The article is posted on a little-known Internet resource in the pdf extension, I duplicate it here.
The camp is like the Devil, the camp is like the Absolute World Evil.

Poetics of "Kolyma Tales" by V. Shalamov

Having written six artistic and prose cycles of Kolyma Tales (1954-1974), Shalamov came to a paradoxical conclusion: “The undescribed, unfulfilled part of my work is huge ... and the best Kolyma stories are all just a surface, precisely because it is described in an accessible way” (6:58). Imaginary simplicity and accessibility is an erroneous idea of ​​the author's philosophical prose. Varlam Shalamov is not only a writer who testified about a crime against a person, but he is also a talented writer with a special style, with “a unique rhythm of prose, with innovative novelistic character, with all-pervading paradox, with ambivalent symbolism and a brilliant command of the word in its semantic, sound appearance and even in descriptive configuration" (1:3).

In this regard, the simplicity and clarity of the words of V. T. Shalamov, his style and the terrible world of Kolyma, the world, according to M. Zolotonosov, “represented as such, without an artistic lens” (3: 183) N. K. Gey notes that a work of art "is not reducible to logically complete interpretations" (1:97)
Exploring the types of verbal images in V. Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales", such as: LEXICAL (word-image), SUBJECT (detail), CHARACTER (image-character), let's imagine the WORK AS "IMAGE OF THE WORLD", because the images of each subsequent level arise on the basis of images of previous levels. V. T. Shalamov himself wrote as follows: “The prose of the future seems to me simple prose, where there is no ornateness, with an exact language, where only from time to time does a new one appear - first seen - a detail or detail described vividly. At these details the reader should be surprised and believe the whole story” (5:66). The expressiveness and accuracy of everyday relief in the writer's stories earned him the fame of a Kolyma documentarian. There are a lot of such details in the text, for example, the story "Carpenters", which talks about the harsh reality of camp life, when prisoners were forced to work even in the most severe frosts. “I had to go to work at any degree. In addition, the old-timers almost accurately determined the frost without a thermometer: if there is a frosty fog, it means that it is forty degrees below zero outside; if the air comes out with noise during breathing, but it is still not difficult to breathe, then forty-five degrees; if breathing is noisy and shortness of breath is noticeable - fifty degrees. Over fifty-five degrees - spit freezes on the fly. Spit has been freezing on the fly for two weeks already” (5:23). So one artistic detail “spit freezes on the fly” speaks volumes: about the inhuman conditions of existence, about the hopelessness and despair of a person who finds himself in the extremely cruel world of the Kolyma camps. Or another story, "Sherry Brandy", in which the author seems to dispassionately describe the slow death of the poet from hunger: "Life went in and out of him, and he was dying ... By evening he was dead." (5:75) Only at the very end of the work does one eloquent detail appear, when inventive neighbors write him off two days later in order to receive bread on him as if they were alive “... the dead man raised his hand like a puppet doll” (5:76) This detail emphasizes with even greater force the absurdity of human existence in the conditions of the camp. E. Shklovsky wrote that in "Visher" the detail had a partly "remembering" character, and in "Kolyma Tales" it becomes a "lump" (7:64) It seems that the absurdity and paradoxicality of what is happening increase from page to page. In the story “In the Bath”, the author remarks with bitter irony: “The dream of taking a bath is an impossible dream” (5:80) and at the same time uses details that speak convincingly about this, because after washing everything is “slippery, dirty, smelly" (5:85).
V. T. Shalamov denied detailed descriptiveness and the traditional creation of characters. Instead, there are carefully selected details that create a multi-dimensional psychological atmosphere that envelops the entire story. Or one or two close-up details. Or the details-symbols dissolved in the text, presented without intrusive fixation. This is how Garkunov's red sweater is remembered, on which the blood of the murdered is not visible ("For the show"); a blue cloud above the white shiny snow that hangs after the person trampling the road has gone further (“In the snow”); a white pillowcase on a feather pillow, which the doctor crumples with his hands, which gives “physical pleasure” to the narrator, who had neither underwear, nor such a pillow, nor a pillowcase (“Domino”); the ending of the story "Single metering", when Dugaev realized that he would be shot, and "regretted that he had worked in vain, this last day had been tormented in vain." In Varlam Shalamov, almost every detail is built either on hyperbole, or on comparison, or on the grotesque: “The cries of the guards cheered us up like whips” (“How It Started”); “Unheated damp barracks, where thick ice froze up in all the cracks from the inside, as if some huge stearin candle had floated in the corner of the barracks” (“Tatar mullah and fresh air”); “The bodies of people on the plank beds looked like growths, humps of wood, a curved board” (“Typhoid Quarantine”); “We followed the tracks of the tractor, like the tracks of some prehistoric animal” (“Dry rations”).
The world of the Gulag is antagonistic, truth is dialectical, in this context the use of contrast and opposition by the writer becomes one of the leading methods. It is a way of approaching a difficult truth. The use of contrast in detail makes an indelible impression and enhances the effect of the absurdity of what is happening. So in the story “Domino”, the lieutenant of the tank troops Svechnikov eats the meat of the corpses of people from the morgue, but at the same time he is “a gentle rosy-cheeked young man” (5: 101), Glebov, the camp horseman, in another story forgot the name of his wife, and “in his former free life he was Professor of Philosophy" (6:110), the Dutch communist Fritz David in the story "Marcel Proust" is sent out of the house "velvet trousers and a silk scarf" (5:121), and he dies of hunger in these clothes.
The contrast in the details becomes an expression of Shalamov's conviction that a normal person is not able to resist the hell of the Gulag.
Thus, the artistic detail in "Kolyma Tales", distinguished by its descriptive brightness, often paradoxical, causes an aesthetic shock, an explosion and once again testifies that "there is no life and cannot be in the conditions of the camp."
Israeli researcher Leona Toker wrote about the presence of elements of mediaeval consciousness in Shalamov's work. Consider how the Devil appears on the pages of Kolyma Tales. Here is an excerpt from the description of a thieves' card fight in the story “For a performance”: “A brand new deck of cards lay on a pillow, and one of the players patted it with a dirty hand with thin white non-working fingers. The nail of the little finger was of supernatural length ... The sleek yellow nail gleamed like a precious stone. (5:129) This physiological oddity also has a domestic intra-camp explanation - just below the narrator adds that such nails were prescribed by the then criminal fashion. One could consider this semantic connection accidental, but the criminal's claw, polished to a shine, does not disappear from the pages of the story.
Further, as the action develops, this image is still saturated with elements of fantasy: “Sevochka's nail drew intricate patterns in the air. The cards then disappeared in his palm, then appeared again ... ”(5:145). Let's also not forget about the inevitable associations associated with the theme of the card game. A game of cards with the devil as a partner is a "wandering" plot characteristic of European folklore and often found in literature. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that the cards themselves were the invention of the Devil. At the pre-climax of the story “At the Show”, the opponent of the clawed Sevochka puts on the line and loses “... some kind of Ukrainian towel with roosters, some kind of cigarette case with an embossed portrait of Gogol” (5:147). This direct appeal to the Ukrainian period of Gogol's work connects "At the Show" with "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", saturated with the most incredible devilry. Thus, in one of the stories in this collection, The Missing Letter, a Cossack is forced to play cards for his soul with witches and devils. Thus, references to a folklore source and literary works introduce a gambler into an infernal associative array. In the story mentioned above, devilry seems to emerge from camp life and appears to the reader as a natural property of the local universe. The Devil of the Kolyma Tales is an indisputable element of the universe, so not isolated from the environment that its active presence is found only at breaks, at the junctions of metaphors.
“Gold slaughter made healthy people disabled in three weeks: hunger, lack of sleep, many hours of hard work, beatings. New people were included in the brigade, and Moloch chewed” (5:23).
Let us note that the word "Moloch" is used by the narrator not as a proper name, but as a common noun; intonationally, it is not separated from the text in any way, as if it is not a metaphor, but the name of some real-life camp mechanism or institution. Recall the work "Moloch" by A. I. Kuprin, where the bloodthirsty creature is capitalized and used as a proper name. The camp world is identified not only with the possessions of the Devil, but also with the Devil himself.
One more important feature should be noted: the Kolyma Tales camp is a hell, non-existence, the undivided kingdom of the devil, as it were in itself - its infernal properties are not directly dependent on the ideology of its creators or the previous wave of social upheavals. Shalamov does not describe the genesis of the camp system. The camp arises at once, suddenly, out of nothing, and even with physical memory, even with pain in the bones, it is no longer possible to determine, “... on which of the winter days the wind changed and everything became too scary ...” (5:149). The camp of "Kolyma Tales" is one, whole, eternal, self-sufficient, indestructible - for once having sailed to these hitherto unknown shores, putting their outlines on the map, we are no longer able to erase them either from memory or from the surface of the planet - and combines the traditional functions of hell and the devil: passive and active evil.
The devil arose in the medieval mentality as a personification of the forces of evil. Introducing the image of the devil into Kolyma Tales, Shalamov used this medieval metaphor for its intended purpose. He did not simply declare the camp evil, but affirmed the fact of the existence of evil, evil, autonomous, inherent in human nature. Black-and-white apocalyptic medieval thinking operated with categories, with the help of which the author of the Kolyma Tales could realize and describe “a grandiose spill of evil hitherto not seen in centuries and millennia” (4:182). Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov himself in one of the program poems identifies himself with the archpriest Avvakum, whose image has long become in Russian culture both a symbol of the Middle Ages, archaic, and a symbol of adamant opposition to evil.
Thus, the camp, in Varlam Shalamov's view, is not evil and not even unambiguous unalloyed evil, but the embodiment of the Absolute World Evil, the degree of evil, for the reproduction of which it was necessary to call up the image of the medieval devil on the pages of the Kolyma Tales, because it could not be described in others categories.
The creative manner of the writer involves the process of spontaneous crystallization of metaphors. The author does not stun the reader with the statement that the action takes place in hell, but unobtrusively, detail by detail, builds an associative array where the appearance of Dante's shadow looks natural, even self-evident. Such cumulative meaning formation is one of the main characteristics of Shalamov's artistic manner. The narrator accurately describes the details of camp life, each word has a hard, fixed meaning, as if embedded in the camp context. Sequential enumeration of documentary details constitutes a coherent plot. However, the text very quickly enters the stage of oversaturation, when seemingly unrelated and completely independent details begin to form complex, unexpected connections, as if by themselves, which in turn form a powerful associative stream parallel to the literal meaning of the text. In this flow, everything: objects, events, connections between them - changes at the very moment of their appearance on the pages of the story, turning into something different, polysemantic, often alien to natural human experience. There is a “Big Bang effect” (7:64), when subtext and associations are continuously formed, when new meanings crystallize, where the formation of galaxies seems to be involuntary, and the semantic continuum is limited only by the volume of associations possible for the reader-interpreter. V. Shalamov himself set himself very difficult tasks: to return the experienced feeling, but at the same time not to be at the mercy of the material and the assessments dictated by it, to hear “a thousand truths” (4:182) with the rule of one truth of talent.

References

Volkova, E.: Varlam Shalamov: the duel of the word with the absurd. In: Questions of Literature 1997, no. 2, p. 3.
Gay, N.: Correlation between fact and idea as a problem of style. In: Theory of literary styles. M., 1978. S. 97.
Zolotonosov, M.: Consequences of Shalamov. In: Shalamovsky collection 1994, no. 1, p. 183.
Timofeev, L.: Poetics of camp prose. In: October 1991, No. 3, p. 182.
Shalamov, V.: Selected. "ABC Classic", St. Petersburg. 2002. S. 23, 75, 80, 85, 101, 110, 121, 129, 145, 150.
Shalamov, V.: About my prose. In: New World 1989, No. 12, p. 58, 66.
Shklovsky, E.: Varlam Shalamov. M., 1991. S. 64.

Elena Frolova, Russia, Perm

2. Kolyma "anti-world" and its inhabitants

According to E.A. Shklovsky: “It is difficult to write about the work of Varlam Shalamov. It is difficult, first of all, because his tragic fate, which was largely reflected in the famous "Kolyma Tales" and many poems, seems to require a commensurate experience. An experience that you will not regret even to the enemy. Almost twenty years in prison, camps, exile, loneliness and oblivion in the last years of his life, a miserable nursing home and, in the end, death in a psychiatric hospital, where the writer was forcibly transported to soon die of pneumonia. In the face of V. Shalamov, in his gift of a great writer, a nationwide tragedy is shown, which received its witness-martyr with his own soul and blood, who paid for terrible knowledge.

Kolyma Tales is the first collection of short stories by Varlam Shalamov, which reflects the life of Gulag prisoners. Gulag - the main administration of the camps, as well as an extensive network of concentration camps during the mass repressions. The collection was created from 1954 to 1962, after the return of Shalamov from Kolyma. The Kolyma stories are an artistic comprehension of everything Shalamov saw and experienced during the 13 years he spent in prison in Kolyma (1938-1951).

V.T. Shalamov formulated the problematics of his work as follows: ““Kolyma Tales” is an attempt to raise and solve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved on other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one's destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, the teeth of evil. Illusory and heaviness of hope. Opportunity to rely on forces other than hope.

As G. L. Nefagina wrote: “Realistic works about the Gulag system were, as a rule, dedicated to the lives of political prisoners. They depicted camp horrors, torture, bullying. But in such works (A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko) the victory of the human spirit over evil was demonstrated.

Today it is becoming more and more obvious that Shalamov is not only and perhaps not so much a historical evidence of crimes that it is criminal to forget. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, all-pervading paradox, symbolism, a brilliant command of the word in its semantic, sound appearance, a subtle strategy of the master.

The Kolyma wound was constantly bleeding, and while working on the stories, Shalamov "shouted, threatened, wept" - and wiped away his tears only after the story was over. But at the same time, he did not get tired of repeating that “the work of the artist is precisely the form”, work with the word.

Shalamovskaya Kolyma is a set of island camps. It was Shalamov, as Timofeev claimed, who found this metaphor - “island camp”. Already in the story “The Snake Charmer”, the prisoner Platonov, “a screenwriter in his first life”, speaks with bitter sarcasm about the sophistication of the human mind, which invented “things like our islands with all the improbability of their life”. And in the story “The Man from the Steamboat”, the camp doctor, a man of sharp sardonic mind, expresses his secret dream to his listener: “... If our islands, would you understand me? Our islands have sunk into the ground.

The islands, the archipelago of islands, is a precise and eminently expressive image. He "caught" the forced isolation and at the same time the bondage of a single slave regime of all these prisons, camps, settlements, "business trips" that were part of the Gulag system. An archipelago is a group of sea islands located close to each other. But Solzhenitsyn's "archipelago," as Nefagina argued, is primarily a conditional term-metaphor denoting the object of study. For Shalamov, "our islands" is a huge integral image. He is not subject to the narrator, he has an epic self-development, he absorbs and subordinates to his sinister whirlwind, his "plot" everything, absolutely everything - the sky, snow, trees, faces, destinies, thoughts, executions ...

Nothing else that would be located outside of "our islands" does not exist in the "Kolyma Tales". That pre-camp, free life is called the "first life", it ended, disappeared, melted away, it no longer exists. And was she? The prisoners of "our islands" themselves think of it as a fabulous, unrealizable land that lies somewhere "beyond the blue seas, behind high mountains", as, for example, in "The Snake Charmer". The camp had swallowed up any other existence. He subordinated everything and everyone to the ruthless dictates of his prison rules. Having grown infinitely, it has become a whole country. The concept of "the country of Kolyma" is directly stated in the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev": "In this country of hopes, and therefore, the country of rumors, conjectures, assumptions, hypotheses."

A concentration camp that has replaced the whole country, a country turned into a huge archipelago of camps - such is the grotesquely monumental image of the world that is made up of the mosaic of Kolyma Tales. It is ordered and expedient in its own way, this world. This is what the camp for prisoners in the “Golden Taiga” looks like: “The small zone is a transfer. A large zone - a camp of the mountain administration - endless barracks, prisoner streets, a triple fence of barbed wire, guard towers in winter, similar to birdhouses. And then follows: "The architecture of the Small Zone is ideal." It turns out that this is a whole city, built in full accordance with its purpose. And there is architecture here, and even one to which the highest aesthetic criteria are applicable. In a word, everything is as it should, everything is “like with people”.

Brewer M. reports: “This is the space of the “country of Kolyma”. The laws of time also apply here. True, in contrast to the hidden sarcasm in the depiction of a seemingly normal camp space, camp time is frankly taken out of the natural flow, this is a strange, abnormal time.

"Months in the Far North are considered years - so great is the experience, the human experience, acquired there." This generalization belongs to the impersonal narrator from the story "Major Pugachev's Last Battle". And here is the subjective, personal perception of time by one of the prisoners, the former doctor Glebov in the story “Night”: “The real was a minute, an hour, a day from wake up to lights out - then he did not guess and did not find the strength to guess. Like everyone else" .

In this space and in this time, the life of a prisoner passes for years. It has its own way of life, its own rules, its own scale of values, its own social hierarchy. Shalamov describes this way of life with the meticulousness of an ethnographer. Here are the details of household arrangements: how, for example, a camp barrack is being built (“a rare hedge in two rows, the gap is filled with pieces of frosted moss and peat”), how the stove is heated in the barrack, what is a home-made camp lamp - a gasoline “kolyma” ... The social structure of the camp is also the subject of careful description. Two poles: "blatari", they are also "friends of the people" - on one, and on the other - political prisoners, they are also "enemies of the people". Union of thieves' laws and government regulations. The vile power of all these Fedecheks, Senecheks, served by a motley servant of “mashkas”, “funnellings”, “heel scratchers”. And no less merciless oppression of a whole pyramid of official bosses: foremen, accountants, guards, escorts ...

Such is the established and established order of life on “our islands”. In a different regime, the GULAG would not be able to fulfill its function: to absorb millions of people, and in return "give out" gold and timber. But why do all these Shalamov "ethnographies" and "physiology" evoke a feeling of apocalyptic horror? After all, quite recently, one of the former Kolyma prisoners reassuringly told that “winter there, in general, is a little colder than Leningrad” and that on Butugychag, for example, “mortality was actually insignificant,” and appropriate therapeutic and preventive measures were taken to combat scurvy , like forced drinking of dwarf extract, etc.

And Shalamov has about this extract and much more. But he does not write ethnographic essays about Kolyma, he creates the image of Kolyma as the embodiment of a whole country turned into a Gulag. The seeming outline is only the “first layer” of the image. Shalamov goes through "ethnography" to the spiritual essence of Kolyma, he is looking for this essence in the aesthetic core of real facts and events.

In the anti-world of Kolyma, where everything is aimed at trampling, trampling on the dignity of the prisoner, the liquidation of the individual takes place. Among the "Kolyma stories" there are those that describe the behavior of creatures that have descended almost to the complete loss of human consciousness. Here is the novella "Night". The former doctor Glebov and his partner Bagretsov are doing what, according to the scale of generally accepted moral standards, has always been considered extreme blasphemy: they are tearing up the grave, undressing the corpse of a partner in order to later exchange his pitiful linen for bread. This is beyond the limit: there is no longer a personality, only a purely animal vital reflex remains.

However, in the anti-world of Kolyma, not only mental strength is exhausted, not only reason goes out, but such a final phase sets in, when the very reflex of life disappears: a person no longer cares about his own death. Such a state is described in the story "Single Measurement". Student Dugaev, still quite young - twenty-three years old, is so crushed by the camp that he no longer even has the strength to suffer. All that remains is - before the execution - a dim regret, "that I worked in vain, this last day was tormented in vain."

As Nefagina G.L. points out: “Shalamov writes ruthlessly and harshly about the dehumanization of a person by the Gulag system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Shalamov's sixty Kolyma stories and his Essays on the Underworld, noted: “Shalamov's camp experience was bitter and longer than mine, and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not me, who got to touch that bottom of brutality and despair, to which the whole camp life was pulling us.

In "Kolyma Tales" the object of comprehension is not the System, but a person in the millstones of the System. Shalamov is not interested in how the repressive machine of the Gulag works, but in how the human soul “works”, which this machine tries to crush and grind. And it is not the logic of concatenation of judgments that dominates in Kolyma Tales, but the logic of concatenation of images - primordial artistic logic. All this is directly related not only to the dispute about the "image of the uprising", but much more broadly - to the problem of an adequate reading of the "Kolyma Tales", in accordance with their own nature and the creative principles that guided their author.

Of course, everything human is extremely dear to Shalamov. He sometimes even tenderly "husks" out of the gloomy chaos of Kolyma the most microscopic evidence that the System has not been able to completely freeze in people's souls - that primary moral feeling, which is called the ability to compassion.

When the doctor Lidia Ivanovna in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” in her low voice upsets the paramedic that she yelled at Andreev, he remembered her “for the rest of his life” - “for a kind word spoken on time”. When an elderly toolmaker in the story “Carpenters” covers two clumsy intellectuals who called themselves carpenters, just to stay at least a day in the warmth of a carpentry workshop, and gives them hand-turned ax handles. When the bakers from the bakery in the story "Bread" try first of all to feed the camp goers sent to them. When the convicts, hardened by fate and the struggle for survival, in the story “The Apostle Paul” burn a letter and a statement from the only daughter of an old carpenter with a renunciation of her father, then all these seemingly insignificant actions appear as acts of high humanity. And what the investigator does in the story "Handwriting" - he throws the case of Krist, who is included in the next list of those sentenced to death, into the oven - this is, by existing standards, a desperate act, a real feat of compassion.

So, a normal "average" person in completely abnormal, absolutely inhuman circumstances. Shalamov explores the process of interaction between a Kolyma prisoner and the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious, on that border strip where the Gulag wine press pushed a person back - on the shaky line between a person who still retains the ability to think and suffer , and that impersonal being who no longer controls himself and begins to live by the most primitive reflexes.

STRUCTURE OF "KOLYMA STORIES" The writer divided his stories into six cycles: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch" and "Glove, or KR-2".

FEATURE OF "KOLYMA STORIES" The stories reflect the spiritual experience of the writer, the individual author's artistic thinking, which has features of both existential and mythological consciousness.

central problem. main motives. The central problem is the problem of the destruction of the personality in the camp and the possibility of a person's spiritual rebirth. The main motives: the motive of the absurd world, the motive of loneliness, the motive of doom, the motive of resurrection.

One of the most important means of creating an artistic model of the world in "Kolyma Tales" by V. T. Shalamov are natural-cosmic mythologems (earth, water, fire, air), thanks to which elements of ancient archaic thinking and individual author's myth-making are combined in the work.

L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn, S. D. Dovlatov, V. T. Shalamov have something in common in the topic of state captivity 1. Particular attention is paid to the description of the work and life of prisoners, the influence of difficult conditions life on the individual. 2. One subject of the image (prison, camp, penal servitude). 3. Specific typology of characters (prisoners, bosses, guards, etc.) 4. Description of almost the same real space (barracks, barbed wire, guard towers, lanterns, etc.).

Shalamov depicted in his works the most severe camps - the Kolyma camps, in which it was almost impossible for prisoners to survive.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW With Solzhenitsyn, the camp world did not so much destroy as test a person, moreover, trials in it could also become the reason for his spiritual development. For Shalamov, the camp appears as a “school of evil”, in which everything is aimed at destroying the personality: every day in it carries a real threat to life. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov paid special attention to the most tragic moments in the life of people in the camp, creating a world of "otherness".

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In "Kolyma Tales", unlike Dovlatov's "Zone", life in the camp was assessed from the point of view of a prisoner, not a guard. But Shalamov and Dovlatov agreed that the difficult living conditions in the camp contribute not only to the physical, but also to the moral degradation of a person.

THE INDIVIDUALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) For Solzhenitsyn and Dovlatov, the main source of "evil" is the Soviet power. For Shalamov, the source of “evil” is not only the Soviet government, but also the system of violence against a person in general and the government that legitimized this violence. According to Shalamov, violence was characteristic of man at all times to a greater or lesser extent, therefore "the executions of the thirty-seventh year can be repeated again."

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The world is historical, history is eternal, therefore: it is no coincidence that Shalamov compares life in the camp with Egyptian slavery (“Engineer Kiselev”), with the reign of Ivan the Terrible (“Lyosha Chekanov, or Odnodeltsy in Kolyma”). One of the important theses of the writer: the camp is “world-like”, the camp is a “model of the world”.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Shalamov refuses to give detailed characteristics of the characters, descriptions of their portraits, verbose monologues, descriptions of nature of considerable length, etc. However, in each Shalamov's text there are always several artistic details "hidden" in the text or, conversely, highlighted in close-up, carrying an increased semantic load, giving the narrative a deep philosophical overtones and psychologism (“On the Predstavka”, “Condensed Milk”, “The First Chekist”, etc.).

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Both Solzhenitsyn and Dovlatov show the absurdity of the camp world. A significant difference is observed in the attitude towards the absurdity of the main characters of these works: in Shalamov and Dovlatov, the absurdity of the camp world is felt by an educated, thinking person who is able to realize the hostility of the camp system; in Solzhenitsyn, in One Day in Ivan Denisovich, the main character is a peasant who camp world, studied its laws and even justifies some of them. At the same time, it should be noted that Solzhenitsyn deliberately distances himself from his character. He, like the reader, is amazed that a person can adapt to the world of the Gulag. Dovlatovsky Boris Alikhanov appears as an “outsider” person who cannot accept the world around him, and evaluates all the events that happen to him in the camp from the outside, as if they were happening to someone else.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The "Kolyma Tales" mainly presents two types of people of the absurd: "rebellious" heroes ("Major Pugachev's Last Fight", "Silence", "Tombstone", etc.) and characters who do not have physical and moral strength to resist the absurdity ("At night", "Vaska Denisov, the thief of pigs", etc.). The main characters of "Kolyma Tales" - representatives of the intelligentsia - are trying to overcome the absurdity and chaos of what is happening and oppose them to a "different" space, where the categories of "memory" and "creativity" turn out to be fundamental.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Shalamov constantly models life situations in which the inner world of the characters is fully revealed: a state of loneliness, doom, awareness of imminent death. In existential literature, such situations are called "borderlines". The situation of loneliness and doom modeled by Shalamov characterizes the position of a person in the world and is ontological in nature: a person remains alone with the world, cannot find support either in God or in the “other” (“Bread”, “Seraphim”, etc.) , although paradoxically, loneliness can become a condition for self-knowledge and creativity (“Path”, “In the snow”, etc.).

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Features of the behavior of doomed people in the camp: - shock from the discrepancy between reality, as it should be, and the reality into which a person has fallen ("Single measurement"), - concentration of attention on petty everyday worries to distract from the worst (“Rain”), inability to commit suicide (“Two meetings”), fatalism (“Tombstone”, “Green Prosecutor”).

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The motif of doom is emphasized by allusions to the plot of a journey to the afterlife, the analog of which is the camp. An important role in revealing the motives of doom and loneliness is played by the images of the Kolyma nature. Nature in "Kolyma Tales" can be hostile, "alien" to man ("Carpenters") or "understanding", emphasizing his spiritual communication with the world ("Kant").

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The sign of world culture - the Word - in the "Kolyma stories" is a symbol of rebirth ("Sentence", "Athenian Nights", etc.). In Shalamov's parables ("Path", "In the Snow"), the artist's creative path is described in an allegorical form. The main idea in them is that a creative gift is a great responsibility, because every artist must pave his own “path” in creativity.

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The image of a taiga tree has a positive connotation, acquiring the features of the World Tree. In mythology, the image of the World Tree is simultaneously associated with life and death, while the concept of death has a positive connotation, since it includes the idea of ​​rebirth. In Shalamov, the archetypal meanings of the World Tree are reflected in the images of Larch and Dwarf. In Shalamov's story "Graphite", Larch becomes a symbol of sacrifice - "The Mother of God of Chukotka", "Virgin Mary of Kolyma", whose "wounded" body "exudes" juice.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Taiga trees are associated with the motif of resurrection, rebirth, and the preservation of humanity in man. In this regard, they are also the embodiment of the mythology of Mother Earth as a symbol of fertility and rebirth. In the story "The Resurrection of the Larch", where a broken, "dead" tree branch, having made a long journey from Kolyma to Moscow, suddenly comes to life, not due to the fact that it was warm and was put into the water, especially since the water in Moscow is "evil , chlorinated”, “dead”, but because in the branch “other, secret forces have been awakened”. She resurrects in obedience to human “strength and faith”: placed in a jar of water on the anniversary of the death of the mistress’s husband, she resurrects the “memory of the dead”.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In this story, Shalamov uses a mythological story about a dying and resurrecting god-man, which he has as a poet. The writer is convinced that there is only "one kind of immortality - art", therefore, in his story, the deceased poet appears, the memory of which is kept by his wife. There is a resemblance here with well-known mythological plots in which the main idea of ​​the Tree of Life is associated with vitality and immortality.

I give way to flowers ... I give way to flowers, That follow me on my heels, Overtake in any region, In the underworld or in paradise. Let the flowers protect me From the vicissitudes of every day. Like a thin vegetative cover, Consisting of mosses and flowers, Like a thin vegetative cover, I am ready to answer for the earth. And a painted shield of flowers is more reliable for me than any protection In the bright kingdom of plants, where I am - Also someone's detachment and family. In the fields near the flowers of the field Remarks left my verse.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (1907-1982) spent the twenty best years of his life - from the age of twenty-two - in camps and exile. The first time he was arrested was in 1929. Shalamov was then a student at Moscow State University. He was accused of distributing Lenin's letter to the 12th Party Congress, the so-called "Lenin's political testament". For almost three years he had to work in the camps of the Western Urals, on Vishera.

In 1937, a new arrest. This time he ended up in Kolyma. In 1953 he was allowed to return to Central Russia, but without the right to live in big cities. For two days, Shalamov secretly came to Moscow to see his wife and daughter after a sixteen-year separation. There is such an episode in the story "The Gravestone" [Shalamov 1998: 215-222]. On Christmas Eve by the stove, prisoners share their cherished desires:

• - It would be nice, brothers, to return home to us. After all, a miracle happens, - said Glebov, a horseman, a former professor of philosophy, known in our barracks for having forgotten the name of his wife a month ago.
• - Home?
• - Yes.
• “I will tell the truth,” I replied. - It would be better to go to jail. I am not kidding. I don't want to go back to my family now. They will never understand me, they will never be able to understand me. What they think is important, I know it's nothing. What is important to me is the little that I have left, they do not need to understand or feel. I will bring them a new fear, one more fear to the thousand fears that fill their lives. What I saw, a person does not need to see and does not even need to know. Prison is another matter. Prison is freedom. This is the only place I know where people are not afraid to say whatever they think. Where they rested their souls. They rested their bodies because they were not working. There, every hour of existence is meaningful.

Returning to Moscow, Shalamov soon fell seriously ill until the end of his life, lived on a modest pension and wrote Kolyma Tales, which, the writer hoped, would arouse reader interest and serve the cause of the moral purification of society.

Work on "Kolyma Tales" - his main book - Shalamov began in 1954, when he lived in the Kalinin region, working as a foreman in peat extraction. He continued to work, moving to Moscow after rehabilitation (1956), and finished in 1973.

"Kolyma Tales" - a panorama of life, suffering and death of people in Dalstroy - a camp empire in the North - East of the USSR, covering an area of ​​more than two million square kilometers. The writer spent more than sixteen years in camps and exile there, working in gold mines and coal mines, and in recent years as a paramedic in hospitals for prisoners. "Kolyma Tales" consists of six books, including more than 100 stories and essays.

V. Shalamov defined the theme of his book as "an artistic study of a terrible reality", "the new behavior of a person reduced to the level of an animal", "the fate of martyrs who were not and could not become heroes." He characterized "Kolyma Tales" as "new prose, prose of living life, which at the same time is a transformed reality, a transformed document." Varlamov compared himself to "Pluto rising from hell" [Shalamov 1988: 72, 84].

From the beginning of the 1960s, V. Shalamov offered Kolyma Tales to Soviet magazines and publishing houses, but even during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization (1962-1963), none of them could pass Soviet censorship. The stories received the widest circulation in samizdat (as a rule, they were reprinted on a typewriter in 2-3 copies) and immediately put Shalamov in the category of whistleblowers of Stalin's tyranny in unofficial public opinion next to A. Solzhenitsyn.

Rare public performances by V. Shalamov with the reading of "Kolyma Tales" became a social event (for example, in May 1965, the writer read the story "Sherry Brandy" at an evening in memory of the poet Osip Mandelstam, held in the building of Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills).

Since 1966, Kolyma Tales, having got abroad, began to be systematically published in emigre magazines and newspapers (in total, 33 stories and essays from the book were published in 1966-1973). Shalamov himself had a negative attitude to this fact, since he dreamed of seeing the Kolyma Tales published in one volume and believed that scattered publications did not give a complete impression of the book, moreover, making the author of the stories an unwitting permanent employee of emigrant periodicals.

In 1972, on the pages of the Moscow Literaturnaya Gazeta, the writer publicly protested against these publications. However, when the Kolyma Tales were finally published together in 1978 by the London publishing house (the volume was 896 pages), the seriously ill Shalamov was very happy about this. Only six years after the writer's death, at the height of Gorbachev's perestroika, was it possible to publish Kolyma Tales in the USSR (for the first time in the Novy Mir magazine, No. 6, 1988). Since 1989, "Kolyma Tales" has been repeatedly published in the homeland in various author's collections by V. Shalamov and as part of his collected works.

The autobiographical basis, the reality of destinies and situations give the "Kolyma Tales" the significance of a historical document. In the context of the GULAG theme in Russian literature, Shalamov's work is one of the peaks - on a par with the work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. The names of these writers are perceived as symbols of different approaches to the topic: fundamental artistic research, historical and philosophical generalizations of the Gulag Archipelago, and Shalamov's pictures of the irrational world of Kolyma, a world beyond logic, beyond truth, beyond lies, in which death reigns for bodies and corruption for souls. Shalamov wrote a number of notes about his artistic principles, which he called "new prose": "It is important to resurrect the feeling<...>, extraordinary new details are needed, descriptions in a new way to make believe in the story, in everything else not as information, but as an open heart wound. "The poetics of Shalamov's story outwardly resembles the canons of the adventure genre, it consists of a concise, accurate description of a specific case, an event experienced by the author. The description is fundamentally ascetic, unemotional and mysteriously highlights the transcendent inhumanity of what is happening. Examples can be the masterpieces of the Kolyma Tales - Golden Taiga, Sherry Brandy, Major Pugachev's Last Fight, The Caster serpent", "Magic", "Conspiracy of lawyers", "Glove", "Sentence", "Condensed milk", "Weismanist". The giant corpus of "Kolyma Tales" connects the personality of the author, the tension of his soul, thoughts, vicissitudes of fate. Twenty years spent in camps - three in the Urals, seventeen in the Kolyma - the inhuman price of this work. "The artist is Pluto, who has risen from hell, and not Orpheus, penitent to hell" - Shalamov's suffering principle of his new prose.

Shalamov was not satisfied with the way his contemporaries understood him. This applies primarily to those aspects of the general concept of the Kolyma Tales that were perceived as controversial and caused controversy. Shalamov rejects the entire literary tradition with its humanistic foundations, since, in his opinion, it has shown its inability to prevent the brutalization of people and the world; "The ovens of Auschwitz and the shame of Kolyma proved that art and literature are zero" (see also a letter to A.I. Solzhenitsyn in 1962, which says: "Remember the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone" ). The world of camps is reflected in "Kolyma Tales" as a world of absolute evil, gravely closed space and stopped time - the world of existential non-existence. But all the contradictions lurking in the maximalism of this position paradoxically give rise to a strong and pure light of true love for people, the high artistic pathos of the Kolyma Tales. "Kolyma stories", as well as the autobiographical story "The Fourth Vologda", the story "Butyrka Prison", the anti-novel "Vishera" in their spiritual and literary meaning belong to the final values ​​of Russian literature for the 20th century.

The spirit of death wafts over the Kolyma Tales. But the word "death" does not mean anything here. Doesn't convey anything. In general, we understand death in an abstract way: the end, we will all die. To imagine death as a life stretching on without end, on the exhaustion of the last physical strength of a person, is much more terrible. They said and say: "in the face of death." Shalamov's stories are written in the face of life. Life is the worst. Not only because flour. Having experienced life, a person asks himself: why are you alive? In the situation in Kolyma, all life is selfishness, sin, the murder of your neighbor, whom you surpassed only by the fact that you survived, And life is meanness. Life is generally indecent. A survivor in these conditions will always have a residue of "life" in his soul, as something shameful, shameful. Why didn't you die? - the last question that is put to a person ... Indeed: why am I still alive when everyone is dead? ..

Worse than death is the loss of life during life, the loss of the human image in man. It turns out that a person can not stand it and turns into matter - into wood, into stone - from which the builders do what they want. Living, moving material discovers unexpected properties along the way. First, a man, it turned out, is more enduring and stronger than a horse. Stronger than any animal. Secondly, spiritual, intellectual, moral qualities are something secondary, and they easily fall off like a husk, one has only to bring a person to the appropriate material condition. Thirdly, it turns out that in such a state a person does not think about anything, does not remember anything, loses his mind, feeling, willpower. To commit suicide is to show independence. However, for this step, you must first eat a piece of bread. Fourth, hope corrupts. Hope is the most dangerous thing in the camp (bait, traitor). Fifthly, as soon as a person recovers, his first movements will be fear and envy. Sixth, seventh, tenth, the facts say that there is no place for man. Only one slice of human material, which speaks of one thing: the psyche has disappeared, there is physics that reacts to a blow, to bread rations, to hunger, to heat ... In this sense, the nature of Kolyma is like a person - permafrost. The "artistic means" in Shalamov's stories boil down to listing our residual properties: parchment-dry, chapped skin; thin, like ropes, muscles; withered brain cells that can no longer perceive anything; frostbitten fingers, not sensitive to objects; festering ulcers wrapped in dirty rags. This is a man. A man descending to his own bones, from which a bridge to socialism is being built across the tundra and taiga of the Kolyma. Not an accusation - a statement: this is how it was done ...

In general, there are no heroes in Shalamov's stories. There are no characters: not up to psychology. There are more or less uniform segments of "man-time" - the stories themselves. The main plot is the survival of a person who knows how to end, and another question: is it good or bad to survive in a situation where everyone dies, presented as a given, as the starting point of the story. The task of survival is a double-edged sword and stimulates both the worst and the best in people, while maintaining interest, like body temperature, in Shalamov's storytelling.

The reader has a hard time here. Unlike other literary works, the reader in "Kolyma Tales" is equated not with the author, not with the writer (who "knows everything" and leads the reader), but with the arrested person. To a person forbidden in the conditions of the story. No choice. Kindly read these short stories in a row, not finding rest, dragging a log, a wheelbarrow with a stone. This is a test of endurance, these are tests of human (reader's) good quality. You can throw a book and return to life. After all, the reader is not a prisoner! But how to live with this, not reading to the end? - A traitor? A coward who does not have the strength to face the truth? A future executioner or a victim of the provisions that are described here?

To all existing camp literature, Shalamov in his Kolyma Tales is the antipode. He leaves us no choice. It seems that he is as merciless to his readers as life was merciless to him, to the people he portrays. Like Kolyma. Hence the feeling of authenticity, the adequacy of the text - the plot. And this is Shalamov's special advantage over other authors. He writes as if he were dead. From the camp, he brought an extremely negative experience. And never gets tired of repeating:

"It's terrible to see the camp, and not a single person in the world needs to know the camps, The camp experience is completely negative up to a single minute. The person only gets worse. And it cannot be otherwise ..."

"The camp was a great test of the moral strength of a person, ordinary human morality, and ninety-nine percent of the people did not stand this test. Those who survived, died along with those who could not stand it ..."

"Everything that was expensive is trampled to dust, civilization and culture fly off a person in the shortest possible time, calculated in weeks ..."

One can argue with this: is it really nothing, nobody? For example, Solzhenitsyn argues in The Gulag Archipelago: “Shalamov himself ... writes: after all, I won’t inform on others! After all, I won’t become a foreman to force others to work. you suddenly do not become an informer or a foreman, since no one in the camp can avoid this sloping hill of corruption? Since truth and falsehood are sisters? So you clung to some branch, hit some stone - and did not crawl further? Maybe anger is not the most durable feeling after all? With your personality... don't you refute your own concept?"

Maybe he refutes it. Never mind. That's not the point. The bottom line is the denial of a person by the camp, and this is where we must begin. Shalamov is the initiator. He has Kolyma. And there is nowhere else to go. And the same Solzhenitsyn, embracing the Archipelago, takes Shalamov out of the brackets of his own and general experience. Comparing with his book, Solzhenitsyn writes: "Perhaps, in Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, the reader will rather feel the ruthlessness of the spirit of the Archipelago and the edge of human despair."

All this can be represented as an iceberg, "Kolyma Tales" is included in its underwater part. Seeing an ice mass swaying on the surface, one must remember - what is under it, what is at the core? There's nothing. There is no death. Time has stopped, frozen. Historical development is not reflected in the ice.

When life has reached the degree of "semi-consciousness", is it possible to speak of the soul? It turned out it was possible. The soul is material. You don't read it, you read it, you bite into it. A section of the material - bypassing "morality" - shows us a concentrated person. In good and evil. And even on the other side. In good? - we'll ask. Yes. He jumped out of the pit, saving his comrade, risking himself, contrary to reason - just like that, obeying the residual tension of the muscles (the story "Rain"). This is concentration. A concentrated person, surviving, is guided cruelly, but firmly: "... I expected to help someone, and with someone to settle scores ten years ago. I hoped to become a man again."

In the draft notes of the 70s there are such statements: "I do not believe in literature. I do not believe in its ability to correct a person. The experience of humanistic literature led to the bloody executions of the twentieth century before my eyes. I do not believe in the possibility of warning anything, to get rid of repetition. History repeats itself. And any execution of 1937 can be repeated." Why did Shalamov persistently write and write about his camp experience, overcoming severe illnesses, fatigue and despair from the fact that almost nothing of what he wrote was published? Probably, the fact is that the writer felt the moral responsibility, which is obligatory for the poet.

His body does not contain heat, and the soul no longer distinguishes between truth and lies. And this distinction no longer interests a person. Any need for simple human communication disappears. “I don’t know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: “Don’t ask, and you won’t be lied to.” I didn’t care if they lied to me or not , I was outside the truth, outside the lie," Shalamov writes in the story "Sentence".

But in some of the heroes of "Kolyma Tales" there is still a desire to break free. A whole cycle of short stories called "Green Prosecutor" is dedicated to the escapes from the camp. But all shoots end unsuccessfully, because luck is basically impossible here. Enclosed space in Shalamov acquires a symbolic meaning. These are not just Kolyma camps fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which normal free people live. But everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the same abyss. That is, the writer associates the whole country with a huge camp, where everyone living in it is already doomed.

A new theory of selection rules here, unnatural and unlike any previous one. But it is built on the material of life and death of millions. “Tall people were the first to die. No habit of hard work changed absolutely anything here. there was little use, because the main painting remained the same, not designed for tall people in any way. Here, little depended on moral qualities, beliefs, and faith. The most persistent and strong feeling was anger, everything else was frozen, lost. Life was limited by hard physical labor, and the soul, thoughts, feelings, speech were an unnecessary burden from which the body tried to free itself. The Kolyma camp contributed to new unexpected discoveries. For example, the fact that in the eyes of the state a physically strong person is better, more valuable than a weak one, since he can throw 20 cubic meters of soil out of a trench per shift. If he fulfills the "interest", that is, his main duty to the state, then he is more moral than a goner-intellectual. That is, physical strength turns into moral.

Perhaps the main feature of the Gulag is that there is no concept of guilt in the camp, because there are victims of lawlessness here: in the Kolyma camp hell, prisoners do not know their guilt, therefore they do not know either repentance or the desire to atone for their sin.

Addressing the reader, the author seeks to convey the idea that the camp is not a separate, isolated part of the world. It is a mold of our entire society. “There is nothing in it that would not exist in the wild, in its social and spiritual structure. The camp ideas only repeat the ideas of the will transmitted by order of the authorities. Not a single social movement, campaign, the slightest turn in the wild remains without an immediate reflection, a trace in the camp "The camp reflects not only the struggle of political cliques succeeding each other in power, but the culture of these people, their secret aspirations, tastes, habits, repressed desires." Only by assimilating this knowledge well, which millions of the exterminated have obtained at the cost of their own lives and Shalamov reported at the cost of his own life, will we be able to defeat the surrounding evil, to prevent a new Gulag.

“Reflect life? I don’t want to reflect anything, I don’t have the right to speak for someone (except for the Kolyma dead, maybe). I want to speak about some patterns of human behavior in certain circumstances, not to teach someone something. By no means." "Art is deprived of the right to preach. No one can teach anyone, has no right to teach ... New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description. That is, the document, the direct participation of the author in the events of life. Prose experienced as a document. .. The prose of the future is the prose of experienced people". Shalamov does not try to teach or moralize over what he has experienced. He provides the reader with the facts obtained by him "looking at himself as an instrument of knowledge of the world, as a perfect of perfect instruments ...". Shalamov was in conditions where there was no hope of survival, he testifies to the death of people crushed by the camp. It seems a miracle that the author himself managed not only to survive physically, but also to survive as a person. However, to the question asked to him: "How did you manage not to break, what is the secret of this?" Shalamov answered without hesitation: "There is no secret, anyone can break." This answer shows that the author overcame the temptation to consider himself the winner of the hell he went through and explains why Shalamov does not teach how to survive in the camp, does not try to convey the experience of camp life, but only testifies to what the camp system is like. Shalamov's prose is a continuation of Pushkin's prose tradition of describing a person in a special situation through his behavior, rather than psychological analysis. In such prose there is no place for the hero's confession, no place for extended reflection.