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Introduction

Brief biographical note

The history of the creation of "Kolyma stories"

1 The main themes and motives of Shalamov's work

2 The context of life during the creation of the Kolyma Tales

Analysis of several stories from the cycle "Kolyma stories"

1 General analysis of the Kolyma Tales

2 Analysis of several stories from the collection "Kolyma stories"

Conclusion

Bibliographic list

Introduction

"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...

V. Shalamov

Shalamov is a master of naturalistic descriptions. At the end of the 1980s, in connection with the ideas of "perestroika" and "new thinking" put forward, a flood of previously forbidden literature fell upon the general reader. Works began to be published on the so-called "camp theme", which until that time had been represented only by A.I. Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Literary and artistic periodicals gave their pages to the works of N. Mandelstam, E. Ginzburg, L. Razgon, A. Zhigulin, V. Shalamov; the novels of O. Volkov, Yu. Dombrovsky saw the light.

Creativity V.T. Shalamov had a fate determined by the peculiarities of the transitional time: superficial reading, hasty conclusions and enrollment in the "camp theme", which now, as many believe, has only historical value. For many, not only ordinary readers, but also literary critics, Shalamov remained the creator of the Kolyma Tales.

Shalamov is a writer of a special kind and with special creativity, representing not only artistic, but also historical significance for Russian literature. Shalamov is the mouthpiece of the era, who found the strength to tell about the horrors of the Gulag experienced without concealment, embellishment, but with perfect documentary authenticity. Shalamov's view is a view from within.

The purpose of our work is an attempt to explore the influence of the context of the writer's life. In this case, V. Shalamov, on his work.

V.Shalamov's creativity gives an opportunity for social moralization. V. Esipov writes: “[Shalamov] initially focused on the truth as the norm of literature and the norm of being (highlighted by the author - I.N.). Behind this is Shalamov's great faith in the ineradicability of absolute human values, which sooner or later will return to his country. The artist was not afraid to tell the unpleasant, to show the terrible in a person - not so that we would be frightened, shudder, but so that we would know. V. Shalamov, having shown the "dehumanization" of the world, turned out to be a prophet: cruelty is growing everywhere. The writer never aestheticized inhumanity. He wanted the reader to see and appreciate what it is like in real life. And if the works of V. Shalamov really teach someone hatred of arbitrariness, cruelty (although he did not try to teach anyone), then this "vaccination" is both necessary and relevant. Not only in the Stalinist camps - in the very essence of human existence, a deadly abscess became noticeable. Everything is allowed - a terrible reality of the history of mankind, which must be resisted.

1. Brief biographical note

June 1907year in the city of Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolaevich Shalamov and his wife Nadezhda Alexandrovna, the son Varlaam (Varlam) was born.

1914- enters the gymnasium named after Alexander the Blessed in Vologda.

1923- graduates from the unified labor school of the second stage No. 6, located in the former gymnasium.

1924- leaves Vologda and goes to work as a tanner at a tannery in the city of Kuntsevo, Moscow Region.

1926- enters in the direction from the factory for the 1st year of the Moscow Textile Institute and at the same time on a free set - to the faculty of Soviet law of Moscow State University. Choose MSU.

1927 (November 7)- participates in the demonstration of the opposition to the 10th anniversary of October, held under the slogan "Down with Stalin!" and "Let's carry out Lenin's will!"

1928- visiting a literary circle at the magazine "New LEF".

February 19, 1929- Arrested during a raid in an underground printing house when printing leaflets called "Lenin's Testament". Receives for this as a "socially dangerous element" 3 years of imprisonment in camps.

April 13, 1929- after being held in Butyrskaya prison, he arrives with a convoy to the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). Works on the construction of the Berezniki chemical plant under the leadership of E.P. Berzin, the future head of the Kolyma Dalstroy. In the camp he meets with Galina Ignatievna Gudz, the future first wife.

October 1931- released from the forced labor camp, reinstated. He earns money to leave the Berezniki chemical plant.

1932- returns to Moscow and begins to work in the trade union magazines "For Shock Work" and "For Mastering Technique". Meets G.I. Gudz.

1933- comes to Vologda to visit his parents.

March 3, 1933father T.N. Shalamov dies. Comes to Vologda for the funeral.

December 26, 1934- N.A. Shalamov's mother dies. Comes to Vologda for the funeral.

1934 - 1937- Works in the magazine "For Industrial Personnel".

1936- publishes the first short story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" in the magazine "October" No. 1.

January 13, 1937- Arrested for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities and again placed in Butyrka prison. By a special meeting, he was sentenced to 5 years in labor camps with use in hard work.

August 14, 1937- with a large batch of prisoners on the ship arrives in the bay of Nagaevo (Magadan).

August 1937 - December 1938- works in the gold-mining faces of the Partizan mine.

December 1938- Arrested in the camp "case of lawyers". He is in the remand prison in Magadan ("Vaskov's House").

December 1938 - April 1939- is in typhoid quarantine in the Magadan transit prison.

April 1939 - August 1940- works in the exploration party at the Black River mine - as a digger, boilerman, assistant topographer.

August 1940 - December 1942- works in the coal faces of the Kadykchan and Arkagala camps.

December 22, 1942 – May 1943- Works in general works at the Dzhelgala penal mine.

May 1943- Arrested on the denunciation of fellow campers "for anti-Soviet statements" and for praising the great Russian writer I.A. Bunin.

June 22, 1943- at the court in the village. Yagodnoy was sentenced to 10 years in the camps for anti-Soviet agitation.

Autumn 1943- in a state of “walker” he ends up in the Belichya camp hospital near the village. Berry.

December 1943 - Summer 1944- Works in a mine at the Spokoyny mine.

Summer 1944- is arrested on a denunciation with the same incrimination, but does not receive a term, because departs under the same article.

Summer 1945 - autumn 1945- Seriously ill patients are in the Belichya hospital. With the help of sympathetic doctors, he comes out of his dying state. He remains temporarily in the hospital as a cult trader and auxiliary worker.

Autumn 1945- works with lumberjacks in the taiga in the Diamond Key zone. Unable to withstand the load, he decides to escape.

Autumn 1945 - Spring 1946- As a punishment for the escape, he is again sent to general work at the Dzhelgala penal mine.

Spring 1946- in general work at the Susuman mine. With suspicion of dysentery, he again ends up in the Belichya hospital. After recovering with the help of a doctor, A.M.Pantyukhova is sent to study at the paramedic courses at the camp hospital at the 23rd kilometer from Magadan.

December 1946- after completing the course, he is sent to work as a paramedic in the surgical department at the Left Bank Central Hospital for Prisoners (Debin village, 400 km from Magadan).

Spring 1949 - Summer 1950- works as a paramedic in the village of lumberjacks "Duskanya's Key". He begins to write poems, which were later included in the cycle "Kolyma Notebooks".

1950 - 1951- Works as a paramedic in the emergency room of the hospital "Left Bank".

October 13, 1951- end of term. In the next two years, in the direction of the Dalstroy trust, he worked as a paramedic in the villages of Baragon, Kyubyuma, Liryukovan (Oymyakonsky district, Yakutia). The goal is to earn money for leaving Kolyma. He continues to write poetry and sends what he has written through a doctor friend, E.A. Mamuchashvili, to Moscow, to B.L. Pasternak. Receives a response. The correspondence between the two poets begins.

November 13, 1953- meets with B.L. Pasternak, who helps to establish contacts with literary circles.

November 29, 1953- gets a job as a foreman in the Ozeretsko-Neklyuevsky construction department of the Tsentrtorfstroy trust of the Kalinin region (the so-called "101st kilometer").

June 23, 1954 – Summer 1956- works as a supply agent at the Reshetnikovsky peat enterprise of the Kalinin region. Lives in the village of Turkmen, 15 km from Reshetnikov.

1954- begins work on the first collection "Kolyma stories". Dissolves marriage with G. I. Gudz.

July 18, 1956- receives rehabilitation due to the absence of corpus delicti and is dismissed from the Reshetnikovsky enterprise.

1956- moves to Moscow. Marries O.S. Neklyudova.

1957- works as a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, publishes the first poems from the Kolyma Notebooks in the Znamya magazine, No. 5.

1957 - 1958- suffers a serious illness, attacks of Meniere's disease, is treated at the Botkin hospital.

1961- publishes the first book of poems "Flint". He continues to work on Kolyma Tales and Essays on the Underworld.

1962 - 1964- Works as a freelance internal reviewer of the Novy Mir magazine.

1964- publishes a book of poems "Rustle of leaves".

1964 - 1965- completes the collections of stories of the Kolyma cycle "The Left Bank" and "The Artist of the Shovel".

1966- divorces O.S. Neklyudova. He meets I.P. Sirotinskaya, at that time an employee of the Central State Archive of Literature and Art.

1966 - 1967- creates a collection of short stories "The Resurrection of the Larch".

1967- publishes a book of poems "The Road and Fate".

1968 - 1971- working on the autobiographical story "The Fourth Vologda".

1970 - 1971- working on "Vishera anti-novel".

1972- learns about the publication in the West, in the publishing house "Posev", of his "Kolyma stories". Writes a letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta protesting against unauthorized illegal publications that violate the will and right of the author. Many literary colleagues perceive this letter as a rejection of the Kolyma Tales and break off relations with Shalamov.

1972- publishes a book of poems "Moscow Clouds". Admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR.

1973 - 1974- Works on the cycle "Glove, or KR-2" (the final cycle of "Kolyma Tales").

1977- publishes a book of poems "Boiling Point". In connection with the 70th anniversary, he was presented to the Order of the Badge of Honor, but did not receive an award.

1978- in London, in the publishing house "Overseas Publications" (Overseas Publications), the book "Kolyma Tales" is published in Russian. The publication was also carried out outside the will of the author. Shalamov's health is rapidly deteriorating. Begins to lose hearing and vision, attacks of Meniere's disease with loss of coordination of movements become more frequent.

1979- with the help of friends and the Union of Writers, he goes to a boarding house for the elderly and disabled.

1980- received news of the award of the French PEN Club award to him, but never received the award.

1980 - 1981- suffers a stroke. In moments of recovery, he reads poetry to A.A. Morozov, a lover of poetry who visited him. The latter publishes them in Paris, in the Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement.

January 14, 1982- according to the conclusion of the medical board, he is transferred to a boarding house for psychochronics.

January 17, 1982- dies of croupous pneumonia. He was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow.

1 The main themes and motives of V. Shalamov's creativity

century turned out to be one of the most terrible centuries in the history of mankind. Age-old ideas about the inviolability of eternal truths - goodness, morality, humanity - are shaken or completely destroyed. The 20th century, having exposed the bad sides of human essence, showed the helplessness of a person in the face of the evil embodied in the System, in state structures. The moral layer of the human soul turned out to be fragile, cracked under the pressure of totalitarianism.

The martyrology of the poets of the 20th century is longer, their torments are more terrible. Gumilyov, Pilnyak, Babel, Kornilov, Vasiliev were shot. Death from cancer overtook Tvardovsky, Grossman, Trifonov. The camp killed Mandelstam. The departure of Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Tsvetaeva, Fadeev is tragic.

But even against this background, the fate of Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov is exceptional. His camp experience is unique and, fortunately, not repeated by any other artist.

During his lifetime, Varlam Shalamov was an uncomfortable person, and after his death - despite the fact that his works are included in the school curriculum - he remains an extremely uncomfortable writer, since his views on history, on the evolution of the mind, on the moral progress of civilization run counter to the generally accepted theories of the beautiful-hearted humanists.

Shalamov did not like epithets. The dispassionate speech of an eyewitness is his method. The works of V. Shalamov, of course, have the value of historical evidence. He himself went through those circles of hell, which he spoke about, his prose is the embodiment in the word of the bleeding memory of the artist. No wonder F. Suchkov called his stories "testimonies" of the author. And Shalamov himself considered "Kolyma Tales" a document. He does not explain anything, does not go into analysis, does not reveal the background, does not give a panorama. At first glance, his texts are a chain of private episodes. Here someone rotted alive, another was slaughtered because of a warm jersey. It turns out that the saying "work like a horse" is wrong: horses are much less hardy than people. Here is the scene of the distribution and eating of herring, which, with its head, skin, tail and bones, dissolves in the toothless mouths of the prisoners. Here one is eating condensed milk, and ten are standing around and watching - not waiting to be treated, but simply watching, unable to take their eyes off. The stories are short, others two or three pages long, almost miniatures. There are no plots in the conventional sense. It is impossible to single out any one or several stories - "the best", "the most characteristic". Shalamov can be read from anywhere, from a half-phrase - instant immersion is guaranteed. Cold, hunger, scurvy, tuberculosis, cholera, physical and nervous exhaustion, degradation and disintegration of personality, indifference and cruelty, death on every page, apocalypse in every paragraph.

Shalamov's campers are not industrious and do not know how to live. They are dying. They are half people, half beasts. They are broken and flattened. They live in a parallel universe where elementary physical laws are turned upside down. They are preoccupied - literally - with a fence-to-dinner existence.

Shalamov considers not a person, but the ashes left during its combustion. Shalamov is not interested in human dignity, but in his ashes.

Shalamov's camp is a kingdom of absurdity, where everything is the opposite. Black is white. Life is death. Illness is a blessing, because the sick person will be sent to the hospital, where they are well fed, where you can delay your death for at least a few days.

In the story "Silence", the authorities, as an experiment, fed a brigade of goners to their fill, so that they would work better. The goners immediately quit their jobs and settled down to digest and assimilate an unprecedented double ration, and the weakest one committed suicide. Food gave him strength, and he spent this strength on the most important and important thing: suicide.

In the story "Bread" the hero is incredibly lucky: he is sent to work at a bakery. The brigadier leads him to the stoker, brings him a loaf of bread, but the stoker, despising the brigadier, throws the old loaf into the furnace behind his back and brings the guest fresh, still warm. What's a hero? He was not horrified by the extravagance of the stoker. He is not amazed at the nobility of the gesture: throw away the stale bread, bring fresh bread to the hungry. He does not feel anything, he is too weak, he only indifferently fixes what is happening.

The names and characters of Shalamov's characters are not remembered. There are no metaphors, no aphorisms, no lyrics, no mind games, no witty dialogues. Many put this as a reproach to the author of Kolyma Tales. They say that Shalamov is weak as an artist of the word, as a "writer", they accuse him of reporting and stigmatize him as a memoirist. In fact, Shalamov's texts, for all their seeming imperfection, are sophisticated and unique. The characters are the same precisely because everyone in the camp is the same. There are no personalities, no bright people. No one jokes, no one sprinkles proverbs. The narrator is dry, and at times even tongue-tied - exactly to the same extent as camp inmates are tongue-tied. The narrator is short - just as the life of a camper is short. Shalamov's phrase breaks, bends, stumbles - just like a prisoner breaks, bends and stumbles. But here is the story "Sherry Brandy", dedicated to the death of Mandelstam - here Shalamov is already working in almost blank verse: rhythmic, melodic and ruthless.

Shalamov is a consistent and original artist. It is enough to study his essay “On Prose”, where, for example, he states that the text should be created only according to the principle “right away” - any later editing is unacceptable, because it is already done in a different state of mind and feeling.

"Feeling" is Shalamov's defining category. His essays and notebooks are full of discussions about feeling, real and imaginary. The ability and desire to convey true feelings lead Shalamov out of the ranks of "life writers", "ethnographers", "reporters", and prove his originality.

It was Shalamov who stated in detail and reasonedly: one should not overestimate a person. Man is great, but he is also insignificant. The person is noble - but in the same degree vile and low. A person is able to improve morally, but this is a slow process, centuries long, and attempts to accelerate it are doomed to failure.

His works are an absolutely separate island in the archipelago of "camp prose". The unique writer's vision, the constant feeling of the end of life, behind which - only madness, special artistic techniques, the denial of classical realistic traditions - all this prose has absorbed.

Varlam Shalamov is a realist. But the reality surrounding him is surreal. The authors of Western thrillers are also able to create scary pictures - but they constantly balance on the verge of black humor and self-parody, falling into this latter especially often. V. Shalamov is not in the least trying to "tickle the nerves." In a world full of evil and violence, art, even terrible and cruel, acts as a carrier of goodness and hope due to its spiritual purity.

The deepest, perhaps far from appreciated, meaning of V. Shalamov's work is that with the whole artistic fabric of his works he defends the intrinsic value of life: the goal of life is not in the "construction" of anything, it is in life itself.

2 The context of life during the creation of the Kolyma Tales»

"Kolyma Tales" by Varlam Shalamov is a struggle against oblivion. Their goal is to create a memorable trail where any memory of the camp is torn out, destroyed. In addition, they consider the difficulty of communicating and describing the camp experience. The body of the author, with which he can, as a witness, document the truth of his own words, is not suitable for this: it is a completely different body, not the one that the camp suffered. Like Primo Levi, Shalamov appeals to the ambivalent metaphor of the prosthesis. Remembrance is, on the one hand, a "prosthesis" of experience; on the other hand, the crippled body could not speak without this prosthesis.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, writer and poet, was born in the city of Vologda in 1907. Barely entering a conscious age, Varlam left for Moscow and in 1926 entered Moscow University.

It was then that the course was taken for industrialization. General literacy, gigantic construction projects, Mayakovsky, shooting clubs, “our answer to Chamberlain”, Osoaviakhim1, Alexei Tolstoy’s novel “Aelita” - young Shalamov found himself among enthusiastic, almost exalted peers who considered building a new world the task of the next two or three years.

If you are twenty-two years old, the goal can only be a world revolution. Otherwise it is impossible.

Educated youth didn't want a revolution according to Stalin - a dull, bureaucratic, buttoned-up revolution, where it was proposed to slide the bolts, bristle and be at enmity with the whole world. The youth wanted Trotsky's revolution: continuous, worldwide, for everyone, around the clock.

But then, in 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the RSFSR, the opposition was crushed, the young son of the priest Varlam Shalamov was accused of distributing Lenin's Testament.

Three years of imprisonment did not cool his ardor. Five years pass quietly: Shalamov is back in Moscow, working in small industry magazines. Writes poetry, tries himself in prose.

Shalamov began to publish in 1934, but over the period from 1934 to 1937. there was no critical response to his publication. By an evil irony of fate, in the magazine “Vokrug Sveta” No. 12 for 1936, immediately after the publication of Shalamov’s story “The Return”, D. Dar’s story “Magadan” followed, in which, in a romantic style, it was told about Kolyma, about people whose fate is connected with the development of this wild edge. “Everything can be here and everything will be here, because the owners of this region are the Bolsheviks, for whom nothing is impossible,” D. Dar (3) concluded his story pathetically. For Shalamov, this region became not only a place of imprisonment, but also a place where he was formed as a poet and writer.

In the USSR, the slave labor of prisoners was an important component of the economy. Prisoners worked in places where ordinary people did not want to work. A brilliant tyrant, Stalin divided his subjects into two parts: those who were free, every day were waiting for arrest and were easily controlled; those who were already in the camp were reduced to the state of an animal and were even easier to manage. In the north-east of the Eurasian continent there was a colossal empire, where, on a territory several times larger than the area of Europe, there was almost nothing but camps, and the leaders of this empire had power and power a hundred times greater than the Roman Caesars. The empire of Stalin's camps had no precedent in world history.

He returned from the Kolyma meat grinder at the age of forty-seven, in 1954. The total length of service of the prisoner is seventeen years.

And again, as thirty years ago, events in Moscow, eyes burn again, again everyone is full of forebodings of great changes. Stalin is dead and taken out of the Mausoleum. The cult of personality is condemned. Several million convicts were released from the camps. The war is over, tyranny has been defeated - then everything will be fine. Samizdat is blooming in luxuriant color (of course, now it’s possible, now they don’t plant). Shalamov is an active participant in samizdat. True, while official magazines do not take it. Even lyrics. Not to mention stories. But everyone knows the stories. The stories are too scary - after reading any, it is impossible not to remember.

He tries to publish his texts at the same time, in the late 1950s. But he will be disappointed. The legendary publication in Novy Mir of Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" opened and closed the camp theme in official Soviet literature. Khrushchev threw a bone at the liberal intellectuals, "progressive humanity" - the second did not follow. We need camp prose - here is camp prose for you, first-hand literary evidence, please. And Shalamov is not needed. One Solzhenitsyn is enough.

It is not known which is worse: seventeen years in the camps - or for two decades to create non-standard, cutting-edge prose without any hope of publishing it.

Kolyma took all his health from him. He suffered from Meniere's disease, could lose consciousness at any moment, on the streets they took him for a drunk. His stories were "samizdat bestsellers", they were read - the writer himself lived in a tiny room, almost starving. Meanwhile, Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev; tragic camp stories about rotten, frozen, distraught people from hunger prevented the building of developed socialism, and the Soviet system pretended that Varlam Shalamov did not exist.

year. Shalamov publishes an open letter in Literaturnaya Gazeta: he sharply, even rudely condemns the publication of his stories by the emigrant publishing house Posev. Militant dissidents immediately turn away from the old man. They thought he would be with them. They thought that Shalamov was a kind of Solzhenitsyn Light. They didn't understand anything. More precisely, Shalamov already understood everything, but they failed. The millions who rotted alive in Kolyma have never been of interest to the West. The West had to bring down the "Evil Empire". The West urgently needed professional anti-communists. Solzhenitsyn, who passionately dreamed of “shepherding the peoples,” came up perfectly, but he was not enough - two or three more in a set ... However, Shalamov was too scrupulous, he did not want someone’s hands, no one knows how clean, to wave the Kolyma stories" as a banner. Shalamov believed that documentary evidence of human imperfection should not be waved.

According to Shalamov, the Stalinist camp was evidence of the bankruptcy not of the "Soviet" idea, or the "communist" idea, but of the entire humanistic civilization of the 20th century. What does communism or anti-communism have to do with it? This is the same.

Varlam Shalamov died in 1982. He died, as a Russian writer should die: in poverty, in a hospital for the mentally ill old people. And even more nightmarish: on the way from the nursing home to the insane asylum. The canon of the terrible ending was observed to the smallest detail. A man went through hell during his lifetime - and hell followed him: in 2000, the tombstone of the writer was desecrated, the bronze monument was stolen. Who did this? Of course, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the prolific Platons Karataevs and Ivan-Denisychs. Passed on non-ferrous metal. It seems that Shalamov himself would not have condemned the kidnappers: what can you not do in order to survive? Kolyma stories teach that life conquers death and a bad life is better than a good death. Death is static and impenetrable, while life is mobile and diverse. And the question of what is stronger - life or death, Shalamov, like any genius, decides in favor of life.

The official recognition of Varlam Shalamov began in the second half of the 1980s, when his prose began to be published in the Soviet Union, first in magazines, and then in separate collections.

There is also a Kafkaesque afterword to the fate of the Russian Dante: according to the first, 1929, conviction, Shalamov was rehabilitated only in 2002, when documents were found that were allegedly previously considered lost. Less than a hundred years later, the world-famous writer was finally forgiven by his own state.

The further the stupid Russian capitalism rumbles and rings like a saucepan, in which there is no place for respect for the individual, no hard work, no order, no patience, the more relevant the literature of Varlam Shalamov becomes.

Of course, modern Russia is not Kolyma, not a camp, not a zone, and its citizens do not die of starvation and beatings. But it is in modern Russia that the collapse of the ideas of “moral progress” is clearly visible. Our reality is marking time under the loud cries of "Forward, Russia!". Despised by prisoner Shalamov, "progressive humanity" has already broken its brains, but over the past half century it has not been able to invent anything better than the "consumer society" - which, having existed for a few years, consumed itself and burst. It was not possible to instantly instill in Russian society a bourgeois-capitalist type of relationship based on the instinct of personal well-being. The economic breakthrough has failed. The idea of freedom is bankrupt. The Internet - the territory of freedom - has simultaneously become a global cesspool. The sociological competition "Name of Russia" showed that many millions of citizens still tremble before the figure of Comrade Stalin. Still, after all, he was in order! Well-being is still associated with discipline imposed from the outside, forcibly, and not arising from within the personality as its natural need. The Orthodox churching of the broad masses expected by many did not happen. Exchanging oil for televisions, Russia is rushing at full speed, not sorting out the road, without God, without a goal, without an idea, driven by demagogic nonsense about progress for the sake of progress.

2. Analysis of several stories from the cycle "Kolyma stories"

1 General analysis of the "Kolyma Tales"

It is difficult to imagine what emotional tension these stories cost Shalamov. I would like to dwell on the compositional features of the Kolyma Tales. The plots of the stories at first glance are unrelated, however, they are compositionally integral. “Kolyma Stories” consists of 6 books, the first of which is called “Kolyma Stories”, then the books “Left Bank”, “Artist of the Shovel”, “Essays on the Underworld”, “Resurrection of the Larch”, “Glove, or KR -2".

In the manuscript of V. Shalamov "Kolyma Tales" there are 33 stories - both very small (1 - 3 pages), and more. It is immediately felt that they were written by a qualified, experienced writer. Most are read with interest, have a sharp plot (but the plotless short stories are thoughtfully and interestingly constructed), are written in a clear and figurative language (and even though they mainly tell about the “thieves' world”, the manuscript does not feel a passion for argotism). So, if we talk about editing in the sense of stylistic correction, “shaking up” the composition of stories, etc., then the manuscript, in essence, does not need such revision.

Shalamov is a master of naturalistic descriptions. Reading his stories, we plunge into the world of prisons, transit points, camps. The story is told in the third person. The collection is, as it were, a creepy mosaic, each story is a photographic piece of the daily life of prisoners, very often - "criminals", thieves, swindlers and murderers in places of detention. All the heroes of Shalamov are different people: military and civilian, engineers and workers. They got used to the camp life, absorbed its laws. Sometimes, looking at them, we do not know who they are: whether they are intelligent creatures or animals in which only one instinct lives - to survive at all costs. It seems comical to us a scene from the story Duck when a person tries to catch a bird, and she turns out to be smarter than him. But gradually we understand the tragedy of this situation, when hunting led to nothing but forever frostbitten fingers and lost hopes of the possibility of being struck out of sinister list . But in people ideas about mercy, compassion, conscientiousness still live. It's just that all these feelings are hidden under the armor of a camp experience that allows you to survive. Therefore, it is considered shameful to deceive someone or eat food in front of hungry companions, as the hero of the story does. Condensed milk . But the strongest thing in the prisoners is the thirst for freedom. Even if for a moment, but they wanted to enjoy it, feel it, and then it’s not scary to die, but by no means captured - there is death. Because the protagonist of the story Major Pugachev's last fight prefers to kill himself rather than surrender.

“We have learned humility, we have forgotten how to be surprised. We did not have pride, selfishness, pride, and jealousy and passion seemed to us Martian concepts, and, moreover, trifles, ”wrote Shalamov.

The author in the most detailed way (by the way, there are a number of cases when the same - literally, verbatim - descriptions of certain scenes are found in several stories) describes everything - how prisoners sleep, wake up, eat, walk, dress, work, “have fun” ; how brutally the guards, doctors, camp authorities treat them. Each story speaks of continuously sucking hunger, constant cold, illness, unbearable hard labor, from which they fall down, about incessant insults and humiliations, about the fear that never leaves the soul of being offended, beaten, crippled, stabbed to death by “criminals ", which the camp authorities are also afraid of. Several times V. Shalamov compares the life of these camps with Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead and each time comes to the conclusion that Dostoevsky's House of the Dead is heaven on earth compared to what the characters of the Kolyma Tales experience. The only ones who thrive in the camps are thieves. They rob and kill with impunity, terrorize doctors, pretend, do not work, give bribes right and left - and live well. There is no control over them. Constant torment, suffering, exhausting work, driving to the grave - this is the lot of honest people who are driven here on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, but in fact they are people who are innocent of anything.

And now we have before us the “frames” of this terrible story: murders during a card game (“For a performance”), digging up corpses from graves for robbery (“At Night”), insanity (“Rain”), religious fanaticism (“Apostle Paul” ), death ("Aunt Polya"), murder ("First Death"), suicide ("Seraphim"), the unlimited dominion of thieves ("The Snake Charmer"), barbaric methods of revealing simulation ("Shock Therapy"), the murder of doctors (" Red Cross”), killings of prisoners by convoy (“Berries”), killing dogs (“Bitch Tamara”), eating human corpses (“Golden Taiga”) and so on and everything in the same spirit.

Moreover, all descriptions are very visible, very detailed, often with numerous naturalistic details.

The main emotional motives run through all the descriptions - a feeling of hunger that turns every person into a beast, fear and humiliation, slow dying, boundless arbitrariness and lawlessness. All this is photographed, strung together, horrors are heaped up without any attempts to somehow comprehend everything, to understand the causes and consequences of what is described.

If we talk about the skill of Shalamov - the artist, about his manner of presentation, then it should be noted that the language of his prose is simple, extremely accurate. The tone of the story is calm, without strain. Severely, concisely, without any attempts at psychological analysis, even somewhere documented, the writer speaks about what is happening. Shalamov achieves a stunning impact on the reader by contrasting the calmness of the author's unhurried, calm narrative with explosive, terrifying content.

Surprisingly, nowhere does the writer fall into a pathetic anguish, nowhere does he curse fate or power. He leaves this privilege to the reader, who willy-nilly will shudder when reading each new story. After all, he will know that all this is not the author's fiction, but the cruel truth, albeit clothed in an artistic form.

The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as an absolute evil. Shalamova considers the GULAG as an exact copy of the model of the totalitarian Stalinist society: “... The camp is not the opposition of hell to paradise. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like. The camp is hell is a constant association that comes to mind while reading the Kolyma Tales. This association arises not even because you are constantly faced with the inhuman torments of prisoners, but also because the camp seems to be the kingdom of the dead. So, the story "Tombstone" begins with the words: "Everyone died ..." On each page you meet with death, which here can be named among the main characters. All heroes, if we consider them in connection with the prospect of death in the camp, can be divided into three groups: the first - heroes who have already died, and the writer remembers them; the second, those who are almost certain to die; and the third group - those who may be lucky, but this is not certain. This statement becomes most obvious if we recall that the writer in most cases talks about those whom he met and whom he survived in the camp: a man who was shot for not fulfilling the plan by his plot, his classmate, whom they met 10 years later in the Butyrskaya cell prison, a French communist whom the brigadier killed with one blow of his fist...

Varlam Shalamov lived through his whole life anew, writing a rather difficult work. Where did he get his strength from? Perhaps everything was so that one of those who remained alive would convey in a word the horrors of the Russian people in their own land. I have changed the idea of life as a good thing, about happiness. Kolyma taught me something completely different. The principle of my age, my personal existence, my whole life, the conclusion from my personal experience, the rule learned by this experience, can be expressed in a few words. First, you need to return slaps in the face, and only in the second place - alms. Remember evil before good. Remember all the good - a hundred years, and all the bad - two hundred. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ”(V. Shalamov)

2 Analysis of the story "On the show"

Each story by V. Shalamov is unique, because it addresses an unusual and frightening topic - the life of prisoners, or, to be more precise, not life, but existence, where every second for a person is a struggle. People have no past, no future, there is only "now" and nothing else.

According to Elena Mikhailik: “Shalamov's images, as a rule, are polysemantic and multifunctional. So, for example, the first phrase of the story “On the introduction” sets the tone, lays a false trail - and at the same time gives the story volume, introduces the concept of historical time into its frame of reference. The erased memory of the characters greatly enhances the impression made on the reader.

Igor Sukhikh in his work “Life after Kolyma” notes that “... Shalamov’s personal, internal theme is not a prison, not a camp in general, but Kolyma with its experience of grandiose, unprecedented extermination of man and suppression of the human. “Kolyma Tales” is an image of new psychological patterns in human behavior, people in new conditions.”

Interest in this work is not accidental, because it literally reveals all the secrets and horrors of camp life, and the process of a card game stands out especially brightly, as something diabolical and fatal.

The story “At the show” begins with the phrase: “We played cards at Naumov’s konogon” (5, p. 182). As noted by Elena Mikhailik, this phrase “sets the tone, lays a false trail - and at the same time gives the story volume, introduces it into the reference system of the concept of historical time, because the “minor night incident” in the barracks of the konogonov appears to the reader as a reflection, a projection of Pushkin's tragedy. Shalamov uses the classic plot as a probe - by the degree and nature of the damage, the reader can judge the properties of the camp universe. The writer, as it were, takes us back several centuries to show all the backwardness and underdevelopment of camp life, because Kolyma is completely unsuitable for life, the entire “GULAG world” is closed, limited. Such a concept as freedom is not at all applicable here, a person is even afraid to think, all his thoughts are focused on surviving. Even dreams do not allow his soul to rest - they are empty.

It is safe and warm in the hut by the horse-drawn horse. And it was this “warm place” that was chosen by the thieves for card fights.

A duel is a confrontation, most often the spirit of the parties, often with sad consequences.

Night is the time of the devil, when all evil spirits come out of the ground. It is believed among the people that it is easier for people to sin at night, supposedly the Lord God will not notice. “... And every night the thieves gathered there” (5, p. 182).

At first glance, there is nothing strange in this phrase, since night is the only free time for prisoners, but if we draw an analogy with the classics of Russian literature, it can be noted that at that time card games were banned and they were played mainly at night. Thus, we again note the perniciousness of camp life.

It is dark in the barracks, the only light comes from the pole. The light from it is dim, dim with a tint of red, so that the hut of the konogon looks more like hell than living space.

And just in this place the players gathered for a duel. “There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs folded in the Buryat style, the partners were sitting ...” (5, p. 182).

The Soviet government, having come to control, destroyed the noble society and everything connected with it. During this period, card games were strictly prohibited, and it was impossible to buy cards, however, "Russia is full of talents" and there were craftsmen who made cards on their own.

“There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow...” (5, p. 182). As in the classic game of chance, a new game starts with a new deck of cards. But these cards are extraordinary, they are made from a volume of Victor Hugo. Let us suggest that, perhaps, from the text of the same novel, which also deals with convicts "Les Misérables", so we can draw a parallel with the world of the French Revolution. We do this in order to see the detrimental effect of the disunity and underdevelopment of society during the repression. Cards are played on a pillow, which is absolutely impossible to do, since the energy of the cards is negative and affects the subconscious of a person.

These deviations from the rules of the classic game become a wake-up call for the reader, indicating that the characters of the story are forced to play in order to survive in this camp chaos.

“The suits did not differ in color - and the difference is not necessary for the player” (5, p. 183). We see the complete depersonalization of space, this is due to the fact that in the world of camp life there are no colors, everything is the same: gray and black.

Everything in life has a reverse side, an opposite, and cards too. Suits "black" (clubs and spades) are opposite to "red" (hearts and diamonds), just as evil is opposite to good, and life is death.

The ability to make cards yourself was considered the norm of decency among the "convict knights", and playing cards was almost mandatory among the prison elite. “A brand new deck of cards lay on the pillow” (5, p. 183) washed away, the meaning of this phrase completely corresponds to the phrase “There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow”. Perhaps the author wants to show by this repetition that the fate of the players is already a foregone conclusion and it is impossible to break this vicious circle. “... One of the players patted her with a dirty hand with thin, white non-working fingers” (5, p. 183). This is the hand of Sevochka, the local baron. This hero is two-faced - the opposition of white and black. “The nail of the little finger was of supernatural length…” (5, p.183) Since ancient times, there has been an opinion among the people that certain signs of the beast are always preserved in the appearance of the devil - horns, hooves, claws. We could consider this semantic connection to be accidental, however, there is a lot of evidence and correlations between Sevochka and the devil in the text: “Sevochka's nail drew intricate patterns in the air. The cards either disappeared from his palm or appeared again” (5, p. 185).

Based on the foregoing, we allow ourselves to suggest that Naumov, without realizing it, signed a sentence for himself - he sat down to play cards with the "devil", and if he comes out of this fight alive, then he definitely will not become a winner.

But Naumov is not as pure as it seems: on his chest is a quote from Yesenin's poem "How few roads have been traveled, how many mistakes have been made." Yesenin is a kind of political hooligan, which is why he is recognized by convicts as a poet. Naumov does not believe in God, however, there is a cross on his chest. The cross on the body of an unbeliever testifies to the venality of the soul. In thieves' semantics, the cross is a sign of high society.

Sevochka starts the game. “Sevochka shuffled cards ...” (5, p. 185). The story is told directly from the point of view of the narrator. He and his friend Garkunov are daily witnesses of the games. In the meantime, Naumov managed to lose everything, except for worthless and useless government items. “According to the rules, the fight cannot be over while the partner can respond with something else” (5, p. 185).

“Naumov stakes some kind of cigar with a repressed profile of Gogol” (5, p. 185), this direct appeal to the Ukrainian period of Gogol’s work naturally connects “On the Presentation” with “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, saturated with peculiar devilry. Thus, references to folklore and public literary works firmly introduce the thug gambler into the informal associative array. Naumov is ruined. The only hope is the risk - to go to the show. An introduction is like a bet "for hire", an opportunity to recoup without having anything. Sevochka was a little naughty and, in the end, in the role of a sort of benefactor, agreed to give him a chance.

"He won back the blanket, the pillow, the pants - and again he lost everything." “Heavy black eyes looked around. My hair is tangled” (5, p. 186) - Naumov seems to be going crazy. He is painfully aware of the horror of the situation. The phrase dropped by Sevochka: "I'll wait," refers not only to the proposal to weld the chifirka, but also directly to Naumov's loss. The presentation was given only for an hour, and card debt is a matter of honor. A thought suddenly appeared in his head: “If there are no left of your own things to pay off, you need to take them from the weaker one!” Two more heroes appear on the arena of the card fight - this is the narrator and his friend Garkunov. Having discovered that one can profit from something only at Garkunov's, Naumov calls him to him. This textile engineer is a man not broken by camp life. (The hero is already unusual in that he has a profession that is not typical for the camp) The textile engineer creates, connects, ... and in the camp there is only one devastation and nothing more.) He, like chain mail, is protected by a sweater knitted by his wife from the surrounding abomination. This thing is his memory of a past life, he does not lose hope of returning.

In response to Garkunov's negative answer regarding the sweater, several people rushed at him and knocked him down, but in vain. Garkunov was not going to give up so easily. In the camp there is no place for bright feelings, such as friendship, devotion, or just justice. Naumov's servant, like a faithful knight's squire, attacked the engineer with a knife...

“... Garkunov sobbed and began to roll over on his side.

Couldn't they have done without it! Sevochka shouted.

This character seems to blame everyone for what happened, but in fact he is just upset because the goods are slightly damaged.

“Sashka pulled the sweater off the dead man” (5, p. 187) The blood on the red sweater is not visible - Garkunov's life is worth nothing, and, in the end, one more drop in the sea of blood means absolutely nothing.

“Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing firewood” ...

In the camp, human life is NOTHING, and the person himself is an insect, although even that insect has more rights to life than people in the camp.

There is no person - another will take his place, and this whole diabolical machine will work in the same rhythm, no matter what.

Conclusion

Shalamov Kolyma stories

Shalamov's prose is not just memoirs, memoirs of a man who went through the circles of the Kolyma hell. This is literature of a special kind, "new prose," as the writer himself called it.

The works and life of Varlam Shalamov vividly reflect the fate of the intelligentsia in times of great repression. We should not reject literary works like "Kolyma Tales" - they should serve as an indicator for the present (especially given the degradation that is taking place in the minds of people and which is so clearly seen through the quality of today's culture).

Shalamov's decision to describe the "life" of concentration camp prisoners, which vividly reflects the Stalinist dictatorship, is a heroic act. "Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person - neither the head, nor the prisoner does not need to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. [ ...] For my part, I decided a long time ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this very truth, "wrote Shalamov.

He believed that his works could not fit into the traditional boundaries of Russian literature with its preaching, teaching and humane faith in the high destiny of man. "Art is deprived of the right to preach," wrote Varlam Shalamov. "Art does not ennoble, does not improve people. Art is a way of living, but not a way of knowing life. New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description."

The works of Varlam Shalamov opened an unknown life to the reader, introduced him to new, unknown people - people with an inverted consciousness. It was impossible to use the traditional methods of artistic creation to describe this.

There are no analogues to Varlam Shalamov and his Kolyma Tales in world culture. Let's hope they don't. If there is no new Kolyma. But there is already a lot of evidence that the new Kolyma has been designed and is being created. Right in our minds. The disintegration of the personality now does not take place in permafrost, under the barking of escort dogs, now slaves do not need to be taken to the tundra and fed with gruel, now slaves - new, ultra-modern, perfectly obedient - are easier and cheaper to grow from the cradle with the help of media technologies, manipulation of mass consciousness. Shalamov is gone, his memory is kept by a small group of brave idealists. The self-satisfied and squeamish "progressive humanity" has won. But as long as there are books by Varlam Shalamov, it will not be able to triumph.

Literature

1. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. M., 1991. 357 p.

2.Andrey Rubanov "Varlam Shalamov as a mirror of Russian capitalism"

Shalamovsky collection: Vol. 3. Comp. V. V. Esipov]. - Vologda: Griffon, 2002. - S.35-38.

Artistic prose texts, articles and correspondence by V.Shalamov

Http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2001/6/suhuh.html Igor Sukhikh "To live after Kolyma" (1954 - 1973. "Kolyma stories" by V. Shalamov)

.Elena Mikhailik "In the context of literature and history"

Shalamov V.<Автобиографические заметки>Introduction and publication I. Sirotinskaya // Literary newspaper. 1987.8 July C.6.

Jacque Rossi. Guide to the Gulag: In two parts. M., 1991. 4.1. 317. p. 4.2. 284 p.

Shalamov V. Requiem: Shalamov V. Sobr. cit.: In 4 vols. Vol. 3. Poems. M., 1998. S. 136.

Esipov V.V. Shalamov. - M.: Young guard, 2012. - 346 p.: ill. - (The life of remarkable people: a series of biogr.; Issue 1374).

Nekrasova, Irina Vladimirovna Varlam Shalamov-prose writer: Problematics and poetics: dis. ... cand. philol. Sciences: 10.01.01. Samara, 1995.

Anoshina, Anna Valerievna Artistic world of Varlam Shalamov: dis. ... cand. philol. Sciences: 10.01.01. Severodvinsk, 2006. Supervisor - Professor E.Ya. Fesenko. Thesis defense date: December 8, 2006

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The work of Varlam Shalamov belongs to the Russian literature of the 20th century, and Shalamov himself is recognized as one of the most outstanding and talented writers of this century.

His works are imbued with realism and unbending courage, and "Kolyma Tales", his main artistic legacy, is the clearest example of all the motives of Shalamov's work.

Each story included in the collection of short stories is reliable, since the writer himself had to endure the Stalinist Gulag and all the torments of the camps that followed it.

Man and the totalitarian state

As mentioned earlier, "Kolyma Tales" is dedicated to the life that an incredible number of people had to endure who went through the ruthless Stalinist camps.

Thus, Shalamov raises the main moral issue of that era, reveals the key problem of that time - this is the confrontation between the individual person and the totalitarian state, which does not spare human destinies.

Shalamov does this through the depiction of the life of people exiled to camps, because this is already the final moment of such a confrontation.

Shalamov does not shy away from harsh reality and shows the whole reality of that so-called "life process" that devours human personalities.

Changes in the values of human life

In addition to the fact that the writer shows how severe, inhuman and unfair punishment this is, Shalamov focuses on who a person is forced to turn into after the camps.

This topic is especially clearly highlighted in the story “Dry rations”, Shalamov shows how much the will and oppression of the state suppresses the personal principle in a person, how much his soul will be dissolved in this malicious state machine.

Through physical abuse: constant hunger and cold, people were turned into animals, no longer aware of anything around, wanting only food and warmth, denying all human feelings and experiences.

The values of life become elementary things that transform the human soul, turn a person into an animal. All that people begin to desire is to survive, all that controls them is a dull and limited thirst for life, a thirst just to be.

Artistic techniques in "Kolyma stories"

These almost documentary stories are imbued with a subtle, powerful philosophy and spirit of courage and courage. Many critics emphasize the special composition of the entire book, which consists of 33 stories, but does not lose its integrity.

Moreover, the stories are not arranged in chronological order, but this composition does not lose its semantic purpose. On the contrary, Shalamov's stories are arranged in a special order, which allows you to see the life of people in the camps fully, to feel it as a single organism.

The artistic techniques used by the writer are striking in their thoughtfulness. Shalamov uses laconism in describing the nightmare that people experience in such inhuman conditions.

This creates an even more powerful and tangible effect of what is described - after all, he speaks dryly and realistically about the horror and pain that he himself managed to experience.

But "Kolyma stories" consist of different stories. For example, the story "Tombstone" is saturated with unbearable bitterness and hopelessness, and the story "Sherry Brandy" shows how much a person is above circumstances and that for any life is filled with meaning and truth.

Analysis of several stories from the cycle "Kolyma stories"

General analysis of the "Kolyma Tales"

In the manuscript of V. Shalamov "Kolyma Tales" there are 33 stories - both very small (for 1 - 3 pages), and more. It is immediately felt that they were written by a qualified, experienced writer. Most are read with interest, have a sharp plot (but the plotless short stories are thoughtfully and interestingly constructed), are written in a clear and figurative language (and even though they mainly tell about the “thieves' world”, the manuscript does not feel a passion for argotism). So, if we talk about editing in the sense of stylistic correction, “shaking up” the composition of stories, etc., then the manuscript, in essence, does not need such revision.

Shalamov is a master of naturalistic descriptions. Reading his stories, we plunge into the world of prisons, transit points, camps. The story is told in the third person. The collection is, as it were, an eerie mosaic, each story is a photographic piece of the daily life of prisoners, very often - "criminals", thieves, swindlers and murderers in places of detention. All the heroes of Shalamov are different people: military and civilian, engineers and workers. They got used to the camp life, absorbed its laws. Sometimes, looking at them, we do not know who they are: whether they are intelligent creatures or animals in which only one instinct lives - to survive at all costs. The scene from the story “Duck” seems comical to us, when a person tries to catch a bird, and she turns out to be smarter than him. But gradually we understand the tragedy of this situation, when the “hunt” did not lead to anything, except for fingers frostbitten forever and lost hopes of the possibility of being crossed out of the “sinister list”. But in people ideas about mercy, compassion, conscientiousness still live. It's just that all these feelings are hidden under the armor of a camp experience that allows you to survive. Therefore, it is considered shameful to deceive someone or eat food in front of hungry companions, as the hero of the story “Condensed Milk” does. But the strongest thing in the prisoners is the thirst for freedom. Even if for a moment, but they wanted to enjoy it, feel it, and then it’s not scary to die, but by no means captured - there is death. Therefore, the protagonist of the story “Major Pugachev's Last Fight” prefers to kill himself rather than surrender.

The author in the most detailed way (by the way, there are a number of cases when the same - literally, verbatim - descriptions of certain scenes are found in several stories) describes everything - how they sleep, wake up, eat, walk, dress, work, " having fun” prisoners; how brutally the guards, doctors, camp authorities treat them. Each story speaks of continuously sucking hunger, constant cold, illness, unbearable hard labor, from which they fall down, about incessant insults and humiliations, about the fear that never leaves the soul of being offended, beaten, crippled, stabbed to death by “criminals ", which the camp authorities are also afraid of. Several times V. Shalamov compares the life of these camps with Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead and each time comes to the conclusion that Dostoevsky's House of the Dead is heaven on earth compared to what the characters in the Kolyma Tales experience. The only ones who thrive in the camps are thieves. They rob and kill with impunity, terrorize doctors, pretend, do not work, give bribes right and left - and live well. There is no control over them. Constant torment, suffering, exhausting work, driving to the grave - this is the lot of honest people who are driven here on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, but in fact they are people who are innocent of anything.

Moreover, all descriptions are very visible, very detailed, often with numerous naturalistic details.

The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as an absolute evil. Shalamova considers the GULAG as an exact copy of the Stalinist totalitarian society model: “... The camp is not a contrast between hell and paradise. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like. The camp - hell - is a constant association that comes to mind while reading the Kolyma Tales. This association arises not even because you are constantly faced with the inhuman torments of prisoners, but also because the camp seems to be the kingdom of the dead. So, the story "Tombstone" begins with the words: "Everyone died ..." On each page you meet with death, which here can be named among the main characters. All heroes, if we consider them in connection with the prospect of death in the camp, can be divided into three groups: the first - heroes who have already died, and the writer remembers them; the second, those who are almost certain to die; and the third group - those who may be lucky, but this is not certain. This statement becomes most obvious if we recall that the writer in most cases talks about those whom he met and whom he survived in the camp: a man who was shot for not fulfilling the plan by his plot, his classmate, whom they met 10 years later in the Butyrskaya cell prison, a French communist whom the brigadier killed with one blow of his fist...

For a long time, for a long time, I wanted to analyze in detail, paragraph by paragraph, at least one work of such a recognized authority in the field of describing the sheer horrors of the Gulag, the second master after the Great Solzhenitsyn, like Varlam Shalamov.

And then I accidentally fell into the hands of a 1989 issue of the Novy Mir magazine. I re-read it, and finally decided that it was impossible to do without a detailed analysis. Analysis not from the point of view of literary criticism, but based on elementary logic and common sense, designed to simply answer the question: is the author honest with us, can he be trusted, is it permissible to take what is described in his stories as an objective historical picture?

It is enough to show on the example of one story - "Lesha Chekanov, or Odnodeltsy in Kolyma".
But first - about Shalamov's "creative method" from his own words. Here is what the author thinks about objectivity and reliability: " It is important to resurrect the feeling<...>, extraordinary new details, descriptions in a new way are needed in order to force believe in the story, in everything else not as in the information but as in an open heart wound".
And we will see that the whole story boils down to the fact that the facts described there by Shalamov himself, as such, sharply diverge from the way he seeks to "present" them. Facts are facts. And the conclusions are what Shalamov urges us to draw from them, imposes his own view, as a priori objective. Let's see how the first and second fit together.

So let's go: "We were taken to Kolyma to die, and since December 1937 they were thrown into the Garanin executions, into beatings, into hunger. The lists of the executed were read day and night."(from RP: Why read the lists of those who have been spread out to convicts - after all, they don’t really know each other, especially if they do it at night?)

"We were taken to Kolyma to die" - this is the leading leitmotif in all Shalamov's stories. Expanded, this means the following: the Gulag and in particular its Kolyma branches - were death camps, extermination camps, those who got there were doomed to death. This is repeated in different ways on each page many times. Therefore, our task will be impartially, not succumbing to the author's cries and sobs, to consider, relying only on his own words, to find out - is it really so?

"Everyone who did not die at Serpantinnaya, the Mining Directorate's investigative prison, where tens of thousands were shot to the hum of tractors in 1938, was shot according to the lists, daily to the orchestra, to the carcasses read twice a day on divorces - day and night shifts."- Strange inconsistencies are already beginning in such a short segment of the text.

First: why did you need to take tens and hundreds of thousands of prisoners to distant lands, VERY far, to the edge of geography, spend food on them on the way, diesel fuel and coal for steam locomotives and ships, food and money for the maintenance of thousands of escorts, build the camps themselves, etc. .P. - if no one interfered with the execution of all these people (if they wanted to be shot) in the cellars of those prisons in which they were imprisoned upon arrest? What hindered? UN? Journalists? LiveJournal community with its gossip? Then this was not the case. Nothing stood in the way technically.

Secondly, it is not clear what the mass execution of tens of thousands of people looked like from a legal point of view? No, I do not idealize the justice of that time. But still - a verdict is a verdict, it is passed by the court. And if the court pronounced a verdict - deprivation of liberty, then how can one shoot, I emphasize, not just rot at work, starve, etc. - namely, officially massively shoot? now the stage has come for the head of the camp - 1000 people, each has his own term, his own article, his own business. And he them all in one fell swoop - r-r-time! and under the hum of tractors! How will he explain this to his superiors that his camp has become empty? were they all killed while trying to escape? he was sent to contain and protect them, and he sprayed them all. By what right, by command, how will he confirm that they have not fled?

(from RP: By the way, where are the graves of tens and hundreds of thousands of those who were shot? After all, they should be comparable in size to at least Babi Yar. During the 20 years of the rule of the anti-Soviet, not a single such burial was found - and archives and aerial photography and everything else should be at their disposal. And everything is simple - there are no these graves of tens and hundreds of thousands who were shot in Kolyma. Generally.)

And again - we return to the first point: why was it necessary to carry for 15,000 kilometers? What, there were no tractors in the European part of the USSR?

Third. Tractors and an orchestra do not fit together at all. Tractors - they (if we accept that they were and were buzzing) to hide the fact of executions from the prisoners. And the execution to the orchestra, in front of everyone - to show: this will happen to everyone. How does it fit together? So that at the same time they do not know, but tremble? Or to be afraid, but unaware of the executions?

"I "sailed" dozens of times, wandered from the face to the hospital and back"- it's about life in the camp of death, destruction and total pestilence. Shalamov honestly writes that he was not allowed to die TENS of times. He was led or carried to the hospital, and there he was nursed. Why nursed, and not just - "recovered"? Yes, because just to recover, to "survive", you can two or three times. Not dozens. An extremely emaciated organism cannot survive by labor, cold, beatings on its own.

Here is one of two:
- either the "death camps" did not set themselves the goal of destroying their prisoners, since they pulled them out of the grave dozens of times
- or, if Shalamov himself recovered dozens of times, then the living and working conditions were not at all as hellish as they paint them.

"The means of physical destruction of the political enemies of the state - this is the main role of the foreman in production, and even on one that serves the extermination camps"- here again sounds "annihilation camps". But new details are emerging. It turns out that not everyone was shot (but what about a little higher, what - "everyone", to the orchestras from tractors?). It turns out that a labor process is needed, in which the main role is assigned to the foreman, whose purpose is to destroy the enemies of the state (political ones, remember this).

"The crimes of the brigadiers in Kolyma are incalculable - they are the physical executors of Moscow's high policy of the Stalin years" - and a little higher "The foreman is, as it were, the breadwinner and provider of the brigade, but only within the limits that are allotted to him from above. He himself is under strict control, you won’t go far on postscripts - the mine surveyor in the next measurement will expose fake, advanced cubes, and then the brigadier is dead. Therefore the foreman follows a proven, reliable path - knocking these cubes out of hard workers, knocking them out in the most real physical sense - with a pick on the back".

It turns out that the main culprits are the same forced people ( "For five people, a permanent foreman is allocated, not released from work, of course, but the same hard worker"), moreover - within certain limits - the breadwinners and drinkers of their brigades, whose crime is that they force their comrades to work. How - we will see further.
"That's why, in the few statistics and numerous memoirs, the exact, historically obtained formula was noted:" A person can swim in two weeks. at hard work, beaten, fed only with camp rations and not allowed to sleep ... Two weeks - this is the period that turns a healthy person into a goner. I knew all this, I understood that there is no salvation in labor, and I wandered from the hospital to the slaughterhouse and back for eight years." .

Ah, that's the point! Yes, our author is a simulator!! While - as he claims - the strong men reach "in two weeks" (and again our main question: why were they transported over 15,000 km?), Varlam Tikhonovich wanders from the hospital to the slaughter and back for 8 years. Apparently, he was warmed by the idea that while others "swim", he must survive in order to tell...

But here the lafa and bullshit ends:
"At the brigadier he (new foreman - approx.)immediately inquired about my work behavior. The characteristic was given negative (that's strange! - note).

- Well, b ..., - Lesha Chekanov said loudly, looking me straight in the eyes, - do you think that if we are from the same prison, then you don’t need to work? I don't help Philosophers. You deserve it with hard work. Honest work.

From that day on, I was driven more diligently than before."

Here it is - the immeasurable crime of an accomplice the high politics of Moscow in the Stalin years.

Here, you understand, Varlam Tikhonovich outlived his fellow campers who died-in-two-weeks by 208 times, and they began to drive him more diligently. It should be noted that they did not put him in a punishment cell, did not cut his rations, did not beat off his kidneys, did not even shoot him. They just began to pay more attention to how he works.

Then Shalamov will be sent for correction to the brigades to the fanatic, and this is what happens to him:
“Every day, in front of the whole brigade, Sergey Polupan beat me: with his feet, fists, a log, a pick handle, a shovel. He beat my literacy out of me. . Polupan knocked out several of my teeth, broke a rib ".

I'm afraid to seem cynical, but let people with a medical education pull me up or correct me: Shalamov writes that he was beaten for many days and weeks in a row. They beat me with a pick (that is, with a pick), a crowbar, a log, and just with their fists. Tell me, knowledgeable people, I would especially like to hear the opinion of forensic experts or pathologists: how can a person live and get off with JUST a few teeth and a broken rib, who is beaten with all their might with a CROWBAR AND KYLE - beaten for many, many days in a row ???? I don’t know how much that crowbar and that pick weighed, but obviously not less than a few kilograms. Please describe what happens to the bones and soft tissues of a person who has been charged with a pick or a crowbar in the head, or in the arms, or simply in the body? ( From RP: Trotsky had one blow with an ice ax - in fact, a pick. One blow with a crowbar, as a rule, interrupts the hand, almost always if it hits - the bones of the hand, after several blows to soft tissues, and even inflicted by a "hot person", the victim will not be able to work accurately.)

Citizen Shalamov was tenacious ...
But all bad things come to an end, and here Shalamov goes to "The Central Northern Directorate - to the village of Yagodny, like a malicious filon, to initiate a criminal case and a new term".
“In the detention center, investigators are sent to work, trying to knock out at least one working hour from the transit day, and the investigators do not like this rooted tradition of camps and transits.
But I didn’t go to work, of course, to try to knock out some kind of norm in a hole made of stone, but simply to get some air, to ask, if they give me, an extra bowl of soup.
In the city, even in the camp city, which was the village of Yagodny, it was better than in the isolation ward, where every log smelled of mortal sweat. For going to work they gave soup and bread, or soup and porridge, or soup and herring.

We continue to be amazed at the order in the "extermination camps" system. Not for the work done, but only for exit to it, give soup and porridge, and you can even beg for an extra bowl.

For comparison, how they fed in real extermination camps, in German:
"On August 6, 1941, the high command of the German army issued an order regarding the food ration of Soviet prisoners of war; according to this order, for 28 days each of them was supposed to:
6 kg of bread - 200 gr. in a day,
400 g of meat - 15 gr. in a day,
440 g fat - 15 g per day and
600 grams of sugar - 21 grams per day.
It can be assumed that they did not give extra bowls.
And here is how they ate in besieged Leningrad: "The fifth reduction in food rations - to 250 grams of bread per day for workers and 125 grams for the rest - occurred on November 20, 1941"

And how did they feed Comrade Shalamov for going to work? Like this:
"Nutritional norm No. 1 (basic) of a prisoner of the Gulag in 1948 (per 1 person per day in grams) :

Bread 700 (800 for hard workers) - !!! compare with German and blockade soldering !!!
Wheat flour 10
Groats different 110
Pasta and vermicelli 10
Meat 20
Fish 60
Fats 13
Potatoes and vegetables 650
Sugar 17
Salt 20
Tea surrogate 2
Tomato puree 10
Pepper 0.1
Bay leaf 0.1" - from here

“My investigation ended in nothing, they didn’t wind up a new term for me. Someone higher reasoned that the state would gain little benefit by adding a new term to me again.”- I wonder why the state reasoned differently, shooting tens of thousands of people convicted under the same Article 58 as Shalamov under the hum of tractors? .. What has changed so dramatically in the state? Or maybe Shalamov above in the text is simply lying?

And finally, the story ends with the fact that the hated monster Polupan is killed, and also with the words "Then they chopped off a lot of foreman's heads, and on our vitamin business trip the blatari sawed off the hated foreman's head with a two-handed saw." .

Remember, I asked you to remember that the brigadiers were the instrument of murder of precisely the political enemies of the state? But in these words we see how the brigadier is killed not by some political, but by the blatari - they kill cruelly and subtly - because they wanted to force him to work. Shalamov is in solidarity with the blatars. The spirit itself did not have enough for anything, only for philonism, but - I agree.

Here is such a story. Lie on lie. Lies seasoned with pathos and hypocrisy. Who has a different opinion?

Ukrainologist

The first half of the 20th century was a truly bloody time for Russia. Naturally, wars, a series of revolutions, the period of collectivization, the emergence of fascist and Stalinist camps should have exacerbated interest in the problem of death in literature, but the problem of the tragic was comprehended in the literature of the Soviet period, then " distorted and largely selective» Ideological censorship also played a big role in this. G. Mitin noted a peculiar historical paradox of what was happening: “ When the era of death ended in the life of our society, only then did death enter our literature.» .

One of those who were not afraid to turn to the theme of death in Soviet literature was V.T. Shalamov. And it couldn't be otherwise. It is known that the Kolyma camps, about which he wrote, were the most severe: “ To return from there alive physically and with a living soul was considered a miracle.» . Therefore, it is not surprising that the characters Kolyma stories The people became doomed. V.T. Shalamov often depicts the death of his characters, describing the physiological signs of dying in a rather naturalistic way (his medical education affected), but thanks to multi-layered metaphors, symbols, intertextual connections, a philosophical subtext is created in his almost sketchy prose, which allows the author to reflect not only on physical death, but also about spiritual death, while noting that " there is nothing in the camp that would not be in the wild, in its social and spiritual structure» . M.Ya. Heller wrote about this: Kolyma stories” is a book about the camp, but first of all about the world that created the camp, the place of destruction of man. Destruction even when a person survived.

V.T. Shalamov describes in detail the forces that killed people in Kolyma: “ Perhaps the most terrible, merciless was the cold ... The very first frostbite: fingers, hands, nose, ears, everything that was caught by the slightest movement of air» . Winter for Kolyma residents is the most terrible time of the year. V " Kolyma stories» Permafrost, cold and snow are not only a real threat to people, but also a symbol of hopelessness, loss, and death. It was in the last minutes before leaving " on an icy night ... in this indecisive hustle at the half-open doors, from where icy steam creeps, human character is shown. One, overpowering his trembling, strode straight into the darkness, the other hurriedly sucked the butt of a shag cigarette that had come from nowhere, where there was no smell or trace of shag; the third shaded the face from the cold wind; the fourth stood over the stove, holding mittens and gaining warmth in them» (« Conspiracy of lawyers"). This is how V.T. Shalamov the departure of a person into oblivion.

In many stories, the writer shows how the cold gets not only to the bones, but also to the human soul: “ Wanderers just crossed the boundaries of good and evil, heat and cold» (« Glove»); « So is the soul, it froze, shrank and, perhaps, will forever remain cold.» (« Carpenters"). It is no longer the physical sensations of people that are emphasized, but the state of their soul, the existential state when a person is in " border situation between life and death.

No less terrible, killing the body and soul of a person in a short time, was hunger. V.T. Shalamov in many stories describes with medical accuracy the physiological processes occurring in the body of a starved person: “ I understood that the body, and therefore the brain cells, were not getting enough nutrition, my brain had long been on a starvation diet, and that this would inevitably lead to insanity, early sclerosis, or something else ...» (« Rain"). From hunger, speech was difficult for people, memory weakened: “ The words were spoken slowly and difficultly - it was like a translation from a foreign language. I forgot everything. I'm used to remembering", - says the hero of the story" Dominoes". In the story " sherry brandy» Hunger takes on additional metaphorical meaning. Shalamov describes the death of the poet from hunger: life either leaves him or returns again, “ like poetry, like inspiration»; before death " it was given to him to know that life was an inspiration". The writer asks the question: What does it mean: died as a poet?". According to Shalamov, a poet dies when he cannot create. The Austrian scientist V. Frankl, who worked with concentration camp prisoners for decades, noted in his writings that it is vital for a person to be able to realize his “productive creative actions” and receive values as a result “ creative» . V.T. Shalamov has repeatedly described how the camp kills creative abilities in people, thereby deforming their psyche and killing them.

No less than cold and hunger, overwork and physical abuse ruined a person. V.T. Shalamov describes cases when people fell dead during work and were beaten to death, during which all the insides were beaten off the prisoners. But even if a person was not killed, violence against a person, his constant suppression, was fatal. The author describes the process of dulling the feelings of a person who is at the mercy of someone else's will: “ Nothing worried us anymore, it was easy for us to live in the power of someone else's will. We did not even care about saving our lives, and if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the schedule of the camp day.", - the heroes of the story " Dry rations". In a prisoner, his individuality and self-esteem were suppressed, as a result, a person died as a person. According to F. Apanovich, “ force becomes for Shalamov a synonym for evil, metaphysical evil, penetrating the entire basis of existence and at the same time putting existence under attack, trying to lead it to death, to non-existence» . According to the observations of V.T. Shalamova: " 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.": many prisoners began to believe that the truth of camp life at" blatary”, almost everyone learned to steal. Analyzing the behavior of prisoners in the camp, V. Esipov cites the words of B. Betteleim (a former prisoner of Dachau and Buchenwald): “ The camp was a training ground for turning free and honest people into not just whimpering slaves, but slaves who learned in many ways the values of their masters.» .

In identifying the causes of spiritual death of people, V.T. Shalamov is close to the existentialists in many ways, but in his emotional attitude to death " future dead”, about which he writes, and the existential heroes of Western European philosophers and writers, significant differences can be identified. Thus, the awareness of the finiteness, temporality of life causes disappointment, melancholy, boredom in the characters of Sartre and Camus. According to K. Jaspers, “ fear is intensified in consciousness by the inevitability of disappearing like a lost point in empty space, for all human connections are significant only in time» . Characters « Kolyma stories”are striking in their indifferent attitude to death, the absence of fear of it, there is no specific aura of death around them - neither horror nor disgust, it becomes an everyday phenomenon. A.I. Bunin showed in his story " gentleman from san francisco”, how people are indifferent and casual about the death of another person, and Shalamov’s heroes of his works are just as indifferent, doomed to their death.

Many of Shalamov's psychological discoveries coincide with the scientific research of psychologists who went through concentration camps. So, I. Cohen and V. Frankl, describing the psychology of people who survived the concentration camps, considered their lack of fear as a kind of psychological defense mechanism. At first, a person in the camp is shocked by the discrepancy between reality, as it should be, and the reality in which he fell (“ income shock" or " primary reaction phase"). V.T. Shalamov in the story " Single metering"Describes Dugaev's emotions:" Everything he saw and heard here surprised him more than frightened him.»; learning that he was being led to execution, Dugaev regretted that he had worked in vain, this last day was tormented in vain". Psychologists define the second phase as " adaptation phase". Describing it, V. Frankl recalls F.M. Dostoevsky, who noticed that a person is a creature that gets used to everything. Cohen also noted great» physical and spiritual adaptability of a person. According to V.T. Shalamova, a man became a man " because he was physically stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced his spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle» .

V.T. Shalamov, like V. Frankl and I. Cohen, raised the issue of suicide in the camp, noting that their number was relatively small, given the unthinkable living conditions. They all concluded that, firstly, the instinct of life plays a big role in this: Hungry and angry, I knew that nothing in the world would make me commit suicide. It was at this time that I began to understand the essence of the great instinct of life", - said the hero of the story" Rain»; secondly, apathy, which, like shock, is a protective reaction of the body. Almost all the characters of V.T. Shalamova, having spent considerable time in the camp, become fatalists. They don't count your life further, as a day ahead". It all comes down to satisfying immediate needs: Like this, mixing "star" questions in the brain(about soup, stove and cigarettes - A.A.), I waited, soaked to the skin, but calm", - says a man who spent three days in a cold pit in the incessant rain (" Rain"). A person begins to live with the lowest animal instincts, he is reduced to an animal state and, according to V. Frankl, “ falls into cultural dormancy". Shalamov was convinced that human culture was " extremely fragile»: « A man becomes a beast after three weeks - with hard work, cold, hunger and beatings» .

Despite all the protective reactions of the body, cases of suicide in the camp still happened. People voluntarily passed away, having lost the meaning of existence. This psychological phenomenon was well known to Shalamov. So, in the story Rain' the narrator, hearing the cry of his comrade: ' I realized that there is no meaning to life”, rushes to save him, even before he made a suicide attempt. V. Frankl in his book cites similar observations of the military psychiatrist Nardini, who stated that the chance to survive in prison depends on a person’s attitude to life, he must be aware that “ survival is his duty, that it has meaning» . Speaking about the meaning of life as a factor that contributed to survival in the camp, V. Frankl noted that “ no psychiatrist and no psychotherapist - including the logotherapist - can tell the patient what the meaning is". However, he is entitled to state that life has meaning and even, moreover, that it retains this meaning in any conditions and under any circumstances...» [Ibid: 40]. He was convinced that " ...suffering, guilt, death... in no way detract from the meaning of life, but, on the contrary, in principle, they can always be transformed into something positive. There is no doubt that a poet is incomparably better and easier than a scientist to convey to an inexperienced reader the essence of such a premise.» [Ibid: 23].

« Kolyma stories» Shalamova is an artistic and philosophical study of the inner world of a person in a death camp. In particular, they analyze the psychology of bodily and spiritual dying. When creating the "poetics of death", the writer uses the language of symbols, metaphors, allusions, reminiscences.

List of used literature

1. Apanovich F. Filippika against force // Shalamovsky collection. Vologda, 1997. Issue. 2.

2. Geller M. Ya. "Kolyma Tales" or "Left Bank"? // Russian thought = La pensee russe. Paris, 1989. 22 Sept. No. 3794.

3. Esipov V. The norm of literature and the norm of being: Notes on the writer's fate: Notes on the writer's fate of Varlam Shalamov / / Free Thought. M., 1994. No. 4.

5. Mishin G. About life. About death. About the eternal // Literature at school. 1995. No. 3.

6. Toper P. Tragic in the art of the XX century // Questions of literature. 2000. No. 2.

7. Shalamov V. T. Favorites. SPb., 2003.

8. Shalamov V. T. New book: Memoirs. Notebooks. Correspondence. Investigative cases. M, 2004.

9. Shalamov V. T. About prose // Shalamov V. Several of my lives. Prose. Poetry. Essay. M., 1996.

10. Frankl V. Man in search of meaning. M., 1990.

11. Jaspers K. Spiritual situation of time // Jaspers K. Meaning and purpose of history. M., 1994.

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