In 1951 Shalamov was released from the camps, and in 1953 he was permitted to leave Magadan, though not to reside in a large city. It was after this, his final release, that he began to write Kolyma Tales. On 18 July 1956 he was formally ‘rehabilitated’ by the Soviet government and permitted to return to Moscow, where he worked as a journalist and, in 1961, began publishing his poetry. In all, he published five slender collections. Shalamov’s verse is intimately bound up with his experiences in Kolyma, a circumstance that could not be mentioned at the time in the collections themselves. But his true talent was as a prose writer, and his poetry did not bring him the recognition he had hoped for.
The manuscript of Kolyma Tales was brought to the United States in 1966 by Professor Clarence Brown of Princeton University. From 1970 to 1976 Roman Goul, editor of the New York Russian émigré quarterly the New Review, published one or two of the Kolyma Tales in most issues of his journal. Others appeared in the émigré journal Grani, published in Frankfurt-am-Main. The full Russian language version did not appear until 1978, when it was brought out by Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd in London. To protect Shalamov from reprisals the editors always placed a note to the effect that the stories were being published without the knowledge and consent of the author.
Although Shalamov had, in fact, consented to publication, he became angry with Goul for editing the stories and for failing to publish a separate collection. On the pages of Literaturnaya gazeta Shalamov published a statement claiming that the topic of Kolyma Tales was no longer relevant after Khrushchev’s famous de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, that he had never sent any manuscript abroad for publication and that he was a loyal Soviet citizen. He inveighed against everyone previously involved in the publication of his stories in the West, shocking his former admirers so deeply that some literally removed his portrait from their homes. But even having betrayed his own major achievement, Kolyma Tales, he continued to write them.
Shalamov’s stories are in the Chekhovian tradition, though they depict a far more savage era. A brief plot is devoted to one incident; an objective, dispassionate narration provides a contrast to the horror of the moment; and a pointe ends it. As Chekhov was compared with Tolstoy, so Shalamov has his counterpart: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The parallels go beyond brevity versus amplitude. Chekhov, a writer who respected the rights of the reader in the artistic process, consciously avoided drawing conclusions for his audience. Tolstoy, on the other hand (like Solzhenitsyn later), constantly lectures the reader.
By his own admission, Solzhenitsyn barely touches on Kolyma in his writings. He asked Shalamov to co-author his Gulag Archipelago with him, but Shalamov, already old and sick, declined. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn writes: ‘Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.’
The British Slavist Geoffrey Hosking summed up the differences between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn welclass="underline"
Like Gulag Archipelago… this volume constitutes a chronicle and indictment of labour camp life. Yet anyone who comes to it with Gulag Archipelago in mind is likely to be very surprised. Outwardly at least, Shalamov’s work is about as different from Solzhenitsyn’s as it is possible to imagine. Where Solzhenitsyn constructs a single vast panorama, loose and sprawling, Shalamov chooses the most concise of literary forms, the short story, and shapes it consciously and carefully, so that his overall structure is like a mosaic made of tiny pieces. Where Solzhenitsyn writes with anger, sarcasm and bitterness, Shalamov adopts a studiedly dry and neutral tone. Where Solzhenitsyn plunges into his characters’ fates, telling their story from a variety of subjective viewpoints, Shalamov takes strict control of his discourse, usually conducting his narrative from an undivided viewpoint and aiming at complete objectivity. Where Solzhenitsyn is fiercely moralistic and preaches redemption through suffering, Shalamov contents himself with cool aphorisms and asserts that real suffering, such as Kolyma imposed on its inmates, can only demoralize and break the spirit.3
Central to any discussion of Shalamov’s writing is the subject of genre. We have here a literary form attempting to bridge the gap between fact and fiction – something like the historical novel. Shalamov’s stories represent a fusion of art and life, and it is not possible to separate aesthetic evaluation from historical appraisal. While the stories should not be accepted as precise factual accounts, it is important to realize that the overwhelming majority of them are autobiographical in nature.
In ‘My First Tooth’ Shalamov describes how he himself was beaten during his first sentence for speaking up for a member of a religious sect; his tooth was knocked out, and he was made to stand naked in the cold. ‘The Lawyers’ Plot’ describes what was to have been his own execution; he was saved by a bloody shake-up among the political bosses. Merzlakov’s attempt to feign paralysis in ‘Shock Therapy’ is a case that he personally witnessed. He saw the bodies dug from the ground by the American bulldozer in ‘Lend-Lease’, and ‘Condensed Milk’ describes how another convict tried to lure him into an escape attempt so as to be able to betray him to camp authorities. His correspondence with ‘Fleming’ in ‘The Used-Book Dealer’ is part of his personal archive, and ‘The Train’ describes his own attempt to return home. ‘A Pushover Job’, ‘Carpenters’, ‘Dry Rations’, ‘Sententious’, ‘Quiet’, ‘On Tick’, ‘A Piece of Meat’, ‘The Snake Charmer’, ‘Chief of Political Control’, ‘A Child’s Drawings’, ‘Magic’ and ‘Esperanto’ are all taken from his personal experience; ‘Major Pugachov’s Last Battle’, on the other hand, was not taken from his own life, although it is partly based on historical fact.
In the late 1970s Shalamov’s health began to fail. In 1979 the Literary Fund (the department of the Writers’ Union that oversaw questions of residence, pensions and the like) managed to have him placed in an old people’s home, where he lost his vision and hearing. The degree to which he was able to comprehend what was happening around him is unclear.
On 17 January 1982 I gave a talk on Shalamov’s life and work for the Greater Washington, DC chapter of the Russian Literary Fund. It was the coldest day in the city’s history – as if Kolyma had come to Washington – and only a handful of devoted admirers braved the weather. We did not know it at the time, but Shalamov had died that very day.
When I learned the news I called the Moscow offices of the Soviet Writers’ Union, which refused to provide any information other than the fact that Shalamov had died and been buried. Later I received photographs of the funeral and learned that two days earlier he had been transferred from one old people’s home to another and had not survived the move.