Varlam Shalamov

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Image:Shalamov mono.jpg Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (Варлам Тихонович Шаламов, July 1, 1907–January 17, 1982) was a Russian writer, journalist, poet, political prisoner and Gulag survivor.

Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, Russia to a family of an orthodox religious minister and a teacher. In 1914, he entered the academic gymnasium of St. Alexander's and graduated in 1923. In 1926, after working for 2 years, he was accepted in Moscow State University, in the faculty of Soviet law. While studying Soviet law at Moscow State University, he joined a Trotskyists' group and on February 19, 1929 was arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labor in Vishera, North Urals for distributing the Letters to the Party Congress known as Lenin's Testament, which, in part, criticized Stalin, and for participating in a demonstration marking the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution with the slogan, "Down with Stalin." He was released in 1931, and worked in the town of Berezniki in construction until his return to Moscow in 1932.

Upon return back to Moscow in 1932, Shalamov worked as a journalist and some of his essays and articles were published, including his first short story (in 1936) "The three deaths of Doctor Austino."

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." In 1943 he was handed another term, this time for 10 years, for anti-Soviet agitation: he called Ivan Bunin a "classic Russian writer."

The conditions that he endured were extreme, first in gold mining opertions, and then in coal mining, during which time he also contracted typhus. He was repeatedly sent to punishment zones, both for his political "crimes" as well as for his attempt to escape.

In 1946, being a dohodyaga (emaciated and devitalized), his life was saved by a doctor-inmate A.I. Pantyukhov, who risked his own life to qualify Shalamov as a hospital attendant. The new "career" allowed Shalamov to survive and to write poetry. In 1951 he was released from the camp, and continued working as a medical assistant for the forced labor camps while still writing, and in 1952, Shalamov sent his poetry to Boris Leonidovich Paternak, who praised Shalamov's work. After his release from the camps, he was faced with the dissolution of his former family, including a grown daughter who no longer recognized her father.

Shalamov was allowed to leave Magadan in November 1953 following the death of Stalin, and was permitted to go to the settlement of Turkmen in Kakininsky Oblast, where he worked as a supply agent. Beginning in 1954, and continuing until 1973, he worked on "Kolyma Tales."

After the death of Stalin in March 1953, masses of zeks (from the Russian abbreviation z/k for zakliuchonnyi, an inmate) were being released and rehabilitated, many posthumously. Shalamov was allowed to return to Moscow after having been officially rehabilitated in 1956. In 1957, Shalmov became a correspondent for the journal "Moskva," and his poetry began being published. His health, however, had been broken by his years in the camps, and he received an invalid's pension.

Shalamov proceeded publishing poetry and essays in the major Soviet literary magazines, while writing his magnum opus, The Kolyma Tales. He was acquainted with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak and Nadezhda Mandelstam. The manuscripts were smuggled abroad and distributed via samizdat. The translations have been published in the West since 1966. The complete Russian-language edition was published in London in 1978, and thereafter both in Russian and in translation. "Kolyma Tales" is considered to be one of the great Russian group of short stories of the twentieth century.

The Western publishers always disclaimed that Shalamov's stories were being published without the author's knowledge or consent. Surprisingly, in 1972 Shalamov retracted the Tales, most likely being forced to do so by the Soviet regime. As his health deteriorated, he spent the last three years of his life in a house for elderly and disabled literary workers in Tushino. Shalamov died of poor health on January 17th 1982 and was interred at Kuntsevo Cemetery, Moscow.

The book was finally published on Russian soil in 1987, as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy, when the collapse of the Soviet Union was imminent.

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