Kolyma stories. Shalamov V.T.

“Kolyma stories”, on which Shalamov began to work immediately upon his return from the Stalinist camps and worked for almost twenty years, from 1954 to 1973-an amazing artistic and documentary evidence of one of the terrible tragedies of the twentieth century.

All the short stories of the Kolyma epic-there were about 140 of them-the writer divided into six collection cycles, the first of which, consisting of 33 novels, he called the Kolyma Stories. The publishing house “Soviet Writer”, where this collection proposed this collection in 1962, he was rejected with the wording: “The heroes of your stories are deprived of all the human, and the author’s position is anti -humanistic.” As a result, Kolyma Stories in our country were published by I.P. Sirotinskaya (according to the manuscripts of the writer’s archive) only in the late 80s.

“Planet Kolyma”, depicted by Shalamov, is a world in front of which Dante's “Hell” looks like an innocent joke. There is no way out of there. It seems there is no hope. But Shalamov himself-the first expert writer in Russian literature-emphasized that in the camp there is an opportunity to "rely on other forces than hope."

A modern reader, familiar with many works of “camp” literature and free from politicized cliches, can appreciate the deep artistic originality of Shalamov’s stories.