[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 Chekhov, and there are resemblances in style and structure, the major difference being that Shalamov's prose seems wrung from a bloody rag.

Abbé Sieyès, when asked what he did during the French Revolution, responded: "I survived." Shalamov, a dokhodyagas (goner) who survived, acts as the narrator, a full participant, in these stories. Each story is different from the others, without the gray sameness usual in this genre, but all share constants such as cold, food and work….

Kolyma was sadness ("It was a good thing that tears have no odor"), a sadness "easier to bear if you write it down. Once you've done that, you can forget." And men survive by forgetting. Though bitterness often intrudes, there is no self-pity and no...