Kolyma Tales (Combined Two-Volume Edition)

Rating:
Summary: One of the earliest "Trapped in the GULAG" books
Review: Varlam Shalamov went through Hell, no doubt about it. However, he disavowed much of the cruelty of the Stalinist times during the 1960's. Would I have done the same thing if I were him? Was he under pressure to say "things weren't so bad, really.."? Perhaps. "Kolyma Tales" is a series of short stories, which in many ways was hard to warm up to. I prefered several other books in this genre...such as Alexander Dolgin's book. I read "Kolyma Tales" while I was in Russia for five weeks this summer, and I did not haul the book home with me. It was worth reading, but not worth carrying around.

Rating:
Summary: Torture does not purify me, it destroys me.
Review: Varlam Shalamov's style is minimal, brutal, and straight-forward. He does not preach to his reader about terror, torture, death, and injustice. Rather, he describes the horrible experiences he endured in short stories that are far more like eye witness narratives than the typical short story. He does not need to tell you that cutting off a man's hands is a terrible crime, he just describes the actions and allows the reader to absorb the impact as they read the cold, hard narrative. Life in Kolyma had no frills and lace, and neither does Shalamov's narrative style.

I think this book would make excellent classroom reading and discussion for high school seniors. I say this primarily because of the exposure to the Soviet system of social control, especially between 1936-1956. Understanding totalitarianism and social control should be part of our education of our youth. I also think that Shalamov counters the concept that suffering is redemptive. Rather, Shalamov indicates that extreme hunger, torture, work, beatings, exhaustion, cold, and experience of arbitrary death and injustice gradually destroys any human being, depriving them of uplifting emotions, imagination, creativity, and finally empathy and a sense of self survival.

Shalamov carefully demonstrates this loss of our humanity under conditions of extreme torture, exhaustion, hunger and cold by showing character after character disintegrating in unique but common ways. In general, empathy and sympathy are gradually dissolved in the horror of their experiences and are replaced by a depressed apathy. Rarely does he show the downward spiral to go from nobility to criminal cruelty. Rather, his characters become devoid of emotions, both positive and eventually even negative, before they give up.

In the story "Condensed Milk" one prisoner trys to get other prisoners to attempt escape so he can inform on them and get special treatment from the guards. In "Shock Therapy" a disgusting young egg-head physician trys to identify "fakers" in the first aid clinic with electric shock. In "The Lawyers' Plot" a Soviet official trys to arrest a whole social network of law students based on social contacts rather than evidence and eventually is arrested himself. "Typhoid Quarantine" was my favorite story. A man who has survived the gold mines is returned to camp dkuring a typhoid quarantine. Through some basic reasoning and knowledge of the Kolyma "system", he is able to survive in the camps and at least temporarily avoid the killing gold mines. In "The Lepers", persons who have leprosy are able to hide amongst the frost bite victims and victims of Warld War II injuries. In "Committees of the Poor" a great description of the social norms amongh the prisoners is described. In "Major Pugachov's Last Battle" a daring escape from the camps is told. In "Lend Lease" a terrible tale is told of American bull dozers being used to dig mass graves for the millions of frozen dead laborers. In "An Epitaph" Shalamov writes short paragraphs about people who may not need a whole short story for their tale of horror and death, but none-the-less needed to be related in a stream of consciousness account of misery of the common prisoner. In "In the Bathhouse" we learn that efforts to control lice and parasites are totally ineffective and are actually demeaning totures for the inmates.

We will never know the exact number of persons who died under Stalin's Soviet experiment. Conservative figures reach 22 million citizens of his own country. Shalamov at least gives us a true accouting of his horror and allows many of the dead to at least be enobled through a story. This book should make us sad at the true nature of human existence and how a social system can be designed to make our darker nature the dominant feature. Knowing this fact, and knowing that we can not change human nature, we are compelled to design social and political systems of public discourse that do not allow this horror to erupt and overtake us.