Hardly anyone who has read Kolyma Tales, which were recently published in two issues of Novyi Zhurnal without the author’s knowledge, would ever be able to forget them. In my opinion, they are scarier and more dreadful than One Day of in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that thundered across the world, and these short sketches would have probably caused as much sensation and talk had they appeared in a Soviet publication instead of the émigré one. Although, Solzhenitsyn still has the advantage of novelty and discovery: he was the first to speak on what many in the West denied and that until recent years, not without mocking arrogance, had been referred to as slanderous fabrications. After his testimony appeared in the Moscow press it became impossible to talk about slander. However, Shalamov’s testimony – which is, essentially and without a doubt, based on what he personally experienced – is worse, more dismal, more hopeless than Solzhenitsyn’s. For all his slavish deprivation of rights and suffering, Ivan Denisovich was still a living person – just as his comrades in misfortune were. In Kolyma Tales, there are only wandering shadows, who are almost dead but were once alive: they exchange fragmentary remarks, they argue, they scold each other, hate each other, sometimes seem to be clinging to life – but these are truly “dead souls,” dead, killed by the incessant fear and ever-growing desperation. In these stories, hard labor not only did, but also finally accomplished its job, which does not take place in Solzhenitsyn’s story.
A small collection of Varlam Shalamov’s poems published this spring in Moscow causes alarming curiosity even before one starts reading it: what are they like, what could the poems of a person who spent many years in Kolyma be like? The book has a rather unusual but, in my view, a good and expressive title: The Road and Destiny. The author’s portrait is attached: a frowning, tired face, a heavy, intent gaze. The publishing house reports that “V. Shalamov’s poetry draws one’s attention through its deep philosophical origins, reliability of observations, the balance of words,” and that “the poet has a wide range of interests.” There is not a word about his fate, about his relatively recent past. And of course, in Shalamov’s collection, the reader cannot help but look for a reflection of the poet had lived through.
The poems are intelligent, a little dry. Judging by their general disposition, Shalamov is not inclined to forget or forgive the past as much as he is ready to give up on it. Only one poem stands out among the others for its bitterness, its open attempt to settle scores with the “scoundrels, sycophants, and hypocrites” – and by the way, this is by far not the best poem in the book. Shalamov’s poetic skill is incomparably more convincing where he examines nature, – “indifferent nature,” according to Pushkin, – where he talks to himself or mentions his return from exile to Moscow with restrained excitement, “intertwined with my fate by the will of the era.”
Baratynsky is his teacher and apparently his favorite poet, from whom he inherited the desire to combine feeling with thought as much as possible. Of course, the matter here is not in the “philosophical origins,” as the editorial note somewhat simple-mindedly indicates, but in his disregard for light lyricism, for the inevitable charm at any cost, following the example of some followers of Fet. There is a poem in The Road and Destiny titled “Baratynsky,” the text of which is almost anecdotal, despite the serious tone: in a hard-labor camp, three prisoners accidentally found a volume of Baratynsky’s poems in someone’s abandoned house and immediately divided it into three parts. The first took the preface – “for cigarettes.” The second took the afterword to carve a deck of playing cards out of it (makeshift cards are also mentioned in Kolyma Tales). Shalamov got the “inspired poems of the half-forgotten poet” and recognized it as “happiness.”
Reading the verses of the poet, if only a “half-forgotten” but still an extraordinary one, forever leaves a trace on the prisoner’s subconscious, provided that he read them for the first time. Baratynsky taught him accuracy, the steadiness of poetic techniques, the mystical precision of images. Here is one example chosen almost randomly:
A Pine Tree in the Swamp
God punished the pine tree for something
And threw it off a cliff
She fell into the swamp
Amidst the cold haze.
Half alive, she
Barely held back a sigh,
The mud and damp crimson moss
Was sucking her in.
She didn’t dare to straighten up,
To cling to the cracks in the rocks,
And the wind – the one that was the killer, –
Squeezed her hand gently,
Squeezed her still living hand,
Wanted her to
Be thankful for the science,
While she was still visible.
The collection of Shalamov’s poems, unique in their spirit and significant in their own way, unlike most of today’s poetry, especially Soviet poetry, should be examined from a purely literary point of view, without delving into the author’s biography. The poems would deserve such an analysis, and, probably, for Shalamov himself, this would be the only acceptable approach to his work. But whether the author is annoyed or indifferent, it is difficult for us over here to avoid the “Kolyma” approach to his poetry. One cannot help oneself the question: can it be, at least in its essence, that the dryness and strictness of these verses come from camp loneliness, from the lonely nocturnal thoughts about that “road and destiny” that sometimes befalls a person? Maybe it was because of such thoughts that the illusions, which so often turn out to be the essence and core of lyrics, have disappeared without a trace in Shalamov’s consciousness; maybe Shalamov would have been a different poet if he had a different destiny? But guesses remain guesses, and we have no reliable answer to them.
