Essays on the Criminal World. On Kolyma

The collection "Essays on the Criminal World" and the memoirs "On Kolyma" are not just stories, but one of the most powerful and authentic artistic testimonies – sometimes terrifying, sometimes brutal – of life in conditions of extreme trials and hopelessness, based on the personal experience of Varlam Shalamov, who spent nearly twenty years in the camps. He describes with ruthless precision how the system destroys human destinies and moral values and, most importantly, tells about the lives of people in inhuman conditions, when previous criteria of morality and culture become inoperative, and crime becomes not only a means of survival but also a philosophy of existence.