Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories

(Paperback)

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In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches from of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953 and continued for the next twenty years. In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered first-hand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky's underground- "How does someone stop being human" and "How are criminals made" By 1972, when he was writing his last stories, the remnants of the camps were being destroyed, the guard towers and barracks razed, the barbed wire rolled up and taken away. "Did we exist" Shalamov asks, then answers without hesitation, "I reply, 'We did,' with all the expressiveness of an official statement, with the responsibility, the precision of a document."

Reviews

"The most powerful stories in this volume wed Shalamovsunblinking awareness of human frailty and historic catastrophe to his keenappreciation for nature . . . [A]t its best, Shalamovs prose ispoetry of the highest order.Boris Dralyuk,The Times Literary Supplement

The impotence of intellectuals and other bookish sorts when they encounter the allied forces of Stalinists and gangsters is a recurrent theme. . . . And yet, despite the emotional and physical damage he sustained in Stalins camps, Shalamov survived and wrote his hundreds of stories and poems. He embraces the very words he derides. Most other writers in comparison look like dilettantes. Patrick Kurp,The Los Angeles Review of Books

As in his earlier volume [Kolyma Stories], Shalamov writes matter-of-factly, unblinkingly, about the endless horrors of the gulag, which are scarcely comprehensible. Essential chronicles of the worst face of the totalitarian state. Kirkus

"A Virgil of this icy underworld, Shalamov is at his most compelling when bearing witness. He spares no detail,describing the diagnosis of dysentery, corpses exhumed for their clothing and the hacked-off hands of fugitivesused for fingerprint identification. . . .We are fortunate that hewho died deaf, nearly blind andinstitutionalisednot only survived his sentence but had the force to withstand the exorcism of theexperience. Mia Levitin,The Spectator

'Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,' Shalamov wrote in 1971. . . .Shalamovs stories are slaps in all our facesand, like a slap, they can enliven as wellas hurt. . . .Shalamov is not only a unique witness, but also a fine poet and one of the greatest of Russian writers of shortstories. He is as important a figure as Primo Levi." Robert Chandler,Financial Times

"Shalamov is an unparalleled reporter on life in the Gulag and anatomist of the camp condition, which like an ulcer bled its malignance through the whole body of Soviet society. Not only a reporter but a great practitioner too of a ruthlessly stripped-down art." J. M. Coetzee

Shalamovs experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own. . . . I respectfully confess that to him and not me it was given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Author Bio

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was a Russian writer, journalist, poet, and survivor of the Gulag. NYRB Classics publishesd his Kolyma Stories, which, together with Sketches of the Criminal World, comprise the first complete English translation of all of Shalamov's Kolyma writings. Donald Rayfield is an emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He translated Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls for NYRB Classics.