Kolyma Tales

Between 1929 and 1953, Varlam Shalamov spent 20 years in Soviet labour camps as a dissident. 16 of those in Kolyma, a region in the most distant part of Siberia that at the time was essentially a prison the size of a large country, half a world away from... anything. When he was released, he started writing about it; short stories based on his and others' experiences. Stories of what it's like to survive for decades in an environment where everything is essentially trying to kill you, by violence or starvation or cold or exhaustion, specifically designed to be hell.

Life in the camps is horrible; nobody ever became a better person in the camps. The experience is completely negative, every single minute of it. Man deteriorates. That is what happens, nothing else.

Kolyma Tales certainly isn't easy reading; Shalamov is a brilliant writer, but obviously it's not the sort of stories that lend themselves to affirming the best of humanity. Shalamov never tries to find beauty, heroism or transcendence in suffering, quite the opposite; he just wants to document exactly how bad it was, how bad it can be, what people are capable of surviving (not that everyone does, far from it), how it happened - there's a presence in his prose that's just amazing.

It's also remarkable how political the stories are not; Stalin is never even mentioned, and neither are, for the most part, the opinions and actions that landed him and his fellow prisoners. When he raises his eye over the daily slog of trying to stay alive, the image he paints of Stalinism isn't one of deliberate malice as much as complete arbitrariness. Many were there not because of things they had done but for opinions their family members supposedly held. Your sentence could be extended or commuted to a death sentence on a whim, and even if you were technically released you were still stuck in Kolyma with no way to get all the way back to Russia. It was a crapshoot who ended up serving 20 years and who didn't, and who survived it and who didn't. And that's the mentality that spread from the camps.

The Kolyma Tales, however well-written, are ugly. Death, starvation, oppression, the almost complete loss of hope and morality... and yet there's still always something there. It's hard to point at the little gestures of humanity between people, because they're frequently offset and overwhelmed by the complete inhumanity (if anything done by humans can be termed inhuman) of the entire situation. But the simple fact that he wrote about it, that he spent 20 years reliving hell just to tell others about it, all in this razorsharp, vivid detail, says a lot. Stalin captured them, made them non-persons, to fade away and die in the middle of nowhere. In capturing them in prose, making them real again, Shalamov sets them free.