Kolyma Tales”. The weakening of artistic fiction opens up in Shalamov other original sources of figurative generalizations, based not on the construction of conventional spatio-temporal forms, but on empathizing with the contents of various kinds of private, official, historical documents truly preserved in the personal and national memory of camp life. Mikheev M.O. says that “the author appears in the “Kolyma” epic both as a sensitive documentary artist, and as a biased witness of history, convinced of the moral need to “remember all the good things for a hundred years, and all the bad things for two hundred years,” and as the creator of the original concept of a “new prose”, acquiring before the reader’s eyes the authenticity of a “transformed document”. That revolutionary “transcendence beyond literature” that Shalamov so strived for did not take place. But even without it, which is hardly feasible at all, without this breakthrough beyond the limits permitted by nature itself, Shalamov’s prose certainly remains valuable for humanity, interesting for study - precisely as a unique fact of literature. His texts are unconditional evidence of the era:

Not indoor begonia

The trembling of a petal

And the trembling of human agony

I remember the hand.

And his prose is a document of literary innovation.

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.

2.1 The descent of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova

Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions.

What truth about the man was revealed to Shalamov in the camp? Golden N. believed: “The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and 99% of people could not stand this test. Those who could stand it died along with those who couldn’t stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves.” “A great experiment in the corruption of human souls” - this is how Shalamov characterizes the creation of the Gulag archipelago.

Of course, his contingent had very little to do with the problem of eradicating crime in the country. According to Silaikin’s observations from the story “Courses,” “there are no criminals at all, except thieves. All the other prisoners behaved in freedom the same way as all the others - they stole just as much from the state, made just as many mistakes, violated the law just as much as those who were not convicted under the articles of the Criminal Code and each continued to do his own work. The thirty-seventh year emphasized this with particular force - by destroying any guarantee among the Russian people. It became impossible to get around the prison, no one could get around it.”

The overwhelming majority of prisoners in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “were not enemies of the authorities and, dying, did not understand why they had to die. The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral fortitude of the prisoners; they immediately learned not to stand up for each other, not to support each other. This is what the management was striving for."

At first they are still like people: “the lucky one who caught the bread divided it among everyone who wanted it - a nobility that after three weeks we weaned off forever.” “He shared the last piece, or rather, he shared some more. This means that he never managed to live to a time when no one had the last piece, when no one shared anything with anyone.”

Inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. Shalamov states: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards... Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot there that a person should not know, should not see, and if he has seen, it is better for him to die... It turns out that you can do mean things and still live. You can lie and live. Not keeping promises - and still living... Skepticism is still good, this is even the best of the camp heritage.”

The bestial nature in a person is extremely exposed, sadism no longer appears as a perversion of human nature, but as an integral property of it, as an essential anthropological phenomenon: “for a person there is no better feeling than realizing that someone is even weaker, even worse... Power is molestation. The beast unleashed from the chain, hidden in the human soul, seeks greedy satisfaction of its eternal human essence - in beatings, in murders.” The story “Berries” describes the cold-blooded murder by a guard, nicknamed Seroshapka, of a prisoner who was picking berries for a “smoke break” and, unnoticed by himself, crossed the border of the work area marked with markers; after this murder, the guard turns to the main character of the story: “I wanted you,” said Seroshapka, “but he didn’t show up, you bastard!” . In the story “The Parcel,” the hero’s bag of food is taken away: “someone hit me on the head with something heavy, and when I jumped up and came to my senses, the bag was gone. Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with evil joy. The entertainment was of the best kind. In such cases, we were doubly happy: firstly, someone felt bad, and secondly, it wasn’t me who felt bad. This is not envy, no."

But where are those spiritual gains that are believed to be almost directly related to material deprivation? Aren’t the prisoners similar to ascetics and, dying of hunger and cold, didn’t they repeat the ascetic experience of past centuries?

The likening of prisoners to holy ascetics is, in fact, repeatedly found in Shalamov’s story “Dry Rations”: “We considered ourselves almost saints - thinking that during the camp years we had atoned for all our sins... Nothing worried us anymore, life was easy for us at the mercy of someone else's will. We didn’t even care about saving our lives, and even if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the camp daily routine. The peace of mind achieved by the dullness of our feelings was reminiscent of the supreme freedom of the barracks that Lawrence dreamed of, or Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil - someone else’s will was always guarding our peace of mind.”

However, the dispassion achieved by camp prisoners bore little resemblance to the dispassion to which ascetics of all times and peoples aspired. It seemed to the latter that when they were freed from feelings - these transitory states of theirs, the most important, central and lofty things would remain in their souls. Alas, from personal experience, the Kolyma ascetic slaves were convinced of the opposite: the last thing that remains after the death of all feelings is hatred and malice. “The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person goes into oblivion.” “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - left us with the meat that we lost during our long fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling." Hence the constant quarrels and fights: “A prison quarrel breaks out like a fire in a dry forest.” “When you have lost strength, when you have weakened, you want to fight uncontrollably. This feeling - the enthusiasm of a weakened person - is familiar to every prisoner who has ever gone hungry... There are an infinite number of reasons for a quarrel to arise. The prisoner is irritated by everything: the authorities, the upcoming work, the cold, the heavy tool, and the comrade standing next to him. The prisoner argues with the sky, with a shovel, with a stone and with the living thing that is next to him. The slightest dispute is ready to escalate into a bloody battle.”

Friendship? “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those “difficult” conditions of life that, as fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need brought people together and gave birth to friendship, it means that this need is not extreme and the misfortune is not great. Grief is not acute and deep enough if you can share it with friends. In real need, only one’s own mental and physical strength is learned, the limits of one’s “possibilities,” physical endurance and moral strength are determined.”

Love? “Those who were older did not allow the feeling of love to interfere with the future. Love was too cheap a bet in the camp game."

Nobility? “I thought: I won’t play at being noble, I won’t refuse, I’ll leave, I’ll fly away. Seventeen years of Kolyma are behind me."

The same applies to religiosity: like other high human feelings, it does not arise in the nightmare of a camp. Of course, the camp often becomes the place of the final triumph of faith, its triumph, but for this “it is necessary that its strong foundation be laid when the conditions of life have not yet reached the final limit, beyond which there is nothing human in a person, but only mistrust.” , malice and lies." “When you have to wage a cruel, minute-by-minute struggle for existence, the slightest thought about God, about that life means a weakening of the willpower with which the embittered prisoner clings to this life. But he is unable to tear himself away from this damned life, just like a person struck by an electric current cannot take his hands off a high-voltage wire: to do this, additional strength is needed. Even suicide turns out to require some excess energy, which is absent from the “goons”; sometimes it accidentally falls from the sky in the form of an extra portion of gruel, and only then does a person become capable of committing suicide. Hunger, cold, hated labor, and finally, direct physical impact - beatings - all this revealed “the depths of the human essence - and how vile and insignificant this human essence turned out to be. Under the cane, inventors discovered new things in science, wrote poems and novels. A spark of creative fire can be knocked out with an ordinary stick.”

So, the highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Moreover, this highest thing itself - speech, thinking - is material, as in the story “Condensed Milk”: “It was not easy to think. For the first time, the materiality of our psyche appeared to me in all its clarity, in all its perceptibility. It was painful to think about. But I had to think." Once upon a time, to find out whether energy was spent on thinking, an experimental person was placed for many days in a calorimeter; It turns out that there is absolutely no need to conduct such painstaking experiments: it is enough to place the inquisitive scientists themselves for many days (or even years) in places not so remote, and they will be convinced from their own experience of the complete and final triumph of materialism, as in the story “The Pursuit of locomotive smoke": "I crawled, trying not to make a single unnecessary thought, thoughts were like movements - energy should not be spent on anything else but scratching, waddle, dragging my own body forward along the winter road," “I saved my strength. The words were pronounced slowly and difficultly - it was like translating from a foreign language. I forgot everything. I’m out of the habit of remembering.”

2. Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants

Not limiting himself to evidence about human nature, Shalamov also reflects on his origins, on the question of his origin. He expresses his opinion, the opinion of an old prisoner, on such a seemingly academic problem as the problem of anthropogenesis - as it is seen from the camp: “man became a man not because he was God’s creation, and not because he had an amazing great finger on each hand. But because he was physically stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced his spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle,” “it often seems, and it probably is, that this is why man rose” from the animal kingdom, became a man... that he was physically tougher than any animal. It was not the hand that humanized the monkey, not the embryo of the brain, not the soul - there are dogs and bears that act smarter and more morally than humans. And not by subjugating the power of fire - all this happened after the main condition of transformation was fulfilled. All other things being equal, at one time man turned out to be stronger and physically more resilient than any animal. He was tenacious “like a cat” - this saying when applied to a person is incorrect. It would be more correct to say about a cat: this creature is tenacious, like a person. A horse cannot stand even a month of such winter life here in a cold room with many hours of hard work in the cold... But a person lives. Maybe he lives with hopes? But he has no hopes. If he is not a fool, he cannot live in hopes. That's why there are so many suicides. But the sense of self-preservation, tenacity to life, precisely physical tenacity, to which his consciousness is also subject, saves him. He lives in the same way that a stone, a tree, a bird, a dog lives. But he clings to life more tightly than they do. And he is tougher than any animal."

Leiderman N.L. writes: “These are the most bitter words about a person that have ever been written. And at the same time - the most powerful: in comparison with them, literary metaphors like “this is steel, this is iron” or “if you made nails out of these people, there would be no stronger nails in the world” - pathetic nonsense.

Finally, Shalamov debunks another illusion. Brought up by a secularized culture, in a humanistic sense, a “courageous” and “idealistically” minded person often seems to have complete control over his life: one can always prefer death to a “shameful” existence, especially since death-manifestation could become some kind of supreme moment of life , a worthy final chord. Sometimes this happens in the camps, but much more often the “way of being” changes unnoticed by the prisoner himself. Thus, a freezing person thinks until the last minute that he is simply resting, that at any moment he can get up and move on - and does not notice the transition to death. Shalamov also testifies to the same thing: “The readiness for death, which many people with a highly developed sense of self-esteem have, gradually disappears to God knows where as a person becomes physically weaker.” And in the story “The Life of Engineer Kipreev” he reports: “For many years I thought that death is a form of life, and, calmed by the instability of judgment, I developed a formula for the active defense of my existence on this sorrowful land. I thought that a person can then consider himself a person when at any moment he feels with his whole body that he is ready to commit suicide, that he is ready to intervene in his own life. This consciousness gives freedom to life. I tested myself - many times - and, feeling the strength to die, I remained alive. Much later, I realized that I simply built myself a shelter, avoided the question, because at the moment of decision I will not be the same as now, when life and death are a time of will. I will weaken, I will change, I will betray myself.”

As we see, inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. The highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions. The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and many could not stand it. Those who could stand it died along with those who could not stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves.

2.2 The rise of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova

This is how, over the course of almost a thousand pages, the author-convict persistently and systematically deprives the reader-“fraer” of all illusions, all hopes - just as his camp life eroded them for decades. And yet - although the “literary myth” about man, about his greatness and divine dignity seems to be “exposed” - still hope does not leave the reader.

Hope can be seen from the fact that a person does not lose the feeling of “up” and “down”, rise and fall, the concept of “better” and “worse” until the very end. Already in this fluctuation of human existence there is a guarantee and promise of change, improvement, resurrection to a new life, which is shown in the story “Dry Rations”: “We realized that life, even the worst, consists of a change of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and don’t be afraid that there are more failures than successes.” Such heterogeneity and inequality of different moments of existence gives rise to the possibility of their biased sorting, directed selection. Such selection is carried out by memory, or more precisely, by something standing above memory and controlling it from an inaccessible depth. And this invisible action is truly saving for a person. “Man lives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to forget the bad and remember only the good.” “Memory does not at all indifferently “give out” the entire past in a row. No, she chooses what is more joyful and easier to live with. This is like a protective reaction of the body. This property of human nature is essentially a distortion of the truth. But what is truth? .

The discontinuity and heterogeneity of existence in time also corresponds to the spatial heterogeneity of existence: in the general world (and for Shalamov’s heroes - the camp) organism, it manifests itself in the variety of human situations, in the gradual transition from good to evil, as in the story “The Washed Photograph”: “One One of the most important feelings in the camp is the vastness of humiliation, but also the feeling of consolation that there is always, in any circumstances, someone worse than you. This gradation is varied. This consolation is saving, and perhaps the main secret of a person is hidden in it. This feeling is saving, and at the same time it is reconciliation with the irreconcilable.”

How can one prisoner help another? He has neither food nor property, and usually no strength for any action. However, there remains inaction, that very “criminal inaction”, one of the forms of which is “non-reporting”. Those cases when this help goes a little further than silent sympathy are remembered for a lifetime, as shown in the story “The Diamond Key: “Where I am going and from where - Stepan did not ask. I appreciated his delicacy - forever. I never saw him again. But even now I remember the hot millet soup, the smell of burnt porridge, reminiscent of chocolate, the taste of the stem of the pipe, which Stepan, having wiped with his sleeve, handed to me when we said goodbye, so that I could “smoke” on the way. A step to the left, a step to the right, I consider it an escape - a step march! - and we walked, and one of the jokers, and they are always there in any difficult situation, because irony is the weapon of the unarmed, - one of the jokers repeated the eternal camp joke: “I consider a jump up as agitation.” This evil wit was suggested inaudibly to the guard. She brought encouragement, gave a second, tiny relief. We received warnings four times a day... and each time, after the familiar formula, someone prompted a remark about the jump, and no one got tired of it, no one was annoyed. On the contrary, we were ready to hear this joke a thousand times.”

There are not so few ways to remain human, as Shalamov testifies. For some, it is stoic calm in the face of the inevitable, as in the story “May”: “For a long time he did not understand what they were doing to us, but in the end he understood and began to calmly wait for death. He had enough courage." For others, it is an oath not to be a brigadier, not to seek salvation in dangerous camp positions. For still others, it is faith, as shown in the story “Courses”: “I have not seen more worthy people in the camps than religious people. Corruption gripped the souls of everyone, and only the religious held out. This was the case 15 and 5 years ago."

Finally, the most determined, the most ardent, the most irreconcilable go to open resistance to the forces of evil. Such are Major Pugachev and his friends - front-line convicts, whose desperate escape is described in the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev." Having attacked the guards and seized weapons, they try to make their way to the airfield, but die in an unequal battle. Having slipped out of encirclement, Pugachev, not wanting to capitulate, commits suicide, taking refuge in some forest den. His last thoughts are Shalamov’s hymn to man and at the same time a requiem for all those who died in the fight against totalitarianism - the most monstrous evil of the 20th century: “And no one betrayed them,” thought Pugachev, “until the last day. Of course, many in the camp knew about the proposed escape. People were selected for several months. Many with whom Pugachev spoke frankly refused, but no one ran to the watch with a denunciation. This circumstance reconciled Pugachev with life... And, lying in the cave, he remembered his life - a difficult man's life, a life that now ends on the bear taiga path... many, many people with whom fate brought him together, he remembered. But best of all, most worthy of all were his 11 deceased comrades. None of those other people in his life suffered so much disappointment, deception, and lies. And in this northern hell they found the strength to believe in him, Pugachev, and stretch out their hands to freedom. And die in battle. Yes, these were the best people of his life."

Shalamov himself, one of the main characters of the monumental camp epic he created, belongs to such real people. In “Kolyma Stories” we see him at different periods of his life, but he is always true to himself. Here he is, as a novice prisoner, protesting against the beating by a convoy of a sectarian who refuses to stand for verification in the story “The First Tooth”: “And suddenly I felt my heart become burning hot. I suddenly realized that everything, my whole life, would be decided now. And if I don’t do something - and what exactly I don’t know myself, then it means that I came to this stage in vain, I lived my 20 years in vain. The burning shame for my own cowardice faded from my cheeks - I felt my cheeks become cold and my body light. I broke ranks and said in a trembling voice: “Don’t you dare hit a person.” Here he reflects after receiving a third term in the story “My Trial”: “What is the use of human experience... guessing that this person is an informer, an informer, and that one is a scoundrel... that it is more profitable, more useful, more saving for me to deal with them friendship, not enmity. Or, at least, keep quiet... What’s the point if I can’t change my character, my behavior?.. All my life I can’t bring myself to call a scoundrel an honest person.” Finally, wised by many years of camp experience, he, as it were, sums up the final camp summary of his life through the lips of his lyrical hero in the story “Typhoid Quarantine”: “It was here that he realized that he had no fear and did not value life. He also understood that he had been tested by a great test and survived... He was deceived by his family, deceived by his country. Love, energy, abilities - everything was trampled, broken... It was here, on these cyclopean bunks, that Andreev realized that he was worth something, that he could respect himself. Here he is still alive and has not betrayed or sold anyone either during the investigation or in the camp. He managed to tell a lot of the truth, he managed to suppress his fear.”

It becomes obvious that a person does not lose the feeling of “up” and “down”, rise and fall, the concept of “better” and “worse” until the very end. We realized that life, even the worst one, consists of alternating joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and we should not be afraid that there are more failures than successes. One of the most important feelings in camp is the feeling of consolation that there is always, in any circumstances, someone worse than you.

3. Figurative concepts of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova

However, the main semantic load in Shalamov’s short stories is not carried by these moments, even those very dear to the author. A much more important place in the system of reference coordinates of the artistic world of “Kolyma Tales” belongs to the antitheses of image-symbols. The Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following definition of antithesis. Antithesis - (from the Greek antnthesis - opposition) a stylistic figure based on a sharp contrast of images and concepts. Among them is perhaps the most significant: the antithesis of seemingly incompatible images - the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree.

In the system of moral references of the Kolyma Tales, there is nothing lower than stooping to the position of a heel scratcher. And when Andreev from the story “Typhoid Quarantine” saw that Schneider, a former sea captain, “an expert on Goethe, an educated Marxist theorist,” “a merry fellow by nature,” who supported the morale of the cell in Butyrki, now, in Kolyma, is fussy and helpful scratches the heels of some Senechka the thug, then he, Andreev, “didn’t want to live.” The theme of the Heel Scratcher becomes one of the ominous leitmotifs of the entire Kolyma cycle.

But no matter how disgusting the figure of the Heel Scratcher is, the author does not brand him with contempt, for he knows very well that “a hungry man can be forgiven a lot, a lot.” Maybe precisely because a person exhausted by hunger does not always manage to retain the ability to completely control his consciousness. Shalamov poses as the antithesis of the Heel Comber not another type of behavior, not a person, but a tree, a persistent, tenacious Northern Tree.

Shalamov's most revered tree is dwarf dwarf. In “Kolyma Stories” a separate miniature is dedicated to him, a pure poem in prose: paragraphs with their clear internal rhythm are similar to stanzas, the grace of details and details, their metaphorical halo: “In the Far North, at the junction of taiga and tundra, among dwarf birches, low-growing rowan bushes with unexpectedly large watery berries, among the six-hundred-year-old larches that reach maturity at three hundred years, there lives a special tree - dwarf dwarf. This is a distant relative of the cedar, cedar - evergreen coniferous bushes with trunks thicker than a human arm, two to three meters long. It is unpretentious and grows by clinging its roots to cracks in the rocks of the mountain slope. He is courageous and stubborn, like all northern trees. His sensitivity is extraordinary."

This is how this prose poem begins. And then it describes how the elfin tree behaves: how it spreads out on the ground in anticipation of cold weather and how it “gets up before everyone else in the North” - “hears the call of spring that we cannot catch.” “The dwarf dwarf tree has always seemed to me to be the most poetic Russian tree, better than the famous weeping willow, plane tree, cypress...” - this is how Varlam Shalamov ends his poem. But then, as if ashamed of the beautiful phrase, he adds the soberly everyday: “And wood from dwarf wood is hotter.” However, this everyday decline not only does not detract, but, on the contrary, enhances the poetic expression of the image, because those who passed through Kolyma know well the price of warmth... The image of the Northern Tree - dwarf, larch, larch branch - is found in the stories “ Dry rations", "Resurrection", "Kant", "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev." And everywhere it is filled with symbolic and sometimes downright didactic meaning.

The images of the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree are a kind of emblems, signs of moral poles that are polarly opposed to each other. But no less important in the system of cross-cutting motifs of “Kolyma Tales” is another, even more paradoxical pair of antipodal images, which denote two opposite poles of human psychological states. This is an image of Malice and an image of the Word.

Anger, Shalamov proves, is the last feeling that smolders in a person who is being ground by the millstones of Kolyma. This is shown in the story “Dry Rations”: “In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling.” Or in the story “Sentence”: “Anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones.” Or in the story “The Train”: “He lived only with indifferent malice.”

The characters in “Kolyma Tales” most often find themselves in this state, or rather, the author finds them in this state.

And anger is not hatred. Hatred is still a form of resistance. Anger is total bitterness towards the whole world, blind hostility towards life itself, towards the sun, towards the sky, towards the grass. Such separation from existence is already the end of personality, the death of the spirit. And at the opposite pole of the mental states of Shalamov’s hero there is a sense of the word, worship of the Word as the bearer of spiritual meaning, as an instrument of spiritual work.

According to E.V. Volkova: “One of Shalamov’s best works is the story “Sentence.” Here is presented a whole chain of mental states through which the prisoner of Kolyma passes, returning from spiritual non-existence to human form. The initial stage is anger. Then, as physical strength was restored, “indifference appeared—fearlessness. Behind indifference came fear, not very strong fear - fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of the boiler, the high cold sky and the aching pain in worn-out muscles.”

And after the return of the vital reflex, envy returned - as a revival of the ability to assess one’s position: “I envied my dead comrades - the people who died in '38.” Love did not return, but pity returned: “Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.” And finally, the highest thing - the return of the Word. And how it is described!

“My language, the rough language of the mines, was poor - just as poor were the feelings still living near the bones... I was happy that I did not have to look for any other words. Whether these other words existed, I did not know. I couldn't answer this question.

I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, right here - I remember it clearly - under the right parietal bone, a word was born that was not at all suitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades . I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity.

Maxim! Maxim! - And I burst out laughing. - Sentence! - I yelled straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, not yet understanding the meaning of this word born within me. And if this word has returned, been found again, so much the better! All the better! Great joy filled my entire being - maxim!”

The very process of restoring the Word appears in Shalamov as a painful act of liberation of the soul, making its way from a dark prison to the light, to freedom. And yet he is making his way - in spite of Kolyma, in spite of hard labor and hunger, in spite of the guards and informers. Thus, having gone through all mental states, having re-mastered the entire scale of feelings - from the feeling of anger to the feeling of words, a person comes to life spiritually, restores his connection with the world, returns to his place in the universe - to the place of homo sapiens, a thinking being.

And maintaining the ability to think is one of the most important concerns of Shalamov’s hero. He is afraid, as in the story “The Carpenters”: “If bones can freeze, the brain could freeze and become dull, and the soul could freeze.” Or “Dry rations”: “But the most ordinary verbal communication is dear to him as a thinking process, and he says, “rejoicing that his brain is still mobile.”

Nekrasova I. informs the reader: “Varlam Shalamov is a man who lived by culture and created culture with the highest concentration. But such a judgment would be incorrect in principle. Rather, on the contrary: the system of life attitudes adopted by Shalamov from his father, a Vologda priest, a highly educated person, and then consciously cultivated in himself starting from his student years, where spiritual values \u200b\u200bare in the first place - thought, culture, creativity, was realized in Kolyma to them as the main one, moreover, as the only defense belt that can protect the human personality from decay and decay.” To protect not just Shalamov, a professional writer, but any normal person turned into a slave of the System, to protect not only in the Kolyma “archipelago”, but everywhere, in any inhumane circumstances. And a thinking person who protects his soul with a belt of culture is able to understand what is happening around him. An understanding person is the highest assessment of personality in the world of “Kolyma Tales”. There are very few such characters here - and in this Shalamov is also true to reality, but the narrator’s attitude towards them is the most respectful. Such, for example, is Alexander Grigorievich Andreev, “the former general secretary of the society of political prisoners, a right-wing Socialist Revolutionary, who knew both tsarist hard labor and Soviet exile.” An integral, morally impeccable personality, not compromising one iota of human dignity even in the interrogation cell of the Butyrka prison in 1937. What holds it together from the inside? The narrator feels this strength in the story “The First Chekist”: “Andreev - he knows some truth unfamiliar to the majority. This truth cannot be told. Not because it is a secret, but because it cannot be believed.”

In communication with people like Andreev, people who had left everything outside the prison gates, who had lost not only the past, but also hope for the future, found what they did not have even in freedom. They also began to understand. Like that simple-minded, honest “first security officer” - the head of the fire brigade, Alekseev: “It was as if he had been silent for many years - and then the arrest, the prison cell returned the power of speech to him. He found here the opportunity to understand the most important thing, to guess the passage of time, to see his own destiny and understand why... To find the answer to that huge thing hanging over his entire life and destiny, and not only over his life and the destiny of hundreds of thousands others, a huge, gigantic “why”.

And for Shalamov’s hero there is nothing higher than enjoying the act of mental communication in a joint search for truth. Hence the psychological reactions that are strange at first glance, paradoxically at odds with everyday common sense. For example, he remembers with joy the “high-pressure conversations” during long prison nights. And the most deafening paradox in “Kolyma Tales” is the Christmas dream of one of the prisoners (and the hero-narrator, alter ego of the author) to return from Kolyma not home, not to his family, but to a pre-trial detention cell. Here are his arguments, which are described in the story “Funeral Word”: “I would not like to return to my family now. They will never understand me there, they will never be able to understand me. What seems important to them, I know is a trifle. What is important to me - the little that I have left - is not given to them to understand or feel. I will bring them a new fear, one more fear to add to the thousand fears that fill their lives. What I saw is not necessary to know. Prison is a different matter. Prison is freedom. This is the only place I know where people said what they thought without fear. Where they rested their souls. We rested our bodies because we didn’t work. There, every hour of existence was meaningful.”

The tragic comprehension of “why,” the digging here, in prison, behind bars, to the secret of what is happening in the country—this is the insight, this is the spiritual gain that is given to some of the heroes of “Kolyma Stories”—those who wanted and knew how to think. And with their understanding of the terrible truth, they rise above time. This is their moral victory over the totalitarian regime, for the regime managed to replace freedom with prison, but failed to deceive people with political demagoguery and hide the true roots of evil from the inquisitive mind.

And when a person understands, he is able to make the most correct decisions even in absolutely hopeless circumstances. And one of the characters in the story “Dry Rations,” the old carpenter Ivan Ivanovich, chose to commit suicide, and another, student Savelyev, to cut off his fingers rather than return from a “free” forest trip back behind the wire, into the camp hell. And Major Pugachev, who raised his comrades to escape with rare courage, knows that they will not be able to escape from the iron ring of a numerous and heavily armed raid. But “if you don’t run away at all, then die free,” that’s what the major and his comrades did. These are the actions of people who understand. Neither the old carpenter Ivan Ivanovich, nor the student Savelyev, nor Major Pugachev and his eleven comrades are looking for justification from the System, which condemned them to Kolyma. They no longer harbor any illusions; they themselves have understood the deeply anti-human essence of this political regime. Condemned by the System, they have risen to the consciousness of judges above it and pronounce their sentence on it - an act of suicide or a desperate escape, tantamount to collective suicide. In those circumstances, this is one of two forms of conscious protest and human resistance to the omnipotent state evil.

What about the other one? And the other is to survive. To spite the System. Don't let a machine specially created to destroy a person crush you - neither morally nor physically. This is also a battle, as Shalamov’s heroes understand it - “a battle for life.” Sometimes unsuccessful, as in “Typhoid Quarantine,” but to the end.

It is not by chance that the proportion of details and details in “Kolyma Stories” is so great. And this is the writer’s conscious attitude. We read in one of Shalamov’s fragments “On Prose”: “Details must be introduced and planted into the story - unusual new details, descriptions in a new way.<...>This is always a symbolic detail, a sign detail, translating the entire story into a different plane, giving “subtext” that serves the will of the author, an important element of the artistic decision, the artistic method.”

Moreover, in Shalamov, almost every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and the high, the naturalistically rough and the spiritual collide. Sometimes a writer takes an ancient, sacred image-symbol and grounds it in the physiologically rough “Kolyma context”, as in the story “Dry Rations”: “Each of us is accustomed to breathing the sour smell of a worn dress, sweat - it’s also good that there are no tears have a smell."

Even more often, Shalamov makes the opposite move: he transforms a seemingly random detail of prison life by association into a series of lofty spiritual symbols. The symbolism that the author finds in the everyday realities of camp or prison life is so rich that sometimes the description of this detail develops into an entire micronovel. Here is one of these micronovels in the story “The First Chekist”: “The lock rang, the door opened, and a stream of rays burst out of the chamber. Through the open door, it became visible how the rays crossed the corridor, rushed through the window of the corridor, flew over the prison yard and crashed on the window panes of another prison building. All sixty residents of the cell managed to see all this in the short time the door was open. The door slammed shut with a melodious ringing sound, similar to the ringing of ancient chests when the lid is slammed shut. And immediately all the prisoners, eagerly following the throw of the light stream, the movement of the beam, as if it were a living creature, their brother and comrade, realized that the sun was again locked up with them.”

This micronovel - about an escape, about the failed escape of the sun's rays - organically fits into the psychological atmosphere of the story about people languishing in the cells of the Butyrka investigative prison.

Moreover, such traditional literary images-symbols that Shalamov introduces into his stories (tears, sunbeams, candles, crosses and the like), like clots of energy accumulated by centuries-old culture, electrify the picture of the world-camp, permeating it with boundless tragedy.

But even stronger in “Kolyma Stories” is the aesthetic shock caused by the details, these little things of everyday camp existence. Particularly creepy are the descriptions of the prayerful, ecstatic consumption of food: “He doesn’t eat herring. He licks it and licks it, and little by little the tail disappears from his fingers”; “I took the pot, ate and licked the bottom until it shined according to mine habit”; “He woke up only when food was given, and then, having carefully and carefully licked his hands, he slept again.”

And this is all together with a description of how a person bites his nails and gnaws “dirty, thick, slightly softened skin piece by piece,” how scurvy ulcers heal, how pus flows out of frostbitten toes - all this that we have always attributed to the department crude naturalism, takes on a special, artistic meaning in “Kolyma Tales”. There is some kind of strange inverse relationship here: the more specific and reliable the description, the more unreal, chimerical this world, the world of Kolyma, looks. This is no longer naturalism, but something else: the principle of articulation of the vitally reliable and the illogical, nightmarish, which is generally characteristic of the “theater of the absurd,” is at work here.

Indeed, the world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov’s stories as a genuine “theater of the absurd.” Administrative madness rules here: here, for example, because of some bureaucratic nonsense, people are transported across the winter Kolyma tundra hundreds of kilometers to verify a fantastic conspiracy, as in the story “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy.” And reading at morning and evening inspections the lists of those sentenced to death, sentenced for nothing. This is clearly shown in the story “How It Began”: “Saying out loud that the work is hard is enough to get you shot. For any, even the most innocent remark addressed to Stalin, you will be shot. To remain silent when they shout “hurray” for Stalin is also enough to be shot, reading by smoky torches, framed by a musical carcass?” . What is this if not a wild nightmare?

“It all seemed alien, too scary to be reality.” This Shalamov phrase is the most accurate formula of the “absurd world.”

And in the center of the absurd world of Kolyma, the author places an ordinary, normal person. His names are Andreev, Glebov, Krist, Ruchkin, Vasily Petrovich, Dugaev, “I”. Volkova E.V. states that “Shalamov does not give us any right to look for autobiographical traits in these characters: undoubtedly, they actually exist, but autobiographicalism is not aesthetically significant here. On the contrary, even “I” is one of the characters, equated with all prisoners like him, “enemies of the people.” All of them are different hypostases of the same human type. This is a person who is not famous for anything, was not a member of the party elite, was not a major military leader, did not participate in factions, and did not belong to either the former or the current “hegemons”. This is an ordinary intellectual - a doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist, film scriptwriter, student. It is this type of person, neither a hero nor a villain, an ordinary citizen, that Shalamov makes the main object of his research.

We can conclude: V.T. Shalamov attaches great importance to details and details in “Kolyma Stories”. An important place in the artistic world of “Kolyma Tales” is occupied by antitheses of images and symbols. The world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov’s stories as a genuine “theater of the absurd.” Administrative madness reigns here. Every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and the high, the naturalistically rough and the spiritual collide. Sometimes a writer takes an ancient, sacred image-symbol and grounds it in the physiologically rough “Kolyma context.”

Conclusion

Kolyma story of Shalamov

This course work examined the moral issues of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamov.

The first section presents a synthesis of artistic thinking and documentaryism, which is the main “nerve” of the aesthetic system of the author of “Kolyma Tales”. The weakening of artistic fiction opens up in Shalamov other original sources of figurative generalizations, based not on the construction of conventional spatio-temporal forms, but on empathizing with the contents of various kinds of private, official, historical documents truly preserved in the personal and national memory of camp life. Shalamov's prose certainly remains valuable for humanity and interesting to study - precisely as a unique fact of literature. His texts are an unconditional testimony of the era, and his prose is a document of literary innovation.

The second section examines Shalamov’s process of interaction between the Kolyma prisoner and the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious. The highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions. The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and many could not stand it. Those who could stand it died along with those who could not stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves. Life, even the worst, consists of alternating joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there is no need to be afraid that there are more failures than successes. One of the most important feelings in camp is the feeling of consolation that there is always, in any circumstances, someone worse than you.

The third section is devoted to the antitheses of image-symbols, leitmotifs. The images of the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree were chosen for analysis. V.T. Shalamov attaches great importance to details and details in “Kolyma Stories”. Administrative madness reigns here. Every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and the high, the naturalistically rough and the spiritual collide. Sometimes a writer takes an ancient, sacred image-symbol and grounds it in the physiologically rough “Kolyma context.”

It is also necessary to draw some conclusions from the results of the study. An important place in the artistic world of “Kolyma Tales” is occupied by antitheses of images and symbols. The world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov’s stories as a genuine “theater of the absurd.” Shalamov V.T. appears in the “Kolyma” epic both as a sensitive documentary artist, and as a biased witness of history, convinced of the moral necessity of “remembering all the good things for a hundred years, and all the bad things for two hundred years,” and as the creator of the original concept of “new prose”, which has gained in the eyes of the reader, the authenticity of the “transformed document”. The heroes of the stories do not lose the feeling of “up” and “down”, rise and fall, the concept of “better” and “worse” until the very end. Thus, it seems possible to develop this topic or some of its directions.

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