Kolyma Tales

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov 1907–1982 – a Russian Soviet prose writer and poet was born in Vologda to a priest's family. He received a good home education, graduated from gymnasium, and a labor school. But he did not want to follow in his father's footsteps, moved to Moscow, where he worked as a tanner at the Kuntsevo leather factory and was later accepted into Moscow University in the Faculty of Soviet Law. In the capital, he attended literary circles and went to poetry evenings. Shalamov was arrested twice and exiled first from 1929–1931 to the Vishersky camp in the Perm region, where he built the Berezniki chemical plant, and then to Kolyma from 1937–1951 to the northeastern camp, where he worked as a gold miner, lumberjack, and digger, extracting coal. Later, having completed paramedic courses, Shalamov worked as a paramedic in the Far East. The inhumanly heavy labor and camp life conditions that fell upon an entire generation laid the foundation for Shalamov's cycle of stories and essays, Kolyma Tales, which narrate the life of prisoners in Soviet correctional labor camps in the 1930s to 1950s. Kolyma Tales, on which V. Shalamov began working immediately upon returning from the Stalinist camps and worked for almost twenty years, from 1954 to 1973, is a stunning artistic-documentary testimony of one of the most terrible tragedies of the 20th century.