Shalamov, Varlam (2020). Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9781681373676. There can be no doubt that Shalamov’s reportage from the lower depths of the Gulag of a society building a ‘new world’ will remain forever among the masterpieces of documentary or memoir literature and an invaluable source for the present and future understanding of the ‘Soviet human condition.’”—Laszlo Dienes, World Literature Today

Upon his graduation it became clear that the Regional Department of People's Education (RONO, Regionalnoe Otdelenie Narodnogo Obrazovania) would not support his further education because Varlam was a son of a priest. Therefore, he found a job as a tanner at the leather factory in the settlement of Kuntsevo (a suburb of Moscow, since 1960 part of the Moscow city). In 1926, after having worked for two years, he was accepted into the department of Soviet Law at Moscow State University through open competition. While studying there Varlam was intrigued by the oratory skills displayed during the debates between Anatoly Lunacharsky and Metropolitan Alexander Vvedensky. At that time Shalamov was convinced that he would become a literature specialist. His literary tastes included Modernist literature (later, he would say that he considered his teachers not Tolstoy, of whom he was very critical, or other classic writers, but Andrei Bely and Aleksey Remizov) and classic poetry. His favorite poets were Alexander Pushkin and Boris Pasternak, whose works influenced him his entire life. He also praised Dostoevsky, Savinkov, Joyce and Hemingway, about whom he later wrote a long essay depicting the myriad possibilities of artistic endeavors. Varlam Shalamov (1998) "Complete Works" (Варлам Шаламов. Собрание сочинений в четырех томах), printed by publishers Vagrius and Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, ISBN 5-280-03163-1, ISBN 5-280-03162-3

The parallel between Kolyma and the last, frozen circle of Hell is taken for granted; Shalamov’s emphasis on the fact that, like Dante, he has the power to build. *** Shalamov joined a Trotskyist-leaning group and on February 19, 1929, was arrested and sent to Butyrskaya prison for solitary confinement. He was later sentenced to three years of correctional labor in the town of Vizhaikha, convicted of distributing the "Letters to the Party Congress" known as Lenin's Testament, which were critical of Joseph Stalin, and of participating in a demonstration marking the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution with the slogan "Down with Stalin". Courageously he refused to sign the sentence branding him a criminal. Later, he would write in his short stories that he was proud of having continued the Russian revolutionary tradition of members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and Narodnaya Volya, who were fighting against tsarism. He was taken by train to the former Solikamsk monastery, which was transformed into a militsiya headquarters of the Vishera department of Solovki ITL [1] [ bettersourceneeded] Dikov, N.N.; Clark, Gerald H. (1965). "The Stone Age of Kamchatka and the Chukchi Peninsula in the Light of New Archaeological Data". Arctic Anthropology. 3 (1): 10–25. JSTOR 40315601. Though he wrote about imprisonment under the Stalinist regime, Shalamov made only one mention of Joseph Stalin in the book, a brief comment on a large portrait of Stalin in an administrator's office.

In 1932 expeditions pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma, embarking on the construction of the Kolyma Highway, which was to become known as the Road of Bones. Eventually, about 80 different camps dotted the region of the uninhabited taiga. Shalamov’s belief can be detected in the stories themselves. The first in the entire sequence, Through the Snow, describes the way a new road is trodden down by a team of prisoners. The story appears to be a straightforward description of a physical process. Until, that is, we come to the final lines: The frozen earth, then, keeper and revealer of secrets, acts as an archive, the physical counterpart to Shalamov’s memorialising stories. Because despite their pessimism, and despite his contention that nothing good could come from the camps (“We had all been permanently poisoned by the north, and we knew it”), his writing is an act of defiance, not despair. He genuinely believed that his stories, in Leona Toker’s description, were “a truthful but not despondent or cynical testimony”; that they “are – rather than are about – the victory of good, a slap in the face of evil”. Hunger, horror, fear, humiliation: everything was used to turn a thinking man into a stupid animal.Shalamov is suggesting, I believe, that it was his loyalty to old-fashioned ideas of courage and honour that led to him spending over sixteen years in Kolyma. Shalamov was one of the relatively few people whom the NKVD arrested for an actual reason — rather than simply to fulfil a quota. In 1927 he had taken part in a demonstration on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution; one of the slogans had been “Down with Stalin!” And he was arrested for the first time as early as 1929; he had been involved in an attempt to print and distribute the suppressed letter Lenin wrote shortly before his death, recommending that Stalin be removed from his post as General Secretary of the Party. *** Golden, Nathaniel (2004) Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma tales: a formalist analysis, Studies in Slavic literature and poetics, 41, Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 193 pp., ISBN 90-420-1198-X At the outset of the Great Purge, on January 12, 1937, Shalamov was arrested again for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sent to Kolyma, also known as "the land of white death", for five years. He was already in jail awaiting sentencing when one of his short stories was published in the literary journal Literary Contemporary. Kolyma Tales or Kolyma Stories ( Russian: Колымские рассказы, Kolymskiye rasskazy) is the name given to six collections of short stories by Russian author Varlam Shalamov, about labour camp life in the Soviet Union. He began working on this book in 1954 and continued until 1973. The book is considered Shalamov's magnum opus as a writer and one of the most important works of Russian 20th-century literature.

This was a tough read but one I am very glad to have read. This was a collection of stories about the conditions in Soviet forced-labour camps during the Stalinist regime. It definitely filled in many of the knowledge gaps I had of what happened in the Siberian gulags. Only someone who spent time in a Siberian labour camp could ever have come up with such a collection of short stories, stories that capture the abysmal conditions of the camps, describe what the camp does to the human psyche (both the prisoner’s and the officer’s), and the new codes the prisoners must adhere to. What I found astounding were the details included in each story. They were definitely not things most of us would consider. Adi suçlulara hikaye anlatarak ve onların topuklarını kaşıyarak daha rahat bir kamp hayatı geçirebilirsin, yapmıyorsun, seni o kadar aşağılamalarına izin vermiyorsun. Oyun oynadığınız köpeği öldürüyorlar, etinden sana da veriyorlar bir parça, açlıktan ölsen de yemiyorsun. İktidarın nasıl bir güç ve acımasızlık getirdiğinin farkındasın, hiç kimseye zarar vermemek için sana en ufak bir yetki verecek tüm görevleri reddediyorsun. Kendinden başka kimseye minnet duymak istemiyorsun, tek başına çıkacaksın bu kamptan, kendi gücünle, kendi becerinle. Sözcükler seni terk ediyor, anılar da. Ama sevdiğin şiirler hâlâ duruyor. Bitkinliğin, soğuğun, açlığın, sonu gelmez aşağılamaların bastıramadığı o şiirler sana hayatta kalabilmek için güç veriyor.a b Conquest, Robert, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Viking Press, (1978), ISBN 0-670-41499-9, pp. 228–229