Sketches of the Criminal World, page 1
VARLAM SHALAMOV (1907–1982) was born in Vologda in western Russia to a Russian Orthodox priest and his wife. After being expelled from law school for his political beliefs, Shalamov worked as a journalist in Moscow. In 1929, he was arrested at an underground printshop and sentenced to three years of hard labor in the Ural Mountains, where he met his first wife, Galina Gudz. The two returned to Moscow after Shalamov’s release in 1931; they were married in 1934 and had a daughter, Elena, in 1935. Shalamov resumed work as a journalist and writer, publishing his first short story, “The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino,” in 1936. The following year, he was arrested again for counterrevolutionary activities and shipped to the Far North of the Kolyma basin. Over the next fifteen years, he was moved from labor camp to labor camp, imprisoned many times for anti-Soviet propaganda, forced to mine gold and coal, quarantined for typhus, and, finally, assigned to work as a paramedic. Upon his release in 1951, he made his way back to Moscow where he divorced his wife and began writing what would become the two-volume Kolyma Stories. He also wrote many books of poetry, including Ognivo (Flint, 1961) and Moskovskiye oblaka (Moscow Clouds, 1972). Severely weakened by his years in the camps, in 1979 Shalamov was committed to a decrepit nursing home north of Moscow. Following a heart attack in 1980, he dictated his final poems to the poet A.A. Morozov. In 1981, he was awarded the French PEN Club’s Liberty Prize; he died of pneumonia in 1982.
DONALD RAYFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. As well as books and articles on Russian literature (notably A Life of Anton Chekhov), he is the author of many articles on Georgian writers and of a history of Georgian literature. In 2012 he published Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, which has recently come out in an expanded Russian edition, as have his A Life of Chekhov and Stalin and His Hangmen. He was the chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. He has translated several novels, including Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance from the Uzbek and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (an NYRB Classic), as well as Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories (an NYRB Classic).
ALISSA VALLES is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Hospitium. Her translations include Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems and Collected Prose, Ryszard Krynicki’s Our Life Grows (NYRB Poets), and Józef Czapski’s Memories of Starobielsk, forthcoming from NYRB Classics in 2020.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2020 by Alexander Rigosik
Translation copyright © 2020 by Donald Rayfield
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Alissa Valles
All rights reserved.
English publishing rights acquired via FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia in 2015.
Originally published in Russian in Sobranie sochineniĭ v 6 + 1 tomakh (Collected Works, vols. 1–7) by TERRA-Knizhnyĭ klub in 2013.
The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.
Cover image: Emil Gataullin, Black Raven; © Emil Gataullin/Edition Lammerhuber
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shalamov, Varlam, author. | Rayfield, Donald, 1942– translator, writer of introduction.
Title: Kolyma stories / by Varlam Shalamov ; translated and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield.
Other titles: Kolymskie rasskazy. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046693 (print) | LCCN 2017049306 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372150 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372143 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Political prisoners—Soviet Union—Fiction. | Kolyma (Concentration camp)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PG3487.A592 (ebook) | LCC PG3487.A592 K6413 2018 (print) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046693
ISBN 978-1-68137-368-3
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD
Further Kolyma Stories
VARLAM SHALAMOV
Translated from the Russian by
DONALD RAYFIELD
Introduction by
ALISSA VALLES
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Copyright and More Information
Title Page
Introduction
BOOK FOUR: SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD
What Fiction Writers Get Wrong
Crooks by Blood
A Woman from the Criminal World
The Prison Bread Ration
The War of the “Bitches”
Apollo Among the Criminals
Sergei Yesenin and the World of Thieves
How “Novels” Are “Printed”
BOOK FIVE: THE RESURRECTION OF THE LARCH
The Path
Graphite
Hell’s Dock
Silence
Two Encounters
Grishka Logun’s Thermometer
A Roundup
Brave Eyes
Marcel Proust
The Faded Photograph
The Boss of the Political Administration
Riabokon
The Life of Engineer Kipreyev
Pain
The Nameless Cat
Someone Else’s Bread
A Theft
The Town on the Hill
The Examination
Fetching a Letter
The Gold Medal
By the Stirrup
Khan-Girei
Evening Prayer
Boris Yuzhanin
Mr. Popp’s Visit
The Squirrel
The Waterfall
Taming the Fire
The Resurrection of the Larch
BOOK SIX: THE GLOVE, OR, KOLYMA STORIES II
The Glove
Galina Pavlovna Zybalova
Liosha Chekanov, or, A Fellow-Accused in Kolyma
Third-Class Triangulation
Wheelbarrow I
Wheelbarrow II
Water Hemlock
Dr. Yampolsky
Lieutenant Colonel Fragin
Permafrost
Ivan Bogdanov
Yakov Ovseyevich Zavodnik
Dr. Kuzmenko’s Chess
The Man Off the Ship
Aleksandr Ghoghoberidze
Lessons in Love
Athenian Nights
A Journey to Ola
A Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Service
The Military Commissar
Riva-Rocci
Notes
INTRODUCTION
“Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,” Varlam Shalamov wrote to his friend Irina Sirotinskaya in 1971, “and like any slap in the face, has laws of a purely muscular character.” He returns to the idea a little later in the letter, contrasting his own ideal of prose to the expansive “spade work” of Tolstoy: “A slap in the face must be short, resonant.”1 Most of Shalamov’s stories are indeed short, some extremely so, and constitute an argument both with the great nineteenth-century Russian novels and with the wretched ones of the Stalinist era that sought to pour the pap of socialist realism into a pseudo-epic form. The slap works simultaneously as a figure for aesthetic form and political protest, and in Shalamov’s late essays and letters, it functions as a motto of sorts, a creed of laconic defiance echoing, distantly, the Russian futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste and—more intimately and immediately—the famous opening of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope: “After slapping Aleksey Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow.”
Mandelstam sent the manuscript of her memoir about life with the poet Osip Mandelstam to Shalamov in 1965, and while neither could hope to publish their prose in the Soviet Union at that time, the two established in the correspondence that followed a shared sense of purpose. He writes: “If I had to give a literature course on the second half of the twentieth century, I would start by burning all the textbooks on the podium, in front of the students. The link between eras, between cultures has been broken; the exchange has been interrupted and our mission is to pick up the ends of string and tie them back together.” She replies: “I don’t think we should burn textbooks: it’s too classical a gesture . . . Let’s just not use any”; her main concern, too, she writes, is “the link that connects one era to another, the only thing that allows society to be human, a human being to be human.”
The task Shalamov took on as a writer was what Osip Mandelstam in the celebrated and chilling poem “The Age” (“Vek”) figured as piecing together the broken back of an animal.
My age, my beast, who will look you
straight into the eye
And with his own life blood fuse
Two centuries’ vertebrae?
Shalamov conceives of his writing not only as an act of witness (to a crime) but also as an act of healing or at least of treating an illness or injury. The crimes of Stalinism were committed by a country against itself, in a self-consuming process by which each generation
of executioners soon became the next group of victims. Giving an account of the Gulag means finding a form for a suicidal cycle of alienation and death. What is being documented has no end, either logically (since to rid the Soviet state of all its possible “enemies” Stalin would have had to exterminate every single citizen) or historically (there was no liberation of the camps, no formal end to the system, even after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s denunciation). The literary means to find an escape from a vicious cycle is necessarily elliptical. A narrative slap in the face, as opposed to a physical one, is the opposite of mimetic violence: it is a transformation of pain into artistic form—a form that, like a set fracture, makes the bone stronger than it was before.
But the Stalinist years brought with them—along with the torture, starvation, and destruction of millions of human beings—an assault on language that systematically subverted and diminished the power and viability of words. To resurrect the dead in living memory Shalamov had to bring words back into an organic relation with reality. He found help in the Acmeist movement to which Mandelstam had belonged, the work of a group of poets reacting against the mystical vagaries of symbolism and striving to plant poetry firmly back in the soil of the physical, perceptible world. The essays that Shalamov wrote alongside his stories in the 1950s and ’60s—including one titled “Diseases of Language and Their Treatment”—are his continuation of that struggle. In their polemical, battle-ready tone and their call for a “new prose” equal to the new crisis conditions of Soviet life, they bring to mind the manifestos of the prewar avant-garde. Challenge and disputation are methods of “tying the ends together” no less than reverence and emulation.
Shalamov’s insistence on the direct participation of literature in life has its roots in the 1920s, when he was a student and, briefly, a journalist in Moscow. Few environments in modern history can have been more exciting to an aspiring writer than the Moscow of those years, a revolutionary city teeming with artistic movements, publications, performances, and quarrels. The futurist movement, the radical formal explorations of the journal LEF, and slightly later Novyi LEF and its promotion of “factography,” all had a profound appeal for Shalamov, who sincerely believed in the aim of raising millions out of illiteracy and out of the poverty he himself had known growing up in Vologda. Inclined to believe in the place of art in that struggle, he spent several years exploring the contending ideas of art as political instrument and the work of art as a sovereign creation.
In 1925, the year Shalamov arrived in Moscow, the critic Viktor Shklovsky published his Theory of Prose, and in the years that followed Shalamov eagerly read the publications of OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, a group that in addition to Shklovsky included the critics Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynyanov. Although Shalamov didn’t develop into an exemplar of the formalist program, it is hard not to see an affinity between the stony reality of the Kolyma stories and the kind of prose Shklovsky argued for in his Theory: “And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.”2 It was also Shklovsky who gave, in Knight’s Move (1923), a brutal description of hunger in Civil War–era Petersburg that is already more than halfway to the long drawn-out starvation in the Gulag that sounds the ground tone of Kolyma in Shalamov’s stories.
In 1958, drawing from his own experience of near starvation and his passage (a year earlier) through the same transit camp near Vladivostok where Osip Mandelstam died, Shalamov wrote the story “Cherry Brandy”3 about the poet’s last days hovering between life and death, a narrative of the end of a life permeated and animated by a poetic consciousness (reminiscent in some ways of Hermann Broch’s magisterial novel The Death of Virgil, but condensed into six pages). The later story “The Resurrection of the Larch” (1966), included in this volume (and lending its title to Shalamov’s fifth collection), enacts an oblique resurrection in the form of a larch branch sent from Kolyma to the poet’s widow. Aided by the woman’s “passionate will,” the branch miraculously returns to life standing in an empty food can with dirty Moscow tap water, growing fresh green needles and exuding the vague odor of turpentine, which is “the voice of the dead.” Only a living culture can remember and mourn. In bringing the branch back to life, both sender and recipient resurrect for a moment “a memory of the millions who were killed and tortured to death, who are laid in common graves to the north of Magadan.”
The story invokes the great age of the dahurian larch, which is still maturing at two hundred years and achieves maturity at three hundred. The Gulag alters not only the measures of human life—emotion, ethical choice, and spirit—but also the scale of historical time. The natural world, on the other hand, even in the hostile climate of Kolyma, can sometimes be enlisted as an ally of art against the prisoner’s extremes of deprivation and erasure. The larch can be called as a witness not only to the fate of a prisoner in the Far North under Stalin but also to the journey Shalamov invokes of the eighteenth-century writer Natalia Sheremeteva-Dolgorukova, who as a young wife followed her husband into exile in Siberia, where he perished: “[The larch] can see and shout out that nothing has changed in Russia, neither men’s fates, nor human spite, nor indifference.”
In the story “Graphite,” the marks (“tags”) made by topographers on notches cut in trees connect the twentieth-century dwellers in Kolyma with the vast time span of the geological earth. The author follows this observation with the unsentimental comment that dead prisoners go into the earth each with a tag of their own tied to one toe and marked with graphite—a product of millennia of compressed organic matter. In “The Resurrection of the Larch” and “Graphite” Shalamov reminds the reader that the bodies of the dead do not decay in the Arctic permafrost: they endure in an icy immortality that is a terrible inversion of heroic glory and also a powerful metaphor for the Soviet inability to mourn the victims of Stalin. (By the same token, the current signs of thaw in the Arctic permafrost as a result of climate change may bring the dead back to press their claims on a world that denied them.)
Nothing has changed: yet elsewhere, Shalamov insists on contrasting the conditions of earlier prisoners with those he himself experienced in Kolyma. In the story “Grishka Logun’s Thermometer,” he marks the distance between the prisoner-narrator and the prisoner Dostoyevsky by pointing to the novelist’s many “miserable, tearful, humiliating but touching letters to his seniors for all of the ten years he spent as a soldier after the ‘House of the Dead,’” even his “poems to the empress.” The narrator writes a petition on behalf of his immediate boss, Zuyev, a mining inspector and a former prisoner, who is trying to get his conviction annulled by the authorities. The narrator agrees to the job in order to spend a day indoors, out of the lethal cold, but he fails to produce a letter of sufficient rhetorical power because he is so depleted and damaged that “the repository where I used to keep grandiose adjectives now had nothing in it except hatred . . . There was no Kolyma in the ‘House of the Dead.’ If there had been, Dostoyevsky would have been struck dumb.”
To Shalamov, Dostoyevsky is a genius and an example of artistic integrity, but he is also to be judged severely for his failure to reveal the true depths of depravity in penal camp life. In “What Fiction Writers Get Wrong,” an argument against nineteenth-century literary romanticization of criminals, Shalamov claims that Dostoyevsky mistook the accidental criminals he came across during his imprisonment for gangsters, for the professional class of criminals who live by their own brutal code of law and have dominated camp life for generations. Shalamov is willing to allow for the possibility that “Dostoyevsky never knew them,” because “if he did see and know them, then, as an artist, he turned his back on them.” Tolstoy and Chekhov also failed in this regard, in Shalamov’s view, although he felt Chekhov had undoubtedly come across real criminals on his journey to the prison island of Sakhalin; in “Crooks by Blood” he is pleased to be able to correct Chekhov on a fragment of gangster cardplayers’ slang misheard on Sakhalin.
Shalamov considered swashbuckling portrayals of criminal outlaws by twentieth-century writers like Babel to be frivolous. In the letter to Sirotinskaya quoted earlier, his censure also falls on Babel’s prose style (to many a model of concision): “If I practically never thought about how to write a novel, I thought about how to write a short story from early on and for decades . . . I once took a pencil and crossed out of Babel’s stories all their beauty, all those fires like resurrections, and looked at what was left. Of Babel not much was left, and of Larisa Reisner, nothing at all.” As for poets, Sergei Yesenin, despite his great lyrical gifts, was fatally compromised in Shalamov’s eyes by sucking up to the criminal world and by the fact that criminals had adopted him as their bard, tattooing lines from his poems on their bodies. “The gangster . . . is not wholly without aesthetic needs, however little he may be human. His needs are satisfied by prison songs . . . usually very sentimental, plaintive, and touching” (this from “Apollo Among the Criminals”). Yesenin caters to that taste.
