Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those "difficult" conditions of life, which, as fairy tales tell us, fiction, are prerequisite friendships are just not difficult enough. If misfortune and need rallied, gave birth to the friendship of people, then this need is not extreme and the trouble is not great. Grief is not sharp and deep enough to be shared with friends. In real need, only one's own mental and bodily strength is known, the limits of one's capabilities, physical endurance and moral strength are determined.
We have learned to understand people, to foresee their actions, to unravel them. We realized - this was the most important thing - that our knowledge of people does not give us anything useful in life. What is the use of understanding, feeling, guessing, foreseeing the actions of another person? After all, I cannot change my behavior towards him, I will not inform on the same prisoner as myself, no matter what he does.
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories
Man is happy with his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to forget the bad and remember only the good.
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories
It turns out that the person who committed meanness does not die.
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories
However, with hunger, cold and insomnia, no friendship is struck up, and Dugaev, despite his youth, understood the falsity of the saying about friendship, tested by misfortune and misfortune. In order for friendship to be friendship, it is necessary that its strong foundation be laid when conditions, life have not yet reached the last boundary, beyond which there is nothing human in a person, but only distrust, anger and lies. Dugaev well remembered the northern proverb, the three commandments of the prisoner: do not believe, do not be afraid and do not ask ...
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories
There are people who always know everything and guess everything. There are those who want to see the best in everything, and their sanguine temperament in the most difficult situation always looks for some formula of agreement with life. For others, on the contrary, events are developing for the worse, and they perceive any improvement incredulously, as some kind of oversight of fate. And this difference in judgments depends little on personal experience: it seems to be given in childhood - for life ...
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories
The camp experience is entirely negative, up to a single minute. The person is only getting worse.
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories
Even now the stanzas stood up easily, one after another, and although he had not written down and could not write down his poems for a long time, nevertheless the words easily stood up in some prescribed and each time extraordinary rhythm. Rhyme was a finder, a tool for magnetic search of words and concepts. Each word was part of the world, it responded to rhyme, and the whole world rushed by with the speed of some kind of electronic machine. Everything screamed: take me. I am not here. There was nothing to look for. I just had to throw it away. It was as if there were two people here - the one who composes, who launched his turntable with might and main, and the other who selects and from time to time stops the running machine. And, seeing that he was two people, the poet realized that he was now composing real poems. What if they are not recorded? Write down, print - all this is vanity of vanities. Everything that is born unselfishly is not the best. The best thing that is not written down, what was composed and disappeared, melted away without a trace, and only the creative joy that he feels and which cannot be confused with anything proves that the poem was created, that the beautiful was created. Is he wrong? Is his creative joy unmistakable?
He remembered how bad, how poetically helpless Blok's last verses were, and how Blok seemed not to understand this...
In 1924, after graduating from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, Shalamov arrived in Moscow, where for two years he worked as a tanner at a tannery. Since 1926 he studied at the Faculty of Soviet Law of Moscow State University, but in 1928 he was expelled "for concealing social background(did not indicate that his father was a priest).
On 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 in the Northern Urals. In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, worked in departmental journals, published articles, essays and feuilletons.
In January 1937, the writer was again arrested for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" - he was sentenced to five years in the camps and spent this period in Kolyma. On June 22, 1943, he was re-convicted to 10 years for anti-Soviet agitation. According to the writer himself, the reason was that he "called Ivan Bunin a Russian classic".
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp, worked as a paramedic in the Central Hospital for prisoners on the left bank of the Kolyma, lived in the Kalinin region, worked in Reshetnikov. After rehabilitation in 1956, he returned to Moscow. All this time, Varlam Tikhonovich obsessively wrote one of his main works - "Kolyma stories" , which he completed in 1973. At the same time, he was admitted to the Writers' Union.
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 1981, the French branch of PEN awarded writers with the Liberty Prize. On January 17, 1982, the writer died of pneumonia.
"Evening" offers to your attention a selection of quotes from the works of a man who passed inhuman tests and brought us the truth about the Stalinist camps.
"Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble.. Those "difficult" conditions of life, which, as the fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need rallied, gave birth to the friendship of people, then this need is not extreme and the trouble is not great. Grief is not sharp and deep enough to be shared with friends. In real need, only one's own mental and bodily strength is known, the limits of one's capabilities, physical endurance and moral strength are determined.
"The principle of my age, my personal existence, my whole life, the conclusion from my personal experience, the rule learned by this experience, can be expressed in a few words. First, you need to return slaps in the face, and only in the second place - alms. Remember evil before good. Remember all the good - a hundred years, and all the bad - two hundred. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
"We have learned to understand people to anticipate their actions, to unravel them. We realized - this was the most important thing - that our knowledge of people does not give us anything useful in life. What is the use of understanding, feeling, guessing, foreseeing the actions of another person? After all, I cannot change my behavior towards him, I will not inform on the same prisoner as myself, no matter what he does.
"Love comes when everything human feelings already back. Love comes last, comes back last, and does it come back? But not only indifference, envy and fear witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned before pity for people."
"There are many things in the camp that a person should not see. But to see the bottom of life is not the worst thing. The worst thing is when a person begins to feel this very bottom - forever in his own life when his moral standards are borrowed from the camp experience, when the morality of the blatars is applied in free life. When a person's mind not only serves to justify these camp feelings, but serves these feelings themselves. I know many intellectuals - and not only intellectuals - who have made precisely the thieves' borders the secret borders of their behavior in the wild. In the battle of these people with the camp, the camp won.
"Hope for a prisoner is always shackles. Hope is always unfree. A person who hopes for something changes his behavior, more often prevaricates than a person who does not have hope.
"Impunity? Dormant somewhere at the bottom of the soul thirst for blood? The desire to excel in front of the highest authorities? Power is a terrible thing."
"It was not the hand that humanized the monkey, not a brain germ, not a soul - there are dogs and bears that act smarter and more moral than a man. And not by subordinating the power of fire to oneself - all this was after the fulfillment of the main condition for the transformation. Other things being equal, at one time a person turned out to be much stronger and more enduring physically, only physically. He was tenacious like a cat - this saying is not true. It would be more correct to say about a cat - this creature is tenacious, like a person. The horse cannot endure a month of winter life here in a cold room with many hours of hard work in the cold. If it's not a Yakut horse. But they don't work on Yakut horses. However, they are not fed. They, like deer in winter, hoof the snow and pull out last year's dry grass. But the man lives. Maybe he lives in hope? But he doesn't have any hope. If he is not a fool, he cannot live in hope. That's why there are so many suicides."
"I learned that the world should not be divided into good and bad people but on cowards and not cowards. 95% of cowards with a weak threat are capable of all sorts of meanness, deadly meanness."
"Man is happy with his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to forget the bad and remember only the good."
Even now the stanzas stood up easily, one after another, and although he had not written down and could not write down his poems for a long time, they nevertheless easily stood up in some prescribed and each time extraordinary rhythm. Rhyme was a finder, a tool for magnetic search of words and concepts. Each word was part of the world, it responded to rhyme, and the whole world rushed by with the speed of some kind of electronic machine. Everything screamed: take me. , me. There was nothing to look for. I just had to throw it away. It was as if there were two people here - the one who composes, who launched his turntable with might and main, and the other who chooses and from time to time stops the running machine. And, seeing that he was two people, the poet realized that he was now composing real ones. What if they are not recorded? Record, print - all this is vanity. Everything that is born unselfishly is not the best. The best is what is not written down, what is composed and disappeared, melted away without a trace, and only the creative, which he feels and which cannot be confused with anything, proves that the poem was created, that it was created. Is he wrong? Is his creative joy unmistakable?
He remembered how bad, how poetically helpless Blok's last verses were, and how Blok seemed not to understand this...
In 1924, after graduating from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, Shalamov arrived in Moscow, where for two years he worked as a tanner at a tannery. Since 1926, he studied at the Faculty of Soviet Law of Moscow State University, but in 1928 he was expelled "for concealing his social origin" (he did not indicate that his father was a priest).
On 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 in the Northern Urals. In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, worked in departmental journals, published articles, essays and feuilletons.
In January 1937, the writer was again arrested for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" - he was sentenced to five years in the camps and spent this period in Kolyma. On June 22, 1943, he was re-convicted to 10 years for anti-Soviet agitation. According to the writer himself, the reason was that he "called Ivan Bunin a Russian classic".
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp, worked as a paramedic in the Central Hospital for prisoners on the left bank of the Kolyma, lived in the Kalinin region, worked in Reshetnikov. After rehabilitation in 1956, he returned to Moscow. All this time, Varlam Tikhonovich obsessively wrote one of his main works - "Kolyma stories", which he completed in 1973. At the same time, he was admitted to the Writers' Union.
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 1981, the French branch of PEN awarded writers with the Liberty Prize. On January 17, 1982, the writer died of pneumonia.
"Evening" offers to your attention a selection of quotes from the works of a man who passed inhuman tests and brought us the truth about the Stalinist camps.
"Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble.. Those "difficult" conditions of life, which, as the fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need rallied, gave birth to the friendship of people, then this need is not extreme and the trouble is not great. Grief is not sharp and deep enough to be shared with friends. In real need, only one's own mental and bodily strength is known, the limits of one's capabilities, physical endurance and moral strength are determined.
"The principle of my age, my personal existence, my whole life, the conclusion from my personal experience, the rule learned by this experience, can be expressed in a few words. First, you need to return slaps in the face, and only in the second place - alms. Remember evil before good. Remember all the good - a hundred years, and all the bad - two hundred. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
"We have learned to understand people to anticipate their actions, to unravel them. We realized - this was the most important thing - that our knowledge of people does not give us anything useful in life. What is the use of understanding, feeling, guessing, foreseeing the actions of another person? After all, I cannot change my behavior towards him, I will not inform on the same prisoner as myself, no matter what he does.
"Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, comes back last, and does it come back? But not only indifference, envy and fear witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned before pity for people."
"There are many things in the camp that a person should not see. But to see the bottom of life is not the worst thing. The worst thing is when a person begins to feel this very bottom forever in his own life, when his moral standards are borrowed from the camp experience, when the morality of the blatars is applied in free life. When a person's mind not only serves to justify these camp feelings, but serves these feelings themselves. I know many intellectuals - and not only intellectuals - who have made precisely the thieves' borders the secret borders of their behavior in the wild. In the battle of these people with the camp, the camp won.
"Hope for a prisoner is always shackles. Hope is always unfree. A person who hopes for something changes his behavior, more often prevaricates than a person who does not have hope.
"Impunity? Dormant somewhere at the bottom of the soul thirst for blood? The desire to excel in front of the highest authorities? Power is a terrible thing."
"It was not the hand that humanized the monkey, not the embryo of the brain, not the soul - there are dogs and bears that act smarter and more moral than a person. And not by subordinating the power of fire to oneself - all this was after the fulfillment of the main condition for the transformation. Other things being equal, at one time a person turned out to be much stronger and more enduring physically, only physically. He was tenacious like a cat - this saying is not true. It would be more correct to say about a cat - this creature is tenacious, like a person. The horse cannot endure a month of winter life here in a cold room with many hours of hard work in the cold. If it's not a Yakut horse. But they don't work on Yakut horses. However, they are not fed. They, like deer in winter, hoof the snow and pull out last year's dry grass. But the man lives. Maybe he lives in hope? But he doesn't have any hope. If he is not a fool, he cannot live in hope. That's why there are so many suicides."
"I learned that the world should be divided not into good and bad people, but into cowards and not cowards. 95% of cowards with a weak threat are capable of all sorts of meanness, deadly meanness."
"Man is happy with his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to forget the bad and remember only the good."
