The first problem in analyzing the CD (as the author himself designated the cycle) is ethical. It is well known what personal experience and material lies behind the text; almost twenty years of imprisonment in Soviet concentration camps, fifteen of them in Kolyma (1937 - 1951).
Can a cry be assessed according to rhetorical laws? Is it possible to talk about genre, composition and other professional things in the presence of such suffering?
It is possible and even necessary. Varlam Shalamov did not ask for leniency.
Shalamov’s main aesthetic manifesto, the article “On Prose” (1965), is supported by numerous “notes about poetry,” extended fragments in letters, notes in workbooks, and finally, comments in the stories themselves and poems about poetry. What we have here is a type of reflective artist common in the 20th century, trying first to understand and then to implement.
Shalamov’s personal, internal theme is not the prison, not the camp in general, but Kolyma with its experience of the grandiose, unprecedented, unprecedented extermination of man and the suppression of humanity. “Kolyma Stories” is a depiction of new psychological patterns in human behavior, people in new conditions. Are they still human? Where is the border between man and animal? Definitions may vary, nevertheless, always gravitating towards the extreme: “People are depicted here in an extremely important, not yet described state, when a person approaches a state close to the state of humanity” (“About my prose”).
The twentieth century, according to Shalamov, became a real “collapse of humanism.” And, accordingly, a catastrophe occurred with the main literary genre, the aesthetic “spine” of the 19th century: “The novel is dead. And no force in the world will resurrect this literary form. People who went through revolutions, wars, concentration camps do not care about the novel.” The novel must be replaced by new prose - a document, an eyewitness testimony, transformed into an image with his blood, feeling, talent.
Shalamov describes in detail the structure of this prose. Heroes: people without a biography, without a past and without a future. Action: plot completeness. Narrator: transition from first to third person, transitioning hero. Style: short, slap-in-the-face phrase; purity of tone, cutting off all the husks of halftones (like Gauguin), rhythm, a single musical structure; accurate, true, new detail, at the same time transferring the story to a different plane, giving “subtext”, turning into a detail-sign, detail-symbol; special attention to the beginning and ending, until these two phrases are found and formulated in the brain - the first and the last - there is no story. The hypnosis of Shalamov’s clarity and aphorism is such that the poetics of the Kyrgyz Republic are usually perceived from the angle specified by the author. Meanwhile, like any great writer, his theoretical “generative model” and specific aesthetic practice are not absolutely adequate, which is noticeable even in small things.
Rejecting Tolstoy’s method of going through several options for Katyusha Maslova’s eye color in his drafts (“absolute anti-art”), Shalamov declares: “Is there really an eye color for any hero of the Kolyma Tales - if they are there? In Kolyma there were no people who had would be the color of the eyes, and this is not an aberration of my memory, but the essence of life at that time.”
Let's look at the texts of the Kyrgyz Republic. “...a black-haired fellow, with such a pained expression of black, deeply sunken eyes...” (“To the performance”). “Her eyes flashed with a dark green, emerald fire, somehow out of place, out of place” (“Unconverted”).
But some key provisions of Shalamov’s “art of poetry” are limited and situational, in different places they are formulated in exactly the opposite way, presenting not even a paradox, but an obvious contradiction.
Speaking about the absolute reliability of each story, the reliability of the document, Shalamov can nearby note that he is just a “chronicler of his own soul.” Emphasizing the role of the writer as an eyewitness, a witness and an expert on the material, state that excessive knowledge, going over to the side of the material harms the writer, because the reader ceases to understand him. Talk about types of plot - and say that his stories “have no plot.” Notice that “the one who knows the end is a fabulist, an illustrator,” and let it slip that he has “many notebooks where only the first phrase and the last are written down—this is all the work of the future.” (But isn’t the last phrase the end?). In the same year (1971) to reject a flattering comparison of a fellow writer (Otten: You are the direct heir of all Russian literature - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. - Me: I am the direct heir of Russian modernism - Bely and Remizov. I did not study with Tolstoy , and Bely, and in any of my stories there are traces of this study”) - and actually repeat it (“In a sense, I am a direct heir of the Russian realistic school - documentary, like realism”). And so on...
The CDs begin with a short one-page text “On the Trail,” about how to make a road through virgin snow. The strongest goes first across the snowy vastness, marking its path with deep holes. Those following him step near the trail, but not in the trail itself, then they also return back, changing the tired leader, but even the weakest must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s trail - only then will the road be broken in the end. “And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.” The last phrase turns the landscape picture into a symbol. We are talking about writing, about the relationship between “old” and “new” in it. The hardest thing is for the absolute innovator who goes first. Those small and weak who follow the trail also deserve respect. They go through the necessary part of the journey; the road would not exist without them. The Shalamov symbol can be expanded further. “New Prose,” it seems, was perceived by him as a path through virgin soil.
The volume, boundaries and general structure of the Kolyma cycle became clear after the death of the author, in the early nineties (after the publication efforts of I. Sirotinskaya). 137 texts made up five collections: “Kolyma Stories” itself (33 texts, 1954 – 1962), “Left Bank” (25 texts, 1956 – 1965), “Shovel Artist” (28 texts, 1955 – 1964), “Resurrection larches" (30 texts, 1965 - 1967), "Glove, or KR-2" (21 texts, 1962 - 1973). The corpus of Kolyma prose also includes one more book - “Essays on the Underworld” (8 texts, 1959). It can serve as a starting point for clarifying the nature and genre repertoire of the Kyrgyz Republic in the broad sense of the word.
The trail near which Shalamov steps is obvious here. “Essays...” demonstrate their genre already in the title. Since the forties of the last century, the genre of physiological essay, physiology, has been established in our literature - a detailed, multifaceted description of a selected phenomenon or type, accompanied by reasoning and vivid pictures. The basis of physiology was empirical observations, eyewitness testimony (document). The author was not interested in psychological depths or characters, but in social types, unfamiliar spheres and areas of life.
Invented and implemented under the editorship of Nekrasov, “Physiology of St. Petersburg” became famous in its time. Vl was interested in physiology. Dahl, S. Maksimov (who wrote the three-volume “Siberia and Hard Labor”).
“Essays...” by Shalamov - the physiology of the criminal world of the Soviet era in its prison and camp life. Eight chapters tell about how one gets into the criminal world, what its internal structure and conflicts are, relations with the outside world and the state, solutions to “women’s” and “children’s” issues. Much space is devoted to the problems of thieves’ culture: “Apollo among the thieves,” “Sergei Yesenin and the thieves’ world,” “How they “squeeze novels”.”
The well-worn journalistic pathos of Shalamov’s essay-research is also obvious. He begins with a sharp argument against the “mistakes of fiction” that glorified the criminal world. Here it goes not only to Gorky, I. Babel, N. Pogodin and Ilf and Petrov for the “farmazon” Ostap Bender, but also to V. Hugo and Dostoevsky, who “did not agree to a truthful portrayal of the thieves.” In the text itself, Shalamov harshly repeats several times: “... people unworthy of the title of man.”
The problematics and method of essays, individual motives and “anecdotes” do not disappear anywhere in other CDs. In the fabric of the “new prose” they represent a clearly distinguishable basis. The essays in their pure form in Shalamov’s five books include no less than thirty texts.
As befits a physiologist-chronicler, documentary witness, observer-researcher, Shalamov gives a comprehensive description of the subject, demonstrates various cross-sections of Kolyma “beyond human” life: comparison of prison and camp (“Tatar mullah and clean air”), gold mining, the most terrible general work , the “hellish firebox” of the Kolyma camp “Car 1”, “Car 2”), executions in 1938 (“How it Began”), the story of escapes (“Green Prosecutor”), a woman in the camp (“Lessons of Love”), medicine in Kolyma (“Red Cross”), bath day, which also turns into torment (“In the Bath”).
Around this core, other themes are growing: easier and more specific prison life (“Kombedy”, “Best Praise”), the mystery of the “big trials” of the thirties (“Bukinist”; based on the testimony of a Leningrad security officer, Shalamov believes that they were “a secret pharmacology", "suppression of the will by chemical means" and, possibly, hypnosis), reflections on the role of Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists in modern history ("Gold Medal") and on the relationship between the intelligentsia and the authorities ("At the Stirrup").
In this dense everyday texture, one’s own destiny is written in dotted lines. The prison, where young Shalamov was the head of the cell, met with the old prisoner, Socialist-Revolutionary Andreev, and earned from him “the best praise” (it is mentioned more than once in the texts of the Kyrgyz Republic): “You can sit in prison, you can. I tell you this from the bottom of my heart.” A camp trial in which the experienced convict Shalamov, following a denunciation, received a new term, among other things, for calling Bunin a great Russian writer. Life-saving paramedic courses that turned his fate (“Courses”, “Exam”), Happy hospital poetry evenings with fellow sufferers (“Athens Nights”). The first attempt to escape from the camp world, a trip to the coast of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk immediately after official liberation (“Journey to Ola”).
This CD block does not overcome the document, but demonstrates it. Extracts from newspapers and encyclopedias with precise indications of sources, dozens of real names should confirm the authenticity of events and characters that did not appear on the pages of large, written history. “The time of allegories has passed, the time of direct speech has come. All the killers in my stories are given a real last name.”
The Kolyma camp is fundamentally different from a prison. This is a place where all previous human laws, norms, and habits are abolished. Above each camp gate hangs the slogan “Work is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism” (a detail repeatedly used in the Kyrgyz Republic, but it is never mentioned that these words belonged to Stalin).
The weakest of all in this upside-down world are the intellectuals (their camp nickname is “Ivany Ivanych”), less adapted than others to hard physical labor. They are hated more than others - by order and from the heart - by the camp authorities, as the political “58th Article”, opposed to the “socially close” everyday workers. They are persecuted and robbed by thieves, organized, arrogant, who have placed themselves outside of human morality. They get the worst of it from the foreman, the foreman, the cook - any of the camp authorities from the prisoners themselves, who ensure their precarious well-being with the blood of others.
Powerful, unprecedented physical and mental pressure leads to the fact that within three weeks of general work (Shalamov names this period many times) a person turns into a goner with a completely changed physiology and psychology.
In “Athenian Nights” Shalamov recalls that Thomas More in “Utopia” named four feelings, the satisfaction of which gives a person the highest bliss: hunger, sexual feeling, urination, defecation. “It was these four main pleasures that we were deprived of in the camp...”
In the same way, other feelings on which ordinary human coexistence rests are successively sorted out and discarded.
Friendship? “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those “difficult” living conditions that, as fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough” (“Dry Rations”).
The luxury of human communication? “He did not consult with anyone... For he knew: everyone to whom he told his plan would betray it to his superiors - for praise, for a cigarette butt, just like that...” (“Typhoid Quarantine”).
“...We have been starving for a long time. All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - left us with the meat that we lost during our long fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling" ("Dry Rations").
But then the anger goes away, the soul completely freezes, all that remains is an indifferent existence at this moment of existence, without any memory of the past.
The writing of everyday life, philosophy, and journalism do not form into a linear – plot or problem – picture for Shalamov. “Essays on the Underworld” do not develop into “Physiology of Kolyma... an “experience in artistic research” of one of the islands of the Gulag archipelago. On the contrary, essay fragments, without any chronology of events or author's biography, are freely scattered throughout all five collections, interspersed with things of a completely different genre nature.
The second in the Kyrgyz Republic, immediately after the short “In the Snow” that plays the role of epigraph, is the text “To the Show” with the instantly recognizable first phrase: “We played cards at Naumov’s horse-driver.”
Two thieves are playing, one of them loses everything and, after the last failure, “for the show”, in debt, tries to take off the sweater from a former engineer working in the barracks. He refuses and in an instant scuffle is stabbed by the orderly who poured him soup an hour ago. “Sashka stretched the dead man’s arms, tore his undershirt and pulled the sweater over his head. The sweater was red, and the blood on it was barely noticeable. Sevochka carefully, so as not to stain his fingers, folded the sweater into a plywood suitcase. The game was over and I could go home. Now I had to look for another partner to cut wood.”
“To the show” is written on the material from “Sketches of the Underworld.” From there, whole descriptive blocks go here: here, too, it is told how homemade cards are made from stolen books, the rules of the thieves' game are outlined, the favorite themes of thieves' tattoos are listed, and mention is made of Yesenin, beloved by the world of thieves, to whom an entire chapter is devoted in "Essays...".
But the structure of the whole is completely different here. Documentary essay material turns into a figurative “knot”, into a single, unique event. The sociological characteristics of the types are transformed into psychological traits of the characters' behavior. A detailed description is compressed to a dagger-like single detail (the maps are made not just from a book, but from the “volume of Victor Hugo,” perhaps the same one that depicts the suffering of a noble convict; here they are, real ones, and not fake book thieves, - Yesenin is quoted from tattoo on Naumov’s chest, so this is, indeed, “the only poet recognized and canonized by the criminal world”).
The frank paraphrasing of “The Queen of Spades” in the very first phrase is multifunctional. It demonstrates a change in aesthetic dominance; what happens is seen not in the empirical factuality of the case, but through the prism of literary tradition. It turns out to be a stylistic tuning fork, emphasizing the author’s devotion to “a short, sonorous Pushkin phrase.” It - when the story is brought to the end - demonstrates the difference, the abyss between this world and this: here the bet in a card game, without any mysticism, becomes someone else's life and the inhumanly normal reaction of the narrator is opposed to madness. It finally sets the formula for the genre, to which both “The Queen of Spades” and “Belkin’s Tale”, and the American Beers, beloved by Shalamov in the twenties, and Babel, whom he did not like, are directly related.
The second, along with the essay, genre support of the “new prose” is the old short story. In the short story with its obligatory “suddenly”, climax, pointe, the category of “event” is rehabilitated, different levels of being are restored, necessary for the movement of the plot. Life, presented in the essays and the accompanying commentary as a colorless, hopeless, meaningless plane, again acquires a clear, visual relief, albeit on a different – ​​transcendental – level. The straight line of dying turns into a cardiogram in the novels - survival or death as an event, not extinction.
A former student receives a single measurement and painfully tries to fulfill an impossible quota. The day ends, the warden counts only twenty percent, in the evening the prisoner is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions about the article and the term. “The next day he again worked with the brigade, with Baranov, and on the night of the day after tomorrow the soldiers took him behind the conbase, and led him along a forest path to a place where, almost blocking a small gorge, there stood a high fence with barbed wire stretched across the top, and from where the distant whirring of tractors could be heard at night. And, realizing what the matter was, Dugaev regretted that he had worked in vain, that he had suffered this last day in vain” (“Single Measurement”). The pointe of the novella is the last phrase - the last human feeling before the senseless mercilessness of what is happening. Here you can see an invariant of the motif “the futility of efforts in trying to beat fate.”
Fate plays with a person according to some of its own irrational rules. Diligent work cannot save one. Another is saved thanks to trifles, nonsense. The novella, written ten years after "Single Measurement" and included in another book, seems to begin with the same climax. “Late at night, Krist was called “behind the conbase”... An investigator for especially important cases lived there... Ready for anything, indifferent to everything, Krist walked along a narrow path.” Having checked the prisoner's handwriting, the investigator instructs him to copy out some endless lists, the meaning of which he does not think about. Until the employer ends up with a strange folder in his hands, which, after a painful hesitation “... as if the soul had been illuminated to the bottom and something very important, human was found in it at the very bottom”), the investigator sends it to the burning stove , “...and only many years later I realized that it was his, Krista’s, folder. Many of Christ's comrades had already been shot. The investigator was also shot. But Krist was still alive and sometimes - at least once every few years - he remembered the burning folder, the decisive fingers of the investigator, tearing up Krist’s “case” - a gift to the doomed from the doomed. Krist’s handwriting was life-saving, calligraphic” (“Handwriting”). The dependence of a person’s fate in that world on some random circumstances, on the blowing of the wind, is embodied in a surprisingly invented (of course, invented, and not taken from Kolyma!) changeover plot. Perhaps in those lists that Christ wrote in calligraphic handwriting, there was also the name Dugaev. Perhaps he also copied the paper with the investigator’s name.
In the second type of novelistic structure of the CR, the pointe becomes a thought, a word, usually the last phrase (here Shalamov again resembles his disliked Babel, who more than once used a similar short story-meaning in “Cavalry”).
“Funeral Word” is first built on the leitmotif phrase “everyone died.” Having listed twelve names, indicating with a dotted line twelve lives and deaths - the organizer of the Russian Komsomol, Kirov's referent, Volokolamsk peasant, French communist, sea captain (Shalamov uses this panning more than once in his essays) - the narrator ends with a remark from one of the heroes, dreaming on Christmas evening (here's a Christmas story for you!), unlike others; not about returning home or to prison, picking up cigarette butts in the district committee or eating to the full, but about something completely different. “And I - And his voice was calm and unhurried - would like to be a stump. A human stump, you know, without arms, without legs. Then I would find the strength to spit in their faces for everything they do to us.”
It was not by chance that Shalamov spoke about slap phrases... What has been done is irreversible and unforgivable.
Insisting on the uniqueness of the Kolyma experience and fate, Shalamov harshly formulates: “My idea of ​​life as a blessing, about happiness has changed... First, slaps need to be returned, and only secondarily, alms. Remember evil before good. To remember all the good things is for a hundred years, and all the bad things are for two hundred years. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (“The Glove”).
The implementation of this formula is the text “What I saw and understood” preserved in one of the workbooks. The list of things seen and understood is bitter and unambiguous. It brings together motives and reflections scattered across various essays and short stories of the Kyrgyz Republic: the fragility of human culture and civilization; the transformation of a man into a beast in three weeks through hard work, hunger, cold and beatings; Russian people's passion for complaint and denunciation; the cowardice of the majority; weakness of the intelligentsia; weakness of human flesh; corruption by power; thieves' molestation; corruption of the human soul in general. The list ends at the forty-seventh point.
Only after the CDs were published in full did the author’s protest against isolated publication and perception of individual texts become clear. “Compositional integrity is an important quality of Kolyma Tales.” In this collection, only some stories can be replaced and rearranged, but the main, supporting ones must remain in their places.”
What has been said about the first collection, “Kolyma Tales” itself, is directly related to both “The Left Bank” and “The Shovel Artist.” In essence, within everything Shalamov has done, these three books turn out to be most closely connected, forming a trilogy with a dotted meta-plot, distinct beginnings, plot twists and turns and a denouement.
If, according to Shalamov, the first and last phrases are pivotal in the short story, then in the composition of the book as a whole, the first and last positions are certainly significant.
At the beginning of the CD, Shalamov puts “In the Snow” - a lyrical-symbolic short story, a prose poem (another important genre of the Kolyma cycle), the epigraph of the book, and “To the Showcase” - a pure, classic short story that sets the theme, genre, literary tradition. This is a tuning fork, a model of the whole.
The further sequence is quite free; here, indeed, something can be “rearranged”, because there is no point in rigid super-textual movement.
The last four texts bring together the main themes and genre trends of the book.
“Slanik” is again a lyrical-symbolic short story, rhyming with the initial one in genre and structure. An apparently “naturalistic” description, a landscape picture, as it unfolds, turns into a philosophical parabola: it turns out that we are talking about courage, stubbornness, patience, and the indestructibility of hope.
Stlanik seems to be the only real hero of the hopeless first book of the Kyrgyz Republic.
“The Red Cross” is a physiological essay about the relationship in the camp world of two forces that have a huge impact on the fate of an ordinary prisoner, a hard worker. In “The Red Cross,” Shalamov explores and exposes the criminal legend about special treatment for doctors. The semantic result here, as in “Sketches of the Underworld,” is the direct word. “The atrocities of the thieves in the camp are innumerable... The boss is rude and cruel, the teacher is deceitful, the doctor is unscrupulous, but all these are nothing compared to the corrupting power of the criminal world. They are still people, and no, no, even humanity can be seen in them. The thieves are not people.” This text, in essence, could become a chapter of “Sketches of the Underworld,” completely coinciding with them in structural terms.
“The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” and “Typhoid Quarantine” are two cumulative short stories, varying many times, strengthening the initial situation in order to complete it with a sudden turn. The pendulum of a prisoner's fate, “swinging from life to death, to put it in a high calm” (“The Glove”), is compressed here to one beat. In “The Lawyers' Conspiracy,” the prisoner Andreev is summoned to the commissioner and sent to Magadan. “The route is the artery and main nerve of Kolyma.” Investigators, their offices, cells, guards, random fellow travelers flash in the kaleidoscope of the road (“Where are they taking you? – To Magadan. To be shot. We are condemned”). It turns out that he was sentenced too. Magadan investigator Rebrov is inflating a grandiose case, first by arresting all the lawyer-prisoners in all the mines of the North. After interrogation, the hero finds himself in another cell, but a day later the wind blows in the opposite direction. “We are being released, fool,” said Parfentyev. - Are they releasing? To freedom? That is, not to freedom, but to transfer, to transit... - What happened? Why are we being released? - Captain Rebrov has been arrested. “I have been ordered to release everyone who is on his orders,” someone omniscient said quietly.” As in the short story “Handwriting,” the pursuer and the victim change places. Justice triumphs for a moment in such a strange, perverted form.
In “Typhoid Quarantine,” the same Andreev, fleeing the deadly gold mines, clings to the transit point until the last moment, showing all the cunning and diligence acquired in the camp. When it seems that everything is already behind him, that he has “won the battle for life,” the last truck takes him not to a short business trip with light work, but to the depths of Kolyma, where “the sections of the road departments began - places little better than gold mines.”
“Typhoid quarantine” is the end of the description of the circles of hell, and the machine that throws people out to new suffering, to a new stage (stage!) is a story that cannot begin a book,” explained Shalamov (“On Prose”).
“Kolyma Tales” in the general structure of the Kyrgyz Republic is a book of the dead, a story about people with forever frozen souls, about martyrs who were not and did not become heroes.
“Left Bank” changes the semantic dominant. The composition of the second collection creates a different image of the world and emphasizes a different emotion.
The title of this book contains the name of the hospital, which became a sharp turning point for Shalamov in the camp’s fate and actually saved his life.
“Procurator of Judea,” the first short story, is again a symbol, an epigraph to the whole. A front-line surgeon who has just arrived in Kolyma, honestly saving prisoners flooded in icy water in the hold, seventeen years later forces himself to forget about this ship, although he perfectly remembers everything else, including hospital novels and the ranks of the camp authorities. Shalamov needs the exact number of years for the last phrase, the last novelistic point: “Anatole France has a story “Procurator of Judea.” There Pontius Pilate cannot remember the name of Christ after seventeen years.”
Some motifs of the novella are retrospective, referring to the past, to the first book of the Kyrgyz Republic. But something important appears for the first time: a mention of active resistance rather than the submission of victims (“on the way, the prisoners rebelled”); inclusion of the Kolyma material in the framework of culture, big history (the surgeon Kubantsev forgets just like Pontius Pilate; the writer France comes to the aid of the writer Shalamov with his plot).
The theme of senseless, martyrdom, which dominates the first book, is practically absent from The Left Bank. Only “Aortic Aneurysm” and “Special Order” are about this. The content of “Kolyma Tales” is symbolically concentrated here in the short story “According to Lend-Lease”. An American bulldozer, received as part of military supplies, driven by a domestic parricide, but, unlike the political Article 58, “socially close” to the state, is trying to hide the main Kolyma secret - a huge common grave exposed after a landslide on a mountain slope . But the unconsciousness of technology and man, attempts to hide the crimes committed are powerfully opposed in this short story by the hope for retribution, the memory of man and nature. “In Kolyma, bodies are buried not in the ground, but in stone. The stone keeps and reveals secrets. Stone is more reliable than earth. Permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. Each of our loved ones who died in Kolyma - each of those shot, beaten, bled dry by hunger - can still be identified - even decades later.”
The main emotional tone of the CR - a calm, detached story of a participant and a witness (the simpler, the more terrible) - is replaced here by the intonation of a judge and a prophet, the pathos of accusation and oath.
In other short stories of The Left Bank, a world of feelings appears that seem to have disappeared forever. Perhaps this happens because a person moves away from the edge of the abyss, finds himself not in a gold mine, but in a hospital, in prison, in a geological party, on a taiga business trip.
The essay “Kombeda” talks about the organization of mutual aid among prisoners in Butyrka prison. In its ending, the concepts of “spiritual forces” and “human collective”, impossible in the first book, arise.
In “Magic,” even the head of the camp department sympathizes with the hard-working men and the narrator, but despises informers. “I worked as an informant, citizen boss.” - "Go away!" – Stukov said with contempt and pleasure.”
“The Left Bank” is a book of the living - a story about resistance, about unfreezing a frozen soul, and finding what seems to be forever lost values.
The culmination of the book is “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”, the final point is “Sentence”.
Many years later, after Shalamov’s death, a doctor who worked in a hospital on the Left Bank; will tell the story of one escape, as she remembered it. Its leader was some Bendera man, the prisoners disarmed the guards, went into the hills, hid from pursuit for the whole summer, it seems they lived by robbery, conflicted with each other, divided into two groups, were caught and after the trial in Magadan, while attempting a new escape, some died in shootout, others, after treatment in the hospital, were again sent to camps (the narrator refers to the testimonies of those treated). This confusing story, full of ambiguities, eventual and ethical contradictions, is apparently closest to reality. “This is the only way it happens in life,” Chekhov said on another occasion.
The documentary version of Shalamov is presented in the lengthy essay “The Green Prosecutor” (1959), included in the collection “The Shovel Artist.” Among other attempts to escape from the camp, he recalls the escape of Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky. His daring answer with a hint to the big boss (“Don’t worry, we are preparing a concert that the whole Kolyma will talk about”), the number of those who fled, the details of the escape coincide with the plot outline of “The Last Battle...”. The essay allows us to understand one dark place in the novella. “Khrustalev was the brigadier for whom the fugitives sent after the attack on the detachment - Pugachev did not want to leave without his closest friend. There he is sleeping, Khrustalev, calmly and firmly,” the narrator conveys the internal monologue of the protagonist before the last battle. But there is no dispatch for the brigadier after the attack on the detachment in the novella. This episode remained only in “Green Prosecutor”.
A comparison of “The Green Prosecutor” and “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev,” written in the same year, allows us to see not the similarities, but the striking differences, the abyss between fact and image, essay and novella. Bendera resident - Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky turns into a major and receives a speaking surname - a symbol of Russian rebellion - which also has a Pushkin aura (the poetic Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter). His misunderstanding of the old laws, according to which the prisoner must only obey, endure and die, is emphasized. Any hints about the complexity of the previous lives of his comrades have been removed. “This department was formed immediately after the war only from newcomers - from war criminals, from Vlasovites, from prisoners of war who served in German units...” (“Green Prosecutor”). All twelve (there are twelve of them, like apostles!) receive heroic Soviet biographies, in which dashing escapes from German captivity, distrust of the Vlasovites, loyalty to friendship, humanity hidden under the bark of rudeness.
As a counterpoint to the usual formula of the old Kolyma (“The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral fortitude of the prisoners extremely... The souls of the survivors were subjected to complete corruption...) a completely different leitmotif is introduced: “... If you don’t escape at all, then die free "
And finally, in the finale, Shalamov, overcoming real, everyday ignorance about the fate of the “leader” (as was the case in “The Green Prosecutor”) of the escape, gives him (quite in the spirit of the dying visions of the characters of the unloved Tolstoy) memories of his entire life, “a difficult man’s life.” life" - and the last shot.
“The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” is a Kolyma ballad about the madness of the brave at the “dark abyss on the edge”, about freedom as the highest value in life.
“These were martyrs, not heroes” - it is said about another Kolyma and also in the essay (“How it began”). Heroism, it turns out, still found a place on this sorrowful land, on the damned Left Bank.
“Sentence” (1965) presents a different, less heroic, but no less important experience of resistance, of unfreezing a frozen soul. At the beginning of the short story, the hero-narrator’s usual path downward, already depicted more than once in the Kyrgyz Republic, is given in a condensed form: cold - hunger - indifference - anger - half-consciousness, “an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life.” In the ultra-light work of a goner on a taiga business trip, the spiral gradually begins to unwind in the opposite direction. First, physical sensations return: the need for sleep decreases, muscle pain appears. Anger returns, new indifference-fearlessness, then fear of losing this saving life, then envy of one’s dead comrades and living neighbors, then pity for animals.
One of the main comebacks is still happening. In a “world without books”, in a world of “poor, rough mining language”, where you can forget your wife’s name, suddenly a new word falls out of nowhere, bursts in, floats in. "Maxim! - I yelled straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, I yelled, not yet understanding the meaning of this word that was born in me. And if this word has returned, been found again, so much the better, so much the better. Great joy filled my entire being.”
“Maintenance” is a symbolic short story about the resurrection of the word, about the return to culture, to the world of the living, from which the Kolyma convicts seem to have been excommunicated forever.
In this light, the ending needs to be deciphered. The day comes when everyone, chasing each other, runs to the village, the boss who arrived from Magadan puts the gramophone on the stump and starts some symphonic music. “And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraters, foremen and hard workers. And the boss stood nearby. And the expression on his face was as if he himself had written this music for us, for our remote taiga business trip. The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up in all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring twisted for three hundred years...”
Why are they all gathered in one place, as if for some kind of rally? Why did the camp commander, a creature of “another world,” come from Magadan itself and even seem to curry favor with the prisoners? What is the music about?
In the earlier “Weismanist” (1964), which, however, ended up in the next collection “The Shovel Artist,” the biography of the remarkable surgeon Umansky (a real person, much is said about him in the essay “Courses”) is told. Imbued with the highest confidence in the narrator (here it is Andreev the second, the hypostasis of the central character of the Kyrgyz Republic), he shares with him his cherished dream: “The most important thing is to survive Stalin. Everyone who survives Stalin will live. Did you understand? It cannot be that the curses of millions of people on his head will not materialize. Did you understand? He will certainly die from this universal hatred. He'll get cancer or something! Did you understand? We will still live."
The pointe of the novella is the date: “Umansky died on March 4, 1953...” (In “Courses”, in the same collection, Shalamov indicated only the year of death and noted that the professor “did not wait for what he had been waiting for so many years”; in fact In fact, Umansky, according to the commentator, died back in 1951.) The hero’s hope is not realized here - he dies just one day before the death of the tyrant.
The hero of “Sentence” seems to have survived. This is what the record on the trunk of a three-hundred-year-old larch plays about. The spring, twisted for three hundred years, must finally burst. The returned word, “Roman, hard, Latin,” associated “with the history of political struggle, the struggle of people,” also played some role in this.
In the middle of the century, a catchy philosophical thesis became popular in Europe: after Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry (and the radicals added: prose too). Shalamov seems to agree with this, adding Kolyma to Auschwitz.
But in the notebooks of 1956, when the camp was still breathing down the neck, and the memory of the past was very fresh, it was noted: “Kolyma taught me to understand what poetry is for a person.”
In “The Nights of Athens” (1973), which takes place in a camp hospital, at the point of returning to life, the need for poetry is declared to be the fifth need not taken into account by Thomas More, the satisfaction of which brings the highest bliss.
Feverishly recording poetry was the first thing Shalamov began to do after his “resurrection from the dead.” The lyrical “Kolyma Notebooks” began to take shape in 1949, back in Kolyma, long before the “Kolyma Stories.”
While (and when) there was no need to conceptually clear the field for “new prose,” Shalimov rehabilitated art and literature. Evidence of this is the prose itself. “Sherry Brandy”, “Sentence”, “Marcel Proust”, “Behind the Letter”, “Athenian Nights”.
Previous values ​​are not canceled. On the contrary, their price is realized and increases sharply. Reading poetry in a park or in a punishment cell, writing them in a cozy office or in a camp are indeed two different things. One has to live after Kolyma, fully understanding the fragility and importance of what has been created over thousands of years.
“The Spade Artist,” the third collection of the Kyrgyz Republic, is a book of return, a somewhat outsider look at the Kolyma experience.
Structurally, compositionally, the beginnings of all five Shalamov books are of the same type: in front there is a lyrical short story-epigraph with a key, symbolic motif. Here, as in “Left Bank,” this is a motif of memory. But, unlike “Procurator of Judea,” the chronotope of “The Seizure” goes beyond the boundaries of Kolyma. The action takes place in a neurological institute, where, having lost consciousness, the narrator falls into the past, remembering the only camp day off in six months, on which, nevertheless, all the prisoners were driven to collect firewood and which ended in the same attack of sweet nausea. “The doctor asked something. I answered with difficulty. I wasn't afraid of the memories."
The tension between the essay and novelistic structures arguably increases in the third book.
On the one hand, the collection contains more essays, and lengthy ones at that (“How it began”, “Courses”, “In the bathhouse”, “Green prosecutor”, “Echo in the mountains”). On the other hand, short stories cease to mimic a document, revealing their literary quality.
The literary subtext of “Prostheses” has already been discussed. But the book also contains the grotesque “Caligula” with a final quote from Derzhavin, and the dramatic “RUR” with a comparison of the workers of a high-security company with “Czapek’s robots from the Ruhr”, as well as a counterpoint of times (as in “The Seizure”), “However, “Which of us thought in 1938 about Chapek, about the coal Ruhr? Only twenty to thirty years later are there strengths for comparison, in attempts to resurrect time, colors and a sense of time.”
“Chasing Locomotive Smoke” and “Train,” which conclude the third book, are directly stories about returning from the world of Kolyma “to the mainland” (as they said in the camp), to where you can think about Chapek, remember Tynyanov.
The short stories are constructed as a kaleidoscope of episodes and skits on the last stage of the road to home: walking through the Kolyma bureaucratic labyrinths of a now civilian paramedic - painful delivery of cases - a breakthrough on a plane to Yakutsk (“No, Yakutsk was not yet a city, was not the mainland. There is no there was steam locomotive smoke") – Irkutsk station – bookstore (“Holding books in your hands, standing near the counter of a bookstore - it was like good meat borscht...").
In “The Shovel Artist,” the cross-cutting plot of the Kolyma stories is essentially exhausted. But the inhibited memory is chained to Kolyma, like a convict to a wheelbarrow. Endless painful memories give rise to new texts, which most often turn out to be variations of what has already been written.
“Resurrection of the Larch,” as usual, begins with the lyrical and symbolic “Trail” and “Graphite.” The motif of the first short story (a private path laid in the taiga, on which poetry was written well) is reminiscent of “Across the Snow.” The theme of “Graphite” (the immortality of the Kolyma dead) has already sounded powerfully in the short story “According to Lend-Lease”. The collection’s conclusion, also symbolic, “Resurrection of the Larch,” refers to “Stlanik.” The “Roundup” grows out of the “Typhoid Quarantine.” “Brave Eyes” and “Nameless Cat” resume the motif of pity for animals found in “Tamara the Bitch.” “Marcel Proust” seems to be a more straightforward variation of “Maintenance”: what is depicted there is merely named here. “I, a Kolyma resident, a prisoner, was transported to a long-lost world, into other habits, forgotten, unnecessary... Kalitinsky and I - we both remembered our world, our lost time.”
In “The Resurrection of the Larch,” Shalamov professes the principle he formulated using the example of Proust: “Before memory, as before death, everyone is equal, and the author has the right to remember the servant’s dress and forget the mistress’s jewelry.”
“Should I write five excellent stories that will always remain, will be included in some kind of golden fund, or write a hundred and fifty - each of which is important as a witness to something extremely important, missed by everyone, and cannot be restored by anyone except me,” he formulates Shalamov’s problem after completing “The Shovel Artist” (“About My Prose”). And, apparently, he chooses the second, extensive option. In The Glove, or KR-2, the thoughtful composition of the first books disappears completely. Most of the texts included in the collection are essays-portraits of Kolyma prisoners, commanders, doctors, or physiological sections of camp life, based not so much on imagination and memory, but on the memory of their previous texts (one must not forget that for all twenty years Shalamov’s stories have not are published, and the author is deprived of the opportunity to look at them from the outside, almost deprived of reader feedback, and deprived of the feeling of a creative path). “The Glove” is a book of great fatigue. In structure, it is similar not to KR-1, but to “Essays on the Underworld.” Some texts (“Car 1”, “Lieutenant Colonel of the Medical Service”, “Lessons of Love”), it seems, were not completed, and the entire collection remained unfinished, which has its own, no longer consciously artistic, but biographically bitter symbolism. “I couldn’t hold back with the effort of my pen Everything that happened, it seems, yesterday. I thought: what nonsense! I'll write poetry any time. The reserve of feeling is enough for a hundred years - And there is an indelible mark on the soul. As soon as the right hour comes, everything will be resurrected - as on the retina. But the past, lying at your feet, is slipped through your fingers like sand, And the living past is overgrown with the past. Unconsciousness, oblivion, oblivion,” he predicted back in 1963.
Shalamov’s last work – already pure memories of Kolyma, with an unbroken author’s “I”, a linear chronological sequence, direct journalism – ended at the very beginning.
The movement from “new prose, experienced as a document” to a simple document, from a short story and poetic structure to an essay and an ingenuous memoir, from a symbol to a direct word also opens up some new facets of the “late” Shalamov. We can say that the author of “The Resurrection of the Larch” and “The Glove” becomes simultaneously more journalistic and philosophical.
The constant metaphor of the Kolyma “hell” unfolds. Shalamov fits it into culture, finds a place for it even in Homer’s picture of the world. “The world where gods and heroes live is one world. There are events that are equally formidable for both people and gods. Homer's formulas are very true. But in Homeric times there was no criminal underworld, a world of concentration camps. The underground of Pluto seems like paradise, heaven compared to this world. But this world of ours is only one floor below Pluto; people rise from there to heaven, and the gods sometimes descend, descend along the stairs - below hell" ("Exam"). On the other hand, this “hell” receives a specific historical description: “Kolyma is Stalin’s extermination camp...Auschwitz without ovens” (“Life of Engineer Kipreev”); “Kolyma is a special camp, like Dachau” (“Riva Rocci”). However, this comparison, destructive of the Soviet system, has its limits. Shalamov forever retained the pathos and hopes of the early twenties. He was first arrested for distributing the so-called “Lenin’s testament” (a letter asking to replace Stalin), ended up in a camp with the indelible mark of “Trotskyist” (see “Handwriting”), and always remembered with respect the Socialist Revolutionaries and their predecessors, the Narodnaya Volya. Until the end of his life, he professed the idea of ​​a betrayed revolution, a stolen victory, a historically missed opportunity when everything could still be changed.
“The best people of the Russian revolution made the greatest sacrifices, died Young, nameless, shaking the throne - they made such sacrifices that at the time of the revolution this party had no strength left, no people left to lead Russia behind itself” (“Gold Medal”).
The final formula-aphorism was found in late unfinished memoirs in the chapter entitled “Storm of the Sky”: “The October Revolution, of course, was a world revolution... I was a participant in a huge lost battle for the real renewal of life.”
Late Shalamov ceases to insist on the uniqueness of the Kolyma experience and suffering. The transition from large scales to private fate makes it impossible to weigh pain. In “The Resurrection of the Larch” there is a reflection on the fate of the Russian princess, who in 1730 went into exile with her husband there, in the Far North.
“The larch, whose branch, a twig breathed on the Moscow table, is the same age as Natalya Sheremeteva-Dolgorukova and can remind of her sad fate: about the vicissitudes of life, about loyalty and firmness, about mental fortitude, about physical and moral torment, no different from torment '37... Isn't this an eternal Russian story? The larch, which saw the death of Natalya Dolgorukova and saw millions of corpses - immortal in the permafrost of Kolyma, which saw the death of the Russian poet (Mandelshtam - I.S.), the larch lives somewhere in the North, to see, to shout that nothing has changed in Russia – no fate, no human malice, no indifference.”
This idea is brought to the clarity of the formula in the anti-novel “Vishera”. “The camp is not a contrast between hell and heaven, but a cast of our life... The camp... is world-like.”
The chapter where this aphorism is coined is called “There are no guilty people in the camp.” But the late Shalamov, peering with enlightened memory at this cast of Russian life, comes across another, opposite thought: “There are no innocents in the world.”
The cross-cutting hero of the Kyrgyz Republic in the second round of camp fate also turns out to be a man in whose hands are the fates of others. And his position as victim and judge suddenly transforms.
In The Washed Out Photograph the Fall is almost invisible. Having ended up as a goner in the hospital, and having received the position of an orderly, whom the new patients look at “as their destiny, as a deity,” Krist agrees to the offer of one of them to wash his tunic and is deprived of his main value, his only letter and photograph of his wife.
Having turned into a paramedic, “a true, and not a fictitious Kolyma deity,” it is no longer Krist, but the narrator, who begins his independent work by sending several prisoners who were lying in the hospital, who seem to him to be malingerers, to general work. The next day, a suicide is found in the stable.
Shalamov gives an existential refraction of this theme no longer on the Kolyma material, building a plot based on childhood memories (a similar episode is mentioned - but without any philosophical overtones - in the autobiographical "Fourth Vologda"). In the quiet provincial town there are three main entertainment-spectacles: fires, squirrel hunting and revolution. “But no revolution in the world can drown out the craving for traditional folk entertainment.” And now a huge crowd, seized with a “passionate thirst for murder,” with whistling, howling, and hooting, pursues the lonely victim jumping through the trees and finally reaches the goal.
Only this dead animal is innocent of anything, but the man is still guilty...
“Kolyma Tales” and “The Gulag Archipelago” were written almost simultaneously. The two chroniclers of the camp world closely followed each other's work.
Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn unanimously opposed oblivion, the hushing up of real history, against artistic creations and speculation on the camp theme, and in their work overcame the tradition of “simply memoirs.”
Soviet literature about the camp world was a “literature of bewilderment” (M. Geller). The memoirists more or less truthfully told “what I saw,” unconsciously or carefully avoiding the questions “how?” and why?". Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, starting from their own experience, tried to “guess the passage of time”, to find the answer to the huge, gigantic “why” (“The First Chekist”), which changed the fate of millions of people, of the entire vast country. But their answers did not agree on almost any point. The discrepancies, which became especially obvious after the publication of Shalamov’s letters and diary entries, are too fundamental to be explained by minor everyday circumstances.
Solzhenitsyn designated the genre of his main book as “an experience in artistic research.” The last definition is still more important: the artistry in “Archipelago...” turned out to be on the premises of the concept, document, evidence. – Shalamov’s “new prose” (by design, in principle) overcame the document, melting it into an image. To paraphrase Tynyanov, the author of the CD could say: I continue where the document ends.
Solzhenitsyn inherited from classical realism of the mid-19th century a belief in the novel as a mirror of life and a literary pinnacle. His narrative is large-scale and horizontal. It spreads, unfolds, includes thousands of details, trying - again, in principle! – become equal in size to the object (a map of the archipelago the size of the Gulag itself). Therefore, Solzhenitsyn’s main idea, “The Red Wheel,” turned into a cyclopean series stretching into infinity. – Shalamov continues the side line of harsh, lapidary, poetic prose, presented at the beginning and end of the century (Pushkin, Chekhov) and further in Russian modernism and prose of the twenties. Its main genre is the short story, striving for clear boundaries, verticality, and compression of meaning into an all-explanatory episode, symbol, aphorism.
Shalamov insisted on the uniqueness of Kalyma as the most terrible island of the archipelago. - Solzhenitsyn seems to agree with this in the preamble to the third part - “Destructive Labor”: “Perhaps in Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories the reader will more accurately feel the ruthlessness of the spirit of the Archipelago and the edge of human despair.” But in the text itself (Chapter 4 of the same part), arguing that his book will hardly touch on Kolyma, which deserves separate descriptions, he puts Shalamov’s texts in the category of pure memoirs: “Yes, Kolyma was “lucky”: Varlam Shalamov survived there and I have already written a lot; Evgenia Ginzburg, O. Sliozberg, N. Surovtseva, N. Grankina survived there - and all wrote memoirs,” and makes the following note to this fragment: “Why did such a condensation happen, and there are almost no non-Kolyma memoirs? Is it because the flower of the prison world was really brought to Kolyma? Or, oddly enough, in the “closer” camps they died out more friendly?” A question, called rhetorical in poetics, presupposes a positive answer. The exclusivity of Kolyma for the author of “Archipelago...” is in great doubt.
Shalamov argued that literature in general, and he in particular, cannot and does not want to teach anyone anything. He wanted to be a poet - and only a private person, a loner. “You can’t teach people. Teaching people is an insult... Art has no “teaching” power. Art does not ennoble, does not “improve”... Great literature is created without fans. I am not writing so that what has been described will not be repeated. This doesn’t happen, and no one needs our experience. I write so that people know that such stories are being written, and they themselves decide to do some worthy action - not in the sense of the story, but in anything, in some small plus” (notebooks). – The preaching pathos of the writer Solzhenitsyn is obvious in everything he does: in books, in their “breaking through”, in the history of their publication, in open letters and speeches... His artistic message is initially focused on fans, addressed to the city and the world.
Solzhenitsyn portrayed the Gulag as life next to life, as a general model of Soviet reality: “This striped archipelago cut and mottled another, including the country, crashed into its cities, hung over its streets...” He blessed the prison for the rise of man, the ascension (although added in parentheses: “And from the graves they answer me: “It’s good for you to say when you are still alive!”). – Shalamov’s world is an underground hell, the kingdom of the dead, life after life, in every way the opposite of existence on the mainland (although the logic of the image made, as we have seen, significant adjustments to the original setting). This experience of corruption and fall is practically inapplicable to life in freedom.
Solzhenitsyn considered the main event of his convict life to be coming to God. – Shalamov, the son of a priest, noting that the “religious people” held up best in the camp, left religion as a child and stoically insisted on his faith in unbelief until his last days. “I am not afraid to leave this world, even though I am a complete atheist” (notebooks, 1978). In the Kyrgyz Republic, “Unconverted” is dedicated specifically to this topic. Having received the Gospel from a sympathetic woman doctor who seems to be in love with him, the hero with difficulty, causing pain to the brain cells, asks: “Is there only a religious way out of human tragedies?” The pointe of the novella gives a different, Shalamov-like answer; “I went out, putting the Gospel in my pocket, thinking for some reason not about the Corinthians, and not about the Apostle Paul, and not about the miracle of human memory, the inexplicable miracle that had just happened, but about something completely different. And, imagining this “other”, I realized that I had returned again to the camp world, to the familiar camp world; the possibility of a “religious outlet” was too random and too unearthly. Having put the Gospel in my pocket, I thought only about one thing: will they give me dinner today.” It's a different world here. Soldering is still more important than the sky. But miraculously, as in “Sentence,” it turns out that “long-forgotten words” are returned, and not the only Word.
Solzhenitsyn showed the captivating nature of even forced labor in the camps. – Shalamov exposed him as an eternal curse.
Solzhenitsyn denounced “the lies of all revolutions in history.” – Shalamov remained faithful to his revolution and its losing heroes.
Solzhenitsyn, by the measure of things, in “Archipelago...” chooses a Russian peasant, the “unliterate” Ivan Denisovich. – Shalamov believes that the writer is obliged to protect and glorify, first of all, the Ivanov Ivanovichs. “And let them not “sing” to me about the people. They don’t “sing” about the peasantry. I know what is it. Let the swindlers and businessmen sing that the intelligentsia is to blame for someone. The intelligentsia is not guilty of anyone. The opposite is true. The people, if such a concept exists, are indebted to their intelligentsia” (“Fourth Vologda”).
One of the main colors in Solzhenitsyn’s artistic palette was laughter - satire, humor, irony, anecdote. – Shalamov considered laughter incompatible with the subject of the image. “The camp theme cannot be a subject for comedy. Our fate is not a subject for humor. And it will never be a subject of humor - neither tomorrow, nor in a thousand years. It will never be possible to approach the furnaces of Dachau or the gorges of the Serpentine with a smile.” ("Athenian Nights") Although strange laughter in homeopathic doses also penetrates into the world of CR (“Injector”, “Caligula”, the story of shortened trousers in “Ivan Bogdanov”).
Even in naming the main characters of their prose, the authors of the Kyrgyz Republic and “Archipelago...” differed fundamentally. “By the way, why “zek” and not “zeka”? After all, it’s written like this: s/k and bows: zeka, zekoyu,” Shalamov asked after reading “Ivan Denisovich.” Solzhenitsyn responded to this in “Archipelago”, precisely in the mockingly ironic chapter “Convicts as a Nation”: “They began to write in abbreviated form: for the singular - z/k (ze-ka), for the plural - z/k z/k ( ze-ka ze-ka). This was said by the native guardians very often, everyone heard it, everyone got used to it. However, a government-born word could not be declined not only by cases, but even by numbers; it was a worthy child of a dead and illiterate era. The living ears of the intelligent natives could not put up with this... The animated word began to bend according to cases and numbers.” (And in Kolyma, Shalamov insists, that’s how “ze-ka” was kept in conversation. One can only regret that the Kolyma residents’ ears became numb from the frost.)
The correspondence between the word and the writer's destiny is not an empty thing. It seems that the style and genre of prose of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov was reflected in their destinies. The author of “The Gulag Archipelago” lived, waited, survived, returned... A winner?!.. – Kolyma eventually caught up with the author of the Kyrgyz Republic, his life ending became another of its terrible plots.
“A humiliating thing is life.”
“They don’t like suffering. Suffering will never love.”
Working with this overwhelming material, endlessly talking about corruption, death, humanity, hell, he carefully collects his “crumbs”: a woman’s smile, a doctor’s life-saving direction, a letter with Pasternak’s flying handwriting, the carefree play of a nameless cat, the green paw of an elfin tree rising towards the warmth.
Written after the main body of the Kyrgyz Republic, “The Fourth Vologda” ends with a story about a starving father and mother thrown out of their home. They are saved by the pitiful money sent by monk Joseph Shmalts, who replaced priest Tikhon Shalamov in Alaska. “Why am I writing this down? I don’t believe in miracles, good deeds, or the next world. I’m writing this down just to thank the long-dead monk Joseph Schmaltz and all the people from whom he collected this money. There were no donations, just pennies from the church mug. I, who does not believe in an afterlife, do not want to remain in debt to this unknown monk.”
Declaring his disbelief in God and the devil, in history and literature, in the cruel state and the insidious West, in progressive humanity and the common man, in the so-called humanistic tradition, he still seemed to believe in the inevitability of suffering and the resurrection of the larch.
“Send this rigid, flexible branch to Moscow.
Sending the branch, the man did not understand, did not know, did not think that the branch would be revived in Moscow, that it, resurrected, would smell of the Kolyma, bloom on a Moscow street, that the larch would prove its strength, its immortality; six hundred years of larch life is the practical immortality of a person; that the people of Moscow will touch this rough, unpretentious tough branch with their hands, will look at its dazzling green needles, its rebirth, resurrection, will inhale its smell - not as a memory of the past, but as living life.”

About the title Shalamov parable, or a possible epigraph to “Kolyma Tales”

I About the miniature “In the Snow”

Franciszek Apanovich, in my opinion, very accurately called the miniature sketch “In the Snow” (1956), which opens “Kolyma Tales”, “a symbolic introduction to Kolyma prose in general,” believing that it plays the role of a kind of metatext in relation to the whole whole1 . I completely agree with this interpretation. Noteworthy is the mysterious-sounding ending of this very first text in Shalamovsky five-books. “Across the Snow” should be recognized as a kind of epigraph to all the cycles of “Kolyma Tales”2. The very last phrase in this first sketch story sounds like this:
And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers. ## (“In the snow”)3
How so? In what sense? - after all, if under writer Shalamov understands himself, but readers relates to you and me, then how We involved in the text itself? Does he really think that we will also go to Kolyma, be it on tractors or on horses? Or do “readers” mean servants, guards, exiles, civilians, camp authorities, etc.? It seems that this ending phrase is sharply dissonant with the lyrical sketch as a whole and with the phrases preceding it, which explain the specific “technology” of trampling the road through the difficult-to-pass Kolyma virgin snow (but not at all the relationship between readers and writers). Here are the phrases preceding it, from the beginning:
# The first one has the hardest time of all, and when he is exhausted, another from the same top five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s trail4.
Those. those who ride and do not walk have an “easy” life, while those who trample and trample the road have to do the most work. Initially, at this point in the handwritten text, the first phrase of the paragraph gave the reader a more clear hint on how to understand the ending that followed it, since the paragraph began with a strikethrough:
# This is how literature goes. First one, then the other, comes forward and paves the way, and of those following the trail, even everyone, even the weakest, the smallest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s trail.
However, at the very end - without any editing, as if it had already been prepared in advance - there was a final phrase in which the meaning of the allegory and, as it were, the essence of the whole, the mysterious Shalamov symbol was concentrated:
And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.5 ##
However, actually about those who rides tractors and horses, before that in the text “In the Snow”, and in subsequent stories - neither in the second, nor in the third, nor in the fourth (“To the show” 1956; “At night”6 1954, “Carpenters” 1954) - actually not it says7. A semantic gap arises, which the reader does not know how to fill, and the writer, apparently, sought this? Thus, the first Shalamov parable is revealed - not directly, but indirectly expressed, implied meaning.
I am grateful to Franciszek Apanowicz for help in interpreting it. He previously wrote about the story as a whole:
One gets the impression that there is no narrator here, there is only this strange world that grows on its own from the meager words of the story. But even this mimetic style of perception is refuted by the last sentence of the essay, which is completely incomprehensible from this point of view<…>If we take [it] literally, we would have to come to the absurd conclusion that in the camps in Kolyma only writers trample down the roads. The absurdity of such a conclusion forces us to re-interpret this sentence and understand it as a kind of metatextual statement, belonging not to the narrator, but to some other subject, and perceived as the voice of the author himself8.
It seems to me that Shalamov’s text is deliberately flawed here. The reader loses the thread of the story and contact with the narrator, not understanding where any of them are. The meaning of the mysterious final phrase can also be interpreted as a kind of reproach: the prisoners are making their way, in virgin snow, - intentionally without going follow each other, do not trample general the path and generally act not this way, How reader who is accustomed to using ready-made means, norms established by someone before him (guided, for example, by what books are now fashionable, or what “techniques” are in use among writers), but act exactly like real writers: they try to place their feet separately while walking your own way, paving the way for those who follow them. And only rare of them - i.e. those same five chosen pioneers are given the opportunity for a short time, until they are exhausted, to break through this necessary road - for those who follow behind, on sleighs and on tractors. Writers, from Shalamov’s point of view, must - they are directly obliged, if, of course, they are real writers, to move along the virgin soil (“in their own way,” as Vysotsky will later sing about it). That is, they, unlike us mere mortals, do not ride tractors and horses. Shalamov also invites the reader to take the place of those who pave the way. The mysterious phrase turns into a rich symbol of the entire Kolyma epic. After all, as we know, Shalamov’s detail is a powerful artistic detail that has become a symbol, an image (“Notebooks,” between April and May 1960).
Dmitry Nich noted: in his opinion, this same text as an “epigraph” also echoes the first text in the cycle “Resurrection of the Larch” - a much later sketch “The Path” (1967)9. Let us remember what is happening there and what is, as it were, behind the scenes of what is happening: the narrator finds “his” path (here the narration is personified, unlike “In the Snow,” where it is impersonal10) - the path along which he walks alone, for almost three years, and in which his poems are born. However, as soon as it turns out that this path that he liked, well-trodden, taken as if he owned it, was also opened by someone else (he notices someone else’s footprint on it), it loses its miraculous properties:
I had a wonderful trail in the taiga. I laid it myself in the summer when I was storing firewood for the winter. (...) The path became darker every day and eventually became an ordinary dark gray mountain path. No one walked on it except me. (…) # I walked along this own path for almost three years. Poems were written well on it. It used to be that you would return from a trip, get ready to go on a trail, and inevitably come up with some stanza on that trail. (...) And on the third summer a man walked along my path. I was not at home at the time, I don’t know whether it was some wandering geologist, or a mountain postman on foot, or a hunter - the man left traces of heavy boots. Since then, no poetry has been written on this path.
So, in contrast to the epigraph to the first cycle (“In the Snow”), here, in “The Path,” the emphasis shifts: firstly, the action itself is not collective, but is emphasized individually, even individualistically. That is, the effect of trampling the road itself by others, comrades, in the first case only intensified, became stronger, but here, in the second, in a text written more than a dozen years later, it disappears due to the fact that someone stepped onto the path another. While in “Across the Snow” the very motive of “stepping only onto virgin soil, and not trail after trail” was overlapped by the effect of “collective benefit” - all the torment of the pioneers was needed only so that further, following them, they would go on horse and tractor readers. (The author did not go into details, well, is this ride necessary at all?) Now, it seems as if no reader and altruistic benefit is no longer visible or envisaged. A certain psychological shift can be detected here. Or even the author’s deliberate departure from the reader.

II Confession - in a school essay

Oddly enough, Shalamov’s own views on what “new prose” should be, and what, in fact, a modern writer should strive for, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks and not in treatises, but in essays , or simply a “school essay” written in 1956 - behind Irina Emelyanova, daughter of Olga Ivinskaya (Shalamov had known the latter since the 30s), when this same Irina entered the Literary Institute. As a result, the text itself, which Shalamov deliberately compiled in a somewhat school-like manner, firstly, received from the examiner, N.B. Tomashevsky, the son of the famous Pushkinist, “superpositive review” (ibid., pp. 130-1)11, and secondly, by a happy coincidence, much can now be clarified for us from the views on literature of Shalamov himself, who was already fully matured by the age of 50. m years for his prose, but at that time, it seems, he had not yet “clouded” his aesthetic principles too much, which he clearly did later. Here’s how, using the example of Hemingway’s stories “Something’s Over” (1925), he illustrates the method that captured him of reducing details and raising prose to symbols:
The heroes of his [story] have names, but no longer have surnames. They no longer have a biography.<…>An episode was snatched from the general dark background of “our time”. It's almost just an image. The landscape at the beginning is needed not as a specific background, but as an exclusively emotional accompaniment... In this story, Hemingway uses his favorite method - image.<…># Let's take a story from another period of Hemingway - “Where it is clean, it is light”12. # The heroes don't even have names anymore.<…>It's not even an episode anymore. No action at all<…>. This is a frame.<…># [This] is one of Hemingway's most striking and remarkable stories. Everything there is reduced to a symbol.<…># The path from the early stories to “Clean, Light” is a path of liberation from everyday, somewhat naturalistic details.<…>These are the principles of subtext and laconicism. "<…>The majesty of the iceberg’s movement is that it rises only one-eighth above the surface of the water.”13 Hemingway minimizes linguistic devices, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, landscape as a function of style. # ...the dialogue of any Hemingway story is the eighth part of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. # Of course, this silence about the most important thing requires the reader to have a special culture, careful reading, and internal consonance with the feelings of Hemingway’s heroes.<…># Hemingway's landscape is also relatively neutral. Hemingway usually gives the landscape at the beginning of the story. The principle of dramatic construction - as in a play - before the start of the action, the author indicates the background and decoration in the stage directions. If the landscape is repeated again during the story, then, for the most part, it is the same as at the beginning. #<…># Let's take Chekhov's landscape. For example, from “Ward No. 6”. The story also begins with a landscape. But this landscape is already emotionally colored. It is more biased than Hemingway's.<…># Hemingway has his own stylistic devices, invented by himself. For example, in the collection of stories “In Our Time” these are a kind of reminiscences that precede the story. These are the famous key phrases in which the emotional pathos of the story is concentrated.<…># It is difficult to immediately say what the task of reminiscences is. This depends both on the story and on the content of the reminiscences themselves14.
So, laconicism, omissions, reduction of space for landscapes and - showing, as it were, only individual “frames” - instead of detailed descriptions, and even the obligatory getting rid of comparisons and metaphors, this sore “literary stuff”, expulsion from the text of tendentiousness, the role of subtext, key phrases, reminiscences - here literally all the principles of Shalamov’s own prose are listed! It seems that neither later (in the treatise set out in a letter to I.P. Sirotinskaya “On Prose”, nor in letters to Yu.A. Schrader), nor in diaries and notebooks, did he set out his theories new prose.
This is what Shalamov, perhaps, still couldn’t manage - but what he constantly strived for was to restrain the too direct, immediate expression of his thoughts and feelings, concluding the main thing from the story in subtext and avoiding categorical direct statements and assessments. His ideals seemed to be completely Platonic (or, perhaps, in his mind, Hemingwayian). Let’s compare this assessment of the most “Hemingway”, as is usually considered for Platonov, “The Third Son”:
The third son atoned for the sin of his brothers, who staged a brawl next to the corpse of their mother. But Platonov does not have even a shadow of condemnation of them, he generally refrains from any assessments, in his arsenal there are only facts and images. This, in a way, is the ideal of Hemingway, who persistently strove to erase any assessments from his works: he almost never reported the thoughts of the characters - only their actions, carefully crossed out in his manuscripts all phrases that began with the word “how,” his famous statement about one-eighth part of the iceberg was largely about assessments and emotions. In Platonov’s calm, unhurried prose, the iceberg of emotions not only doesn’t stick out to any part - you have to dive to a considerable depth to get it15.
Here we can only add that Shalamov’s own “iceberg” is still in a state of “about to capsize”: in each “cycle” (and many times) he still shows us his underwater part... Political, and simply The worldly, “fan” temperament of this writer was always off the charts; he could not keep the narrative within the bounds of dispassion.

1 Apanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in “Kolyma Stories” by Varlam Shalamov // IV International Shalamov Readings. Moscow, June 18-19, 1997:
Abstracts of reports and messages. - M.: Republic, 1997, p.40-52 (with reference to Apanowicz F. Nowa proza ​​Warlama Szalamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej. Gdansk, 1996. S. 101-103) http://www.booksite.ru/varlam /reading_IV_09.htm
2 The author worked on them (including “The Resurrection of the Larch” and “The Glove”) for twenty years - from 1954 to 1973. One can consider them a five- or even six-book, depending on whether the “Essays on the Underworld”, which stands somewhat apart, are included in the CD.
3 The # sign indicates the beginning (or end) of a new paragraph in a quotation; sign ## - end (or beginning) of the entire text - M.M.
4 The modality is given here as if as a refrain obligations. It is addressed by the author to himself, but also to the reader. Then it will be repeated in many other stories, as, for example, in the finale of the next one (“To the show”): Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing wood.
5 Manuscript “On the Snow” (code in RGALI 2596-2-2 - on the website http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/2/1.html). The main text, editing and title in the manuscript are in pencil. And above the title, apparently, is the originally intended title of the entire cycle - Northern Drawings?
6 As can be seen from the manuscript (http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/5/1.html), the original title of this short story, then crossed out, was “Lingerie” - here the word is in quotation marks or there are signs on both sides new paragraph "Z"? - That is [“Lingerie” at Night] or: [zLingeriez at Night]. Here is the title of the story “Kant” (1956) - in the manuscript in quotation marks, they are left in the American edition of R. Gul (New Journal No. 85 1966) and in the French edition of M. Geller (1982), but for some reason they not in Sirotinskaya's edition. - That is, it is not clear: the quotation marks were removed by the author himself, in some later editions - or is this an oversight (arbitrariness?) of the publisher. According to the manuscript, quotation marks are also found in many other places where the reader encounters specifically camp terms (for example, in the title of the story “To the Show”).
7 The tractor will be mentioned again for the first time only at the end of “Single Measurement” (1955), i.e. three stories from the beginning. The first hint about riding horses in the same cycle is in the story “The Snake Charmer”, i.e. already 16 stories away from this. Well, about horses in sleigh carts - in “Shock Therapy” (1956), after 27 stories, closer to the end of the entire cycle.
8 Franciszek Apanowicz, “Nowa proza” Warłama Szałamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej, Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1986, s. 101-193 (translation by the author himself). So in personal correspondence, Franciszek Apanovich adds: “Shalamov was convinced that he was paving a new road in literature, along which no man had yet set foot. He not only saw himself as a pioneer, but also believed that there were few such writers breaking new paths.<…>Well, in a symbolic sense, the path here is trodden by writers (I would even say artists in general), and not by readers, about whom we learn nothing except that they ride tractors and horses.”
9 This is a kind of prose poem, Nitsch notes: “the path only serves as a path to poetry until another person has walked along it. That is, a poet or writer cannot follow in the footsteps of others” (in email correspondence).
10 Like a tramp ut road through virgin snow? (…) Roads are always laid ut on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. The man himself plans no yourself landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree... (emphasis mine - M.M.).
11 Irina Emelyanova. Unknown pages of Varlam Shalamov or the History of one “arrival” // Grani No. 241-242, January-June 2012. Tarusa pages. Volume 1, Moscow-Paris-Munich-San Francisco, p.131-2) - also on the website http://shalamov.ru/memory/178/
12 [The story was published in 1926.]
13 [Shalamov quotes Hemingway himself, without precise reference to

Analysis of several stories from the series “Kolyma Tales”

General analysis of “Kolyma Tales”

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

In V. Shalamov’s manuscript “Kolyma Stories” there are 33 stories - both very small (1 to 3 pages), and larger ones. One can immediately feel that they were written by a qualified, experienced writer. Most are read with interest, have a sharp plot (but even the plotless short stories are constructed thoughtfully and interestingly), written in a clear and figurative language (and even, although they tell mainly about the “thieves’ world,” there is no sense of argotism in the manuscript). So, if we are talking about editing in the sense of stylistic corrections, “tweaking” 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 are immersed in the world of prisons, transit points, and camps. The stories are narrated in third person. The collection is like an eerie mosaic, each story is a photographic piece of the everyday life of prisoners, very often “thieves”, thieves, swindlers and murderers in prison. All of Shalamov’s heroes are different people: military and civilian, engineers and workers. They got used to camp life and absorbed its laws. Sometimes, looking at them, we don’t 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 man tries to catch a bird, and it turns out to be smarter than him. But we gradually understand the tragedy of this situation, when the “hunt” led to nothing but forever frostbitten fingers and lost hopes about the possibility of being crossed off from the “ominous list.” But people still have ideas about mercy, compassion, and conscientiousness. It’s just that all these feelings are hidden under the armor of the camp experience, which allows you to survive. Therefore, it is considered disgraceful 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 prisoners is the thirst for freedom. Let it be for a moment, but they wanted to enjoy it, feel it, and then die is not scary, but in no case be captured - there is death. Therefore, the main character of the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” prefers to kill himself rather than surrender.

“We have learned humility, we have forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, selfishness, selfishness, and jealousy and passion seemed to us Martian concepts, and, moreover, trifles,” wrote Shalamov.

The author describes in great detail (by the way, there are a number of cases when the same - literally, word for word - descriptions of certain scenes appear in several stories) - how they sleep, wake up, eat, walk, dress, work, “ prisoners having fun; how brutally the guards, doctors, and camp authorities treat them. Each story talks about constantly sucking hunger, about constant cold, illness, about backbreaking hard labor that makes you fall off your feet, about continuous insults and humiliations, about the fear that never leaves the soul for a minute of being offended, beaten, maimed, stabbed to death by “thieves.” ”, of whom the camp authorities are also afraid. 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 an earthly paradise compared to what the characters in “Kolyma Tales” experience. The only people who prosper in the camps are thieves. They rob and kill with impunity, terrorize doctors, pretend, do not work, give bribes left and right - and live well. There is no control over them. Constant torment, suffering, exhausting work that drives you to the grave - this is the lot of honest people who are driven here on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, but in fact are people innocent of anything.

And here we see “frames” of this terrible narrative: murders during a card game (“At the Presentation”), 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 (“Snake Charmer”), barbaric methods of identifying simulation (“Shock Therapy”), murders of doctors (“Snake Charmer”). Red Cross"), killing prisoners by convoy ("Berry"), 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.

Basic emotional motives run through all the descriptions - the feeling of hunger, which turns every person into a beast, fear and humiliation, slow dying, boundless tyranny and lawlessness. All this is photographed, strung together, horrors are piled up without any attempt to somehow comprehend everything, to understand the causes and consequences of what is being 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 precise. The intonation of the narration is calm, without strain. Severely, laconically, without any attempts at psychological analysis, the writer even talks about what is happening somewhere documented. Shalamov achieves a stunning effect on the reader by contrasting the calmness of the author’s unhurried, calm narrative and the explosive, terrifying content

What is surprising is that the writer never falls into a pathetic breakdown, nowhere does he crumble into curses against fate or power. He leaves this privilege to the reader, who, willy-nilly, will shudder while reading each new story. After all, he will know that all this is not the author’s imagination, but the cruel truth, albeit clothed in artistic form.

The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as absolute evil. Shalamova views the GULAG as an exact copy of the model of totalitarian Stalinist society: “...The camp is not a contrast between hell and heaven. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like.” Camp - hell - is a constant association that comes to mind while reading “Kolyma Tales”. This association arises not even because you are constantly faced with the inhuman torment of prisoners, but also because the camp seems to be the kingdom of the dead. Thus, the story “Funeral Word” begins with the words: “Everyone died...” On every page you encounter 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 will almost certainly die; and the third group are those who may be lucky, but this is not certain. This statement becomes most obvious if we remember that the writer in most cases talks about those whom he met and whom he experienced in the camp: a man who was shot for failure to carry out the plan by his site, his classmate, whom he met 10 years later in the Butyrskaya cell prison, a French communist whom the foreman killed with one blow of his fist...

Varlam Shalamov lived through his entire life again, 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 words the horrors of the Russian people on their own land. My idea of ​​life as a blessing, as happiness, has changed. Kolyma taught me something completely different. The principle of my age, my personal existence, my entire life, a conclusion from my personal experience, a rule learned by this experience, can be expressed in a few words. First you need to return the slaps and only secondly - alms. Remember evil before good. To remember everything good is a hundred years, and everything bad is two hundred. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (V. Shalamov)

The article is posted on a hard-to-reach Internet resource in a pdf extension, duplicated here.

Documentary artistry of the stories “The Parcel” by V.T. Shalamov and “Sanochki” G.S. Zhzhenova

The article is related to the topic of the Kolyma convict camps and is devoted to the analysis of the documentary and artistic world of the stories “The Parcel” by V.T. Shalamov and “Sanochki” G.S. Zhzhenova.

The exposition of Shalamov’s story “The Parcel” directly introduces the main event of the story - the receipt of a parcel by one of the prisoners: “The parcels were handed out during the shift. The foremen verified the identity of the recipient. The plywood broke and cracked in its own way, like plywood. The trees here didn’t break like that, they screamed in a different voice.” It is no coincidence that the sound of parcel plywood is compared with the sound of breaking Kolyma trees, as if symbolizing two opposite modes of human life - life in the wild and life in prison. The “multipolarity” is clearly felt in another equally important circumstance: a prisoner who has come to receive a parcel notices behind the barrier people “with clean hands in overly neat military uniforms.” From the very beginning, the contrast creates an insurmountable barrier between the powerless prisoners and those who stand above them - the arbiters of their destinies. The attitude of the “masters” to the “slaves” is also noted in the beginning of the plot, and the abuse of the prisoner will vary until the end of the story, forming a kind of event constant, emphasizing the absolute lack of rights of the ordinary inhabitant of the Stalinist forced labor camp.

The article deals with the GULAG theme. The author made an attempt to analyze the documentary and fi ction worlds of the two stories.

LITERATURE

1. Zhzhenov G.S. Sanochki // From “Capercaillie” to “Firebird”: a story and stories. - M.: Sovremennik, 1989.
2. Cress Vernon. Zecameron of the 20th century: a novel. - M.: Artist. lit., 1992.
3. Shalamov V.T. Collected works. In 4 volumes. T. 1 // comp., prepared. text and notes I. Sirotinskaya. - M.: Artist. lit., 1998.
4. Shalamov V.T. Collected works. In 4 volumes. T. 2 // comp., prepared. text and notes I. Sirotinskaya. - M.: Artist. lit., 1998.
5. Schiller F.P. Letters from a Dead House / comp., trans. with German, note, afterword V.F. Diesendorff. - M.: Society. acad. sciences grew up Germans, 2002.

NOTES

1. Let us note that dreams about food and bread do not give a hungry prisoner in the camp peace: “I slept and still saw my constant Kolyma dream - loaves of bread floating through the air, filling all the houses, all the streets, all the earth.”
2. Philologist F.P. Schiller wrote to his family in 1940 from a camp in Nakhodka Bay: “If you have not yet sent boots and an outer shirt, then do not send them, otherwise I am afraid that you will send something completely inappropriate.”
3. Shalamov recalls this incident both in “Sketches of the Underworld” and in the story “Funeral Word”: “The burkas cost seven hundred, but it was a profitable sale.<…>And I bought a whole kilogram of butter at the store.<…>I also bought bread...”
4. Due to the constant hunger of prisoners and exhausting hard work, the diagnosis of “nutritional dystrophy” in the camps was common. This became fertile ground for undertaking adventures of unprecedented proportions: “all products that exceeded their shelf life were written off to the camp.”
5. The hero-narrator of the story “Conspiracy of Lawyers” experiences something similar to this feeling: “I haven’t been pushed out of this brigade yet. There were people here who were weaker than me, and this brought some kind of calm, some kind of unexpected joy.” Kolyma resident Vernon Kress writes about human psychology in such conditions: “We were pushed by our comrades, because the sight of a survivor always irritates a healthier person, he guesses his own future in him and, moreover, is drawn to find an even more defenseless person, to take revenge on him.”<...>» .
6. Not only the thugs loved theatricality, other representatives of the camp population also showed interest in it.

Czeslaw Gorbachevsky, South Ural State University

Package

Parcels were handed out during the shift. The foremen verified the identity of the recipient. The plywood broke and cracked in its own way, like plywood. The trees here did not break like that, they screamed in a different voice. Behind a barrier of benches, people with clean hands in overly neat military uniforms opened, checked, shook, handed out. Boxes of parcels, barely alive from the months-long journey, thrown skillfully, fell to the floor and broke into pieces. Lumps of sugar, dried fruit, rotten onions, crumpled packs of shag scattered across the floor. No one picked up what was scattered. The owners of the parcels did not protest - receiving the parcel was a miracle of miracles.

Guards with rifles in their hands stood near the watch - some unfamiliar figures were moving in the white frosty fog.

I stood against the wall and waited in line. These blue pieces are not ice! It's sugar! Sugar! Sugar! Another hour will pass and I will hold these pieces in my hands and they will not melt. They will just melt in your mouth. Such a large piece will be enough for me two times, three times.

And shag! Your own shag! Continental shag, Yaroslavl "Belka" or "Kremenchug No. 2". I will smoke, I will treat everyone, everyone, everyone, and above all those with whom I have smoked all this year. Mainland shag! After all, we were given rations of tobacco taken from army warehouses due to their expiration dates - an adventure of gigantic proportions: all products that exceeded their expiration dates were written off to the camp. But now I will smoke real shag. After all, if the wife doesn’t know that she needs stronger shag, they will tell her.

Surname?

The parcel was cracked, and prunes, leathery prune berries, spilled out of the box. Where's the sugar? Yes, and prunes - two or three handfuls...

Burkas for you! Pilot's burkas! Ha ha ha! With rubber sole! Ha ha ha! Like the head of a mine! Hold it, take it!

I stood there confused. Why do I need burkas? You can wear burkas here only on holidays - there were no holidays. If only reindeer boots, torbasa or ordinary felt boots. Burkas are too chic... It's not appropriate. Moreover...

Do you hear... - Someone’s hand touched my shoulder. I turned so that I could see the cloaks, and the box, at the bottom of which there were some prunes, and the authorities, and the face of the man who was holding my shoulder. It was Andrey Boyko, our mountain ranger. And Boyko whispered hastily:

Sell ​​me these burkas. I'll give you money. One hundred rubles. You can’t bring it to the barracks - they’ll take it away, they’ll snatch it out. - And Boyko pointed his finger into the white fog. - Yes, and they will steal from the barracks. On the first night. “You’ll send it yourself,” I thought.

Okay, give me the money.

You see what I am like! - Boyko counted out the money. - I’m not deceiving you, not like others. I said a hundred - and I give a hundred. - Boyko was afraid that he had overpaid.

I folded the dirty pieces of paper in fours, eights and put them in my trouser pocket. He poured prunes from the box into his pea coat - his pockets had long been torn out for pouches.

I'll buy some oil! A kilogram of butter! And I will eat it with bread, soup, porridge. And sugar! And I’ll get a bag from someone - a small bag with a string. An indispensable accessory of any decent prisoner from the fraer. The thieves don't walk around with little bags.

I returned to the barracks. Everyone was lying on the bunk, only Efremov sat with his hands on the cooled stove and stretched his face towards the disappearing warmth, afraid to straighten up and tear himself away from the stove.

Why don't you melt? The orderly came up.

Efremov's duty! The foreman said: let him take it wherever he wants, as long as there is firewood. I won't let you sleep anyway. Go before it's too late.

Efremov slipped out the door of the barracks.

Where is your package?

We made a mistake...

I ran to the store. Shaparenko, the store manager, was still trading. There was no one in the store.

Shaparenko, I need some bread and butter.

You'll kill me.

Well, take as much as you need.

Do you see how much money I have? - said Shaparenko. - What can a wick like you give? Grab your bread and butter and party fast.

I forgot to ask for sugar. Oils - kilogram. Bread - kilogram. I'll go to Semyon Sheinin. Sheinin was Kirov's former assistant, who had not yet been executed at that time. He and I once worked together, in the same team, but fate separated us.

Sheinin was in the barracks.

Let's eat. Butter, bread.

Sheinin's hungry eyes sparkled.

Now I'm boiling water...

No need for boiling water!

No, I'm right now. - And he disappeared.

Immediately someone hit me on the head with something heavy, and when I jumped up and came to my senses, the bag was gone. Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with evil joy. The entertainment was of the best kind. In such cases, we were doubly happy: firstly, someone felt bad, and secondly, it wasn’t me who felt bad. This is not envy, no...

I didn't cry. I barely survived. Thirty years have passed, and I clearly remember the darkened barracks, the angry, joyful faces of my comrades, the damp log on the floor, Sheinin’s pale cheeks.

I came back to the stall. I no longer asked for butter and did not ask for sugar. I begged for bread, returned to the barracks, melted the snow and began to cook prunes.

Barack was already asleep: he was moaning, wheezing and coughing. The three of us each cooked our own at the stove: Sintsov boiled a crust of bread saved from lunch in order to eat it, sticky, hot, and then to drink greedily the hot snow water that smelled of rain and bread. And Gubarev stuffed frozen cabbage leaves into a pot - a lucky man and a cunning man. The cabbage smelled like the best Ukrainian borscht! And I cooked parcel prunes. We all couldn't help but stare at other people's dishes.

Someone kicked open the doors of the barracks. Two military men emerged from a cloud of frosty steam. One, younger, is the head of the Kovalenko camp, the other, older, is the head of the Ryabov mine. Ryabov was wearing aviation cloaks - my cloaks! I had a hard time realizing that this was a mistake, that the burkas were Ryabov’s. Kovalenko rushed to the stove, waving the pick he had brought with him.

Bowler hats again! Now I’ll show you the bowlers! I'll show you how to stir up dirt!

Kovalenko knocked over the pots with soup, with crusts of bread and cabbage leaves, with prunes and pierced the bottom of each pot with a pick.

Ryabov warmed his hands on the chimney.

“If there are pots, that means there is something to cook,” the head of the mine said thoughtfully. - This, you know, is a sign of contentment.

“You should have seen what they’re cooking,” said Kovalenko, trampling the pots. The bosses came out, and we began to sort out the crumpled pots and each collect our own: I - berries, Sintsov - soggy, shapeless bread, and Gubarev - crumbs of cabbage leaves. We ate everything at once - it was the safest way.

I swallowed a few berries and fell asleep. I learned long ago to fall asleep before my feet warmed up - once I couldn’t do this, but experience, experience... Sleep was like oblivion.

Life was returning like a dream - the doors opened again: white clouds of steam, lying on the floor, running to the far wall of the barracks, people in white sheepskin coats, stinking from newness, unwornness, and something collapsed on the floor, not moving, but alive, grunting.

The orderly, in a bewildered but respectful pose, bowed before the white sheepskin coats of the foreman.

Your man? - And the caretaker pointed to a lump of dirty rags on the floor.

This is Efremov,” said the orderly.

He will know how to steal other people's firewood.

Efremov lay next to me on a bunk for many weeks until he was taken away and died in a disabled town. They knocked his guts out - there were many masters of this craft at the mine. He didn't complain - he lay there and moaned quietly.