V. Shalamov did not bother asking and answering the question about survival in his Kolyma Tales, although, at the same time, there is an answer in his stories, but not one that is thoroughly put together or emphasized, – as if to “expose” the evil (in ourselves?) is far simpler and more interesting. The interesting part makes it so that if you do not speak of the “law of survival,” the horror of communist terror remains one-sided.
Shalamov’s stories about Kolyma camps were published at the end of last year as a separate book in England in Russian. I think it is necessary to make a few comments about this edition.
First of all, about the book itself, its format: the book is a heavy cobblestone. We always looked at publishing Russian books abroad – books whose main readers are Russians – from the perspective of sending them behind the “Iron Curtain.” In this sense, Kolyma Tales are published very poorly: a book with short pages (896 of them all in all) turned out to be a heavy lump. And if the pages were of a regular book format, it would become twice as thin and more convenient to be sent to the “fatherland of the working people.”
Perhaps the author wanted the book to include everything he had written about Kolyma – and the publisher did exactly that. Along with finished stories and sketches, the book also includes short notes, a page- or one-and-a-half pages long, that do not say much about the camps and often bear neither artistic nor educational value. There are also straightforward repetitions. Thus, the story “Major Pugachev’s Last Battle” is included entirely in the extended sketch “The Green Prosecutor,” where the characters are only given different names. Why is such duplication needed? To increase the volume of the book?
There is a note from the publisher on the back of the title page that says that “some of these stories have been published…” It should be specified: there are 103 stories in the book. Of these, 15 were published earlier in the journal Grani and 47 stories in Novyi Zhurnal. In other words, not “some,” but more than half of all them. Had it not been this way, how would a foreign reader learn about Shalamov as a prose writer and appreciate his talent? I know many foreign poets and writers who have long appreciated Shalamov’s talent, – they only could have done this based on his stories published in Novyi Zhurnal and Grani.
The preface is written by M. Geller in very literary, and even panegyric terms, perhaps following the rule that you cannot spoil porridge with butter. But the very first phrase is a nuisance: “The tragic fate of Russian writers has long been unsurprising. As if it has long become something like their destiny.” Voloshin’s lines immediately come to mind: “Inscrutable fate has led / Pushkin under the gun barrel / And Dostoevsky – to the scaffold…” Why, then, this unjustifiable reminiscence? It is a different era, different reasons, different people…Or here, too: as familiar and standard as possible, from Ivan the Terrible on?
Geller cites Solzhenitsyn, who highly valued Kolyma Tales. But he forgot about Solzhenitsyn’s rebuke or condemnation of Shalamov, when Literaturnaia Gazeta published, under Shalamov’s own signature, that his stories about Kolyma, written long ago, are no longer relevant, that he does not write such texts anymore. Should we forget about Solzhenitsyn’s opinion on the subject, it will again turn out like a gumboil, according to Prutkov.
But let us go back to the “law of survival.” Shalamov begins his short story “The Exam” as follows: “I have survived and broken out of the Kolyma hell because I became a doctor, finished medical assistant courses in the camp, and passed the state exam. But earlier there had been another exam – the entrance exam, a more important one.” The author had failed that exam but was accepted into the courses nevertheless.
The author did not know chemistry at all. Their chemistry teacher in Vologda was shot in 1918, and so the subject of chemistry was not taught. The examiner was an academician, a prisoner. He asked for the plaster formula, and the author replied: “I do not know.” The academician was dumbfounded. The lime formula? “I also do not know.” The academician sensed an unheard-of insolence, and even later he indeed considered such answers “a personal insult to a scientist,” since he did not know why the author had not studied chemistry. The author decided not to tell him why. But in all other subjects the author got a straight “A,” so the academician could see he was dealing with an educated and intelligent person. He gave him a “C” and thus saved the author.
As we can see, it is quite in the manner of “surviving at any cost.” Shalamov, however, writes about the academician with hostility, without a shadow of gratitude. There was other kind of help, also in the manner “surviving at any cost,” but elsewhere the author writes otherwise, clearly contradicting himself: “In my camp life, there were almost no anonymous hands that would support me in a blizzard, in a storm; no nameless comrades would save my life. But I remember every piece of bread I had eaten from the hands of a stranger, not government hands, every makhorka cigarette. Many times had I ended up in a hospital. For nine years, I lived from one hospital to another, without any hope, but never did I neglect anyone’s alms either…” These saving “alms,” however, in his short stories remain hidden in the background as something insignificant and routine, something not worth being noticed. In the foreground there is everything most shocking, “impressive” – perhaps also by the Ivan the Terrible standard? Possibly for this reason, it is not always clear from his short stories that they are set during the “Soviet regime”: this, it seems, the author does not consider to be the most important…
