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...
Read more
Critical Essay by George Gibian
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-M...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Bayley
[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...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robert W. Smith
[Kolyma Tales] reveals a very great artist at work…. [Shalamov's voice is] terse, flat, ironic and often beautiful. He has been likened to Bunin and Ch...
Read more
Critical Essay by Irving Howe
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, ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Josephine Woll
[The] stories included in Kolyma Tales represent the range of Shalamov's work, dealing with the basic matter of survival, the overlapping, if fiercely contenti...
Read more
Varlam (Tikhonovich) Shalamov
Critical Essay by George Gibian
