Kolyma Tales

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