Rating: 
Summary: Devastating
Review: Kolyma Tales should be required reading in all universities and even high schools, as it demonstrates the horror created by people and even the resilience of the human spirit. Mr. Shalamov truly created an empathic response.
Rating:
Summary: INCREDIBLE and UNFORGETTABLE
Review: Not only does Shalamov move the reader to the very depths of one's essence, he does so quietly --- no moralizing necessary. The truth of his stories need no embroidery. Seventy-two years I have lived on this earth and have done a great deal of reading. "Kolyma Tales" is the most deeply affecting book ever I have weaved into my soul.
Rating:
Summary: Strong medicine
Review: Shalamov's stories are a powerful, bleak antidote to the idea that suffering serves a redemptive purpose, a conceit all too common in Russia.He saw the physical, psychological and moral devastation wrought by the gulag and recorded it in an unsparing collection of tales based on his experience. There is a second, equally harrowing, collection of his tales.
Rating:
Summary: Strong medicine
Review: Shalamov's stories are a powerful, bleak antidote to the idea that suffering serves a redemptive purpose, a conceit all too common in Russia. He saw the physical, psychological and moral devastation wrought by the gulag and recorded it in an unsparing collection of tales based on his experience. There is a second, equally harrowing, collection of his tales.
Rating:
Summary: Victims of arbitrariness
Review: Shalamov's stories are hauntingly realistic and bitter pictures of the merciless and naked 'struggle for life' under extreme circumstances of work camp inmates in the former Soviet Union under the Stalin regime.
All feelings (love, friendship, honesty, envy, vanity ...) have vanished in the struggle for survival against hunger, bitter coldness, exhaustion and the omnipotent guards. When someone dies, all his clothes are immediately ripped off by the other inmates. The tales give us also good portraits of the prisoners, who were mostly professors, party bureaucrats, engineers, militia men, peasants or skilled workers, not common criminals. Most of them didn't even know why they were imprisoned and why they had to die, because they weren't against the regime. They were only the naïve victims of arbitrary arrests imposed by a ruthless despot. The tales also relate the dead from exhaustion of the well-known Russian writer Andrey Platonov. This impressive but depressing book should be read as a warning against the unchallenged power of the bureaucracy of a one party state.
Rating:
Summary: I Stand as Witness to the Common Lot,
Review: Survivor of that time, that place." Anna Akhmatova, Requiem.
Varlam Shalamov was a survivor of 17 years in the work camps of that time and that place known as Kolyma. Upon his return to Moscow Shalamov crafted a series of short stories that memorialized his time in Stalin's labor camps. Those 54 stories were not published in the USSR but were circulated widely in samizdat form. They were publshed in the west as The Kolyma Tales. They are exquisitely well crafted, powerful, and moving.
Shalamov's prose style is sparse and to the point. The dry recounting of horror after horror has quite an impact on the reader. In fact, the level of passion in Shalamov's writing seems inversely proportional to the nature of the scenes he paints; the more horrific the tale the less emotional the writing. This is certainly an effective style. Some facts do not need embellishment. The stories speak for themselves.
Shalamov also does not tell the reader how to interpret a story. He simply tells a tale. Unlike Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, who had a tendency to tell a story and then advise the reader what lessons should be drawn from it, Shalamov simply tells a story. In that sense his stories can be compared to Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel.
It would be impossible to summarize each individual story in a short review. However, each was compelling in its own way. I was particularly struck by a few of them. The story "In the Night" concerns two men who sneak out of their barracks at night to dig up the grave of a newly deceased fellow prisoner. Why? Because the wanted to steal his relatively new underwear so they could trade it in for bread and tobacco and perhaps live an extra day longer. In Procurator of Judea a military doctor (not a prisoner) transferred from the front lines to Kolyma in order to accelerate his pension. The stark, dry picture of surgeons performing dozens of amputations of the frostbitten limbs of prisoners arriving on a squalid vessel is only a page or two long. It skips forward 17 years and notes that the doctor could remember the names of his orderlies but could not remember the names of the ship or any of its prisoners. The story simply concludes by noting an Anatole France story. Procurator of Judea. In which "after seventeen years, Pontius Pilate cannot remember Christ." Simple words simply spoken speak volumes.
I could not help but think as I read these stories about the use of literature, of art, as a means of providing permanent testimony to man's inhumanity to man in a century that has witnessed more than its share of horrors. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of a different horror once wrote that "rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving not only to survive, but to testify". Varlam Shalamov not only survived but testified and in so doing left a beautifully conceived and executed testament to the lives of those men and women who never made it back home.
This is a book that should be read, and read again.
Rating:
Summary: AN ETERNITY IN THE LIFE OF VARLAM SHALAMOV
Review: This book makes 'A Day in the Life' seem like summer camp. It is not a political commentary. Any politics is buried under the mountains of corpses and the horror of a world in which scientific socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat are made real. This is a landscape in which there is no longer any point to the Revolution, merely the brutal, cold-blooded stamping of the ideological boot on human souls. Do not look for guilt, for justifications or for reason in this book. It is enough to know that these events took place and they must rank among the greatest of man's insanities. I found this book shattering in its intensity.
Rating:
Summary: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword
Review: This is the greatest work of literature in the history of the world. All the special effects in Hollywood cannot conjure the horror that Shalamov's translated words ram into your eyes. Kind of makes you wonder why there is no musuem in D.C. to remember the victims of the Gulag. Read it and weep.
Rating:
Summary: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword
Review: This is the greatest work of literature in the history of the world. All the special effects in Hollywood cannot conjure the horror that Shalamov's translated words ram into your eyes. Kind of makes you wonder why there is no musuem in D.C. to remember the victims of the Gulag. Read it and weep.
Rating: 
Summary: Soviet Censored
Review: unfortunately Soviet approved, but lacks the courage to ask why he was there, not as much detail as Gulag Archipelago (best book on subject) but written of experiences earlier in the 1930's. Author seems to have taken the soft route in jobs (camp medical orderly etc) rather than the default way. According to this book the male criminal element (opposed to s.58) are all homosexuals, and all females in camps are prostitutes, but married to there gay criminal companions. Make of this what you will. Emphasises camp life only, no comments as to the validity of the state in its actions, or actions of Lenin, or Stalin. Or in fulling 5 year plans. A biassed account
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