For a long time, I have been running around with the idea of ​​publishing Shalamov's works here in a more or less complete volume and in a good English translation. I know Varlam Tikhonovich, I love his prose very much and would like his name to enter Western readership. Michael Scammell (editor of Index magazine) negotiated with an American publisher and set the stage. One of my Oxford graduate students – a very capable Englishman – began to translate his stories from those that were published in Novyi Zhurnal. The matter is hindered only by the lack of manuscripts.
Last fall, my Moscow friends agreed to send me a complete collection of his texts (5 large volumes) and my graduate student was supposed to go to Moscow for them. But at the last moment he was denied a visa. Recently, through long and confusing channels, I was informed from Moscow that Shalamov’s manuscripts had reached the YMCA. A week ago, I was in Paris and spoke on the phone with N.A. Struve. He said he had nothing to do with this and that the manuscripts were in your possession. I am unsure if this is the copy that should have been mailed for me, or if you received it independently. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter. I just want Shalamov to be published as fully as possible, because I consider it a crime against the author to publish his stories separately every three months, as Novyi Zhurnal did.
We have some of his stories, but we do not have the main one: “Sketches of the Criminal World” and, in particular, “Bitch Wars.” Do you have them? And could you send them for the English edition? From a conversation with Nikita Alekseevich, I understood that you are working on Shalamov’s Russian edition. If so, then I cannot imagine a better option. We (i.e. Scammell, my graduate student, and myself) could try to make the English edition happen. We thought about publishing it alongside B.P. Sveshnikov’s camp illustrations (I have several dozen almost facsimile photographs of them), which fit very well the nature of Shalamov’s prose.
