[.ca] 20th Century Kolyma Tales (ISBN 0140186956)

Victims of arbitrariness:
Shalamov's stories are hauntingly realistic and bitter pictures of the merciless and naked 'struggle for life' under extreme circumstances of work camp inmates in the former Soviet Union under the Stalin regime. All feelings (love, friendship, honesty, envy, vanity ...) have vanished in the struggle for survival against hunger, bitter coldness, exhaustion and the omnipotent guards. When someone dies, all his clothes are immediately ripped off by the other inmates. The tales give us also good portraits of the prisoners, who were mostly professors, party bureaucrats, engineers, militia men, peasants or skilled workers, not common criminals. Most of them didn't even know why they were imprisoned and why they had to die, because they weren't against the regime. They were only the naïve victims of arbitrary arrests imposed by a ruthless despot. The tales also relate the dead from exhaustion of the well-known Russian writer Andrey Platonov. This impressive but depressing book should be read as a warning against the unchallenged power of the bureaucracy of a one party state.

The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword:
This is the greatest work of literature in the history of the world. All the special effects in Hollywood cannot conjure the horror that Shalamov's translated words ram into your eyes. Kind of makes you wonder why there is no musuem in D.C. to remember the victims of the Gulag. Read it and weep.

INCREDIBLE and UNFORGETTABLE:
Not only does Shalamov move the reader to the very depths of one's essence, he does so quietly --- no moralizing necessary. The truth of his stories need no embroidery. Seventy-two years I have lived on this earth and have done a great deal of reading. "Kolyma Tales" is the most deeply affecting book ever I have weaved into my soul.

Emotionless raw vignettes, terrible translation:
It took me awhile to get into these stories because they're so emotionless, Stoic, devoid of feeling and humanity. Most people are used to reading books or stories about bad periods of time like this where the characters still hang on to hope of being rescued or returned to the outside world, people who are loyal to their friends and relatives, people who can still discuss things like books or music, people who love one another and help one another to keep going in the midst of such inhumanity. This is a stark contrast; for example, Shalamov's wood-cutting partner Garkunov is murdered for his beautiful white sweater which his wife sent him because he wouldn't give it up as a stake in a meaningless game of cards, and all he can say is that he'll have to find a new wood-cutting partner. I did a paper in a Modern Russian Lit class in college, comparing and contrasting these stories with the writing of Solzhenitsyn, and the contrast is stunning. Shalamov is more bitter and emotionless because he spent more time in the GULAG, in worse camps, was treated worse, was there earlier on, in the Thirties, when things were more awful than they were when Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945, conditions were worse, and the people he was surrounded by were nasty ingrates, or else he had no time to become friends with them since many were worked to death within days or even mere hours of their arrival in Kolyma. The zeki here have lost all hope and have no time to sit around dreaming of a return to the outside world, writing secret stories, discussing Marx, Luther, Engels, and Pushkin, hiding eating utensils in their boots, and being nice to domesticated animals who wander into the camp. Even the dead don't get any respect; in one story two inmates lift the rocks off of a man who has recently died so they can get his nice clothes. And who needs emotions or character development when there are haunting images like lice-filled sweaters moving all by themselves, friendly stray dogs being murdered for their meat and fur, and a man being shot presumably dead for trying to escape and having his hands cut off for fingerprints, a man who later returns to the camp dazed and confused, holding his bloody stumps against his body? Some of Shalamov's beliefs about certain elements in camp are suspect, or just plain wrong. He had his life saved by people in the Medical Section twice, and so portrays the Medical Section and camp doctors as angels and saviours here, people who were loving and kind, who kept very sick and emaciated prisoners from going back to slave labour by lying about their conditions. But most of the time, things were just the opposite. Many doctors signed death sentences and sent sick emaciated people back out to be worked or frozen to their deaths. Shalamov says that most of the women in camp were prostitutes. Prostitution was declared a crime, but of the few women in the Kolyma, not a huge percentage were prostitutes. Many women had relationships with male prisoners, for love and comfort, or with people in the camp administration, for better treatment and living conditions, but not all women did that. I agree that the criminals in camp, both male and female, were nasty people without many morals, but to say that most of the career criminals wanted their sons to be criminals too and their daughters to be prostitutes? Keeping young boys for pederasty on a widespread basis? Men allowed to sleep with whomever they wanted, but women being shunned if they slept with non-criminals? The "prostitutes" frequently traded off to new criminal owners? Shunning or beating their kids if they didn't want to be criminals and prostitutes themselves? Thieves raping girls as young as three? Most of the male criminals gay, speaking in feminine voices, and having female nicknames? This seems too fantastic and exaggerated to be true. And if most of these male criminals were gay, why were they having such healthy sex lives with women? The transliteration is all over the place; sometimes the Kh sound is transliterated as Kh and sometimes as X, like in Xvostov and Mixial (i.e., Khvostov and Mikhail). Sometimes there's a ya and then ia, sometimes yu and then iu, no feminine endings on last names, and a man named Chris. Khristofer and Khristian (Khristiyan) are Russian names, but Chris (or Khris) is not a Russian nickname. There are also a few last names transliterated incorrectly, like Pugachev as Pugachov and Nikishev and Nikoshov. Last names with the root ending in ch, sh, or shch, like Khrushchev or Gorbachev, always end in ëv or ëva, not ov. It looks sloppy and misleading. I also noticed two typos--"ment" instead of "element" and "surround" instead of "surrounding." John Glad also doesn't use any of the special GULAG terminology, like tenner (ten-year sentence), Black Mariya or Stolypin Car (special vehicles used to transport prisoners), zek (prisoner), zechka (female prisoner), or dokhodyaga (very emaciated prisoner on his or her last legs; what was called a Muskelmann in the Nazi camps). There's just an untranslatable feeling and image conjured up with those words, and using English equivalents isn't as powerful or evocative. All of the famous prisons have "Prison" after their names; all of the other GULAG writings I've read just called them, for example, Lefortovo or the Lubyanka. You know it's a prison; you don't need to belabour the point. And nowhere else have I seen the worst prison called Butyr; it's Butyrskaya, the Butyrki, or Butyrki. I can't believe this shoddy hack job was nominated for an award; I'm just "Glad" he wasn't one of my professors.

Devastating:
Kolyma Tales should be required reading in all universities and even high schools, as it demonstrates the horror created by people and even the resilience of the human spirit. Mr. Shalamov truly created an empathic response.