Shalamov carpenters analysis. Analysis of several stories from the series “Kolyma Tales”

Introduction

Brief biographical information

The history of the creation of “Kolyma Tales”

1 The main themes and motives of Shalamov’s work

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

Analysis of several stories from the series “ Kolyma stories»

1 General analysis"Kolyma Tales"

2 Analysis of several stories from the collection “Kolyma Stories”

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

“Kolyma Stories” is an attempt to raise and resolve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. The ability to rely on forces other than hope...

V. Shalamov

Shalamov is a master of naturalistic descriptions. At the end of the 80s, in connection with the put forward ideas of “perestroika” and “new thinking,” a flood of previously prohibited literature hit the general reader. Works began to be published on the so-called “camp theme,” which until that time had been represented only by A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Literary and artistic periodicals devoted their pages to the works of N. Mandelstam, E. Ginzburg, L. Razgon, A. Zhigulin, V. Shalamov; The novels of O. Volkov and Y. Dombrovsky saw the light.

The work of V.T. Shalamov suffered a fate determined by the peculiarities of the transitional time: superficial reading, hasty conclusions and inclusion in the “camp theme”, which now, as many believe, has only historical value. For many not only ordinary readers, but also literary critics, Shalamov remains the creator of “Kolyma Tales.”

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

The purpose of our work is to try to explore what influence the context of a writer’s life has. In this case, V. Shalamov, on his work.

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

1. Brief biographical information

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

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

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

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

1926- enrolls from the plant to the 1st year of the Moscow Textile Institute and at the same time, through free admission, to the Faculty of Soviet Law of Moscow State University. Chooses Moscow State University.

1927 (November 7)- participates in the opposition demonstration for the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, held under the slogans “Down with Stalin!” and “Let’s fulfill Lenin’s will!”

1928- visiting the literary circle at the magazine “New LEF”.

February 19, 1929- arrested during a raid on an underground printing house while printing leaflets called “Lenin’s Testament.” For this, as a “socially dangerous element,” he receives 3 years of imprisonment in camps.

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

October 1931- released from a forced labor camp and restored to rights. He earns money to leave the Berezniki chemical plant.

1932- returns to Moscow and begins working in the trade union magazines “For Shock Work” and “For Mastering Technology.” Meets with G.I. Gudz.

1933- comes to Vologda to visit his parents.

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

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

1934 - 1937- works in the magazine “For Industrial Personnel”.

1936- publishes the first short story “The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino” in the magazine “October” No. 1.

January 13, 1937- Arrested for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities and again placed in Butyrka prison. At a special meeting he was sentenced to 5 years of imprisonment in forced labor camps with heavy labor.

August 14, 1937- with a large party of prisoners, he arrives on a ship at Nagaevo Bay (Magadan).

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

December 1938- arrested in the camp “lawyers’ case.” He is in a remand prison in Magadan (“Vaskov House”).

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

April 1939 - August 1940- works in a geological exploration party at the Chernaya Rechka mine - as a digger, boiler operator, and assistant topographer.

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

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

May 1943- arrested following a denunciation by fellow prisoners “for anti-Soviet statements” and for praising the great Russian writer I.A. Bunin.

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

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

December 1943 - summer 1944- works in a mine at the Spokoiny mine.

Summer 1944- is arrested on the basis of a denunciation with the same incrimination, but does not receive a sentence, because is serving under the same article.

Summer 1945 - autumn 1945- seriously ill patients are in the Belichya hospital. With the help of sympathetic doctors, he emerges from his dying state. He remains temporarily in the hospital as a cult organizer and auxiliary worker.

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

Autumn 1945 - spring 1946- as punishment for escaping, he is again sent to general work at the Dzhelgala penal mine.

Spring 1946- on general work at the Susuman mine. Suspected of dysentery, he is again admitted to the Belichya hospital. After recovery with the help of a doctor, A.M. Pantyukhova is sent to study for paramedic courses at the camp hospital 23 kilometers from Magadan.

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

Spring 1949 - summer 1950- works as a paramedic in the lumber camp “Klyuch Duskanya”. He begins to write poetry, which was later included in the “Kolyma Notebooks” cycle.

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

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

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

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

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

1954- begins work on the first collection “Kolyma Stories”. Divorces his marriage with G.I. Gudz.

July 18, 1956- receives rehabilitation for lack of corpus delicti and is dismissed from the Reshetnikovsky enterprise.

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

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

1957 - 1958- transfers serious disease, attacks of Meniere's disease, is being treated at the Botkin Hospital.

1961- publishes the first book of poems “Ognivo”. Continues to work on “Kolyma Stories” and “Essays on the Underworld.”

1962 - 1964- works as a freelance internal reviewer for the New World magazine.

1964- publishes a book of poems “The Rustle of Leaves”.

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

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

1966 - 1967- creates a collection of stories “Resurrection of Larch”.

1967- publishes a book of poems “Road and Fate”.

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

1970 - 1971- working on “Vishera anti-novel”.

1972- learns about the publication in the West, in the Posev publishing house, of his “Kolyma Stories”. Writes a letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta protesting against unauthorized illegal publications that violate the author's will and rights. Many fellow writers perceive this letter as a rejection of “Kolyma Tales” and break off relations with Shalamov.

1972- publishes a book of poems “Moscow Clouds”. Accepted into the USSR Writers' Union.

1973 - 1974- works on the cycle “The Glove, or KR-2” (the final cycle of “Kolyma Tales”).

1977- publishes a book of poems “Boiling Point”. In connection with his 70th anniversary, he was nominated for the Order of the Badge of Honor, but did not receive the award.

1978- in London, the Overseas Publications publishing house publishes the book “Kolyma Stories” in Russian. The publication was also carried out outside the will of the author. Shalamov's health is deteriorating sharply. He begins to lose hearing and vision, and attacks of Meniere's disease with loss of coordination of movements become more frequent.

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

1980- received news that he had been awarded a prize from the French Pen Club, but never received the prize.

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

January 14, 1982- based on the conclusion of the medical commission, he is transferred to a boarding house for psychochronic patients.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shalamov did not like epithets. The dispassionate speech of an eyewitness is his method. The works of V. Shalamov, of course, have the value of historical evidence. He himself went through the circles of hell that he spoke about; his prose is the embodiment in words of the artist’s bleeding memory. It is not for nothing that F. Suchkov called his stories “testimonies” of the author. And Shalamov himself considered “Kolyma Tales” a document. He doesn’t explain anything, doesn’t go into analysis, doesn’t reveal the background, doesn’t give a panorama. At first glance, his texts are a chain of private episodes. Someone rotted alive, another was stabbed to death because of a warm sweatshirt. It turns out that the saying “work like a horse” is wrong: horses are much less resilient than people. Here is a scene of distributing and eating herring, which all, with head, skin, tail and bones, dissolves in the toothless prisoner’s mouths. Here one is eating condensed milk, and ten are standing around and watching - not waiting to be treated, but simply watching, unable to take their eyes off. The stories are short, some are two or three pages long, almost miniatures. There are no plots, in the generally accepted sense. It is impossible to single out one or more stories - “the best”, “the most characteristic”. You can start reading Shalamov from anywhere, from a half-phrase - instant immersion is guaranteed. Cold, hunger, scurvy, tuberculosis, cholera, physical and nervous exhaustion, degradation and disintegration of personality, indifference and cruelty, death on every page, apocalypse in every paragraph.

Shalamov's camp inmates are not hardworking and do not know how to live. They are dying. They are half-humans, half-beasts. They are broken and flattened. They live in a parallel universe, where elementary physical laws are turned upside down. They are concerned - literally - with the existence of “from the fence to the dinner”.

Shalamov examines not the personality, but the ashes left behind when it was burned. Shalamov is not interested in human dignity, but in his ashes.

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

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

In the story “Bread,” the hero is incredibly lucky: he is sent to work at a bakery. The foreman leads him to the firehouse, brings a loaf of bread - but the stoker, despising the foreman, behind his back throws the old loaf into the firebox and brings the guest a fresh, still warm one. What about the hero? He was not horrified by the stoker's extravagance. He is not amazed at the nobility of the gesture: throwing away stale bread and bringing fresh bread to the hungry. He feels nothing, he is too weak, he only indifferently records what is happening.

The names and characters of Shalamov's characters are not remembered. There are no metaphors, aphorisms, no lyrics, no mind games, no witty dialogues. Many reproach the author of “Kolyma Tales” for this. They claim that Shalamov is weak as an artist of words, as a “writer,” they accuse him of reporting and brand him as a memoirist. In fact, Shalamov’s texts, for all their apparent imperfection, are sophisticated and unique. The characters are the same precisely because everyone in the camp is the same. No personalities, no bright people. No one jokes or throws out proverbs. The narrator is dry, and at times tongue-tied - exactly to the same extent as the camp inmates are tongue-tied. The narrator is short, just as the life of a camp inmate is short. Shalamov’s phrase breaks, bends, and stumbles - just as the camp inmate breaks, bends, and stumbles. But here is the story “Sherry Brandy”, dedicated to the death of Mandelstam - here Shalamov already works in almost blank verse: rhythmic, melodic and merciless.

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

“Feeling” is Shalamov’s defining category. His essays and notebooks are full of discussions about feelings, real and imaginary. The ability and desire to convey genuine feelings take Shalamov out of the ranks of “writers of everyday life,” “ethnographers,” “reporters” and prove his originality.

It was Shalamov who stated in detail and with reason: one should not overestimate a person. A man is great, but he is also insignificant. The man is noble - but to the same extent mean and base. Man is capable of moral improvement, but this is a slow process, centuries long, and attempts to speed it up are doomed to failure.

His works are an absolutely separate island in the archipelago of “camp prose.” A unique writer's vision, a constant feeling of the edge of life, beyond which there is only madness, special artistic techniques, denial of classical realistic traditions - this prose has absorbed everything.

Varlam Shalamov is a realist. But the reality around him is surreal. The authors of Western thrillers also know how to create scary pictures - but they constantly balance on the brink of black humor and self-parody, especially often falling into this latter. V. Shalamov does not in the least seek to “tickle the nerves.” In a world full of evil and violence, art, even scary and cruel, acts as a bearer of goodness and hope thanks to its spiritual purity.

The deepest, perhaps far from appreciated, meaning of V. Shalamov’s work is that with the entire artistic fabric of his works he defends the intrinsic value of life: the purpose of life is not in “building” anything, it is in life itself.

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

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

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

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

If you are twenty-two years old, the only goal can be world revolution. There is no other way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He tries to publish his texts at the same time, in the late 1950s. But he will be disappointed. With the legendary publication in Novy Mir of Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the camp theme in official Soviet literature was opened - and closed. Khrushchev threw the liberal intellectuals, “progressive humanity” a bone - there was no second one. We need camp prose - here's camp prose, first-hand literary evidence, please. But Shalamov is not needed. Solzhenitsyn alone is enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The further the stupid Russian capitalism rattles and rings like a saucepan, in which there is no place for respect for the individual, nor hard work, nor order, nor patience, the more relevant the literature of Varlam Shalamov becomes.

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

2. Analysis of several stories from the series “Kolyma Tales”

1 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 (1-3 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 also 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,” the manuscript does not feel carried away by argotisms). 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 seems comical to us Duck when a man tries to catch a bird, but it turns out to be smarter than him. But we gradually understand the tragedy of this situation when hunting did not lead to anything except forever frostbitten fingers and lost hopes about the possibility of being deleted from 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 does. Condensed milk . 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. Because main character story The last battle of Major Pugachev prefers to kill himself rather than give up.

“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 prisoners sleep, wake up, eat, walk, dress, work, “have 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 does not leave 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 them 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 (“The First Death”), suicide (“Seraphim”), the unlimited dominion of thieves (“Snake Charmer”), barbaric methods of identifying simulation (“ Shock therapy"), killing doctors ("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 style 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 art form.

Main image, uniting all the stories - the image of the camp as absolute evil. Shalamova views the GULAG as an exact copy of the model of Stalin’s totalitarian 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, having written enough hard labour. 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 the 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.” (V. Shalamov)

2 Analysis of the story “To the Show”

Each story by V. Shalamov is unique, because he addresses an unusual and frightening topic - the life of prisoners, or, to be more precise, not life, but existence, where every second for a person is a struggle. People have neither past nor future, there is only “now” and nothing more.

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

Igor Sukhikh in his work “Life after Kolyma” notes that “... Shalamov’s personal, internal theme is not the prison, not the camp in general, but Kolyma with its experience of the grandiose, 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.”

Interest in this work is not accidental, because in it literally on the surface lie all the secrets and horrors of camp life, and the process of playing cards stands out especially clearly as something devilish and fatal.

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

It’s safe and warm in the barracks near the horseman. And it was this “warm place” that was chosen by the thieves for card fights.

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

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

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

It’s dark in the barracks, the only light comes from a pole. The light from it is dim, dim with a tint of red, so that the horse barracks outwardly resemble hell more than a living space.

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

The Soviet government, having come to control, destroyed the noble society and everything connected with it. During this period, card games were strictly prohibited, and cards could not be purchased, however, “Rus is full of talents” and there were craftsmen who made cards on their own.

“On the pillow lay a brand new deck of cards...” (5, p.182). Just like in a classic game of chance, a new game starts with a new deck of cards. But these cards are extraordinary, they are made from a volume of Victor Hugo. Let us suggest that, perhaps, from the text of that very novel, which also talks about the convicts “Les Miserables,” we can thus draw a parallel with the world of times french revolution. We do this in order to see the harmful effects of disunity and underdevelopment of society during repression. Cards are played on a pillow, which is absolutely forbidden to do, since the energy of cards is negative and affects a person’s subconscious.

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

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

Everything in life has a downside, an opposite, and cards too. The “black” suits (clubs and spades) are the opposite of the “red” ones (hearts and diamonds), just as evil is the opposite of good, and life is death.

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

Based on all of the above, let us make the assumption that Naumov, without realizing it, signed his own death sentence - he sat down to play cards with the “devilishness”, and if he comes out of this fight alive, then he will definitely not become a winner.

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

Sevochka starts the game. “Sevochka shuffled the cards...” (5, p. 185). The narration is told directly from the narrator's point of view. He and his comrade Garkunov are daily witnesses of the games. Meanwhile, Naumov managed to lose everything except government items that were worth nothing and no one needed. “According to the rules, the fight cannot be over while the partner can still respond in some way” (5, p. 185).

“Naumov is betting on some kind of cigar with a repressed profile of Gogol” (5, p. 185); this direct appeal to the Ukrainian period of Gogol’s work naturally connects “To the Presentation” with “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, imbued with a kind of devilry. Thus, references to folklore and social literary works firmly introduce the thieves gambler into the informal associative series. Naumov is ruined. The only hope is taking a risk - going to the show. A presentation is like a bet “for hire”, an opportunity to win back without having anything. Sevochka was a little capricious and, in the end, in the role of a kind of benefactor, agreed to give him a chance.

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

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

“...Garkunov sobbed and began to fall on his side.

“We couldn’t live without it!” Sevochka shouted.

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

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

“Now we had to look for another partner to cut wood”...

In the camp human life- NOTHING, and the person himself is a bug, although it has more rights to life than the people in the camp.

No man - on him the place will come different, and this whole devilish machine will work in the same rhythm, no matter what.

Conclusion

Shalamov Kolyma stories

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

The works and life of Varlam Shalamov clearly reflect the fate of the intelligentsia during times of great repression. We shouldn't reject literary works, like “Kolyma Tales” - they should serve as an indicator for the present (especially considering the degradation that is happening in people’s minds and which can be so clearly seen through the quality of today’s culture).

Shalamov's decision to describe the "life" of prisoners in concentration camps, which clearly reflects the Stalinist dictatorship, - heroic deed. “Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person, neither a boss nor a prisoner, needs to see him. But if you have seen him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. [ ...] For my part, I decided long ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this truth,” wrote Shalamov.

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

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

There are no analogues to Varlam Shalamov and his “Kolyma Tales” in world culture. Let's hope there won't be any. If there is no new Kolyma. But there is already plenty of evidence that a new Kolyma has been designed and is being created. Right in our minds. The disintegration of personality now does not occur in permafrost, under the barking of guard dogs, now slaves do not need to be taken to the tundra and fed with gruel, now slaves - new, ultra-modern, ideally obedient - are easier and cheaper to raise from the cradle with the help of media technologies, manipulation of mass consciousness. Shalamov is gone, his memory is preserved by a small group of brave idealists. Self-satisfied and disgusting “progressive humanity” won. But as long as Varlam Shalamov’s books exist, it will not be able to triumph.

Literature

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

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

Shalamov collection: Vol. 3. Comp. V.V. Esipov]. - Vologda: Griffin, 2002. - P.35-38.

Literary prose texts, articles and correspondence of V. Shalamov

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

.Elena Mikhailik “In the context of literature and history”

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

Jacques Rossi. Handbook of the Gulag: In two parts. M., 1991. 4.1. 317. p. 4.2. 284 p.

Shalamov V. Requiem: Shalamov V. Collection. Op.: In 4 volumes. Volume 3. Poems. M., 1998. P. 136.

Esipov V.V. Shalamov. - M.: Young Guard, 2012. - 346 p.: ill. - (Life wonderful people: gray biogr.; issue 1374).

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

Anoshina, Anna Valerievna. The artistic world of Varlam Shalamov: dis. ...cand. Philol. Sciences: 10.01.01. Severodvinsk, 2006. Scientific supervisor - Professor E.Ya. Fesenko. Dissertation defense date: December 8, 2006

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Main topic, main plot Shalamov’s biography, all the books of his “Kolyma Stories” are a search for the answer to the question: can a person survive in extreme conditions and remain human? What is the price and what is the meaning of life if you have already been “on the other side”? Revealing his understanding of this problem, Varlam Shalamov helps the reader more accurately understand the author's concept, actively applying the principle of contrast.

The ability to “be combined in a single material as a contradiction, mutual reflection of different values, destinies, characters, and at the same time represent a certain whole” - one of the stable properties of artistic thought. Lomonosov called this “conjugation of distant ideas,” P. Palievsky - “thinking with the help of living contradiction.”

Contradictions are rooted within the material and are extracted from it. But from all their complexity, from the threads cleverly intertwined by life itself, the writer isolates a certain dominant, a driving emotional nerve, and it is this that he makes the content of a work of art based on this material.

Both paradox and contrast, so abundantly used by Shalamov, contribute to the most active emotional perception of a work of art. And in general, “the imagery, freshness, and novelty of his works largely depend on how strong an artist’s ability is to combine heterogeneous and incompatible things.” .

Shalamov makes the reader shudder, remembering the lieutenant of the tank forces Svechnikov (“Domino”), who at the mine “was caught eating the meat of human corpses from the morgue.” But the effect is enhanced by the author due to purely external contrast: this cannibal is a “gentle, rosy-cheeked young man”, calmly explaining his passion for “non-fat, of course” human flesh!

Or the narrator’s meeting with the Comintern figure Schneider, a most educated man, an expert on Goethe (“Typhoid Quarantine”). In the camp he is in the retinue of thieves, in the crowd of beggars. Schneider is happy that he has been entrusted with scratching the heels of the leader of the thieves, Senechka.

Understanding the moral degradation and immorality of Svechnikov and Schneider, victims of the Gulag, is achieved not by verbose arguments, but by using the artistic device of contrast. Thus, contrast performs communicative, meaningful, and artistic functions in the structure of a work of art. It makes you see and feel the world around you in a sharper, new way.

Shalamov attached great importance to the composition of his books and carefully arranged the stories in a certain sequence. Therefore, the appearance side by side of two works contrasting in their artistic and emotional essence is not an accident.

The plot basis of the story “Shock Therapy” is paradoxical: a doctor, whose vocation and duty is to help those in need, directs all his strength and knowledge to exposing the convict-malingerer, who experiences “horror of the world from where he came to the hospital and where he I was afraid to go back.” The story is filled with a detailed description of the barbaric, sadistic procedures carried out by doctors in order to prevent the exhausted, exhausted “goner” from being “free”. Next in the book is the story “Stlanik”. This lyrical short story gives the reader the opportunity to take a break, to move away from the horrors of the previous story. Nature, unlike people, is humane, generous and kind.

Shalamov’s comparison of the natural world and the human world is always not in favor of man. In the story “Bitch Tamara” the head of the site and the dog are contrasted. The boss put the people subordinate to him in such conditions that they were forced to inform on each other. And next to him is a dog, whose “moral firmness especially touched the inhabitants of the village who had seen the sights and been in all troubles.”

In the story “Bears” we encounter a similar situation. In the conditions of the Gulag, each prisoner cares only about himself. The bear encountered by the prisoners clearly took the danger upon itself,ort, a male, sacrificed his life to save his girlfriend, he distracted death from her, he covered her escape.”

The camp world is essentially antagonistic. Hence Shalamov’s use of contrast at the level of the image system.

The hero of the story “Aortic Aneurysm,” doctor Zaitsev, a professional and humanist, is contrasted with the immoral head of the hospital; in the story “The Descendant of the Decembrist”, essentially contrasting characters constantly collide: the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, “a knight, a clever man, a man of immense knowledge, whose word did not diverge from deeds”, and his direct descendant, the immoral and selfish Sergei Mi -Khailovich Lunin, doctor at the camp hospital. The difference between the heroes of the story “Ryabokon” is not only internal, essential, but also external: “The huge body of the Latvian looked like a drowned man - blue-white, swollen, swollen from hunger... Ryabokon did not look like a drowned man. Huge, bony, with withered veins.” People of different life orientations collided at the end of their lives in a common hospital space.

“Sherry Brandy,” a story about the last days of Osip Mandelstam’s life, is permeated with contrasts. The poet dies, but life enters him again, giving birth to thoughts. He was dead and became alive again. He thinks about creative immortality, having already crossed, in essence, the life line.

A dialectically contradictory chain is built: life - death - resurrection - immortality - life. The poet remembers, writes poetry, philosophizes - and then cries that he didn’t get the crust of bread. The one who just quoted Tyutchev “bite bread with scurvy teeth, his gums were bleeding, his teeth were loose, but he did not feel pain. With all his might he pressed the bread to his mouth, stuffed it into his mouth, sucked it, tore it, gnawed it...” Such duality, internal dissimilarity, and inconsistency are characteristic of many of Shalamov’s heroes who find themselves in the hellish conditions of the camp. Zeka often recalls with surprise himself - different, former, free.

It’s scary to read the lines about the camp horse-driver Glebov, who became famous in the barracks for “forgetting the name of his wife a month ago.” In his “free” life, Glebov was... a professor of philosophy (the story “The Funeral Oration”).

In the story “The First Tooth” we learn the story of the sectarian Peter the Hare - a young, black-haired, black-browed giant. The “lame, gray-haired old man coughing up blood” met by the storyteller some time later—that’s him.

Such contrasts within the image, at the level of the hero, are not only an artistic device. This is also an expression of Shalamov’s conviction that a normal person is not able to withstand the hell of GU-LAG. The camp can only be trampled and destroyed. In this, as is known, V. Shalamov disagreed with Solzhenitsyn, who was convinced of the possibility of remaining a man in the camp.

In Shalamov’s prose, the absurdity of the Gulag world is often manifested in the discrepancy between a person’s real situation and his official status. For example, in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” there is an episode when one of the heroes achieves an honorable and very profitable job... as a barracks sanitation worker.

The plot of the story “Aunt Polya” is based on a similar contrasting discrepancy. The heroine is a prisoner taken as a servant by the authorities. She was a slave in the house and at the same time “a secret arbiter in quarrels between husband and wife,” “a person who knows the shadow sides of the house.” She feels good in slavery, she is grateful to fate for the gift. Aunt Polya, who is ill, is placed in a separate ward, from which “ten half-dead corpses were first dragged out into a cold corridor to make room for the orderly chief.” The military and their wives came to Aunt Polya in the hospital asking her to put in a good word for them. forever. And after her death, the “all-powerful” Aunt Polya deserved only a wooden tag with a number on her left shin, because she was just a “prisoner,” a slave. Instead of one orderly, another will come, equally familyless, with only a personal file number behind her. The human person is worthless in the conditions of the camp nightmare.

It has already been noted that the use of contrast activates the reader’s perception.

Shalamov, as a rule, is stingy with detailed, detailed descriptions. When they are used, for the most part they are a detailed opposition.

Extremely indicative in this regard is the description in the story “My Trial”: “There are few sights as expressive as the red-faced figures of the camp authorities standing side by side, red-faced from alcohol, the well-fed, overweight, heavy with fat, figures of the camp authorities in shiny new clothes like the sun.” , stinking sheepskin short fur coats, in fur-painted Yakut malakhai and “gaiter” mittens with a bright pattern - and the figures of “goners”, tattered “wicks” with “smoking” shreds of cotton wool from worn padded jackets, “goners” with the same dirty, bony faces and the hungry gleam of sunken eyes.”

Hyperbole and emphasis on negatively perceived details in the guise of the “camp authorities” are especially noticeable in comparison with the dark, dirty mass of “goons”.

There is a similar kind of contrast in the description of the bright, colorful, sunny Vladivostok and the rainy, gray-dull landscape of Nagaevo Bay (“Hell’s Pier”). Here the contrasting landscape expresses the differences in the hero’s internal state - hope in Vladivostok and expectation of death in Nagaevo Bay.

An interesting example of a contrasting description is in the story “Marcel Proust.” A small episode: the imprisoned Dutch communist Fritz David was sent velvet trousers and a silk scarf in a parcel from home. Exhausted Fritz David died of hunger in these luxurious, but useless clothes in the camp, which “even for bread at the mine could not be exchanged.” This contrasting detail in the strength of its emotional impact can be compared with the horrors in the stories of F. Kafka or E. Poe. The difference is that Shalamov did not invent anything, did not construct an absurd world, but only remembered what he witnessed.

Characterizing different ways using the artistic principle of contrast in Shalamov’s stories, it is appropriate to consider its implementation at the word level.

Verbal contrasts can be divided into two groups. The first includes words whose very meaning is contrasting, opposed and out of context, and the second includes words whose combinations create a contrast, a paradox, already in a specific context.

First, examples from the first group. “They immediately transport prisoners in neat, orderly batches up into the taiga, and in dirty heaps of discards from above, back from the taiga” (“Conspiracy of Lawyers”). The double opposition (“clean” - “dirty”, “up” - “from above”), aggravated by the diminutive suffix, on the one hand, and the reduced phrase “heap of garbage”, on the other, creates the impression a picture of two oncoming human streams seen in reality.

“I rushed, that is, trudged to the workshop” (“Handwriting”). Clearly contradictory lexical meanings here they are equal to each other, telling the reader about the extreme degree of exhaustion and weakness of the hero much more clearly than any lengthy description. In general, Shalamov, recreating the absurd world of the Gulag, often combines, rather than contrasts, words and expressions that are antinomic in their meaning. In several works (in particular, in the stories “Brave Eyes” and “Resurrection of the Larch”),smoldering, moldAndspring, lifeAnddeath:”...the mold also seemed to spring, green, seemed alive too, and the dead trunks emitted the smell of life. Green mold ... seemed like a symbol of spring. But in fact it is the color of decrepitude and decay. But Kolyma asked us more difficult questions, and the similarity of life and death did not bother us”.

Another example of contrasting similarity: ''Graphite is eternity. The highest hardness turned into the highest softness” (“Graphite”).

The second group of verbal contrasts are oxymorons, the use of which gives rise to a new semantic quality. The “upside down” world of the camp makes possible such expressions: “a fairy tale, the joy of solitude”, “a dark cozy punishment cell”, etc.

The color palette of Shalamov's stories is not very intense. The artist sparingly paints the world of his works. It would be excessive to say that a writer always consciously chooses one color or another. He uses color in an unintentional, intuitive way. And, as a rule, the paint has a natural, natural function. For example: “the mountains turned red from lingonberries, blackened from dark blue blueberries, ... large, watery rowan trees filled with yellow...” (“Kant”). But in a number of cases, color in Shalamov’s stories carries a meaningful and ideological load, especially when a contrasting color scheme is used. This is what happens in the story “Children’s Pictures”. While clearing out a garbage heap, the prisoner narrator found in it a notebook with children's drawings. The grass on them is green, the sky is blue, the sun is scarlet. The colors are clean, bright, without halftones. Typical palette children's drawing But: “People and houses... were surrounded by smooth yellow fences entwined with black lines of barbed wire.”

The childhood impressions of a little Kolyma resident run into yellow fences and black barbed wire. Shalamov, as always, does not lecture the reader, does not indulge in reasoning on this matter. The clash of colors helps the artist to enhance the emotional impact of this episode, to convey the author’s idea about the tragedy not only of the prisoners, but also of the Kolyma children who became adults at an early age.

The artistic form of Shalamov’s works is also interesting for other manifestations of the paradoxical. I noticed a contradiction, which is based on the discrepancy between the manner, pathos, “tonality” of the narrative and the essence of what is being described. This artistic technique is adequate to Shalamov’s camp world, in which all the values ​​are literally upside down.

There are many examples of “mixing styles” in stories. A characteristic technique for the artist is to speak pathetically and sublimely about everyday events and facts. For example, about eating. For a prisoner, this is by no means an ordinary event of the day. This is a ritual action that gives a “passionate, selfless feeling” (“At Night”).

The description of the breakfast at which herring is distributed is striking. Artistic time here is stretched to the limit, as close to real as possible. The writer noted all the details and nuances of this exciting event: “While the distributor was approaching, everyone had already calculated which piece would be held out by this indifferent hand. Everyone has already become upset, rejoiced, prepared for a miracle, reached the brink of despair if he was mistaken in his hasty calculations” (“Bread”). And this whole range of feelings is caused by the anticipation of the herring ration!

The can of condensed milk the narrator saw in a dream is grandiose and majestic, and he compared it to the night sky. ''The milk seeped out and flowed in a wide stream Milky Way. And I easily reached with my hands to the sky and ate thick, sweet, star milk” (“Condensed Milk”). Not only comparison, but also inversion (“and I got it easily”) help here to create solemn pathos.

A similar example is in the story “How It Began”, where the guess that “shoe lubricant is fat, oil, nutrition” is compared with Archimedes’ “eureka”.

Sublime and delightful description of the berries touched by the first frost (“Berries”).

Awe and admiration in the camp are caused not only by food, but also by fire and warmth. In the description in the story “The Carpenters” there are truly Homeric notes, the pathos of the sacred rite: “Those who came knelt before the open door of the stove, before the god of fire, one of the first gods of humanity... They stretched out their hands to the warmth...”

The tendency to elevate the ordinary, even the low, is also manifested in those stories by Shalamov that deal with deliberate self-mutilation in the camp. For many prisoners, this was the only, last chance to survive. Making yourself a cripple is not at all easy. Long preparation was required. ''The stone should have fallen and crushed my leg. And I am forever disabled! This passionate dream was subject to calculation... The day, hour and minute were appointed and came” (“Rain”).

The beginning of the story “A Piece of Meat” is full of sublime vocabulary; Richard III, Macbeth, Claudius are mentioned here. The titanic passions of Shakespeare's heroes are equated with the feelings of prisoner Golubev. He sacrificed his appendix to escape the hard labor camp in order to survive. “Yes, Golubev made this bloody sacrifice. A piece of meat is cut from his body and thrown at the feet of the almighty god of the camps. To appease God... Life repeats Shakespearean plots more often than we think.”

In the writer's stories, the elevated perception of a person often contrasts with his true essence, usually low status. A fleeting meeting with “some former or current prostitute” allows the narrator to talk “about her wisdom, about her great heart,” and compare her words with Goethe’s lines about mountain peaks (“Rain”). The distributor of herring heads and tails is perceived by the prisoners as an almighty giant (“Bread”); The doctor on duty at the camp hospital is likened to an “angel in a white coat” (“The Glove”). In the same way, Shalamov shows the reader the camp world of Kolyma that surrounds the heroes. The description of this world is often elevated, pathetic, which contradicts the essential picture of reality. “In this white silence I did not hear the sound of the wind, I heard a musical phrase from the sky and a clear, melodic, ringing human voice...” (“Chasing the locomotive smoke”).

In the story “The Best Praise” we find a description of the sounds in the prison: “This special ringing, and also the rattle of the door lock, which is locked twice, ... and the clicking of the key on the copper belt buckle ... these are the three elements of the symphony.” “concrete” prison music that is remembered for a lifetime.”

The unpleasant metallic sounds of a prison are compared to the rich sound of a symphony orchestra. I note that the above examples of the “sublime” tone of the narrative are taken from those works whose hero either has not yet been to the terrible camp (prison and loneliness are positive for Shalamov), or is no longer there (the narrator has become a paramedic). In works specifically about camp life, there is practically no room for pathos. The exception is, perhaps, the story of Bogdanov. The action in it takes place in 1938, the most terrible year for both Shalamov and millions of other prisoners. It so happened that the NKVD commissioner Bogdanov tore into shreds the letters of his wife, from whom the narrator had no information for two terrible Kolyma years. To convey his strong shock, Shalamov, recalling this episode, resorts to pathos that is, in general, unusual for him. An ordinary incident grows into a true human tragedy. “Here are your letters, fascist bastard!” “Bogdanov tore into shreds and threw into the burning oven letters from my wife, letters that I had been waiting for for more than two years, waiting for in blood, in executions, in beatings of the gold mines of Kolyma.”

In his Kolyma epic, Shalamov also uses the opposite technique. It consists of an everyday, even reduced tone of narration about exceptional facts and phenomena, tragic in their consequences. These descriptions are marked by epic calm. “This calmness, slowness, inhibition is not only a technique that allows us to take a closer look at this transcendental world... The writer does not allow us to turn away, not to see” .

It seems that the epically calm narrative also reflects the prisoners’ habit of death, of the cruelty of camp life. To what E. Shklovsky called “ordinary agony” . He was convinced that " ...suffering, guilt, death... in no way detract from the meaning of life, but, on the contrary, in principle, they can always be transformed into something positive. There is no doubt that a poet will convey the essence of such a premise incomparably better and more simply than a scientist."[Ibid: 23].