Maxim. Varlam Shalamov

e.u. mikhailik

Mikhailik Elena Yurievna

PhD, lecturer,

University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia)

The University of New South Wales (UNSW),

Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052

Tel.: 612-93852389

E-mail: [email protected]

the time of the “Kolyma stories”. 1939 - the year that doesn't exist

Annotation. The article attempts to analyze the nature of the treatment of time in “Kolyma Stories” by Varlam Shalamov, in particular, the “incident of 1939” is investigated. The year 1939, the time of action of many key stories, is extremely important within the Kyrgyz Republic in terms of events, directly as a date and is practically absent from the text. This problem, in our opinion, is part of the more complex problem of the Kyrgyz Republic. Shalamov depicts time in general and historical time in particular as a biosocial category. the ability to perceive time and relate to it in the CR directly depends on the character’s social status and his physical condition. In order for this social incoherence with time and history to come into the reader’s field of vision, time and history themselves must inevitably be present in the same field of vision - as objects of rejection. One of these objects, simultaneously present and absent, was the year 1939 - as we believe, the “standard” camp year according to Shalamov.

Keywords: poetics, time, camp literature, Varlam Shalamov, “Kolyma Tales”, 1939

Varlam Shalamov’s story “Sentence” begins with the words: “People arose from oblivion - one after another” [Shalamov 2004-2013 (1): 399]1. The reader does not suddenly realize that the phrase describes not so much these emerging ones as the state of the narrator: consciousness has returned to

so much so that he gained the ability to notice the presence of others - and talk about it. After all, “Sentence” is a story about how a mine goner, a boiler operator, and then an assistant topographer of a geological party, falling into pieces, slowly - a few extra calories here, a few hours of sleep there - begins to notice the world around him, recognize those around him, and experience some feelings - indifference, anger, envy, pity for animals, pity for people - until the non-camp “Roman word” “maximum” awakens under his parietal bone, finally restoring the connection with his former personality, his former life. The connection is fragile, unfaithful, imperfect, but infinitely valuable. At the end of “Sentence”, the narrator is already able to enjoy symphonic music and put his feelings into an alliterated multi-layered metaphor: “The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring twisted for three hundred years.”

However, by this time the reader already knows that in exactly the same way - a frost will strike, soldering will be reduced, work will change - everything achieved can collapse inward and go in a reverse spiral to the state before the first phrase of the story, to the point where the organism is still conditionally alive, but there is no one to tell the story - or beyond this line.

The density of the narrative, the amount of information per unit of text, is amazing, and therefore it is quite easy to overlook one small information package that is clearly absent from the story: the date. The duration of the “Sentence” is not restored from the story itself. Perhaps the fact is that the character, along with everything else, lost track of time? No - he can say: “I envied my dead comrades - the people who died in the thirty-eighth year,” but how far the thirty-eighth year is from him remains unknown.

Within the “Left Bank” cycle, which includes the story, the year is also not calculated - due to the lack of markers.

Meanwhile, this important date, the date of temporary resurrection, is determined precisely.

The great and terrible year 1939 was a happy one for Varlam Shalamov. In December 1938, Shalamov was pulled from the Partizan mine for investigation into the so-called lawyers’ case. The case did not promise anything other than execution, but then the usual camp accident intervened: the initiator of the process was arrested, and all those under investigation were released for transfer to Magadan. In Magadan - another accident - there was a typhus epidemic, and therefore the “s/k s/k”2 was not immediately sent to departments, but was detained in quarantine. Great luck - the quarantined prisoners, of course, were driven to

2 Standard bureaucratic way of referring to prisoners in the plural.

work, but this work was not in itself murderous. They were also fed and washed periodically, and this respite, which lasted until April 1939, most likely saved Shalamov’s life. And in the spring - the third, decisive and most magical accident - by belated assignment he ended up not in the terrible, deadly gold or even in coal, but in geological exploration on the Black Lake, where, due to complete physical exhaustion and the softness of geological morals, he first worked as a boiler operator, and then as an assistant topographer, that is, he found himself in the very situation described in the “Sentence”.

It should be noted that the year also turned out to be generous for what was called material in the 1930s. The stories “Typhoid Quarantine”3, “Bread”, “Children’s Pictures”, “Esperantist” (from which the reader learns under what circumstances the narrator lost a precious place in geological exploration and ended up in a coal mining camp, where he was immediately assigned to the “Egyptian” cavalry collar instead of a horse), “Apostle Paul”, “Bogdanov”, “Triangulation of the III class”, “Bitch Tamara”, “Ivan Bogdanov” and the already mentioned “Sentence” - all this is the harvest of 1939, collected, of course, much later, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Actually, the plots and circumstances of 1939 appear constantly in Kolyma Stories. But 1939 itself as a date is noticeable, if at all, by its absence. As in "Sentence".

And if - again, as in “Sentence” - 1937, the disastrous, or no less disastrous 1938, is constantly mentioned, including by the characters (“Please note - no one beats you, like in the year thirty-eight. No pressure”), then 1939 is named - directly and indirectly - a total of ten times in the entire corpus of “Kolyma Stories” (hereinafter - KR) in the space of five collections of stories.

Moreover, when analyzing the corpus, one gets the impression that for some reason this particular date cannot be perceived directly, but can only be restored after the fact, according to landmarks and signs - from the outside, from a different situation. In 1939 itself, it’s as if it’s impossible, it’s impossible to know that now it’s the thirty-ninth.

It is later, having become an orderly in a chemical laboratory, a student of privileged medical assistant courses, a paramedic or even a writer, that the narrator will be able to remember with whom and how he washed the floor in 1939 at the Magadan transit station or worked on the Black Lake. The very inhabitant of the quarantine and the geological exploration worker, whoever he is, seems to exist not in the 1939 calendar year, but in some other place - or time.

3 Naturally, partly related to 1938.

If we broaden the field of study somewhat, we will discover that for Soviet camp literature, the story of the camp - and, in fact, the camp itself - seems to begin not with space, but with properly organized time.

In the year nineteen forty-nine, my friends and I came across a remarkable article in the journal “Nature” of the Academy of Sciences. It was written there in small letters that on the Kolyma River, during excavations, an underground lens of ice was somehow discovered - a frozen ancient stream, and in it - frozen representatives of fossil (several tens of thousands of years ago) fauna. Whether these fish or newts were preserved so fresh, the learned correspondent testified that those present, having cracked the ice, immediately eagerly ate them [Solzhenitsyn 2006 (1): 7].

The thirty-seventh year began, in fact, from the end of 1934. More precisely, from December 1, 1934 [Ginsburg 1991: 8].

This list - Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg, Zhigulin - can be continued simply alphabetically. G, “Gorbatov”: “One spring day in 1937, unfolding the newspaper, I read that the state security agencies “uncovered a military-fascist conspiracy”” [Gorbatov 1989: 116]. Z, “Zabolotsky”: “It happened in Leningrad on March 19, 1938. The secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union Miroshnichenko summoned me to the union on an urgent matter” [Zabolotsky 1995: 389]. Ch, “Chetverikov”: “I am writing these lines on April 12, 1979...” [Chetverikov 1991: 20].

Prose writers, poets, memoirists and random passers-by, speaking about the camp as a phenomenon, first of all built a temporal sequence, placed the camp in history and biography, corrected the official - and unofficial - chronology as necessary. And they claimed that it was so. Exactly then, on these calendar dates.

In a paradoxical (and natural) way, the inclusion of camp - monstrous, incorrect and improper - experience in the general flow of biography and history was perceived as a restoration of the connection and coherence of times.

But this restoration had three - mostly unintended - grammatical consequences:

1. The camp turns out to be entirely related to the past tense. Solzhenitsyn even included the life span of his “hero”, “The Gulag Archipelago” - “1918-1956” - in the title of the book. The camp in these texts has a date of birth and a date of death. For the audience, he is the past.

2. The camp as a historical event and even as a historical person endowed with a name and surname does not imply the questions “what are we dealing with?”

What’s the matter?”, “how did this object end up in the middle of our geography?”, “how did we end up here, and who are we - that we ended up here?” - because in various ideological paradigms, all kinds of answers have already been given to all these questions, and the reader chooses from them in accordance with his idea of the general history of the country.

3. Appeal to the past at the biographical level, the genre itself - short story, novella, “artistic research”, memoir or pseudo-memoir - by definition implies that the story being told is complete and has not only a plot, but also a plot, i.e. it offers audience the meaning mastered by the author. “I spent enough time there, I nurtured my soul there and I say adamantly: “Blessings to you, prison, that you were in my life!” [Solzhenitsyn 2006 (2): 501]. The reader assumes that a survivor, by definition, knows what and why he is writing. He's waiting for history.

Thus, placing the camp in the context of historical time, the authors quite rigidly set both the boundaries of a possible conversation and the format of this conversation, implying finitude, plot and mediation. The camp here can only be a concrete historical phenomenon.

Well, if a date suddenly falls out of the chronology of this phenomenon, it means that either this period was not in the author’s experience, or the memory failed, or the author is somehow biased and he is not satisfied with this year and what is happening in it one way or another.

Can this logic be applied to “Kolyma Tales”? How and from what is Shalamov’s camp time made?

The story “To the Show,” which actually opens the CD, begins with the words “They played cards at the horse guard Naumov” - the paraphrase of the beginning of “The Queen of Spades” that has been repeatedly mentioned and studied by everyone: “They played cards at the horse guard Narumov”4.

4 This paraphrase is invariably perceived in terms of opposition. Compare, for example: “So, for example, one of the wonderful “Kolyma stories” by Varlam Shalamov begins with the words: “We played cards at the horse-driver Naumov.” This phrase immediately draws the reader to the parallel - “The Queen of Spades” with its beginning: “...played cards with the horse guard Narumov.” But besides the literary parallel, the terrible contrast of everyday life gives the true meaning to this phrase. The reader must assess the extent of the gap between the horse guard - an officer of one of the most privileged guards regiments - and the horse guard - belonging to the privileged camp aristocracy, where access is denied to “enemies of the people” and which is recruited from criminals. There is also a significant difference, which may escape the ignorant reader, between the typically noble surname Narumov and the common people's surname Naumov. But the most important thing is the terrible difference in the very nature of the card game. Play is one of the main forms of life and it is precisely one of those forms in which the era and its spirit are reflected with particular sharpness” [Lotman 1994: 13-14]; “If in Pushkin’s text there is open space, the free flow of time and the free movement of life, then in Shalamov there is closed space, time seems to stop and no longer

For us, however, it is important that, among other tasks being solved, this mocking quote establishes the relationship of the Kyrgyz Republic with history and culture. Only this relationship is not of connection and coherence, but of conflict and rupture. The fact that in classical literature, in the cultural tradition (and on average, camp literature appealed specifically to it) filled the niche of the terrible, with a situation where a person is killed, because a sweater needed for calculation in a card game is easier to remove from a dead person than from a living one, doesn't correlate at all. What, really, gothic, what, really, ghosts.

What is equally important, within the text of “To the Show” this gap, this conflict could not be realized by anyone, including the narrator. The latter is quite capable of describing in detail and thoughtfully the details of Kolyma life and etiquette of thieves, but is too hungry and too reluctant to return to the frozen barracks to draw conclusions from his own observations, even if we are talking about life and death (including his own life and of death).

As a consequence, all conclusions about how much the reality of the story “To the Show” is separated from the circumstances of “The Queen of Spades” (and how much a new reference is needed in this situation) must be made by the reader - and independently. Thus, the model of interaction with the text, characteristic of camp literature, where all meanings in theory are produced by the author, is turned 180 degrees.

However, in order for the reader to draw this conclusion, someone - no longer the characters, not the narrator, but the author of the CD - must first pose a question to him. In order for the reader to understand the distance to the “Queen of Spades”, the “Queen of Spades” must be brought into the barracks of horsemen. For the connection of times to be visibly broken, it must be present in some form.

One could consider this an overly extensive interpretation of a single case, a single paraphrase, but if we look at how Shalamov generally deals with time, we will see structurally the same situation.

Mentioning any phenomenon hostile to humans (from the countless number of Kolyma phenomena of this type), Shalamov, as a rule, gives it the characteristic of a long or constant action.

“It rained for three days without stopping.”

“There was a white fog all day long...”.

“The spittle has been freezing on the fly for two weeks.”

“Nature in the North is not indifferent, not indifferent - it is in cahoots with those who sent us here.”

The camp structure in all its forms is here equated with natural phenomena. In the story “How It Began,” describing the process of crystallization

laws of life, but death determines the behavior of the characters. Death is not as an event, but as a name for the world in which we find ourselves when we open the book...” [Timofeev 1991: 186].

lization of the camp Kolyma from the geographical Kolyma, the narrator combines, brings into one image cold, hunger, snow drifts and the then head of USVITL5 Colonel Garanin, without making any distinction between them, conceptualizing them as completely homogeneous in the nature of the impact of the combat elements of the emerging system:

For many months, day and night, during morning and evening roll calls, countless execution orders were read. In the fifty-degree frost, the imprisoned musicians from the bytovikov played carcasses... The musicians froze their lips pressed to the necks of flutes, silver helicons, cornets-a-pistons... Each list ended the same way: “The sentence has been carried out. Head of USVITL Colonel Garanin."

The author gives the reading of “countless execution orders” the same temporal characteristic as “cold, fine rain.” Imperfect verbs: “frosted”, “covered”, “ended”, load the action with the additional meaning of duration and incompleteness.

In addition, within the chronotopic system of the Kyrgyz Republic, the time in which the camp exists, the viscous duration of any of its manifestations, is constantly compared with the length of human life: with long-term prison terms, “the gold slaughter made disabled people out of healthy people in three weeks...”. Accordingly, the internal countdown of time in the z/k operates in small currency - hours, days: “Two weeks is a very distant period, a thousand years,” “It was difficult to live a day, let alone a year.”

However, quite quickly hunger, cold, fatigue, fear of an uncertain future, the irrationality of the camp world, the inability to navigate in it, the inevitable decay of memory and brain functions (“It was painful to think”) deprive the heroes of the Kyrgyz Republic of the very ability to perceive the passage of time, turning “now” into the unshakable “always”: “...and then you stop noticing time - and the Great Indifference takes possession of you” [1: 426].

Here we will have to invade the sphere of disciplines that are still very indirectly associated with literary studies - neurology and psychology. At the time of the creation of the main body of Soviet camp literature, this information did not yet exist; It was only in the 1990s that experiments by D. Kahneman and D. Redelmeier were carried out. Patients forced, for example, to undergo painful operations without anesthesia, were asked to record the level of pain at each point in time, and at the end of the procedure, re-evaluate their experience as a whole. It turned out that people who were well aware of their

5 Department of Northeast Forced Labor Camps.

experienced during the process, they invariably retained no memory of either the actual amount of pain experienced or, more importantly, the duration of the procedure itself. The person’s “remembering self,” turning experiences into a plot, simply discarded these data.

In fact, the phenomenon turned out to be so stable that it gave rise to the term duration neglect; Moreover, patients later used their experience as a criterion when choosing between procedures, systematically preferring the one where they experienced some relief in the end over the most painless and quick option.

We have to conclude that that part of the survivor’s personality that is responsible for mastering, comprehending and transmitting experience, by definition, does not remember and, apparently, is physically unable to remember what it went through. And the part that experienced this experience step by step is devoid of speech and memory, and time does not exist for it at all.

In fact, Shalamov, reproducing for the reader the gradual disconnection and disappearance of time, duplicates a real physiological process, which at that moment had not yet been described by specialists, but was probably known directly to the author of the CD. The hero of “Sentence” emerges from that same non-existence and is just as unable to remember what happened to him there.

But, as has already been said, in order for subjective disturbances or the very cessation of the passage of time to become noticeable to the reader, even Kolyma time must flow and still be measured.

So that the inconsistency of the average story with the “big story” comes into view (and how will the hero of the story “At Night” Glebov, who does not remember “whether he himself was ever a doctor”, and the other Glebov, relate to it, for example, or perhaps the same one who forgot the name of his own wife?), the “big story” itself must inevitably be present in the same field of view. After all, neither movement nor the absence of movement can be shown without having a coordinate system, a reference point. In order to create timelessness for the reader, Shalamov is forced to introduce time into the Kyrgyz Republic.

It looks something like this. Opening the “Shovel Artist” series, the reader discovers that the stories “June” and “May” (united by a common character, Andreev) seem to be in the wrong order - summer is ahead of spring. In the process of reading, from the short remarks of the characters about the situation on the fronts, it turns out that Shalamov did not violate the chronological sequence at all, because “June” is June 1941 (in fact, the action of the story begins on the day of the German attack on the USSR), and “May” - May 1945 Is this the end of the work over time? No.

From the same brief remarks, it is quite noticeable that the correlation with historical time exists in the stories as a biosocial luxury, inaccessible to most s/cs and frankly alien to them6:

Listen, said Stupnitsky. - The Germans bombed Sevastopol, Kyiv, Odessa.

Andreev listened politely. The message sounded like news of a war in Paraguay or Bolivia. What does Andreev have to do with this? Stupnitsky is well-fed, he is a foreman - so he is interested in such things as war.

“Listen, you gentlemen convicts,” he said, “the war is over. It ended a week ago. The second courier from the department arrived. And the first courier, they say, was killed by the fugitives.” But Andreev did not listen to the doctor.

But in fact, at this level of exhaustion, not only interest and attention to the events of the outside world, but also, as we have already said, keeping track of time itself becomes unaffordable. This, in fact, is what the reader encounters at the plot level, because:

a) in “June” the action from the end of June for an expected maximum of two months defiantly jumps into winter:

Koryagin removed Andreev from underground work. In winter, the cold in the mine reaches only twenty degrees on the lower horizons, and on the street

Sixty. Andreev stood on the night shift on a high waste heap where rocks were piled up -

Moreover, this winter comes suddenly after July, having missed the warmest Kolyma month, August;

b) the event with which the story “May” begins (the capture of a camp robber) clearly takes place in April.

And the stories end with almost the same phrase: “He had a fever”; “His temperature was rising.” (In both cases, high temperature is, naturally, a purely positive circumstance, contributing to the survival of the character.)

6 Leona Toker's work exhaustively examines the essence and importance of this semantic gap for the Soviet audience, which was accustomed to perceiving the Second World War (or, more precisely, the Great Patriotic War) as one of the pivotal events of Soviet history and (more importantly) as a universal shared experience and which most likely they were disoriented by the fact that for some of their contemporaries the war could turn out to be an unimportant, insignificant and unworthy of attention [Toker 2015].

The literal coincidence of the endings can confidently be considered non-random - both stories were written in 1959 and brought into sequence by the author's will. Shalamov actually closes both stories to a single ending, creating in the reader the illusion of that same motionless, untraceable camp time that does not allow orientation within itself.

In fact, the degree of correlation of a character with historical and biological time is an indicator of physical decay, a measure of absorption in the camp system. Moreover, in Shalamov’s world, camp time and ordinary time cannot coexist within the same organism. It is not without reason that in the story “The Seizure” the memory of the camp, by its appearance, seems to push the narrator out of the real, post-camp, completely historical reality surrounding him and back into his previous experience. Where there is a camp, nothing else exists.

This rule applies not only to people. Within the framework of the CR (we have already talked about this in other works [Mikhailik 2002; 2009; 2013]) any things, creatures, texts and ideas from the outside world perish in the camp: a deck of cards will be made from a book; the cat will be killed and eaten by criminals; a scarf, suit, photograph of a loved one will be taken away during inspection or stolen; sending a package from home will almost cause death; precious letters from his wife will be burned by a drunken camp commander; The plot of the play "Cyrano" will be used to drive his wife to suicide through the hands of an unsuspecting character. In the story “The Tie,” the character does not even manage to hold in his hands this piece of civilian clothing intended for him as a gift: the embroidered tie will be taken away by another camp commander directly from the craftswoman who made it. Neither a tie nor such a complex social concept as a gift can exist on their own in the camp7.

All of the above allows us to assume that Shalamov considered the camp a battery of parameters of the quality of life, or rather the unbearable, murderous absence of this quality, a measure of entropy, a measure of socially organized general decay - not limited by the geographical borders of Kolyma and the time frame of the history of the Gulag (or Soviet power) and easily reproducible on any substrate.

7 See, for example, the story “Hercules”, where the doctor, who gave the head of the hospital his favorite rooster, immediately witnesses how the guest of honor, the head of the medical department, tears off the head of a defenseless tame bird - demonstrating his heroic strength. As a rule, within the corps of the Kyrgyz Republic, people whose “social status” is much higher than the position of the recipient can give gifts successfully (and without catastrophic consequences). The gifts themselves often have a specifically camp character: “And Krist was still alive and sometimes - at least once every few years - he remembered the burning folder, the decisive fingers of the investigator tearing up Krist’s “case” - a gift to the doomed from the doomed.”

Here, for example, is the story “Squirrel” (the cycle “Resurrection of the Larch”), which tells how, in the midst of revolution, famine and the execution of hostages, completely ordinary residents of a non-camp Vologda, not yet spoiled by the housing problem of the 1918 model, selflessly hunt in a crowd for someone who has run into the city a squirrel and kill it - just as later in the camp there will be crazy half-fed people who will catch crazy people dying of hunger with a bread ration forgotten on the table and beat them to death for “theft.”

In the story “The Resurrection of the Larch,” which gives the cycle its name, the narrator writes:

The maturity of Dahurian larch is three hundred years. Three hundred years! The larch, whose branch, a twig breathed on the Moscow table, is the same age as Natalia Sheremeteva-Dolgorukova and can remind of her sad fate... .

These three hundred years, the maturity period of the Daurian larch, the time distance from Shalamov to Natalya Sheremeteva, have already been encountered on the pages of “Kolyma Stories”. These are the same three hundred annual rings of the stump that served as a stand for the gramophone in the finale of “Sentence” - “wound for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years.” And over these three hundred years, Shalamov concludes, “nothing has changed in Russia - neither fate, nor human malice, nor indifference.”

Within the framework of the figurative and philosophical system of the Kyrgyz Republic, the camp was not built by the Soviet government, did not appear out of nowhere and did not suddenly open up - it has always been here, and not at all as a political phenomenon. It inevitably appears at the intersection of physical circumstances and human nature wherever these circumstances and this nature are left to each other long enough - as happened by the will of Sevvost-lag in Kolyma or by the will of Anna Ioannovna in Berezovo. Long enough - for example, two weeks.

What then is the reason for the lack of mention of 1939 - what kind of condition, what kind of category of non-life does this date represent?

Was 1939 different for Shalamov himself from other Kolyma years? Did it exist separately? We can say with confidence - yes, it was different, it existed. Here, for example, is what Shalamov wrote to Solzhenitsyn in November 1964 about the newly published memoirs of A. Gorbatov (New World, 1964, No. 3-5):

Gorbatov is a decent person. He does not want to forget and hide his horror at what he met at the Maldyak mine.<.. .>

Having counted all the terms, you will see that Gorbatov stayed on the “Mal-dyak” for only two or three weeks, at most a month and a half, and was thrown out of the slaughter forever like human slag. But this was 1939, when the wave of terror was already subsiding.

It is characteristic that historians of Kolyma and Dalstroi share this assessment: by the beginning of 1939, the wave of political terror and the wave of executions really subsided. But industrial terror has not disappeared anywhere. Actually, it was then that it was put on the order of the day and introduced into the system [Batsaev 2002: 92]. It was in 1939 that the colonies, free-living settlements for prisoners, created by the first director of the Dalstroy state trust, E.P. Berzin, were liquidated, and their inhabitants were returned behind the wire [Ibid: 94]. It was in 1939 that the parole system was abolished, and the main incentive “to increase labor productivity” was recognized as “supply and food”8. It was in 1939 that the towers and barriers were massively restored and all prisoners who did not fulfill 100% of their daily output were transferred to a reinforced camp regime. It was in the summer of 1939 that “all prisoners who refused to work and maliciously did not comply with work standards were ordered to be transferred to penal food” [Zelyak 2004: 65], and at all mines punishment cells were created for refuseniks and violators of discipline, where the daily ration consisted of 400 grams bread and boiling water (naturally, these 400 grams existed mainly on paper). It was in 1939 that the camp authorities systematically received reprimands for “insufficient deployment of labor to the main production” [Ibid: 66], and eight such leaders were administratively arrested: it is quite easy to imagine how these measures affected the state prisoners. The roster of the workforce of those very terrible mining departments increased from 55,362 to 86,799 people (against the planned figure of 61,617 people) [Batsaev 2002: 59]. Exceeded.

But at the same time, fresh reinforcements arrived from the mainland, and in connection with this, the need for constant 14-16-hour overtime work disappeared, weekends were restored, and prisoners began to be periodically fed in the interests of fulfilling the plan. Some kind of infrastructure appeared that was absent a year earlier. And the Kolyma mortality rate, which reached almost 12% in 1938, drops to 7.5% - a figure also devastating, but already indicating not an intensive mass death, but a gradual slow extinction, which in this way does not contradict the needs of the mining industry [Kokurin, Morukov: 536-537].

It seems to us that this administrative and everyday picture, in combination with the already described poetics of time in the Kyrgyz Republic and Shalamov’s idea of the nature of the camp, makes it possible to explain why 1939 in the Kyrgyz Republic has become partly a figure of silence.

Within Shalamov’s poetics, 1939 took the place of an exemplary camp year, a standard, “point zero.” A time when the Kolyma camp system had already taken shape in all its industrial splendor, undisturbed by the triumphant mismanagement and political rage of 1937 and 1938. This is the place of the environment, that water that the camp fish is unable to notice or name, that state whose parameters can only be identified by comparison.

An environment in which you might even be lucky enough to live longer, if you don’t end up in the mining department, if the work turns out to be feasible. Environments where hunger is not strong enough to kill quickly...

But at the same time, the “prosperous” narrator, happily stuck in typhoid quarantine, will dream of bread, bread and bread, and the child living next to the camp will not remember anything and will not be able to draw about his life, “except yellow houses, barbed wire , towers, shepherd dogs, guards with machine guns and blue, blue sky.”

An environment in which, with incredible luck and the same perseverance, you can regain the word “maximum” - before the first cold snap or denunciation.

The year 1938 in the Kyrgyz Republic is easily dated and distinguished by executions and disappearances, sudden famine, typhus, winter life in tents, a 16-hour working day, the hands of workers instantly bent and petrified along the handle of a shovel. Due to the fact that by the end of any story posted this year, the narrator, the focus of the indirect narrative, his neighbor or his neighbor's neighbor - in fact, anyone - will likely be dead. With no less probability, they will all be dead.

The war years are recognizable by American Lend-Lease bread, the epidemic of camp trials, mass beatings - there are many signs of time in the Kyrgyz Republic, linked with dates, they are distinguished by “s/c s/c”, and the reader will begin to distinguish them.

But in order to say “it was in 1939”, you need to change your state, leave your environment, stand outside and above - a paramedic, a writer, an inhabitant of historical time. Look at the thin crust of ice separating some semblance of life from timelessness, the same for the films of Andreev and Natalya Sheremeteva, for all representatives of our biological species, and say: “This is the thirty-ninth. Ideal camp. It turns out that this is what he was like.”

Literature

Badaev 2002 - Batsaev I. D. Features of the industrial development of the northeast of Russia during the period of mass political repression (1932-1953). Dalstroy. Magadan: North-Eastern Scientific Research Institute of Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2002.

Ginzburg 1991 - Ginzburg E. Cool route. M.: Book, 1991.

Gorbatov 1989 - Gorbatov A.V. Years and wars. M.: Voenizdat, 1989.

Zhigulin 1996 - Zhigulin A.V. Black stones. Uranium fishing rod. M.: Culture, 1996.

Zabolotsky 1995 - Zabolotsky N. A. Fire flickering in a vessel...: Poems and poems. Translations. Letters and articles. Biography. Memoirs of contemporaries. Analysis of creativity: Sat. / Comp., biography and notes. N. N. Zabolotsky. M.: Pedagogika-Press, 1995.

Zelyak 2004 - Zelyak V. G. Five metals of Dalstroy: History of the mining industry of the North-East in the 30s - 50s. XX century Magadan: [b. i.], 2004.

Kokurin, Morukov 2005 - Stalin’s construction projects of the Gulag. 1930-1953 / Comp. A. I. Kokurin, Yu. N. Morukov; Under general ed. acad. A. N. Yakovleva. M.: MFD, 2005.

Lotman 1994 - Lotman Yu. M. Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX centuries). St. Petersburg: Art-SPB, 1994.

Mikhailik 2002 - Mikhailik E. Yu. Cat running between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov // Shalamov collection. Vol. 3 / Comp. V.V. Esipov. Vologda: Griffin, 2002. pp. 101-114.

Mikhailik 2009 - Mikhailik E. Yu. Does not reflect and does not cast a shadow: “closed” society and camp literature // New Literary Review. No. 100. 2009. pp. 356-375.

Mikhailik 2013 - Mikhailik E. Yu. Documentation of Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales”: deformation as authenticity // Document status: final piece of paper or alienated evidence? / Ed. I. M. Kaspe. M.: New. lit. review, 2013. pp. 298-322.

Solzhenitsyn 2006 - Solzhenitsyn A.I. Gulag Archipelago (1918-1956): Experience in artistic research: In 2 volumes. Ekaterinburg: U-Factoria, 2006.

Timofeev 1991 - Timofeev L. Poetics of camp prose: First reading of “Kolyma Stories” by V. Shalamov // October. 1991. No. 3. P. 182-195.

Chetverikov 1991 - Chetverikov B.D. Everything has happened forever. L.: LIO "Editor", 1991.

Shalamov 2004-2013 - ShalamovV. T. Collection cit.: In 6 vols. M.: TERRA - Book Club, 2004-2013.

Kahneman 2011 - Kahneman D. Thinking fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011.

Redelmeier, Kahneman 1996 - Redelmeier D. A., Kahneman D. "Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures // Pain. Vol. 66. No. 1. 1996. R. 3-8.

Toker 2015 - TokerL. Rereading Varlam Shalamov's "June" and "May": Four kinds of

knowledge // (Hi)stories of the Gulag / Ed. by F. Fischer von Weikersthal, K. Thaidigsmann. Heildelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter (forthcoming).

Time in the "Kolyma Tales". 1939 - the year that wasn't there

Mikhailik, Elena Iu.

PhD, Lecturer, The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052 Tel.: 612-93852389 E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: This paper attempts to analyze the treatment of time in the "Kolyma Tales" of Varlam Shalamov: in particular, we investigate "the case of the year 1939". As a date, as a number the year 1939, the time in which many of the key KT stories are set, a period that is very important within the general structure of the events, is for all practical purposes absent from the narration. This problem, in our view, is part of a more complex issue: Shalamov is portraying time in general and historical time in particular as a biosocial category. The very ability to perceive time and relate to it in KT depends directly on the social status of the character, and (therefore) on their physical state. However, if this social lack of cohesion with time and history is to be noticed by the audience, the very same time and history have to be a noticeable part of the general landscape - as objects of rejection. One of such objects that are present and absent at the same time happens to be the year 1939 - a period that represents, as we believe, the model, "perfect" prison camp year in Shalamov.

Keywords: poetics, time, labor camp literature, Varlam Shalamov, "Kolyma Tales", 1939

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Varlam Shalamov

Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the free workers, all of them yesterday’s prisoners, paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - scraps, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a “free” cauldron. No, our freewomen didn’t have any soup left from yesterday.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feather - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted and plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter cans, hung from fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bird bones without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

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Varlam Shalamov

Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

End of introductory fragment.

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Varlaam Shalamov is a writer who spent three terms in the camps, survived hell, lost his family, friends, but was not broken by the ordeals: “The camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. The person - neither the boss nor the prisoner - needs 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.”

The collection “Kolyma Stories” is the main work of the writer, which he composed for almost 20 years. These stories leave an extremely heavy impression of horror from the fact that this is how people really survived. The main themes of the works: camp life, breaking the character of prisoners. All of them were doomedly awaiting inevitable death, not holding out hope, not entering into the fight. 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. All the heroes are unhappy, their destinies are mercilessly broken. The language of the work is simple, unpretentious, not decorated with means of expressiveness, which creates the feeling of a truthful story from an ordinary person, one of many who experienced all this.

Analysis of the stories “At Night” and “Condensed Milk”: problems in “Kolyma Stories”

The story “At Night” tells us about an incident that does not immediately fit into our heads: two prisoners, Bagretsov and Glebov, dig up a grave in order to remove the underwear from a corpse and sell it. Moral and ethical principles have been erased, giving way to the principles of survival: the heroes will sell their linen, buy some bread or even tobacco. The themes of life on the verge of death and doom run like a red thread through the work. Prisoners do not value life, but for some reason they survive, indifferent to everything. The problem of brokenness is revealed to the reader; it is immediately clear that after such shocks a person will never be the same.

The story “Condensed Milk” is dedicated to the problem of betrayal and meanness. The geological engineer Shestakov was “lucky”: in the camp he avoided compulsory work and ended up in an “office” where he received good food and clothing. The prisoners envied not the free ones, but people like Shestakov, because the camp narrowed their interests to everyday ones: “Only something external could bring us out of indifference, take us away from the slowly approaching death. External, not internal strength. Inside, everything was burned out, devastated, we didn’t care, and we didn’t make plans beyond tomorrow.” Shestakov decided to gather a group to escape and hand him over to the authorities, receiving some privileges. This plan was unraveled by the nameless protagonist, familiar to the engineer. The hero demands two cans of canned milk for his participation, this is the ultimate dream for him. And Shestakov brings a treat with a “monstrously blue sticker”, this is the hero’s revenge: he ate both cans under the gaze of other prisoners who were not expecting a treat, just watched the more successful person, and then refused to follow Shestakov. The latter nevertheless persuaded the others and handed them over in cold blood. For what? Where does this desire to curry favor and substitute those who are even worse come from? V. Shalamov answers this question unequivocally: the camp corrupts and kills everything human in the soul.

Analysis of the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”

If most of the heroes of “Kolyma Stories” live indifferently for unknown reasons, then in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” the situation is different. After the end of the Great Patriotic War, former military men poured into the camps, whose only fault was that they were captured. People who fought against the fascists cannot simply live indifferently; they are ready to fight for their honor and dignity. Twelve newly arrived prisoners, led by Major Pugachev, have organized an escape plot that has been in preparation all winter. And so, when spring came, the conspirators burst into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the duty officer, took possession of the weapons. 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. Despite the willpower and determination of the heroes, the camp vehicle overtakes them and shoots them. Only Pugachev was able to leave. But he understands that soon they will find him too. Does he obediently await punishment? No, even in this situation he shows strength of spirit, he himself interrupts his difficult life path: “Major Pugachev remembered them all - one after another - and smiled at each one. Then he put the barrel of a pistol in his mouth and fired for the last time in his life.” The theme of a strong man in the suffocating circumstances of the camp is revealed tragically: he is either crushed by the system, or he fights and dies.

“Kolyma Stories” does not try to pity the reader, but there is so much suffering, pain and melancholy in them! Everyone needs to read this collection to appreciate their life. After all, despite all the usual problems, modern man has relative freedom and choice, he can show other feelings and emotions, except hunger, apathy and the desire to die. “Kolyma Tales” not only frightens, but also makes you look at life differently. For example, stop complaining about fate and feeling sorry for yourself, because we are incredibly lucky than our ancestors, brave, but ground in the millstones of the system.

Interesting? Save it on your wall!

Let's look at Shalamov's collection, on which he worked from 1954 to 1962. Let us describe its brief content. "Kolyma Stories" is a collection whose plot is a description of the camp and prison life of Gulag prisoners, their tragic destinies, similar to one another, in which chance rules. The author’s focus is constantly on hunger and satiety, painful dying and recovery, exhaustion, moral humiliation and degradation. You will learn more about the problems raised by Shalamov by reading the summary. “Kolyma Stories” is a collection that is an understanding of what the author experienced and saw during the 17 years he spent in prison (1929-1931) and Kolyma (from 1937 to 1951). The author's photo is presented below.

Funeral word

The author recalls his comrades from the camps. We will not list their names, since we are making a brief summary. "Kolyma Stories" is a collection in which fiction and documentary are intertwined. However, all killers are given a real last name in the stories.

Continuing the narrative, the author describes how the prisoners died, what torture they endured, talks about their hopes and behavior in “Auschwitz without ovens,” as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, and only a few managed to survive and not break morally.

"The Life of Engineer Kipreev"

Let us dwell on the following interesting story, which we could not help but describe when compiling a summary. “Kolyma Stories” is a collection in which the author, who has not sold or betrayed anyone, says that he has developed for himself a formula for protecting his own existence. It consists in the fact that a person can survive if he is ready to die at any moment, he can commit suicide. But later he realizes that he only built a comfortable shelter for himself, since it is unknown what you will become at the decisive moment, whether you will have enough not only mental strength, but also physical strength.

Kipreev, a physics engineer arrested in 1938, was not only able to withstand interrogation and beating, but even attacked the investigator, as a result of which he was put in a punishment cell. But still they are trying to get him to give false testimony, threatening to arrest his wife. Kipreev nevertheless continues to prove to everyone that he is not a slave, like all prisoners, but a human being. Thanks to his talent (he fixed a broken one and found a way to restore burnt out light bulbs), this hero manages to avoid the most difficult work, but not always. It is only by a miracle that he survives, but the moral shock does not let him go.

"To the show"

Shalamov, who wrote “Kolyma Stories,” a brief summary of which interests us, testifies that camp corruption affected everyone to one degree or another. It was carried out in various forms. Let us describe in a few words another work from the collection “Kolyma Tales” - “To the Show”. A summary of its plot is as follows.

Two thieves are playing cards. One loses and asks to play in debt. Enraged at some point, he orders an unexpectedly imprisoned intellectual, who happened to be among the spectators, to give up his sweater. He refuses. One of the thieves “finishes” him, but the sweater goes to the thieves anyway.

"At night"

Let's move on to the description of another work from the collection "Kolyma Stories" - "At Night". Its summary, in our opinion, will also be interesting to the reader.

Two prisoners sneak towards the grave. The body of their comrade was buried here in the morning. They take off the dead man's linen in order to exchange it for tobacco or bread tomorrow or sell it. Disgust for the clothes of the deceased is replaced by the thought that perhaps tomorrow they will be able to smoke or eat a little more.

There are a lot of works in the collection "Kolyma Stories". "The Carpenters", a summary of which we have omitted, follows the story "Night". We invite you to familiarize yourself with it. The product is small in volume. The format of one article, unfortunately, does not allow us to describe all the stories. Also a very small work from the collection "Kolyma Tales" - "Berry". A summary of the main and, in our opinion, most interesting stories is presented in this article.

"Single metering"

Defined by the author as slave labor in camps, it is another form of corruption. The prisoner, exhausted by it, cannot work his quota; labor turns into torture and leads to slow death. Dugaev, a prisoner, is becoming increasingly weaker due to the 16-hour working day. He pours, picks, carries. In the evening, the caretaker measures what he has done. The figure of 25% mentioned by the caretaker seems very large to Dugaev. His hands, head, and calves ache unbearably. The prisoner no longer even feels hungry. Later he is called to the investigator. He asks: “Name, surname, term, article.” Every other day, soldiers take the prisoner to a remote place surrounded by a fence with barbed wire. At night you can hear the noise of tractors from here. Dugaev realizes why he was brought here and understands that his life is over. He only regrets that he suffered an extra day in vain.

"Rain"

You can talk for a very long time about such a collection as “Kolyma Stories”. The summary of the chapters of the works is for informational purposes only. We bring to your attention the following story - "Rain".

"Sherry Brandy"

The prisoner poet, who was considered the first poet of the 20th century in our country, dies. He lies on the bunks, in the depths of their bottom row. It takes a long time for a poet to die. Sometimes a thought comes to him, for example, that someone stole bread from him, which the poet put under his head. He is ready to search, fight, swear... However, he no longer has the strength to do this. When the daily ration is placed in his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his might, sucks it, tries to gnaw and tear with his loose, scurvy-infested teeth. When a poet dies, he is not written off for another 2 days. During the distribution, the neighbors manage to get bread for him as if he were alive. They arrange for him to raise his hand like a puppet.

"Shock therapy"

Merzlyakov, one of the heroes of the collection “Kolma Stories”, a brief summary of which we are considering, is a convict of large build, and in general work he understands that he is failing. He falls, cannot get up and refuses to take the log. First his own people beat him, then his guards. He is brought to camp with lower back pain and a broken rib. After recovery, Merzlyakov does not stop complaining and pretends that he cannot straighten up. He does this in order to delay discharge. He is sent to the surgical department of the central hospital, and then to the nervous department for examination. Merzlyakov has a chance to be released due to illness. He tries his best not to be exposed. But Pyotr Ivanovich, a doctor, himself a former prisoner, exposes him. Everything human in him replaces the professional. He spends most of his time exposing those who are simulating. Pyotr Ivanovich anticipates the effect that the case with Merzlyakov will produce. The doctor first gives him anesthesia, during which he manages to straighten Merzlyakov’s body. A week later, the patient is prescribed shock therapy, after which he asks to be discharged himself.

"Typhoid quarantine"

Andreev ends up in quarantine after falling ill with typhus. The patient's position, compared to working in the mines, gives him a chance to survive, which he almost did not hope for. Then Andreev decides to stay here as long as possible, and then, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where there is death, beatings, and hunger. Andreev does not respond to the roll call before sending those who have recovered to work. He manages to hide in this way for quite a long time. The transit bus gradually empties, and finally it’s Andreev’s turn. But it seems to him now that he has won the battle for life, and if there are any deployments now, it will only be on local, short-term business trips. But when a truck with a group of prisoners who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms crosses the line separating long- and short-term business trips, Andreev realizes that fate has laughed at him.

The photo below shows the house in Vologda where Shalamov lived.

"Aortic aneurysm"

In Shalamov's stories, illness and hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, ends up in the hospital. Zaitsev, the doctor on duty, immediately liked this beauty. He knows that she is in a relationship with prisoner Podshivalov, an acquaintance of his who runs a local amateur art group, but the doctor still decides to try his luck. As usual, he begins with a medical examination of the patient, listening to the heart. However, male interest is replaced by medical concern. In Glowacka he discovers this is a disease in which every careless movement can provoke death. The authorities, who have made it a rule to separate lovers, have once already sent the girl to a penal women's mine. The head of the hospital, after the doctor’s report about her illness, is sure that this is the machinations of Podshivalov, who wants to detain his mistress. The girl is discharged, but during loading she dies, which is what Zaitsev warned about.

"The Last Battle of Major Pugachev"

The author testifies that after the Great Patriotic War, prisoners who fought and went through captivity began to arrive in the camps. These people are of a different kind: they know how to take risks, they are brave. They only believe in weapons. Camp slavery did not corrupt them; they were not yet exhausted to the point of losing their will and strength. Their “fault” was that these prisoners were captured or surrounded. It was clear to one of them, Major Pugachev, that they had been brought here to die. Then he gathers strong and determined prisoners to match himself, who are ready to die or become free. The escape is prepared all winter. Pugachev realized that only those who managed to avoid general work could escape after surviving the winter. One by one, the participants in the conspiracy are promoted to service. One of them becomes a cook, another becomes a cult leader, the third repairs weapons for security.

One spring day, at 5 am, there was a knock on the watch. The duty officer lets in the prisoner cook, who, as usual, has come to get the keys to the pantry. The cook strangles him, and another prisoner dresses in his uniform. The same thing happens to other duty officers who returned a little later. Then everything happens according to Pugachev’s plan. The conspirators burst into the security room and seize weapons, shooting the guard on duty. They stock up on provisions and put on military uniforms, holding the suddenly awakened soldiers at gunpoint. Having left the camp territory, they stop the truck on the highway, disembark the driver and drive until the gas runs out. Then they go into the taiga. Pugachev, waking up at night after many months of captivity, recalls how in 1944 he escaped from a German camp, crossed the front line, survived interrogation in a special department, after which he was accused of espionage and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He also recalls how emissaries of General Vlasov came to the German camp and recruited Russians, convincing them that the captured soldiers were traitors to the Motherland for the Soviet regime. Pugachev did not believe them then, but soon became convinced of this himself. He looks lovingly at his comrades sleeping nearby. A little later, a hopeless battle ensues with the soldiers who surrounded the fugitives. Almost all of the prisoners die, except one, who is nursed back to health after being seriously wounded in order to be shot. Only Pugachev manages to escape. He is hiding in a bear's den, but he knows that they will find him too. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot is at himself.

So, we looked at the main stories from the collection, authored by Varlam Shalamov (“Kolyma Stories”). A summary introduces the reader to the main events. You can read more about them on the pages of the work. The collection was first published in 1966 by Varlam Shalamov. "Kolyma Stories", a brief summary of which you now know, appeared on the pages of the New York publication "New Journal".

In New York in 1966, only 4 stories were published. The following year, 1967, 26 stories by this author, mainly from the collection of interest to us, were published in translation into German in the city of Cologne. During his lifetime, Shalamov never published the collection “Kolyma Stories” in the USSR. A summary of all the chapters, unfortunately, is not included in the format of one article, since there are a lot of stories in the collection. Therefore, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the rest.

"Condensed milk"

In addition to those described above, we will tell you about one more work from the collection “Kolyma Stories” - Its summary is as follows.

Shestakov, an acquaintance of the narrator, did not work at the mine face, because he was a geological engineer, and he was hired into the office. He met with the narrator and said that he wanted to take the workers and go to the Black Keys, to the sea. And although the latter understood that this was impracticable (the path to the sea is very long), he nevertheless agreed. The narrator reasoned that Shestakov probably wants to hand over all those who will participate in this. But the promised condensed milk (to overcome the journey, he had to refresh himself) bribed him. Going to Shestakov, he ate two jars of this delicacy. And then he suddenly announced that he had changed his mind. A week later, other workers fled. Two of them were killed, three were tried a month later. And Shestakov was transferred to another mine.

We recommend reading other works in the original. Shalamov wrote “Kolyma Tales” very talentedly. The summary ("Berries", "Rain" and "Children's Pictures" we also recommend reading in the original) conveys only the plot. The author's style and artistic merits can only be assessed by becoming familiar with the work itself.

Not included in the collection "Kolyma Stories" "Sentence". We did not describe the summary of this story for this reason. However, this work is one of the most mysterious in Shalamov’s work. Fans of his talent will be interested in getting to know him.