In his code of belief, his sufferings as a prisoner, and his prosaic and poetic references to his overwhelming experiences, Varlam Shalamov was the archetypical representative of the terrifying events that were endemic in the Soviet Union during the...

Varlam Shalamov spent seventeen years as a political prisoner in the Gulag, most of them in Kolyma where winter temperatures sometimes plummeted to -90[degrees]F (human spit freezes in mid-air at -60[degrees]). That the Russian author survived so long in the deadliest of Stalin's...

Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales: A Formalist Analysis. By NATHANIEL GOLDEN. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2004. 193 pp. 40 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 90-420-1198-X. Varlam Shalamov is without question a major figure in Russian literature in the mid-to late twentieth century, though one...

The strength of [Kolyma Tales] derives, first of all, from a refusal to blink at the finality of waste…. [Shalamov writes] not with, and not without, bitterness, but somehow in a voice that seems beyond bitterness. Anger and grief have long ago exhausted themselves. What remains is the determination, perhaps beyond explaining, to get things straight, for whatever record may survive. Shalamov speaks in the voice of the irrevocable: millions perished, other millions were drained of health and youth, an...

[There] is a calmness and a judiciousness in Shalamov's consideration of his 17 years in Kolyma. All Russian authors have been connoisseurs, in their various ways, of the condition of servitude, imprisonment. When Dostoyevsky wrote "The House of the Dead," or Chekhov his account of the prison settlements of Sakhalin Island, they told the truth about those things in a way that at the time seemed horrifying. It was the truth but it wasn't so bad as this, not on the same scale, not ...

Not only is Shalamov a master of the short story, but his work is a major document about a quarter-century of human suffering in the Soviet labor camps of the Kolyma-Magadan region…. Now 24 of his best tales [Kolyma Tales] are available in English. Taken as a whole—and they are far more powerful read together in a collection than individually—these stories give a picture of the Kolyma horrors as broad as the Siberian waste itself: the mass graves, the endless roads trudged by the labore...