Please join us to mark the publication of the second volume of Donald Rayfield's new translation of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories.
These stories present an inimitable depiction of the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. A journalist and poet with pro-Trotsky sympathies, Shalamov faced fifteen years of imprisonment over the course of Stalin’s reign. After years of brutal enforced labor in the gold and coal mines of Kolyma, Shalamov eventually became a medical assistant, a fact which probably saved his life. These years in the camps formed the basis of his life’s work, a monumental collection of short stories that took him nearly twenty years to complete. Only a few of the stories in Sketches of the Criminal World have been translated into English before; many of the original manuscripts have only been recently discovered in the Russian archives.
Shalamov’s work is often compared to Solzhenitsyn’s classic The Gulag Archipelago. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, however, Shalamov refuses to sentimentalize his harrowing experiences or engage in ideological battles. The irredeemable exists, he insists, and this new volume centers on the seemingly boundless displays of immorality he witnessed in the camps and the mines. His subject is not his Soviet captors nor political dissidents but the criminal subcultures among the convicts: prisoners who, jailed not for intellectual or political “crimes” but for violent offenses, formed gangs and dominated the rest of the camp.
Literature, argues Shalamov, is stuffed with irresponsibly sympathetic portrayals of outlaws and crooks. Sketches of the Criminal World offers nearly sixty chilling portraits of people who take pleasure in intimidation and control. Shalamov’s “criminal world” is indeed a world of its own, untouched by any semblance of human decency. He takes special care to consider the vocabulary of the gangster, a challenge of translation that Donald Rayfield’s work meets masterfully, revealing how an intricate web of slang works insulate the universe of organized crime—a world and a language that, particularly in Russia, is still around today.
In English
Praise:
“Shalamov is an unparalleled reporter on life in the Gulag and anatomist of the camp condition, which like an ulcer bled its malignance through the whole body of Soviet society. Not only a reporter but a great practitioner too of a ruthlessly stripped-down art.”—J. M. Coetzee
“Shalamov’s unique tone of voice and his pared-down style are beautifully rendered here by Rayfield—limpid, assured, the scarce moments of lyricism expertly caught.” —William Boyd, The Sunday Times
“A struggle with memory comparable with that of Proust or Beckett, this is a work of art of the highest order by a writer of extraordinary daring and ambition.”—John Gray, New Statesman
“Building on his Kolyma Stories (2018), one-time prisoner Shalamov limns the hell that was the Soviet gulag. The stories gathered here, apparently reportage with a light veneer of fiction to disguise names, open with their author chiding himself for being "thrilled by the ‘heroic' figures of the criminal world," adulation befitting an impressionable teenager. For, as Shalamov writes, there really were criminals in the gulag, not just blameless victims of Stalin. As in his earlier volume, Shalamov writes matter-of-factly, unblinkingly, about the endless horrors of the gulag, which are scarcely comprehensible. Essential chronicles of the worst face of the totalitarian state.” — Kirkus Reviews
About the Author:
Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) was born in Vologda in western Russia to a Russian Orthodox priest and his wife. Shalamov worked as a journalist in Moscow before increasingly turning to fiction and poetry following his first arrest and three year sentence in 1929. Following a 15-year stretch between Russian Gulags from 1936 to 1951, Shalamov returned to Moscow and began writing what would become the Kolyma Stories. He also wrote many volumes of poetry, including Ognivo (1961) and Moskovskiye oblaka (1972). 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. He has translated several novels, including Hamid Ismailov’s Devils’ Dance from the Uzbek, and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Rafy Hay is a writer and filmmaker, and is Facilities and Development Officer at Pushkin House.