Russian writer. Born in the family of a priest. Memories of parents, impressions of childhood and youth were later embodied in the autobiographical prose Fourth Vologda (1971).
In 1914 he entered the gymnasium, in 1923 he graduated from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage. In 1924 he left Vologda and got a job as a tanner at a tannery in the city of Kuntsevo, Moscow Region. In 1926 he entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Soviet Law.
At this time, Shalamov wrote poetry, participated in the work of literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes. He tried to actively participate in the public life of the country. Established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in the demonstration of the opposition on the 10th anniversary of October under the slogan "Down with Stalin!" February 19, 1929 was arrested. In his autobiographical prose, Vishera's anti-novel (1970-1971, unfinished) wrote: "I consider this day and hour to be the beginning of my social life - the first true test in harsh conditions."
Shalamov was sentenced to three years, which he spent in the northern Urals in the Vishera camp. In 1931 he was released and reinstated. Until 1932 he worked at the construction of a chemical plant in Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937 he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, and For Industrial Personnel. In 1936, his first publication took place - the story Three Deaths of Dr. Austino was published in the magazine "October".
January 12, 1937 Shalamov was arrested "for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years in camps with use in physical labor. He was already in the pre-trial detention center when his story Pava and the Tree was published in the journal Literaturny Sovremennik. Shalamov's next publication (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place in 1957.
Shalamov worked in the faces of a gold mine in Magadan, then, being sentenced to a new term, he got to earthworks, in 1940-1942 he worked in a coal face, in 1942-1943 at a penal mine in Dzhelgala. In 1943 he received a new 10-year term "for anti-Soviet agitation", worked in a mine and as a lumberjack, tried to escape, after which he ended up in a penalty area.
Shalamov's life was saved by the doctor A.M.Pantyukhov, who sent him to paramedic courses at the hospital for prisoners. Upon completion of the courses, Shalamov worked in the surgical department of this hospital and as a paramedic in the village of lumberjacks. In 1949, Shalamov began to write poetry, which compiled the collection Kolyma Notebooks (1937–1956). The collection consists of 6 sections, entitled Shalamov Blue notebook, Postman's bag, Personally and confidentially, Golden Mountains, Fireweed, High latitudes.
In verse, Shalamov considered himself the "plenipotentiary" of the prisoners, whose anthem was the poem Toast for the Ayan-Uryakh River. Subsequently, researchers of Shalamov's work noted his desire to show in verse the spiritual strength of a person who is able, even in camp conditions, to think about love and fidelity, about good and evil, about history and art. An important poetic image of Shalamov is elfin, a Kolyma plant that survives in harsh conditions. A cross-cutting theme of his poems is the relationship between man and nature (Dagologue to dogs, Ballad of a calf, etc.). Shalamov's poetry is permeated with biblical motifs. Shalamov considered the poem Avvakum in Pustozersk to be one of the main works, in which, according to the author's commentary, "the historical image is connected both with the landscape and with the features of the author's biography."
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp, but for another two years he was forbidden to leave Kolyma, he worked as a camp paramedic and left only in 1953. His family broke up, an adult daughter did not know her father. Health was undermined, he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent at peat mining in the village. Turkmen, Kalinin region In 1954, he began work on stories that compiled the collection Kolyma Stories (1954-1973). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of short stories and essays - Kolyma stories, Left Bank, Artist of a shovel, Essays on the underworld, Resurrection of a larch, Glove, or KR-2. All stories have a documentary basis, they contain the author - either under his own name, or called Andreev, Golubev, Krist. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it unacceptable to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but the inner world of the characters was created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means. The writer's style is emphatically antipathetic: the terrible material of life demanded that the prose writer embody it evenly, without declamation. Shalamov's prose is tragic in nature, despite the presence of a few satirical images in it. The author spoke more than once about the confessional nature of the Kolyma stories. He called his narrative manner “new prose”, emphasizing that “it is important for him to resurrect the feeling, extraordinary new details are needed, descriptions in a new way to make believe in the story, everything else is not like information, but like an open heart wound” . The camp world appears in the Kolyma stories as an irrational world.
Shalamov denied the need for suffering. He became convinced that in the abyss of suffering, it is not purification that takes place, but the corruption of human souls. In a letter to AI Solzhenitsyn, he wrote: "The camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone."
In 1956 Shalamov was rehabilitated and moved to Moscow. In 1957 he became a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, at the same time his poems were published. In 1961, a book of his poems Flint was published. In 1979, in a serious condition, he was placed in a boarding house for the disabled and the elderly. He lost his sight and hearing and could hardly move.
Books of Shalamov's poems were published in the USSR in 1972 and 1977. Kolyma stories were published in London (1978, in Russian), in Paris (1980-1982, in French), in New York (1981-1982, in English). After their publication, world fame came to Shalamov. In 1980, the French branch of PEN awarded him the Freedom Prize.
Life and art.
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov(June 5 (June 18), 1907 - January 17, 1982) - Russian prose writer and poet of the Soviet era. Creator of one of the literary cycles about the Soviet camps.
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 5 (June 18), 1907 in Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolaevich Shalamov. Varlam Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was a housewife. In 1914 he entered the gymnasium, but completed his secondary education after the revolution. In 1923, after graduating from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, he came to Moscow, worked for two years as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. From 1926 to 1929 he studied at the Faculty of Soviet Law of Moscow State University.
In his autobiographical story about childhood and youth, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his convictions were formed, how his thirst for justice and determination to fight for it strengthened. His youthful ideal is the People's Will - the sacrifice of their feat, the heroism of the resistance of all the might of the autocratic state. Already in childhood, the boy's artistic talent is evident - he passionately reads and "loses" all the books for himself - from Dumas to Kant.
Repression
On February 19, 1929, Shalamov was arrested for participating in an underground Trotskyist group and distributing an addendum to Lenin's Testament. Out of court as a "socially dangerous element" he was sentenced to three years in the camps. He served his sentence in the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, worked in departmental journals, published articles, essays, feuilletons.
In January 1937, Shalamov was again arrested for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He was sentenced to five years in the camps and spent this period in Kolyma (SVITL). Shalamov went through gold mines, taiga business trips, worked at the mines "Partizan", Black Lake, Arkagala, Dzhelgala, several times ended up in a hospital bed due to the difficult conditions of Kolyma. On June 22, 1943, he was re-convicted to ten years for anti-Soviet agitation, which consisted - in the words of the writer himself - in calling Bunin a Russian classic.
"... I was sentenced to war for the statement that Bunin is a Russian classic."
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp, but at first he could not return to Moscow. Since 1946, having completed eight-month medical assistant courses, he began working at the Central Hospital for Prisoners on the left bank of the Kolyma in the village of Debin and on a forest "business trip" of lumberjacks until 1953. Shalamov owes his career as a paramedic to the doctor A.M. Pantyukhov, who, risking his career as a prisoner doctor, personally recommended Shalamov for paramedic courses. Then he lived in the Kalinin region, worked in Reshetnikovo. The results of the repressions were the disintegration of the family and poor health. In 1956, after rehabilitation, he returned to Moscow.
Creativity, participation in cultural life
In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow after his first term and began to publish in Moscow publications as a journalist. He also published several short stories. One of the first major publications - the story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" - in the magazine "October" (1936).
In 1949, on the key of Duskanya, for the first time in Kolyma, being a prisoner, he began to write down his poems.
After his release in 1951, Shalamov returned to literary activity. However, he could not leave Kolyma. It was not until November 1953 that permission to leave was received. Shalamov arrives in Moscow for two days, meets with Pasternak, with his wife and daughter. However, he cannot live in large cities, and he left for the Kalinin region, where he worked as a foreman in peat extraction, a supply agent. And all this time he obsessively wrote one of his main works - Kolyma stories. The writer created Kolyma Tales from 1954 to 1973. They were published as a separate edition in London in 1978. In the USSR, they were mainly published in 1988-1990. The writer himself divided his stories into six cycles: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "The Shovel Artist", as well as "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch" and "Glove, or KR-2". They are completely collected in the two-volume Kolyma Tales in 1992 in the series "The Way of the Cross of Russia" by the publishing house "Soviet Russia".
In 1962, he wrote to A. I. Solzhenitsyn:
“Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person - neither the chief nor the prisoner needs to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be ... For my part, I decided a long time ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this particular truth.
He met with B. L. Pasternak, who spoke highly of Shalamov's poetry. Later, after the government forced Pasternak to refuse to accept the Nobel Prize, they parted ways.
He completed the collection of poems "Kolyma Notebooks" (1937-1956).
... Mr. Solzhenitsyn, I willingly accept your funeral joke about my death. It is with great feeling and pride that I consider myself the first victim of the Cold War who fell at your hands...
(From an unsent letter from V. T. Shalamov to A. I. Solzhenitsyn)
Since 1956, Shalamov lived in Moscow, first on Gogolevsky Boulevard, since the late 1950s - in one of the writers' wooden cottages on Khoroshevsky Highway (house 10), since 1972 - on Vasilyevskaya Street (house 2, building 6 ). He published in the journals Yunost, Znamya, Moskva, talked a lot with N. Ya. he was a frequent guest at the house of the famous philologist V. N. Klyueva (35 Arbat Street). Both in prose and in Shalamov's poetry (collection Flint, 1961, Rustle of Leaves, 1964, Road and Fate, 1967, etc.), which expressed the hard experience of the Stalinist camps, the theme of Moscow also sounds (poetry collection " Moscow clouds", 1972). In the 1960s he met A. A. Galich.
From 1973 to 1979, when Shalamov moved to live in the Home for the Disabled and the Elderly, he kept workbooks, the analysis and publication of which is still continued by I.P. Sirotinskaya, to whom V.T. Shalamov transferred the rights to all his manuscripts and essays.
Russian poet and writer Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, a prisoner of Stalin's camps, is called by critics "Dostoevsky of the 20th century". He spent half his life behind the barbed wire of the Kolyma camps - and only miraculously escaped death. Later came rehabilitation, and fame, and short-lived international fame, and the Freedom Award of the French Pen Club ... and the lonely death of a forgotten person ... The main thing remains - the work of Shalamov's life, made on a documentary basis and embodying a terrible testimony Soviet history. In Kolyma Tales, with stunning clarity and truthfulness, the author describes the camp experience, the experience of living in conditions incompatible with human life. The strength of Shalamov's talent is that he makes you believe in the story "not as information, but as an open heart wound."
Last years
The last three years of the life of a seriously ill Shalamov spent in the Literary Fund's Home for the Disabled and Elderly (in Tushino). However, even there he continued to write poetry. Probably the last publication of Shalamov took place in the Parisian magazine "Vestnik RHD" No. 133, 1981. In 1981, the French branch of the Pen Club awarded Shalamov with the Freedom Prize.
On January 15, 1982, after a superficial examination by a medical commission, Shalamov was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronics. During transportation, Shalamov caught a cold, fell ill with pneumonia and died on January 17, 1982.
“A certain role in this transfer was played by the noise that a group of his well-wishers raised around him from the second half of 1981. Among them, of course, there were really kind people, there were also those who worked out of self-interest, out of a passion for sensation. After all, it was from them that Varlam Tikhonovich discovered two posthumous “wives”, who, with a crowd of witnesses, besieged the official authorities. His poor, defenseless old age became the subject of a show.
Despite the fact that Shalamov had been an unbeliever all his life, E. Zakharova, one of those who were next to Shalamov, insisted on his funeral during the last year of his life. Funeral service for Varlam Shalamov Fr. Alexander Kulikov, now rector of the Church of St. Nicholas in Klenniki (Maroseyka).
Shalamov is buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow. About 150 people attended the funeral. A. Morozov and F. Suchkov read Shalamov's poems.
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov(June 5, 1907 - January 17, 1982) - Russian prose writer and poet of the Soviet era. Creator of one of the literary cycles about the Soviet camps.
Biography
Family, childhood, youth
Varlam Shalamov Born June 5 (June 18), 1907 in Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolaevich Shalamov, a preacher in the Aleutian Islands. Varlam Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was a housewife. In 1914 he entered the gymnasium, but completed his secondary education after the revolution. In 1924, after graduating from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, he came to Moscow, worked for two years as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. From 1926 to 1928 he studied at the Faculty of Soviet Law of Moscow State University, then he was expelled "for concealing his social origin" (he indicated that his father was disabled, without indicating that he was a priest).
In his autobiographical story about childhood and youth, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his convictions developed, how his thirst for justice and determination to fight for it strengthened. His youthful ideal is the People's Will - the sacrifice of their feat, the heroism of the resistance of all the might of the autocratic state. Already in childhood, the boy's artistic talent is evident - he passionately reads and "loses" all the books for himself - from Dumas to Kant.
Repression
February 19, 1929 Shalamov was arrested for participating in an underground Trotskyist group and for distributing an addendum to Lenin's Testament. Out of court as a "socially dangerous element" he was sentenced to three years in the camps. He served his sentence in the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, worked in departmental journals, published articles, essays, feuilletons.
In January 1937 Shalamova again arrested for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He was sentenced to five years in the camps and spent this period in Kolyma (SVITL). Shalamov went on taiga "business trips", worked at the mines "Partizan", "Black Lake", Arkagala, Dzhelgala, several times ended up in a hospital bed due to the difficult conditions of Kolyma. As Shalamov later wrote:
From the first prison minute it was clear to me that there were no mistakes in the arrests, that there was a systematic extermination of an entire “social” group - all those who remembered from Russian history of recent years not what they should have remembered.
On June 22, 1943, he was again sentenced to ten years for anti-Soviet agitation, which consisted - in the words of the writer himself - in calling I. A. Bunin a Russian classic: "... I was sentenced to war for the statement that Bunin is a Russian classic".
In 1951 Shalamov was released from the camp, but at first he could not return to Moscow. Since 1946, having completed eight-month medical assistant courses, he began working at the Central Hospital for Prisoners on the left bank of the Kolyma in the village of Debin and on a forest "business trip" of lumberjacks until 1953. Appointment to the post of paramedic is obliged to the doctor A. M. Pantyukhov, who personally recommended Shalamov for paramedic courses. Then he lived in the Kalinin region, worked in Reshetnikov. The results of the repressions were the disintegration of the family and poor health. In 1956, after rehabilitation, he returned to Moscow.
Creation
In 1932 Shalamov returned to Moscow after the first term and began to publish in Moscow publications as a journalist. Published several stories. One of the first major publications - the story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" - in the magazine "October" (1936).
In 1949, on the key of Duskanya, for the first time in Kolyma, being a prisoner, he began to write down his poems.
After liberation in 1951 Shalamov returned to literary activity. However, he could not leave Kolyma. It was not until November 1953 that permission to leave was received. Shalamov arrived in Moscow for two days, met with B. L. Pasternak, with his wife and daughter. However, he could not live in large cities, and he left for the Kalinin region (the village of Turkmen, now the Klin district of the Moscow region), where he worked as a foreman in peat extraction, a supply agent. All this time he wrote one of his main works - "Kolyma stories". The writer created Kolyma Tales from 1954 to 1973. They were published as a separate edition in London in 1978. In the USSR, they were mainly published in 1988-1990. The writer himself divided his stories into six cycles: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Artist of the Shovel", "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch" and "Glove, or KR-2". They are completely collected in the two-volume Kolyma Tales in 1992 in the series "The Way of the Cross of Russia" by the publishing house "Soviet Russia".
In 1962, he wrote to A. I. Solzhenitsyn:
Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person - neither the chief nor the prisoner needs to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. For my part, I decided long ago that I would dedicate the rest of my life to this truth.
He met with Pasternak, who spoke highly of Shalamov's poetry. Later, after the government forced Pasternak to refuse to accept the Nobel Prize, they parted ways.
He completed the collection of poems "Kolyma Notebooks" (1937-1956).
Since 1956, Shalamov lived in Moscow, first on Gogolevsky Boulevard, since the late 1950s - in one of the writers' wooden cottages on Khoroshovsky Highway (building 10), since 1972 - on Vasilyevskaya Street (building 2, building 6). He published in the journals Yunost, Znamya, Moskva, communicated with N. Ya. Mandelstam, O. V. Ivinskaya, A. I. Solzhenitsyn (with whom relations later turned into a polemic); he was a frequent visitor to the house of the philologist V. N. Klyueva. Both in prose and in Shalamov's poetry (collection Flint, 1961, Rustle of Leaves, 1964, Road and Fate, 1967, etc.), which expressed the hard experience of the Stalinist camps, the theme of Moscow also sounds (poetry collection " Moscow clouds", 1972). He also did poetry translations. In the 1960s he met A. A. Galich.
In 1973 he was admitted to the Writers' Union. From 1973 until 1979, when Shalamov moved to live in the Home for the Disabled and the Elderly, he kept workbooks, the analysis and publication of which continued until his death in 2011 by I.P. Sirotinskaya, to whom Shalamov transferred the rights to all his manuscripts and essays.
Letter to the Literary Gazette
On February 23, 1972, Literaturnaya Gazeta published Shalamov's letter, which, in particular, stated that "the problems of the Kolyma stories have long been removed by life." The main content of the letter is a protest against the publication of his stories by the émigré publications Posev and Novy Zhurnal. This letter was ambiguously perceived by the public. Many believed that it was written under pressure from the KGB, and Shalamov lost friends among former camp inmates. In the 24th issue of the Chronicle of Current Events, Pyotr Yakir, a member of the dissident movement, expressed "pity for the circumstances" that forced Shalamov to sign this letter. Modern researchers note, however, that the appearance of this letter is due to the painful process of Shalamov's divergence from literary circles and the feeling of impotence from the impossibility of making his main work available to a wide circle of readers in his homeland.
It is possible that in Shalamov's letter one should look for subtext. ... it uses the typically Bolshevik accusatory epithet "stinking" in relation to emigre publications, which is shocking in itself, because "olfactory" characteristics, both metaphorical and literal, are rare in Shalamov's prose (he had chronic rhinitis). For Shalamov's readers, the word was supposed to hurt the eyes as alien - a lexical unit protruding from the text, a "bone", thrown to the watchdog part of the readers (editors, censors) in order to divert attention from the true purpose of the letter - to smuggle the first and last mention of the "Kolymsky" into the official Soviet press. stories" - along with their exact title. In this way, the authentic target audience of the letter is informed that such a collection exists: readers are encouraged to think about where to get it. Understanding perfectly well what is hidden behind the toponym "Kolyma", those who read the letter will ask themselves the question: "" Kolyma stories? "Where is it?"
Last years
The last three years of a seriously ill patient's life Shalamov spent in the Literary Fund's Home for the Disabled and Elderly (in Tushino). The fact that the home for the disabled was like can be judged from the memoirs of E. Zakharova, who was next to Shalamov in the last six months of his life:
Such institutions are the most terrible and most undoubted evidence of the deformation of human consciousness that occurred in our country in the 20th century. A person is deprived not only of the right to a decent life, but also to a decent death.
- E. Zakharova. From a speech at the Shalamov Readings in 2002
However, even there Varlam Tikhonovich, whose ability to move correctly and articulate his speech intelligibly, continued to compose poetry. In the autumn of 1980, A. A. Morozov, in some incredible way, managed to parse and write down these last verses of Shalamov. They were published during Shalamov's lifetime in the Parisian journal Vestnik RHD No. 133, 1981.
In 1981, the French branch of the Pen Club awarded Shalamov with the Freedom Prize.
On January 15, 1982, after a superficial examination by a medical commission, Shalamov was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronics. During transportation, Shalamov caught a cold, fell ill with pneumonia and died on January 17, 1982.
According to Sirotinskaya:
A certain role in this transfer was played by the noise that a group of his well-wishers raised around him from the second half of 1981. Among them, of course, there were really kind people, there were also those who worked out of self-interest, out of a passion for sensation. After all, it was precisely because of them that Varlam Tikhonovich had two posthumous "wives" who, with a crowd of witnesses, besieged the official authorities. His poor, defenseless old age became the subject of a show.
On June 16, 2011, E. Zakharova, who was next to Varlam Tikhonovich on the day of his death, in her speech at a conference dedicated to the fate and work of Varlam Shalamov, said:
I came across some texts that mention that before the death of Varlam Tikhonovich, some unscrupulous people came to him in their own selfish interests. This is how you need to understand, in what such selfish interests?! This is a home for invalids! You are inside a Bosch painting - without exaggeration, I am a witness to this. This is dirt, stench, decomposing half-dead people around, what the hell is medicine there? An immobilized, blind, almost deaf, twitching person is such a shell, and a writer, a poet lives inside it. From time to time, several people come, feed, drink, wash, hold hands, Alexander Anatolyevich was still talking and writing down poems. What vested interests can there be? What is this all about? ... I insist - this must be correctly interpreted. This must not be left unmentioned and unknown.
Despite the fact that Shalamov was a non-believer all his life, E. Zakharova insisted on his funeral. Varlam Shalamov was buried by Archpriest Alexander Kulikov, who later became rector of the Church of St. Nicholas in Klenniki (Maroseyka). The commemoration for Varlam Tikhonovich was organized by the philosopher S. S. Khoruzhy.
Shalamov is buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow. About 150 people attended the funeral. A. Morozov and F. Suchkov read Shalamov's poems.
Family
Varlam Shalamov was married twice. For the first time - on Galina Ignatievna Gudz (1909-1956), who in 1935 gave birth to his daughter Elena (Shalamova Elena Varlamovna, married - Yanushevskaya, died in 1990). By his second marriage (1956-1965) he was married to Olga Sergeevna Neklyudova (1909-1989), also a writer, whose son from his first marriage (Sergey Yuryevich Neklyudov) is a famous Russian folklorist, Doctor of Philology.
Memory
Asteroid 3408 Shalamov, discovered on August 17, 1977 by N. S. Chernykh, was named after V. T. Shalamov.
On the grave of Shalamov, a monument was erected by his friend Fedot Suchkov, who also passed through the Stalinist camps. In June 2000, the monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown people tore off and carried away the bronze head, leaving a lone granite pedestal. This crime did not cause a wide resonance and was not disclosed. Thanks to the help of the metallurgists of Severstal JSC (the writer's fellow countrymen), in 2001 the monument was restored.
Since 1991, an exposition has been operating in Vologda in the Shalamov House - in the building where Shalamov was born and raised and where the Vologda Regional Art Gallery is now located. In the Shalamov House every year on the birthdays and deaths of the writer, memorial evenings are held, and 5 (1991, 1994, 1997, 2002 and 2007) International Shalamov Readings (conferences) have already taken place.
In 1992, the Literary Museum of Local Lore was opened in the village of Tomtor (Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)), where Shalamov spent the last two years (1952-1953) in Kolyma.
Part of the exposition of the Museum of Political Repressions in the village of Yagodnoye, Magadan Region, created in 1994 by local historian Ivan Panikarov, is dedicated to Shalamov.
In 2005, a room-museum of V. Shalamov was created in the village of Debin, where the Central Hospital for Prisoners of Dalstroy (Sevvostlag) operated and where Shalamov worked in 1946-1951.
On July 21, 2007, a memorial to Varlam Shalamov was opened in Krasnovishersk, a city that grew up on the site of Vishlag, where he served his first term.
On October 30, 2013, in Moscow, at No. 8 on Chisty Lane, where the writer lived for three years before his arrest in 1937, a memorial plaque was unveiled to Varlam Shalamov
On July 20, 2012, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the building of the hospital in the village of Debin (the former USVITL central hospital) in Kolyma (Yagodninsky district of the Magadan region).
Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich
And - even if not a tenant in the world -
I am a petitioner and plaintiff
Inexhaustible grief.
I am where the pain is, I am where the groan is,
In the eternal litigation of two sides,
In this old dispute. /"Atomic Poem"/
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 18 (July 1), 1907 in Vologda.
Shalamov's father, Tikhon Nikolaevich, a cathedral priest, was a prominent figure in the city, since he not only served in the church, but was also engaged in active social activities. According to the writer, his father spent eleven years in the Aleutian Islands as an Orthodox missionary, he was a European-educated man, adhering to free and independent views.
The relationship of the future writer with his father was not easy. The youngest son in a large large family often did not find a common language with a categorical father. “My father was from the darkest wilderness of the Ust-Sysolsk wilderness, from a hereditary priestly family, whose ancestors until recently were several generations of Zyryansk shamans, from a shamanic family, who imperceptibly and naturally replaced a tambourine with a censer, still in the power of paganism, the shaman himself and a pagan in the depths of his Zyryansk soul ... ”- this is how V. Shalamov wrote about Tikhon Nikolaevich, although the archives testify to his Slavic origin.
Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was busy with housekeeping and cooking, but she loved poetry, and was closer to Shalamov. A poem is dedicated to her, beginning like this: "My mother was a savage, a dreamer and a cook."
In his autobiographical story about childhood and youth, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his convictions were formed, how his thirst for justice and determination to fight for it strengthened. The Narodnaya Volya became his ideal. He read a lot, especially highlighting the works of Dumas before Kant.
In 1914, Shalamov entered the Alexander Blessed Gymnasium. In 1923 he graduated from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, which, as he wrote, “didn’t instill in me a love for either poetry or fiction, didn’t cultivate a taste, and I made discoveries myself, advancing in zigzags - from Khlebnikov to Lermontov, from Baratynsky to Pushkin, from Igor Severyanin to Pasternak and Blok.
In 1924, Shalamov left Vologda and got a job as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. In 1926, Shalamov entered Moscow State University at the Faculty of Soviet Law.
At this time, Shalamov wrote poems, which were positively evaluated by N. Aseev, participated in the work of literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes.
Shalamov sought to actively participate in the public life of the country. He established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in the demonstration of the opposition on the 10th anniversary of October under the slogans "Down with Stalin!", "Let's fulfill Lenin's testament!"
On February 19, 1929, he was arrested. Unlike many for whom the arrest was really a surprise, he knew why: he was among those who distributed the so-called testament of Lenin, his famous "Letter to the Congress." In this letter, Lenin, seriously ill and actually dismissed from business, gives brief descriptions of his closest associates in the party, in whose hands the main power was concentrated by that time, and, in particular, points out the danger of its concentration with Stalin - due to his unattractive human qualities. It was precisely this letter, hushed up in every possible way at that time, declared a fake after Lenin's death, that refuted the myth that had been intensively propagated about Stalin as the only, indisputable and most consistent successor to the leader of the world proletariat.
In Vishera, Shalamov wrote: "I was a representative of those people who opposed Stalin - no one ever believed that Stalin and Soviet power were one and the same." And then he continues: “The testament of Lenin, hidden from the people, seemed to me a worthy application of my strength. Of course, I was still a blind puppy then. But I was not afraid of life and boldly entered the fight against it in the form in which the heroes of my childhood and youth, all Russian revolutionaries, fought with life and for life. Later, in his autobiographical prose The Vishera Anti-Roman (1970–1971, unfinished), Shalamov wrote: “I consider this day and hour to be the beginning of my social life, the first true test under harsh conditions.”
Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Butyrka prison, which he later described in detail in an essay of the same name. And he perceived his first imprisonment, and then a three-year term in the Vishera camps, as an inevitable and necessary test given to him to test his moral and physical strength, to test himself as a person: “Do I have enough moral strength to go my own way as a some unit, - that's what I was thinking about in the 95th cell of the male solitary corps of the Butyrka prison. There were excellent conditions for thinking about life, and I thank the Butyrka prison for the fact that in search of the necessary formula for my life, I found myself alone in a prison cell. The image of the prison in Shalamov's biography may even seem attractive. For him, it was a truly new and, most importantly, feasible experience, which instilled in his soul confidence in his own strengths and unlimited possibilities of internal spiritual and moral resistance. Shalamov will emphasize the cardinal difference between a prison and a camp.
According to the writer, prison life in 1929 and 1937, in any case, in Butyrki remained much less cruel compared to the camp. A library even functioned here, “the only library in Moscow, and perhaps the country, that did not experience all sorts of seizures, destruction and confiscations that in Stalin’s time forever destroyed the book stocks of hundreds of thousands of libraries” and prisoners could use it. Some studied foreign languages. And after lunch, time was allotted for "lectures", everyone had the opportunity to tell something interesting to others.
Shalamov was sentenced to three years, which he spent in the Northern Urals. He later said: “Our car was sometimes unhooked, then hitched to trains going either to the north or to the northeast. We were in Vologda - my father and my mother lived there twenty minutes walk. I didn't dare leave the note. The train went south again, then to Kotlas, to Perm. It was clear to the experienced - we were going to the 4th department of USLON on Vishera. The end of the railway track - Solikamsk. It was March, Ural March. In 1929, there was only one camp in the Soviet Union - SLON - the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps. We were taken to the 4th department of the ELEPHANT on Vishera. In the camp of 1929 there were a lot of "products", a lot of "sucking", a lot of positions that a good owner did not need at all. But the camp of that time was not a good host. Work was not asked at all, only a way out was asked, and it was for this way out that the prisoners received their rations. It was believed that more could not be asked of a prisoner. There were no offsets for working days, but every year, following the example of the Solovetsky "unloading", lists were submitted for release by the camp authorities themselves, depending on the political wind that blew that year - either the killers were released, then the White Guards, then the Chinese. These lists were considered by the Moscow commission. On Solovki, from year to year, such a commission was headed by Ivan Gavrilovich Filippov, a member of the NKVD collegium, a former Putilov turner. There is such a documentary film "Solovki". In it, Ivan Gavrilovich is filmed in his most famous role: the chairman of the unloading commission. Subsequently, Filippov was the head of the camp on Vishera, then on Kolyma, and died in Magadan prison ... The lists reviewed and prepared by the visiting commission were taken to Moscow, and she claimed or did not claim, sending an answer after a few months. "Unloading" was the only way to get early release at the time."
In 1931 he was released and reinstated.
Shalamov Varlam Shalamov 5
Until 1932, he worked on the construction of a chemical plant in the city of Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937, he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, For Industrial Personnel. In 1936, his first publication took place - the story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" was published in the magazine "October".
On June 29, 1934, Shalamov married G.I. Gudz. April 13, 1935 their daughter Elena is born.
On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was re-arrested "for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years in camps with heavy physical labor. Shalamov was already in the pre-trial detention center when his story "The Pava and the Tree" was published in the journal Literaturny Sovremennik. The next publication of Shalamov (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place twenty years later - in 1957.
Shalamov said: “In 1937, in Moscow, during the second arrest and investigation, at the very first interrogation of the probationary investigator Romanov, my profile was embarrassing. I had to call some colonel, who explained to the young investigator that “then, in the twenties, they gave it like that, don’t be embarrassed,” and, turning to me:
What exactly are you arrested for?
- For the printing of Lenin's will.
- Exactly. So write in the protocol and put it in the memorandum: “I printed and distributed a fake known as the Testament of Lenin.”
The conditions in which the prisoners were in Kolyma were designed for quick physical destruction. Shalamov worked in the faces of a gold mine in Magadan, fell ill with typhus, got into earthworks, in 1940–1942 he worked in a coal face, in 1942–1943 at a penal mine in Dzhelgala. In 1943, Shalamov received a new 10-year sentence "for anti-Soviet agitation", calling Bunin a Russian classic. He ended up in a punishment cell, after which he miraculously survived, worked in a mine and as a lumberjack, tried to escape, after which he ended up in the penalty area. His life often hung in the balance, but he was helped by people who treated him well. Boris Lesnyak, also a convict, who worked as a paramedic in the Belichya hospital of the Northern Mining Department, and Nina Savoyeva, the head doctor of the same hospital, which the patients called Black Mom, became such for him.
Here, in Belichya, Shalamov ended up as a goner in 1943. His condition, according to Savoyeva, was deplorable. As a man of large build, he always had a particularly difficult time on more than meager camp rations. And who knows, Kolyma Tales would have been written if their future author had not been in the hospital of Nina Vladimirovna.
In the mid-1940s, Savoyeva and Lesnyak helped Shalamov stay as a cult trader at the hospital. Shalamov remained at the hospital as long as his friends were there. After they left her and Shalamov was again threatened with hard labor, where he would hardly have survived, in 1946 the doctor Andrey Pantyukhov saved Shalamov from the stage and helped him get a paramedic course at the Central Hospital for Prisoners. Upon completion of the courses, Shalamov worked in the surgical department of this hospital and as a paramedic in the village of lumberjacks.
In 1949, Shalamov began to write down poems that made up the collection Kolyma Notebooks (1937–1956). The collection consisted of 6 sections, entitled Shalamov "Blue Notebook", "Postman's Bag", "Personally and Confidentially", "Golden Mountains", "Fireweed", "High Latitudes".
I swear to death
take revenge on these vile bitches.
Whose vile science I have fully comprehended.
I will wash my hands with the blood of the enemy,
When that blessed moment comes.
Publicly, in Slavonic
I'll drink from the skull
From an enemy skull
as did Svyatoslav.
Arrange this feast
in the former Slavic taste
More expensive than all the afterlife,
any posthumous glory.
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp as having served time, but for another two years he was forbidden to leave Kolyma, and he worked as a paramedic of the camp and left only in 1953. His family had broken up by that time, the adult daughter did not know her father, his health was undermined by the camps, and he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent at peat extraction in the village of Turkmen, Kalinin region.
In 1952, Shalamov sent his poems to Boris Pasternak, who gave them high marks. In 1954, Shalamov began work on the stories that made up the collection Kolyma Tales (1954–1973). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of stories and essays - "Kolyma stories", "Left Bank", "Artist of a shovel", "Essays on the underworld", "Resurrection of a larch", "Glove, or KR-2".
All stories have a documentary basis, they contain the author - either under his own name, or called Andreev, Golubev, Krist. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it unacceptable to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but the inner world of the characters was created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means. The author spoke more than once about the confessional nature of the Kolyma Tales. He called his narrative style "new prose", emphasizing that "it is important for him to resurrect the feeling, extraordinary new details are needed, descriptions in a new way to make believe in the story, everything else is not like information, but like an open heart wound" . The camp world appears in Kolyma Tales as an irrational world.
In 1956, Shalamov was rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti, moved to Moscow and married Olga Neklyudova. In 1957, he became a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, at the same time his poems were published. At the same time, he became seriously ill and became disabled. In 1961, a book of his poems "Flint" was published. The last decade of his life, especially the very last years, were not easy and cloudless for the writer. Shalamov had an organic lesion of the central nervous system, which predetermined the non-regulatory activity of the limbs. He needed treatment - neurological, and he was threatened with psychiatric.
On February 23, 1972, in Literaturnaya Gazeta, where international information gets in the way, a letter was published by Varlam Shalamov, in which he protested against the appearance of his Kolyma Tales abroad. Philosopher Y. Schreider, who met with Shalamov a few days after the letter appeared, recalls that the writer himself treated this publication as a clever trick: it seemed like he tricked everyone, deceived his superiors, and thereby was able to protect himself. "Do you think it's that easy to speak in a newspaper?" - he asked either really sincerely, or checking the impression of the interlocutor.
This letter was perceived in intellectual circles as a renunciation. The image of the inflexible author of the Kolyma Tales that were on the lists was crumbling. Shalamov was not afraid to lose his leading position - he had never had such a thing; he was not afraid of losing his income - he managed with a small pension and infrequent fees. But to say that he had nothing to lose - does not turn the tongue.
Any person always has something to lose, and in 1972 Shalamov turned sixty-five. He was a sick, rapidly aging man who had been robbed of the best years of his life. Shalamov wanted to live and create. He wanted, dreamed that his stories, paid for with his own blood, pain, flour, would be printed in his native country, which had experienced and suffered so much.
In 1966, the writer divorced Neklyudova. Many thought he was already dead.
And Shalamov walked around Moscow in the 70s - he was met on Tverskaya, where he sometimes went out for food from his closet. His appearance was terrible, he staggered like a drunk, he fell. The police were on the alert, Shalamov was raised, and he, who did not take a single gram of alcohol in his mouth, took out a certificate of his illness - Meniere's disease, which worsened after the camps and was associated with impaired coordination of movements. Shalamov began to lose his hearing and vision
In May 1979, Shalamov was placed in a nursing home on Vilis Latsis Street in Tushino. His official pajamas made him look very much like a prisoner. Judging by the stories of people who visited him, he again felt like a prisoner. He took the home for the disabled as a prison. Like forced isolation. He didn't want to interact with the staff. He tore off the linen from the bed, slept on a bare mattress, tied a towel around his neck as if it could be stolen from him, rolled up the blanket and leaned on it with his hand. But Shalamov was not insane, although he could probably make such an impression. Doctor D.F. Lavrov, a specialist psychiatrist, recalls that he was going to Shalamov's nursing home, to which he was invited by the literary critic A. Morozov, who was visiting the writer.
Lavrov was struck not by the state of Shalamov, but by his position - the conditions in which the writer was. As for the condition, there were speech, motor disorders, a severe neurological disease, but he did not find dementia, which alone could give a reason for moving a person to a boarding school for psychochronics, in Shalamov. He was finally convinced of such a diagnosis by the fact that Shalamov - in his presence, right before his eyes - dictated two of his new poems to Morozov. His intellect and memory were intact. He composed poetry, memorized it - and then A. Morozov and I. Sirotinskaya wrote it down after him, in the full sense they took it from his lips. It was not an easy job Shalamov repeated a word several times in order to be understood correctly, but in the end the text formed. He asked Morozov to make a selection from the recorded poems, gave it the name "Unknown Soldier" and expressed the wish that it be taken to magazines. Morozov went and offered. To no avail.
The poems were published abroad in the Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement with Morozov's note on Shalamov's situation. The goal was one - to attract the attention of the public to help find a way out. The goal was achieved in a sense, but the effect was the opposite. After this publication, foreign radio stations started talking about Shalamov. Such attention to the author of Kolyma Tales, a large volume of which was published in Russian in 1978 in London, began to disturb the authorities, and the corresponding department began to take an interest in Shalamov's visitors.
Meanwhile, the writer suffered a stroke. In early September 1981, a commission met to decide whether the writer could continue to be kept in a nursing home. After a short meeting in the director's office, the commission went up to Shalamov's room. Elena Khinkis, who was present there, says that he did not answer questions - most likely he simply ignored it, as he could do it. But the diagnosis was made to him - exactly the one that Shalamov's friends feared: senile dementia. In other words, dementia. Friends who visited Shalamov tried to play it safe: the medical staff were left with phone numbers. New, 1982, A. Morozov met in a nursing home together with Shalamov. At the same time, the last photograph of the writer was taken. On January 14, eyewitnesses said that when Shalamov was being transported, there was a scream. He still tried to resist. He was rolled out in an armchair, half-dressed loaded into a cold car and through all the snowy, frosty, January Moscow - a long way lay from Tushino to Medvedkovo - sent to a boarding school for psychochronics No. 32.
Memories of the last days of Varlam Tikhonovich were left by Elena Zakharova: “.. We approached Shalamov. He was dying. It was obvious, but still I took out a phonendoscope. V.T. died of pneumonia, developed heart failure. I think that everything was simple - stress and hypothermia. He lived in prison, they came for him. And they drove through the whole city, in winter, he didn’t have outerwear, because he couldn’t go out into the street. So, most likely, they threw a blanket over their pajamas. He probably tried to fight, threw off the blanket. I knew very well what the temperature was in the rafiks working on transportation, I myself traveled for several years, working on an ambulance.
On January 17, 1982, Varlam Shalamov died of lobar pneumonia. It was decided not to organize a civil memorial service in the Writers' Union, which turned away from Shalamov, but to sing him, as the son of a priest, according to the Orthodox rite in the church.
The writer was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery, not far from the grave of Nadezhda Mandelstam, in whose house he often visited in the 60s. There were many who came to say goodbye.
In June 2000, in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, a monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown persons tore off and carried away the bronze head of the writer, leaving a lone granite pedestal. Thanks to the help of fellow metallurgists of JSC "Severstal" in 2001, the monument was restored.
A documentary film was made about Varlam Shalamov.
Andrey Goncharov //
PHOTO FILE
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
We occupied two rooms on the first floor, four windows overlooking the extremely noisy and dusty Khoroshevskoye Highway, along which heavy vehicles were moving in an almost continuous stream, with a small two or three hour lull in the middle of the night. One of the rooms was a walk-through, the second was a common one, my mother lived in it and there was a TV, a dining table, and so on. We shared another with Varlam Tikhonovich. I was 16 years old, and the need for a private space was already becoming mutual. And now our room - and they were both more than 12 square meters - we decided to divide along the length, like "pencil cases" in the Semashko hostel with Ilf and Petrov. I had to break through the door in the wall separating the rooms, otherwise the installation of the partition was impossible - the passage room intersected obliquely. The partition was stretched from the wall between the windows almost to the door. Varlam Tikhonovich got the bigger "pencil case", the smaller one - to me. There our life flowed, within these walls.
What to say about this life? I deeply sympathize with the call to talk about Varlam Tikhonovich as a person, for me this is very important. I feel some guilt, because after we parted, I did not take any part in his life. The main reason was that for the last - and many - years, my mother was seriously ill, and I practically could not leave her alone. Well, we parted not so harmoniously, although there were no quarrels either.
Their marital relations began to deteriorate rather quickly, and this, apparently, was predictable: two middle-aged people already with their own ideas about a place in life, resentments, ambitions, and so on - it is unlikely that they could make a friendly couple. In addition, the features of the characters also affected. Mom was biased, touchy, suspicious, with her accounts to the world around her. Well, Varlam Tikhonovich also turned out to be a difficult person, to put it mildly.
In my opinion, he was lonely by nature, so to speak, constitutionally. More than once I observed how he — and always on his initiative — broke off relations with those around him. He was passionately fond of people and just as quickly disappointed in them. I will not talk much about their relationship with Alexander Isaevich - this is a special issue, discussed more than once or twice. I remember his first impressions of Solzhenitsyn's works, how every minute he entered the room and read aloud now Ivan Denisovich, now The Case in Krechetovka, simply trembling with admiration. However, a striking mismatch of characters and temperaments was discovered further, although in the first months, the relationship was very close, but then a sharp quarrel. When Varlam Tikhonovich arrived from Solotchi, where Solzhenitsyn invited him for a joint vacation, his eyes were white with rage: that lifestyle, that rhythm, that type of relationship that were proposed by Alexander Isaevich turned out to be absolutely unacceptable for him. “I didn’t meet Solzhenitsyn after Solotcha” (Notebooks of the 1960s - the first half of the 1970s).
But the internal incompatibility of Varlam Tikhonovich with the outside world extended much further. I remember how he ended his acquaintance with the famous literary critic Leonid Efimovich Pinsky, whom he met at my wedding and was very friendly for some time. The incident I am about to relate happened a couple of years later, after we had parted ways. These were the circumstances. When my eldest daughter Masha was born in 1968, and I didn’t understand where I would bring my wife from the maternity hospital (to my four-meter “pencil case”?), Varlam Tikhonovich received a vacant room on the floor above in our house (he and his mother had already been divorced, and he, as it turned out, was in line for housing). Just on the very day when I discharged my wife and child from the hospital, he moved into this room upstairs. But after that, of course, we met, and some kind of relationship was still maintained.
So, Leonid Efimovich, who somehow came to visit him, called our apartment and said: “He does not open to me. I hear him walking around the apartment, but he doesn't open it." Perhaps Varlam Tikhonovich did not hear the call - he was deaf, but the attacks of this deafness came in waves, which, apparently, also had some psychological reasons. He practically did not speak on the phone, the conversation was always broadcast through me. I remember how his hearing threshold changed depending on the conversation partner. There was nothing artificial about it, not that he pretended to be deaf, God forbid - it was such a self-correction, or something. God knows whether he heard Leonid Efimovich's calls or not, or maybe he did not hear precisely because he was expecting his arrival? I do not rule out that the relationship was on the wane, and a complete break was close.
When he and his mother got married, Varlam Tikhonovich gave the impression of an incredibly strong, wiry, thick-set, very physically strong and very healthy person. But several months passed - and overnight this health disappeared somewhere. As if some kind of rod was taken out of a person, on which everything rested. His teeth began to fall out, he began to go blind and deaf, kidney stones appeared, Meniere's disease syndrome worsened. He tried not to ride in transport, walked as much as possible. When he was motion sick in the subway and began to vomit, he was mistaken for a drunk. The police called, I came and took him home, barely alive. After moving to Khoroshevka, in the late 50s, he was in hospital all the time. Having gone through a cycle of such “post-camp” illnesses, he emerged from it as a complete invalid. He quit smoking, went on a diet, did special exercises, subordinating his life to maintaining health.
He had a special relationship with religion, he was a completely non-church, atheistic person, but in memory of his priest-father and relying on his camp experience (he said: believers there turned out to be the most persistent), he retained respect for believers and for persons of clergy. At the same time, the person is very rational, he absolutely did not tolerate any manifestations of mysticism, or what he considered mysticism. Two cases come to mind. One was when he dispersed our teenage gang, who decided to get into spiritualism for the thrill. Having caught us doing this, he lost his temper, shouting that this was spiritual masturbation. Another case is the break with Veniamin Lvovich Teush, the keeper of the Solzhenitsyn archive, which surprised us with its sharpness, after he brought some anthroposophical literature and tried to propagate anthroposophical ideas in our family.
Anti-Semitism aroused genuine fury in him (also, by the way, a legacy of his father’s upbringing), he expressed it in the sense that this is not an “opinion that has the right to exist”, but a criminal offense, that an anti-Semite simply cannot be shaken hands and should be beaten in the face.
He did not like the countryside, he was a man of purely urban civilization. This affected our lives in such a way that in the summer we went to the country, but he never went there. Of course, the train was also difficult for him, but it's not even just that. All his associations with nature were negative. Once, in my opinion, he and his mother went somewhere to a resort, once we were together in Sukhum with his sister Galina Tikhonovna. Basically, he preferred to live in Moscow. Life without a city apartment with its conveniences, without a daily Lenin library, without going around bookstores was almost unthinkable for him.
With a literary environment... but what is a literary environment? In the understanding of the 1950s and 1960s, it was a corporate closed workshop, a swaggering and arrogant corporation. As everywhere, very worthy people met there, even quite a few, but on the whole it was an extremely unpleasant world, with caste barriers that were difficult to overcome. He actively rejected Varlam Tikhonovich. Now they sometimes ask: what kind of relationship did he have with Tvardovsky? Yes, none! Tvardovsky, with all his literary and social merits, was a Soviet nobleman, with all the attributes of such a position: a dacha, an apartment, a car, etc. And Varlam Tikhonovich was a day laborer in his magazine, a man from a six-meter "pencil case", a literary proletarian who read "spontaneity", that is, what came to the editorial office from outside, by mail. He, as a specialist, was given works on the Kolyma theme - I must say, a lot of interesting things were found in this stream in the 50s and 60s. But not a single line of Shalamov's was published in Novy Mir.
Of course, Varlam Tikhonovich wanted to take place in his country, but everything that was printed from his poetry (only poetry! - there was no talk of stories) represents Shalamov the poet in a distorted, heavily censored form. It seems that in the "Soviet Writer", where collections of his poems were published, there was a wonderful editor, Viktor Sergeevich Fogelson, who tried his best to do something, but he could not resist the pressure of the press of such severity and intensity.
Sergey Neklyudov
Neklyudov Sergey Yurievich - Doctor of Philology, folklorist, son of O.S. Neklyudova, second wife of V.T. Shalamov. Lives in Moscow.
