Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma Tales

Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) was a prominent Russian writer and poet who spent seventeen years in Stalin's labor camps. "Remember, most importantly, a camp is a negative school for anyone from the first to the last day," Shalamov wrote. "No one—neither the warden nor the prisoner—should see it. But if you have seen it, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. <…> For my part, I long ago decided that I would dedicate the rest of my life to this truth." "Kolyma Tales" is V. Shalamov's major work, recounting the lives of prisoners in forced labor camps from the 1930s to the 1950s. The stories were written between 1954 and 1973. and are presented in this edition in their entirety—in six cycles: "Kolyma Tales," "The Left Bank," "The Shovel Artist," "Essays on the Criminal World," "The Resurrection of the Larch," and "The Glove, or KR-2." Shalamov's stories were first published between 1966 and 1976 in the American Russian-language Novy Zhurnal; in his homeland, the works were published only after his death in the late 1980s.