TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Arrested in 1937 at the outset of the Great Purge, Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was among the first wave of Stalin’s political prisoners sent to the Kolyma labor camps. Charged with “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities” and given five years corrective labor, his sentence was later extended ten years for “anti-Soviet agitation” and for having called Ivan Bunin a great Russian writer.
The working conditions at Kolyma were the most brutal in the Soviet gulag system. Prisoners were malnourished, and improperly clothed and sheltered for winter temperatures reaching -60°C. At least half a million died, with mortality rates as high as 30%. Gold and coal mining, logging and road building, were principle activities, with the mines essential to Stalin’s economic plans and later for the Soviet war effort.
During World War II prisoner conditions deteriorated further. Daily rations were reduced to one pound of bread and work days extended to 16 hours. Between 1943 and 1946, Shalamov was near death on three occasions, and hospitalized at Belichya with typhus and dysentery. His attempted escape from a logging camp, at which prisoners were only fed if they met the daily quota, landed him in the punitive labor camp at Jelgala. Prisoners unable to work in the Jelgala mines were thrown off the mountain or dragged to their death by horses.
In late 1946, in a state of dokhodyaga (literally “walking towards death” in Russian), Shalamov was admitted with the help of a camp doctor into a medical orderly training program. The position, for which he was actually ineligible, saved his life, allowing him to avoid hard labor and work as a medical assistant for the remainder of his sentence.
Stationed at a logging camp on the Duskanya Key in 1949, Shalamov was able to write for the first time in twelve years. Prior to his 1937 arrest he had by his account written 200 poems and 150 stories; all subsequently destroyed by his first wife. Now, at 42 years of age and living alone in a hut on the taiga, he had at last received “the right to solitude.” He wrote only poetry, at every opportunity, on anything he could find — on medical forms, cigarette boxes, and scraps of newspaper — and each night transcribed the results into homemade notebooks.

The rushing stream was so powerful that I had no time for even the most basic editing, which would only have been a distraction. As soon as one poem ended, another began. The very possibility of these poetic lines being recorded I considered a great success, almost a miracle, no matter how awkward or shakily constructed (Collected Works, 1998).

Though his prison term ended in October 1951, Shalamov stayed on in Kolyma as a medical assistant. In 1952 he sent a selection of poems to Boris Pasternak, whom he considered the bearer of “high poetic truths,” and received praise as “a strong, original poet.” He worked as a construction foreman and at a peat mine in Kalinin province, writing the first of his Kolyma short stories in 1954. Officially rehabilitated in late 1956 he moved to Moscow, where he worked in earnest on his Kolyma Tales and continued to write poetry. Increasingly isolated, he lived in poverty and his health deteriorated. Deaf, blind, and suffering from Ménière’s Disease, his last poems were dictated to occasional visitors.
Although best known today as a writer of prose, Shalamov thought of himself as a poet foremost. He never stopped writing poetry and considered each poem part of a poetic diary of his life. Genuine poetry was born of tragedy, he insisted, not from other poems. “Poetry is fate, not craft. Until living blood appears in the lines, there is not yet a poet, only a versifier.” His many years in the gulag had made him a poet and it was poetry that had kept him alive.

Every person there had their own very last, most important thing that helped them to live, to cling to life . . . my favorite poems were remembered when everything else had long been forgotten, erased, expelled from memory. They were the one thing that had not been suppressed by fatigue, frost, hunger and endless humiliation (Collected Works).

After arriving in Moscow, perhaps on the advice of Pasternak, Shalamov decided that his Kolyma notebooks contained drafts, not finished poems. The notebooks became “a stock of raw materials, a raw material warehouse,” from which he composed new material. By the mid 1960s he had completed his new Kolyma Notebooks, organized into six cycles totaling 464 poems. Only a dozen survived intact from the original notebooks, with poems about Moscow now included, which he considered related in spirit to Kolyma.
However, Shalamov was unable to publish the book. The five thin volumes of poetry he did publish in the subsequent two decades were heavily censored and received little critical attention. He referred to the editors as “lumberjacks” and considered the poems “disabled”
and “crippled.” His short story collection Kolyma Tales would not be published during his lifetime either, except abroad, against his wishes, in badly edited form.
Kolyma Notebooks was ultimately published in Russia in 1994, twelve years after Shalamov’s death, due to the efforts of his literary
executor Irina Sirotinskaya. Russians did not queue in lines for the book as they had in 1989 for the first publication of Kolyma Tales. As Shalamov noted in his “Remarks on Poetry” (1959), poetry no longer held the privileged place in Russian cultural life that it did in the Twenties before Stalin. Poetry, perhaps, was still recovering from the Thirties and Forties, “that time of continuous collectivization and camps, that time of denunciation elevated to valor; when cruelty and treachery were taken as signs of human wisdom.”

MAXIM VSESLAV BOTKIN
Sofia, Bulgaria