Shalamov analysis of stories. The theme of the tragic fate of a person in a totalitarian state in "Kolyma Tales"

Varlaam Shalamov is a writer who spent three terms in camps, survived hell, lost his family and friends, but was not broken by ordeals: “A 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 very truth.

The collection "Kolyma Tales" is the main work of the writer, which he composed for almost 20 years. These stories leave an extremely heavy impression of horror from the fact that people really survived in this way. The main themes of the works: camp life, breaking the character of prisoners. All of them doomedly waited for imminent death, without cherishing hopes, without entering into a struggle. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful dying, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention. All heroes are unhappy, their destinies are ruthlessly broken. The language of the work is simple, unpretentious, not embellished with expressive means, which creates the feeling of a true story of an ordinary person, one of the many who experienced all this.

Analysis of the stories "At Night" and "Condensed Milk": Problems in "Kolyma Tales"

The story "Night" tells us about a case that does not immediately fit in our heads: two prisoners, Bagretsov and Glebov, dig up a grave in order to remove linen from the corpse and sell it. Moral and ethical principles have been erased, given way to the principles of survival: the heroes will sell linen, buy some bread or even tobacco. The themes of life on the verge of death, doom run like a red thread through the work. Prisoners do not value life, but for some reason they survive, indifferent to everything. The problem of brokenness opens before the reader, it is immediately clear that after such shocks a person will never be the same.

The story "Condensed Milk" is devoted to the problem of betrayal and meanness. Geological engineer Shestakov was “lucky”: in the camp he avoided compulsory work, ended up in an “office”, where he receives good food and clothes. The prisoners did not envy the free, but such as Shestakov, because the camp narrowed the interests to everyday ones: “Only something external could bring us out of indifference, take us away from the slowly approaching death. External, not internal strength. Inside, everything was burned out, devastated, we didn’t care, and we didn’t make any plans beyond tomorrow.” Shestakov decided to assemble a group to escape and hand over to the authorities, having received some privileges. This plan was guessed by the nameless protagonist, familiar to the engineer. The hero demands two cans of canned milk for his participation, this is the ultimate dream for him. And Shestakov brings a treat with a “monstrous blue sticker”, this is the hero’s revenge: he ate both cans under the eyes of other prisoners who did not expect a treat, just watched a more successful person, and then refused to follow Shestakov. The latter nevertheless persuaded the others and coolly surrendered them. For what? Where does this desire to curry favor and expose those who are even worse off? V. Shalamov answers this question unambiguously: the camp corrupts and kills everything human in the soul.

Analysis of the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev"

If most of the heroes of "Kolyma Tales" live indifferently for no reason, then in the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev" the situation is different. After the end of the Great Patriotic War, former military men poured into the camps, whose only fault was that they were captured. People who fought against the Nazis cannot simply live indifferently, they are ready to fight for their honor and dignity. Twelve newly arrived prisoners, led by Major Pugachev, organized a conspiracy to escape, which is being prepared all winter. And so, when spring came, the conspirators burst into the premises of the guard detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, took possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Having gone outside the camp, they stop a truck on the highway, drop off the driver and continue on their way in the car until the gas runs out. After that, they go to the taiga. Despite the willpower and determination of the heroes, the camp car overtakes them and shoots them. Only Pugachev was able to leave. But he understands that soon they will find him. Does he dutifully wait for punishment? No, even in this situation he shows fortitude, he himself interrupts his difficult life path: “Major Pugachev remembered them all - one after another - and smiled at everyone. Then he put the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth and fired for the last time in his life. The theme of a strong man in the suffocating circumstances of the camp is revealed tragically: he is either crushed by the system, or he fights and dies.

"Kolyma Tales" does not try to pity the reader, but how much suffering, pain and longing are in them! Everyone should read this collection in order to appreciate their life. After all, despite all the usual problems, a modern person has relative freedom and choice, he can show other feelings and emotions, except for hunger, apathy and the desire to die. "Kolyma stories" not only scare, but also make you look at life differently. For example, stop complaining about fate and feeling sorry for yourself, because we are unspeakably more fortunate than our ancestors, brave, but ground in the millstones of the system.

On the title parable of Shalamov, or a possible epigraph to the "Kolyma Tales"

I About the miniature "In the Snow"

In my opinion, Franciszek Apanovich very aptly called the miniature-sketch “In the Snow” (1956), which opens the Kolyma Tales, “a symbolic introduction to Kolyma prose in general”, believing that it plays the role of a kind of metatext in relation to the whole whole. . I completely agree with this interpretation. Attention is drawn to the mysterious-sounding ending of this very first text in Shalamovsky five-books. "On the Snow" should be recognized as a kind of epigraph to all cycles of "Kolyma Tales"2. The very last sentence in this first sketch story is:
And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses. ## (“In the snow”)3
How so? In what sense? - after all, if under writer Shalamov understands himself, but to readers relates us to you, then how We involved in the text itself? Does he really think that we will also go to Kolyma, whether on tractors or on horses? Or by "readers" do you mean servants, guards, exiles, civilian employees, camp authorities, etc.? It seems that this phrase of the ending is sharply discordant with the lyrical etude as a whole and with the phrases preceding it, explaining the specific "technology" of trampling the road along the difficult-to-pass Kolyma virgin snow (but not at all - the relationship between readers and writers). Here are the phrases preceding it, from the beginning:
# The first one is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another one from the same head five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint4.
Those. the share of those who ride, but do not go, gets an “easy” life, and those who trample, pave the road, have the main work. At the beginning, in this place of the handwritten text, the first phrase of the paragraph gave the reader a more intelligible hint - how to understand the ending following it, since the paragraph began with a strikethrough:
# This is how literature goes. First one, then the other, comes forward, paves the way, and of those following the trail, even everyone, even the weakest, the smallest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint.
However, at the very end - without any editing, as if already prepared in advance - there was the final phrase, in which the meaning of the allegory and, as it were, the essence of the whole, the mysterious Shalamovsky symbol is concentrated:
And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses.5 ##
However, about those who rides tractors and horses, before that, in the text "In the Snow", and in subsequent stories - neither in the second, nor in the third, nor in the fourth ("On the show" 1956; "Night" 6 1954, "Carpenters" 1954) - actually not says 7. Is there a semantic gap that the reader does not know how to fill, and the writer, apparently, achieved this? Thus, as it were, the first Shalamov parable is revealed - not directly, but indirectly expressed, implied meaning.
I am grateful for the help in its interpretation - to Franciszek Apanovich. He had previously written about the story as a whole:
There is an impression that there is no narrator here, there is only this strange world that grows by itself from the mean words of the story. But even such a mimetic style of perception is refuted by the last sentence of the essay, which is completely incomprehensible from this point of view.<…>if we understand [it] literally, one would have to come to the absurd conclusion that in the camps in Kolyma only writers trample down the roads. The absurdity of such a conclusion forces us to reinterpret this sentence and understand it as a kind of metatextual statement, belonging not to the narrator, but to some other subject, and perceived as the voice of the author himself8.
It seems to me that Shalamov's text gives a deliberate failure here. The reader loses the thread of the story and contact with the narrator, not understanding where one of them is. The meaning of the mysterious final phrase can also be interpreted as a kind of reproach: the prisoners are making their way through virgin snow, - intentionally without going one after another in the wake, do not trample general trail and generally act not this way, How reader who is accustomed to using ready-made tools established by someone before him (guided, for example, by what books are fashionable now, or what “techniques” are used by writers), but - they act exactly like real writers: try to put a leg separately, walking each your way paving the way for those who follow them. And only rare of them - ie. the same five chosen pioneers - are brought for some short time, until they are exhausted, to break through this necessary road - for those who follow, on sledges and on tractors. Writers, from the point of view of Shalamov, must - directly obliged, if, of course, they are real writers, to move along the virgin lands ("their own track", as Vysotsky later sings about this). That is, here they are, unlike us mere mortals, they do not ride tractors and horses. Shalamov also invites the reader to take the place of those who pave the way. The mysterious phrase turns into a rich symbol of the entire Kolyma epic. After all, as we know, Shalamov's detail is a powerful artistic detail that has become a symbol, an image (“Notebooks”, between April and May 1960).
Dmitry Nich noticed: in his opinion, the same text as an “epigraph” also echoes the first text in the cycle “The Resurrection of the Larch” - a much later sketch of “The Path” (1967)9. Let us recall what is happening there and what is, as it were, behind the scenes of what is happening: the narrator finds “his” path (here the narration is personified, in contrast to “In the Snow”, where it is impersonal10) - a path along which he walks alone, during almost three years, and on which his poems are born. However, as soon as it turns out that this path, which he liked, well-worn, taken as if in ownership, was also opened by someone else (he notices someone else's trace on it), it loses its miraculous property:
In the taiga I had a wonderful trail. I myself laid it in the summer, when I stored firewood for the winter. (...) The trail got darker every day and eventually became an ordinary dark gray mountain trail. No one but me walked on it. (…) # I walked this own path for almost three years. She wrote poetry well. It used to happen that you would return from a trip, get ready for the path and, without fail, go out on this path for some stanza. (...) And on the third summer a man walked along my path. I was not at home at that time, I do not know if it was some wandering geologist, or a mountain postman on foot, or a hunter - a man left traces of heavy boots. Since then, no poetry has been written on this path.
So, unlike the epigraph to the first cycle (“On the Snow”), here, in “The Path”, the emphasis shifts: firstly, the action itself is not collective, but is emphasized individually, even individualistically. That is, the effect of trampling the road itself by others, comrades, in the first case, only intensified, strengthened, and here, in the second, in a text written more than a dozen years later, it disappears due to the fact that someone entered the path another. While in "On the Snow" the very motive "to step only on virgin soil, and not trail to trail" was overlapped by the effect of "collective benefit" - all the torments of the pioneers were needed only so that further, after them, they went to horse and tractor readers. (The author did not go into details, but, is this trip really necessary?) Now, it seems that no reader and altruistic benefit is no longer visible and provided. Here you can catch a certain psychological shift. Or even - the intentional departure of the author from the reader.

II Recognition - in a school essay

Oddly enough, Shalamov's own views on what the "new prose" should be like, and what, in fact, the modern writer should strive for, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks and not in treatises, but in essays. , or simply "school essay" written in 1956 - behind Irina Emelyanova, daughter of Olga Ivinskaya (Shalamov had known the latter since the 1930s), when this same Irina entered the Literary Institute. As a result, the text itself, compiled by Shalamov intentionally somewhat school-like, firstly, received from the examiner, N.B. Tomashevsky, the son of a well-known Pushkinist, "superpositive review" (ibid., p. 130-1)11, and secondly, by a happy coincidence - a lot can now be clarified to us from the views on literature of Shalamov himself, who had already fully matured by the age of 50. m years for his prose, but at that time, as it seems, he did not yet "cloud" his aesthetic principles too much, which he obviously did later. Here is how, using the example of Hemingway's stories "Something is over" (1925), he illustrates the method of reducing details and raising prose to symbols that captured him:
The heroes of his [story] have names, but no longer have surnames. They no longer have a biography.<…>An episode is snatched from the general dark background of "our time". It's almost just an image. The landscape at the beginning is needed not as a specific background, but as an exclusively emotional accompaniment .... In this story, Hemingway uses his favorite method - the image.<…># Let's take the story of another period of Hemingway - "Where it's clean, it's light"12. # The heroes don't even have names anymore.<…>Not even an episode is taken. No action at all<…>. This is a frame.<…># [This] is one of Hemingway's most striking and wonderful stories. Everything is brought to the symbol.<…># The path from early stories to "Clean, Light" is the path of liberation from everyday, somewhat naturalistic details.<…>These are the principles of subtext, laconism. "<…>The majesty of the movement of the iceberg is that it rises only one-eighth above the surface of the water. Language devices, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, landscape as a function of Hemingway's style reduces to a minimum. # ... the dialogues of any Hemingway story are the eighth part of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. # Of course, this silence about the most important thing requires the reader to have a special culture, careful reading, inner consonance with the feelings of Hemingway's heroes.<…># The landscape of Hemingway is also comparatively neutral. Usually landscape Hemingway gives at the beginning of the story. The principle of dramatic construction - as in a play - before the beginning of the action, the author indicates in the remarks the background, the scenery. If the scenery repeats itself over the course of the story, it is for the most part the same as at the beginning. #<…># Take Chekhov's landscape. For example, from "Chamber No. 6". The story also begins with a landscape. But this landscape is already emotionally colored. He is more tendentious than Hemingway.<…># Hemingway has his own stylistic devices invented by him. For example, in the collection of short stories "In Our Time" these are a kind of reminiscences prefixed to the story. These are the famous key phrases in which the emotional pathos of the story is concentrated.<…># It is difficult to say at once what the task of reminiscences is. It depends both on the story and on the content of the reminiscences themselves.
So, laconism, omissions, reduction of space for the landscape and - showing, as it were, only individual "frames" - instead of detailed descriptions, and even the obligatory disposal of comparisons and metaphors, this "literary" that has set the teeth on edge, the expulsion of tendentiousness from the text, the role of phrases, reminiscences - here literally all the principles of Shalamov's prose are listed! It seems that neither later (in the treatise set out in a letter to I.P. Sirotinskaya “On Prose”, nor in letters to Yu.A. Schrader), nor in diaries and notebooks, did he anywhere with such consistency set out his theories new prose.
That, perhaps, still did not succeed Shalamov - but what he constantly strived for - was to restrain too direct, direct expression of his thoughts and feelings, concluding the main thing from the story - in the subtext and avoiding categorical direct statements and assessments. His ideals were, as it were, quite Platonic (or, perhaps, in his mind, Hemingway). Let's compare this assessment of the most "Hemingway", as is usually considered for Platonov, "Third Son":
The third son atoned for the sin of his brothers, who staged a brawl next to the corpse of his mother. But Platonov does not even have a shadow of their condemnation, he generally refrains from any assessments whatsoever, in his arsenal there are only facts and images. This is, in a way, the ideal of Hemingway, who stubbornly strove to erase any assessments from his works: he almost never reported the thoughts of the characters - only their actions, diligently crossed out in the manuscripts all the turns that began with the word “how”, his famous statement about one-eighth part of the iceberg was largely about ratings and emotions. In the calm, unhurried prose of Platonov, the iceberg of emotions not only does not protrude into any part - one has to dive to a solid depth for it15.
Here we can only add that Shalamov’s own “iceberg” is still in a state of “about to turn over”: in each “cycle” (and many times) he still shows us his underwater part ... Political, and simply worldly, "cheerleader" temperament of this writer has always gone off scale, he could not keep the story within the framework of dispassion.

1 Apanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales // IV International Shalamov Readings. Moscow, June 18-19, 1997:
Abstracts of reports and communications. - M.: Respublika, 1997, pp. 40-52 (with reference to Apanowicz F. Nowa proza ​​Warlama Szalamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej. Gdansk, 1996. S. 101-103) http://www.booksite.ru/varlam /reading_IV_09.htm
2 The author worked on them (including The Resurrection of the Larch and The Glove) for twenty years - from 1954 to 1973. One can consider them five or even six books, depending on whether the “Essays on the Underworld”, which are somewhat aloof, are included in the CR.
3 The sign # denotes the beginning (or end) of a new paragraph in a quotation; sign ## - the end (or the beginning) of the whole text - М.М.
4 As if a refrain is given here modality duty. It is addressed by the author to himself, but, therefore, to the reader. Then it will be repeated in many other stories, as, for example, in the final of the next one ("To the show"): Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing firewood.
5 Manuscript "In the Snow" (code in RGALI 2596-2-2 - available at http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/2/1.html). The main text, editing and title in the manuscript - in pencil. And above the name, apparently, the originally intended name of the entire cycle - Northern drawings?
6 As can be seen from the manuscript (http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/5/1.html), the original title of this short story, then crossed out, was "Linen" - here the word is in quotation marks or is it signs on both sides new paragraph "Z" ? - That is, [“Underwear” at Night] or: [zUnderwear at Night]. Here is the name of the story “Kant” (1956) - in quotes in the manuscript, they are left in the American edition of R. Gul (“New Journal” No. 85 1966) and in the French edition of M. Geller (1982), but for some reason they not in the Sirotinskaya edition. - That is, it is not clear: the quotes were removed by the author himself, in some later editions - or is this an oversight (arbitrariness?) Of the publisher. According to the manuscript, quotation marks are also found in many other places where the reader comes across camp-specific terms (for example, in the title of the story "On the Show").
7 For the first time, the tractor will be mentioned again only at the end of “Single Measurement” (1955), i.e. three stories from the beginning. The very first hint about riding horses in the same cycle is in the story "The Snake Charmer", i.e. Already through 16 stories from this. Well, about horses in sledges - in "Shock Therapy" (1956), after 27 stories, already towards the end of the entire cycle.
8 Franciszek Apanowicz, "Nowa proza" Warłama Szałamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej, Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1986, s. 101-193 (author's own translation). Here, in personal correspondence, Franciszek Apanovich adds: “Shalamov was convinced that he was paving a new path in literature, which no man had yet set foot on. He not only saw himself as a pioneer, but believed that there were few such writers who break new roads.<…>Well, symbolically, the road is trampled by writers (I would even say - artists in general), and not by readers, about whom we learn nothing, except that they ride tractors and horses.
9 This is a kind of prose poem, Nitsch notes: “A path only serves as a path to poetry until another person has walked along it. That is, a poet or writer cannot follow in the footsteps of others” (in email correspondence).
10 Like topch ut snowy road? (…) Roads are always paving ut on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. The man himself planned no yourself landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree ... (my underlining - M.M.).
11 Irina Emelyanova. Unknown pages of Varlam Shalamov or the History of one "acquisition" // Facets No. 241-242, January-June 2012. Tarusa pages. Volume 1, Moscow-Paris-Munich-San Francisco, p.131-2) - also on the site http://shalamov.ru/memory/178/
12 [The story was published in 1926.]
13 [Shalamov quotes Hemingway himself, without explicit reference to

The work of Varlam Shalamov belongs to the Russian literature of the 20th century, and Shalamov himself is recognized as one of the most outstanding and talented writers of this century.

His works are imbued with realism and unbending courage, and "Kolyma Tales", his main artistic legacy, is the clearest example of all the motives of Shalamov's work.

Each story included in the collection of short stories is reliable, since the writer himself had to endure the Stalinist Gulag and all the torments of the camps that followed it.

Man and the totalitarian state

As mentioned earlier, "Kolyma Tales" is dedicated to the life that an incredible number of people had to endure who went through the ruthless Stalinist camps.

Thus, Shalamov raises the main moral issue of that era, reveals the key problem of that time - this is the confrontation between the individual person and the totalitarian state, which does not spare human destinies.

Shalamov does this through the depiction of the life of people exiled to camps, because this is already the final moment of such a confrontation.

Shalamov does not shy away from harsh reality and shows the whole reality of that so-called "life process" that devours human personalities.

Changes in the values ​​of human life

In addition to the fact that the writer shows how severe, inhuman and unfair punishment this is, Shalamov focuses on who a person is forced to turn into after the camps.

This topic is especially clearly highlighted in the story “Dry rations”, Shalamov shows how much the will and oppression of the state suppresses the personal principle in a person, how much his soul will be dissolved in this malicious state machine.

Through physical abuse: constant hunger and cold, people were turned into animals, no longer aware of anything around, wanting only food and warmth, denying all human feelings and experiences.

The values ​​of life become elementary things that transform the human soul, turn a person into an animal. All that people begin to desire is to survive, all that controls them is a dull and limited thirst for life, a thirst just to be.

Artistic techniques in "Kolyma stories"

These almost documentary stories are imbued with a subtle, powerful philosophy and spirit of courage and courage. Many critics emphasize the special composition of the entire book, which consists of 33 stories, but does not lose its integrity.

Moreover, the stories are not arranged in chronological order, but this composition does not lose its semantic purpose. On the contrary, Shalamov's stories are arranged in a special order, which allows you to see the life of people in the camps fully, to feel it as a single organism.

The artistic techniques used by the writer are striking in their thoughtfulness. Shalamov uses laconism in describing the nightmare that people experience in such inhuman conditions.

This creates an even more powerful and tangible effect of what is described - after all, he speaks dryly and realistically about the horror and pain that he himself managed to experience.

But "Kolyma stories" consist of different stories. For example, the story "Tombstone" is saturated with unbearable bitterness and hopelessness, and the story "Sherry Brandy" shows how much a person is above circumstances and that for any life is filled with meaning and truth.

The first problem in the analysis of CR (as the author himself designated the cycle) is ethical. It is well known what personal experience and material is behind the text; almost twenty years of imprisonment in Soviet concentration camps, fifteen of them in Kolyma (1937-1951).
Is it possible to evaluate a cry according to rhetorical laws? Is it possible to talk about genre, composition and other professional things in the presence of such suffering?
It is possible and even necessary. Varlam Shalamov did not ask for leniency.
Shalamov's main aesthetic manifesto - the article "On Prose" (1965) - is supported by numerous "notes on poetry", detailed fragments in letters, notes in workbooks, and finally, comments in the stories themselves and poems about poetry. Before us is a type of reflective artist common in the 20th century, trying first to understand and then to realize.
Shalamov's personal, internal theme is not a prison, not a camp in general, but Kolyma with its experience of grandiose, unprecedented, unprecedented extermination of man and suppression of the human. "Kolyma Tales" is an image of new psychological patterns in human behavior, people in new conditions. Do they remain human? Where is the boundary between man and animal? Definitions may vary, nevertheless, always gravitating towards extremes: “Here people are depicted in an extremely important, not yet described state, when a person is approaching a state close to the state of humanness” (“On My Prose”).
The twentieth century, according to Shalamov, has become a real "collapse of humanism." And, accordingly, a catastrophe happened to the main literary genre, the aesthetic “backbone” of the 19th century: “The novel is dead. And no force in the world will resurrect this literary form. People who have gone through revolutions, wars, concentration camps, do not care about the novel. The novel should be replaced by a new prose - a document, an eyewitness account, turned into an image by his blood, feeling, talent.
Shalamov describes in detail the structure of this prose. Heroes: people without a biography, without a past and without a future. Action: plot completeness. Narrator: transition from first person to third person, passing hero. Style: short, like a slap, a phrase; purity of tone, cutting off all the husks of halftones (like in Gauguin), rhythm, a single musical structure; accurate, true, new detail, at the same time translating the story into a different plane, giving a “subtext”, turning into a detail-sign, detail-symbol; special attention to the beginning and ending, until these two phrases - the first and the last - are not found in the brain, these two phrases are not formulated - there is no story. The hypnosis of Shalamov's clarity and aphorism is such that the poetics of CR is usually perceived from the point of view set by the author. Meanwhile, like any great writer, his theoretical "generating model" and specific aesthetic practice are not absolutely adequate, which is noticeable even in small things.
Denying Tolstoy's method of sorting through several versions of Katyusha Maslova's eye color in drafts ("absolute anti-artistic"), Shalamov declares: "Is there any eye color for any hero of Kolyma Tales - if there are any? There were no people in Kolyma who had would be the color of the eyes, and this is not an aberration of my memory, but the essence of life then.
Let's look at the texts of the CD. "... a black-haired fellow, with such a suffering expression of black, deeply sunken eyes ..." ("On the show"). “Dark green, emerald fire, her eyes flashed somehow out of place, out of place” (“Unconverted”).
But some key provisions of Shalamov's "art of poetry" are limited situational, in different places they are formulated in exactly the opposite way, representing not even a paradox, but an obvious contradiction.
Speaking about the absolute authenticity of each story, the authenticity of the document, Shalamov can remark nearby that he is just "the chronicler of his own soul." Emphasizing the role of the writer as an eyewitness, witness and connoisseur of the material, to state that excessive knowledge, going over to the side of the material harms the writer, because the reader ceases to understand him. Talk about types of plot - and say that in his stories "there is no plot." To notice that "the one who knows the end is a fabulist, an illustrator" - and let it slip that he has "a lot of notebooks where only the first phrase and the last are written - this is all the work of the future." (But isn't the last sentence the end?). In the same year (1971) to reject the flattering comparison of a fellow writer (Otten: You are the direct heir of all Russian literature - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. - Me: I am the direct heir of Russian modernism - Bely and Remizov. I did not study with Tolstoy , but Bely, and in any of my stories there are traces of this study") - and actually repeat it ("In a sense, I am the direct heir to the Russian realistic school - documentary, like realism"). And so on...
CDs begin with a short one-page text “On the trail”, about how they make their way through the virgin snow. The strongest goes first along the snowy expanse, marking his way with deep pits. Those following him step near the track, but not on the track itself, then they also come back, change the tired leader, but even the weakest must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's track - only then the road will eventually be broken. "And it's not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers." The last phrase turns the landscape picture into a symbol. We are talking about writing, about the ratio of the "old" and "new" in it. The most difficult thing is the absolute innovator who goes first. Those small and weak who follow the trail also deserve respect. They pass the necessary part of the way, the road would not exist without them. Shalamov's symbol can be expanded further. "New Prose", it seems, was perceived by him as a path through the virgin lands.
The volume, boundaries and general structure of the Kolyma cycle became clear already after the death of the author, in the early nineties (after the publication efforts of I. Sirotinskaya). 137 texts made up five collections: the Kolyma Tales proper (33 texts, 1954 - 1962), The Left Bank (25 texts, 1956 - 1965), The Spade Artist (28 texts, 1955 - 1964), Resurrection larches" (30 texts, 1965 - 1967), "Glove, or KR-2" (21 texts, 1962 - 1973). The corpus of Kolyma prose also includes another book - Essays on the Underworld (8 texts, 1959). It can serve as a starting point for clarifying the nature and genre repertoire of the CD in the broad sense of the word.
The trail around which Shalamov steps is obvious here. "Essays ..." exhibit their genre already in the title. Since the forties of the last century, the genre of physiological essay, physiology, has been established in our literature - a detailed, multifaceted description of a chosen phenomenon or type, accompanied by reasoning and vivid pictures. The basis of physiology was empirical observations, eyewitness testimony (document). The author was not interested in psychological depths, not in characters, but in social types, unfamiliar spheres and areas of life.
Invented and implemented under the editorship of Nekrasov, "Physiology of Petersburg" became famous in its time. Physiology was carried away by Vl. Dahl, S. Maksimov (who wrote the three-volume "Siberia and Hard Labor").
"Essays ..." by Shalamov - the physiology of the thieves' world of the Soviet era in its prison and camp life. Eight chapters tell about how they get into the thieves' world, what is its internal structure and conflicts, relations with the outside world and the state, solutions to "women's" and "children's" issues. A lot of space is devoted to the problems of thieves' culture: "Apollo among the thieves", "Sergey Yesenin and the thieves' world", "How novels are squeezed".
The outdated journalistic pathos of Shalamov's essay-research is also obvious. He begins with a sharp argument with the "mistakes of fiction" that glorified the underworld. Here not only Gorky, I. Babel, N. Pogodin and Ilf and Petrov get it for the "farmason" Ostap Bender, but also V. Hugo and Dostoevsky, who "did not go for the truthful portrayal of thieves." In the text itself, Shalamov several times harshly repeats: "... people unworthy of the title of man."
The problematics and method of essays, individual motives and “jokes” do not disappear anywhere in other CRs. In the fabric of the "new prose" they represent a well-distinguishable basis. At least thirty texts belong to essays in their pure form in Shalamov's five books.
As befits a physiologist-chronicler, a witness-documentary, an observer-researcher, Shalamov gives a comprehensive description of the subject, demonstrates various sections of the Kolyma "beyond human" life: comparison of prison and camp ("Tatar mullah and clean air"), gold mining, the most terrible common work , the "hellish furnace" of the Kolyma camp "Wheelbarrow 1", "Wheelbarrow 2"), executions in 1938 ("How it began"), the story of escapes ("The Green Prosecutor"), a woman in the camp ("Lessons of Love"), medicine on Kolyma ("Red Cross"), a bath day, which also turns into torment ("In the Bath").
Other themes are growing around this core: a lighter and more specific prison life (“Combeds”, “Best Praise”), the secret of the “big trials” of the thirties (“Bookinist”; based on the testimony of the Leningrad Chekist, Shalamov believes that they were “a secret pharmacology”, “suppression of the will by chemical means” and, possibly, hypnosis), reflections on the role of terrorist SRs in recent history (“Gold Medal”) and on the relationship between the intelligentsia and power (“At the Stirrup”).
In this dense everyday texture, one's own destiny is inscribed with a dotted line. The prison, where the young Shalamov was the warden of the cell, met with the old inmate, the Socialist-Revolutionary Andreev, and earned from him “the best praise” (in the texts of the KR, she is recalled more than once): “You can sit in prison, you can. I tell you this from the bottom of my heart." The camp process, at which the experienced prisoner Shalamov, on a denunciation, received a new term, among other things, for calling Bunin a great Russian writer. Saving paramedic courses that changed his fate (“Courses”, “Exam”), Happy hospital poetic evenings with comrades in misfortune (“Athenian Nights”). The first attempt to escape from the camp world, a trip to the coast of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk immediately after the official release ("Journey to Ola").
This CD block does not overcome the document, but demonstrates it. Extracts from newspapers and encyclopedias with accurate reference to sources, dozens of real names should confirm the authenticity of events and characters that did not appear on the pages of a large, written history. “The time for allegories has passed, the time for direct speech has come. All the killers in my stories are given a real surname.
The Kolyma camp is fundamentally different from a prison. This is a place where all previous human laws, norms, habits are cancelled. Above each camp gate, the slogan “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism” is obligatory hung (a detail repeatedly used in the KR, but it is never mentioned that these words belong to Stalin).
The weakest of all in this inverted world are the intellectuals (their camp nickname is "Ivan Ivanychi"), less adapted to hard physical labor than others. They are more than others - by order and from the bottom of their hearts - are hated by the camp authorities, as the political "58th article", opposed to the "socially close" bytoviki. They are persecuted and robbed by thieves, organized, arrogant, who put themselves outside of human morality. They get most of all from the brigadier, foreman, cook - any camp authorities from the prisoners themselves, who ensure their unsteady well-being with someone else's blood.
Powerful, unprecedented physical and mental pressure leads to the fact that in three weeks at general work (this period Shalamov names many times), a person turns into a goner with a completely changed physiology and psychology.
In "Athenian Nights" Shalamov recalls that Thomas More in "Utopia" named four feelings, the satisfaction of which gives a person the highest bliss: hunger, sexual feeling, urination, defecation. “It was these four main pleasures that we were deprived of in the camp ...”
In the same way, other feelings are consistently sorted out and discarded, on which the usual human hostel rests.
Friendship? “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 ”(“ Dry Rations ”).
The luxury of human communication? “He did not consult with anyone ... For he knew: everyone to whom he told his plan would betray him to his superiors - for praise, for a cigarette butt, just like that ...” (“Typhoid Quarantine”).
“... We have been starving for a long time. All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - left us with the meat that we lost during our long starvation. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones ... only anger was placed - the most durable human feeling ”(“ Dry Rations ”).
But then the anger also leaves, the soul finally freezes, and only an indifferent existence remains in this moment of being, without any memory of the past.
Life history, philosophy, journalism do not add up to Shalamov in a linear - plot or problem - picture. "Essays on the Underworld" do not develop into "Physiology of the Kolyma..." an "experience in artistic research" of one of the islands of the Gulag archipelago. On the contrary, essay fragments without any chronology of events and author's biography are freely scattered throughout all five collections, interspersed with things of a completely different genre nature.
The second in the CD, immediately after the epigraph playing the role of the short "In the snow", is the text "To the show" with the instantly recognizable first phrase: "We played cards at Naumov's konogon".
They play two thieves, thieves, one of them loses everything and after the last failure “for a performance”, on credit, tries to take off a sweater from a former engineer working in a barracks. He refuses and in an instant dump gets stabbed by an orderly who poured him soup an hour ago. “Sashka stretched out the dead man’s arms, tore off his undershirt and pulled the sweater over his head. The sweater was red, and the blood on it was barely visible. Sevochka carefully, so as not to get his fingers dirty, folded the sweater into a plywood suitcase. The game was over and I could go home. Now I had to look for another partner for cutting firewood.”
"For the show" is written on the material of "Essays on the Underworld". Entire descriptive blocks go from there to here: it also tells how home-made cards are made from stolen books, the rules of the thieves' game are outlined, favorite themes of thieves' tattoos are listed, Yesenin, beloved by the thieves' world, is mentioned, to whom an entire chapter is devoted in "Essays ...".
But the structure of the whole is completely different here. Documentary essay material turns into a figurative "knot", into a single, unique event. The sociological characteristics of the types are transformed into psychological traits of the behavior of the characters. A detailed description is compressed to a single dagger detail (the cards are made not just from a book, but from a “volume of Victor Hugo”, perhaps the very one where the sufferings of a noble convict are depicted; here they are, real, not fake book thieves - Yesenin is quoted from tattooed on Naumov's chest, so that this is, indeed, "the only poet recognized and canonized by the underworld").
The frank paraphrase of the "Queen of Spades" in the very first phrase is multifunctional. It demonstrates a change in the aesthetic dominant; what is happening is seen not in the empirical factual nature of the case, but through the prism of literary tradition. It turns out to be a stylistic tuning fork, emphasizing the author's devotion to "a short, sonorous Pushkin phrase." It - when the story is brought to the end - demonstrates the difference, the abyss between this world and this world: here the stake in the card game, already without any mysticism, becomes someone else's life and the narrator's inhumanly normal reaction is opposed to madness. It finally sets the formula for the genre, to which both The Queen of Spades and Belkin's Tale are directly related, and the American Bierce, beloved by Shalamov in the twenties, and Babel, not beloved by him.
The second, along with the essay, genre support of the "new prose" is the old short story. In the short story, with its obligatory “suddenly”, the climax, the pointe, the category of “events” is rehabilitated, the different levels of being necessary for the movement of the plot are restored. Life, presented in the essays and accompanying comments as a colorless, hopeless, meaningless plane, again acquires a distinct, visual relief, albeit on a different, transcendental level. The straight line of dying turns into a cardiogram in the short stories - survival or death as an event, not extinction.
A former student receives a single measurement and painfully tries to fulfill an impossible norm. The day ends, the caretaker has only twenty percent, in the evening the prisoner is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions about the article and the term. “The next day, he again worked with the brigade, with Baranov, and on the night of the day after tomorrow, the soldiers led him behind the camp, and led him along a forest path to a place where, almost blocking a small gorge, there was a high fence with barbed wire stretched on top, and from where the distant chirring of tractors could be heard at night. And, realizing what was the matter, Dugaev regretted that he had worked in vain, that this last day had been tormented in vain ”(“ Single Measurement ”). The pointe of the novel is the last phrase - the last human feeling before the senseless ruthlessness of what is happening. Here you can see the invariant of the motive "the vanity of efforts in an attempt to replay fate."
Fate plays with a person according to some of its own irrational rules. One does not save diligent work. The other is saved by little things, nonsense. The novella, written ten years after Single Metering and included in another book, seems to start from the same climax. “Late at night, Krist was called “to the base camp” ... An investigator for especially important cases lived there ... Ready for anything, indifferent to everything, Krist walked along a narrow path.” After checking the prisoner's handwriting, the investigator instructs him to rewrite some endless lists, the meaning of which he does not think about. Until the employer finds a strange folder in his hands, which, after painfully pausing “... as if the soul was lit up to the bottom and something very important, human was found in it at the very bottom”), the investigator sends it to a burning stove , “... and only many years later I realized that it was his, Krista, folder. Many of Krist's comrades had already been shot. The investigator was also shot. But Krist beat was still alive and sometimes - at least once every few years - he remembered the burning folder, the resolute fingers of the investigator tearing up Krist's "case" - a gift to the doomed from the doomed. Krist's handwriting was salutary, calligraphic" ("Handwriting"). The dependence of a person's fate in that world on some random circumstances, on a breath of wind, is embodied in a surprisingly invented (of course, invented, and not taken out from Kolyma!) plot-shifter. Perhaps, in those lists that Krist wrote in calligraphic handwriting, there was also the name of Dugaev. Perhaps he also copied the paper with the name of the investigator.
In the second type of novelistic structure of the CR, the pointe becomes a thought, a word, usually the last phrase (here Shalamov again reminds him of Babel, who did not like him, who more than once used a similar novel-meaning in Cavalry).
"Tombstone" is first built on the leitmotif phrase "everyone died." Having listed twelve names, marking twelve lives-deaths with a dotted line - the organizer of the Russian Komsomol, Kirov's assistant, a Volokolamsk peasant, a French communist, a sea captain (Shalamov uses such panning more than once in essays) - the narrator ends with a replica of one of the heroes, dreaming on Christmas evening (here's a Christmas story for you!), Unlike others; not about returning home or to prison, picking up cigarette butts in the district committee or eating to your heart's content, but about something completely different. “And I - And his voice was calm and unhurried - I would like to be a stump. Human stump, you know, no arms, no legs. Then I would have found the strength to spit in their faces for everything they do to us.”
It was no coincidence that Shalamov spoke of slapping phrases... What has been done is irreversible and unforgivable.
Insisting on the uniqueness of the Kolyma experience and fate, Shalamov harshly formulates: “My idea of ​​life as a blessing, happiness has changed ... First, slaps should be returned, and only secondarily, alms. Remember evil before good. To remember everything good is a hundred years, and everything bad is two hundred. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (“Glove”).
The implementation of this formula is the text “What I saw and understood” preserved in one of the workbooks. The list of things seen and understood is bitter and unambiguous. It brings together motifs and reflections scattered throughout various essays and short stories of the Kyrgyz Republic: the fragility of human culture and civilization; the transformation of a man into a beast in three weeks with hard work, hunger, cold and beatings; the passion of a Russian person for complaint and denunciation; the cowardice of the majority; the weakness of the intelligentsia; weakness of human flesh; corruption by power; thieves' corruption; corruption of the human soul in general. The list ends at the forty-seventh paragraph.
Only after the CD was published in full, the author's protest against the isolated publication and perception of individual texts became clear. “Compositional integrity is an important quality of the Kolyma Tales. In this collection, only some stories can be replaced and rearranged, and the main, supporting ones should stand in their places.
What has been said about the first collection, Kolyma Tales itself, is directly related to both the Left Bank and The Spade Artist. In essence, within everything that Shalamov did, these three books are most closely connected, forming a trilogy with a dotted metaplot, distinct plot lines, plot twists and turns, and a denouement.
If, according to Shalamov, the first and last phrases turn out to be pivotal in the short story, then in the composition of the book as a whole, the first and last positions are certainly significant.
At the beginning of the KR, Shalamov puts "In the Snow" - a lyrical-symbolic short story, a prose poem (another important genre of the Kolyma cycle), the book's epigraph, and "On Presentation" - a pure, classic short story that sets the theme, genre, literary tradition. This is a tuning fork, a model of the whole.
The subsequent sequence is quite free, here, indeed, something can be “rearranged”, because there is no sense in a rigid supertextual movement.
The last four texts bring together the main themes and genre trends of the book.
"Stlanik" is again a lyric-symbolic short story, rhyming with the initial in genre and structure. A "naturalistic", apparently, description, a landscape picture, as it unfolds, turns into a philosophical parabola: it turns out that we are talking about courage, stubbornness, patience, and the indestructibility of hope.
Stlanik seems to be the only real hero of the hopeless first book of the CD.
The Red Cross is a physiological essay on the relationship between two forces in the camp world that have a huge impact on the fate of an ordinary prisoner, a hard worker. In The Red Cross, Shalamov explores and exposes the thieves' legend about a special attitude towards doctors. The semantic result here, as in the Essays on the Underworld, is a direct word. “The atrocities of the thieves in the camp are innumerable ... The boss is rude and cruel, the teacher is lying, the doctor is unscrupulous, but all this is nothing compared to the corrupting power of the thieves' world. Those are still people, and no, no, yes, and the human will peep into them. The thieves are not people." This text, in essence, could become the chapter of the Essays on the Underworld, absolutely coinciding with them in structural terms.
"Conspiracy of Lawyers" and "Typhoid Quarantine" are two cumulative novels, varying many times, amplifying the original situation to complete it with a sudden turn. The pendulum of prisoner's fate, "swinging from life to death, expressed in a high calm" ("Glove"), is compressed here to one measure. In the “Conspiracy of Lawyers”, the prisoner Andreev is summoned to the commissioner and sent to Magadan. "The track is the artery and the main nerve of the Kolyma". Investigators flash in the kaleidoscope of the road, their offices, cells, guards, random fellow travelers ("Where are you being taken? - To Magadan. To be shot. We are sentenced"). It turns out that he was sentenced. Magadan investigator Rebrov is inflating a grandiose case, first by arresting all the lawyers-prisoners in all the mines of the North. After interrogation, the hero finds himself in another cell, but a day later the wind blows in the opposite direction. “They let us out, fool,” said Parfentiev. - Released? At will? That is, not at will, but for shipment, for transit ... - And what happened? Why are we being released? - Captain Rebrov is arrested. It is ordered to release everyone who is on his orders, - someone omniscient said softly. As in the novel "Handwriting", the persecutor and the victim switch places. Justice triumphs for a moment in such a strange, perverted form.
In "Typhoid Quarantine", the same Andreev, fleeing from deadly gold mines, clings to the transit point until the last moment, showing all the cunning and diligence acquired in the camp. When it seems that everything is behind him, that he “won the battle for life”, the last truck takes him not on a close business trip with light work, but deep into the Kolyma, where “the sections of the road departments began - places a little better than gold mines.”
"Typhoid quarantine" - ending the description of the circles of hell, and a machine that throws people into new suffering, to a new stage (stage!), - a story that cannot start books, ”explained Shalamov (“On Prose”).
“Kolyma Tales” in the general structure of the Kyrgyz Republic is a book of the dead, a story about people with forever frostbitten souls, about martyrs who were not and did not become heroes.
"Left Bank" changes the semantic dominant. The composition of the second collection creates a different image of the world and accentuates a different emotion.
The title of this book contains the name of the hospital, which became a sharp turning point in the camp fate for Shalamov, in fact, saved his life.
The Procurator of Judea, the first short story, is again a symbol, an epigraph to the whole. A front-line surgeon who has just arrived in Kolyma, honestly saving prisoners flooded in the hold with ice water, after seventeen years forces himself to forget about this ship, although he perfectly remembers everything else, including hospital novels and the ranks of the camp authorities. Shalamov needs the exact number of years for the last phrase, the last novelistic point: “Anatole France has a story “The Procurator of Judea”. There, Pontius Pilate cannot remember the name of Christ in seventeen years.”
Some motifs in the novella are retrospective, referring to the past, to the first book of the CD. But something—and important—appears for the first time: the mention of active resistance rather than submissiveness of the victims (“prisoners rioted along the way”); the inclusion of the Kolyma material in the framework of culture, great history (the surgeon Kubantsev forgets just like Pontius Pilate; the writer Frans comes to the aid of the writer Shalamov with his plot).
In The Left Bank, the theme of senseless, martyrdom, which dominates in the first book, is practically absent. Only about this - only "Aortic Aneurysm" and "Special Order". The content of the "Kolyma Tales" is symbolically concentrated here in the short story "According to Lend-Lease". An American bulldozer received from military supplies, driven by a parricide bytovik, but, unlike the political article 58, “socially close” to the state, is trying to hide the main Kolyma secret - a huge common grave that was exposed after a landslide on a mountain slope . But the unconsciousness of technology and man, attempts to hide committed crimes are powerfully opposed in this short story by the hope for retribution, the memory of man and nature. “In Kolyma, bodies are buried not in the earth, but in stone. The stone keeps and reveals secrets. Stone is stronger than earth. Permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. Each of our loved ones who died in the Kolyma - each of the shot, beaten, bloodless by hunger - can still be identified - even after decades.
The main emotional tone of the CR - the calm, detached story of the participant and the witness (the simpler, the more terrible) - is replaced here by the intonation of the judge and the prophet, the pathos of denunciation and oath.
In other short stories of the Left Bank, a world of feelings appears that seems to have disappeared forever. Perhaps this happens because a person moves away from the edge of the abyss, finds himself not in a gold mine, but in a hospital, in prison, in a geological party, on a taiga business trip.
The essay "Kombedy" tells about the organization of mutual assistance of prisoners in Butyrka prison. In its ending, the concepts of “spiritual forces”, “human collective” that are impossible in the first book, appear.
In "Magic" even the head of the camp department sympathizes with the hard-working peasants and the narrator, but despises informers. "I worked as an informer, citizen chief." - "Go away!" - Stukov said with contempt and pleasure.
"The Left Bank" is a book of the living - a story about resistance, about thawing a frozen soul, finding, it seems, forever lost values.
The culmination of the book is "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev", the final point is "Sentence".
Many years later, after the death of Shalamov, a doctor who worked in the hospital of the Left Bank; will tell the story of one escape, as she remembered it. Some kind of Bendera was its leader, the prisoners disarmed the guards, went to the hills, hid from the chase for a whole summer, it seems that they lived by robbery, conflicted with each other, divided into two groups, were caught and after the trial in Magadan, when trying to escape again, some died in shootout, others, after treatment in the hospital, were again sent to camps (the narrator refers to the testimonies of those who were treated). This confusing, full of ambiguities, eventual and ethical contradictions story, apparently, is closest to reality. “That's the only way it happens in life,” Chekhov said on another occasion.
The documentary version of Shalamov is presented in the lengthy essay "The Green Prosecutor" (1959), which was included in the collection "The Spade Artist". Among other attempts at camp escapes, he recalls the escape of Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky. His impudent reply with a hint to the big boss ("Don't worry, we are preparing a concert that the whole Kolyma will talk about"), the number of those who fled, the details of the escape - coincide with the plot outline of "The Last Battle ...". The essay makes it possible to understand one dark place in the novel. “Khrustalev was the foreman whom the fugitives sent for after the attack on the detachment - Pugachev did not want to leave without his closest friend. There he sleeps, Khrustalev, calmly and soundly, ”the narrator conveys the main character’s internal monologue before the last fight. But there is no parcel for the brigadier after the attack on the detachment in the short story. This episode remained only in the "Green Prosecutor".
Comparison of "The Green Prosecutor" and "Major Pugachev's Last Battle", written in the same year, allows us to see not similarities, but striking differences, the abyss between fact and image, essay and short story. Bendera's lieutenant colonel Yanovsky turns into a major and receives a speaking surname - a symbol of the Russian rebellion - besides having a Pushkin halo (the poetic Pugachev of "The Captain's Daughter"). His lack of understanding of the old laws, according to which the prisoner should only obey, endure and die, is emphasized. Removed all hints of the complexity of the previous life of his associates. “This department was formed immediately after the war only from newcomers - from war criminals, from Vlasov, from prisoners of war who served in German units ...” (“Green Prosecutor”). All twelve (there are twelve of them, like apostles!) receive heroic Soviet biographies in which dashing escapes from German captivity, distrust of the Vlasovites, loyalty to friendship, humanity hidden under the bark of rudeness.
In counterpoint to the familiar formula of the old Kolyma (“The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral stamina of the prisoners extremely ... The souls of the survivors underwent complete corruption ...”), a completely different leitmotif is introduced: “... If you don’t run away at all, then die - free ".
And, finally, in the finale, Shalamov, overcoming real, everyday ignorance about the fate of the “leader” (as it was in “The Green Prosecutor”) of escape, grants him (quite in the spirit of the dying visions of the characters of the unloved Tolstoy) memories of his whole life, “difficult male life" - and the last shot.
"The Last Fight of Major Pugachev" is a Kolyma ballad about the madness of the brave at the "gloomy abyss on the edge", about freedom as the highest life value.
“These were martyrs, not heroes” - it is said about another Kolyma and also in the essay (“How It Started”). Heroism, it turns out, still found a place on this woeful land, on the accursed Left Bank.
Maxim (1965) presents a different, less heroic, but no less important experience of resistance, the thawing of a frozen soul. At the beginning of the short story, in a folded form, the usual downward path of the hero-narrator is given, which has already been depicted more than once in the CD: cold - hunger - indifference - anger - semi-consciousness, "an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life." At the ultralight work of a goner on a taiga business trip, the spiral gradually begins to unwind in the opposite direction. First, physical sensations return: the need for sleep decreases, muscle pain appears. Anger returns, a new indifference-fearlessness, then fear of losing this saving life, then envy of their dead comrades and living neighbors, then pity for animals.
One of the main returns is still happening. In the "world without books", in the world of "poor, rude mining language", where you can forget the name of your wife, suddenly a new word falls down, bursts in, floats in from nowhere. "Maxim! - I yelled straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, yelled, not yet understanding the meaning of this word born in me. And if this word is returned, found again - so much the better, so much the better. Great joy filled my whole being.
"Sentence" is a symbolic short story about the resurrection of the word, about returning to culture, to the world of the living, from which the Kolyma convicts seem to have been excommunicated forever.
In this light, the ending needs to be deciphered. The day comes when everyone, overtaking each other, runs to the village, the chief who arrived from Magadan puts a gramophone on a stump and starts some kind of symphonic music. “And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraer, foremen and hard workers. The boss was standing next to me. And the expression on his face was as if he had written this music for us, for our deaf taiga business trip. The shellac plate whirled and hissed, the stump itself whirled, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years ... ".
Why are they all gathered in one place, as if for some kind of rally? Why did the camp chief, a creature of the "other world", come from Magadan itself and even seem to curry favor with the prisoners? What is the music about?
In the earlier "Weismanist" (1964), which, however, ended up in the next collection "Artist of the Shovel", the biography of the remarkable surgeon Umansky is told (a real person, a lot is said about him in the essay "Courses"). Imbued with the highest confidence in the narrator (here it is Andreev II, the hypostasis of the central character of the KR), he shares his cherished dream with him: “The most important thing is to survive Stalin. All who survive Stalin will live. Did you understand? It cannot be that the curses of millions of people on his head do not materialize. Did you understand? He will certainly die from this universal hatred. He's going to get cancer or something! Did you understand? We will still live."
The pointe of the novel is the date: “Umansky died on March 4, 1953...” (In Kursy, in the same collection, Shalamov indicated only the year of death and noted that the professor “did not wait for what he had been waiting for so many years”; in fact In fact, Umansky, according to the commentator, died back in 1951.) The hero's hope is not realized here - he dies just one day before the death of the tyrant.
The hero of the "Sentence" seems to have survived. This is what the plate on the trunk of a three-hundred-year-old larch plays about. The spring, twisted for three hundred years, must finally burst. The returned word, "Roman, hard, Latin", associated "with the history of political struggle, the struggle of people" also played some role in this.
In the middle of the century, a catchy philosophical thesis became popular in Europe: after Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry (and the radicals added: prose too). Shalamov seems to agree with this, adding Kolyma to Auschwitz.
But in the notebooks of 1956, when the camp was still breathing down the back of the head, and the memory of the past was quite fresh, it was noted: "Kolyma taught me to understand what poetry is for a person."
In Athenian Nights (1973), which takes place in a camp hospital, at the turn of the return to life, the need for poetry is declared the fifth, not taken into account by Thomas More, the need, the satisfaction of which brings the highest bliss.
The feverish writing of poetry is the first thing Shalamov began to do after his "resurrection from the dead." The lyric "Kolyma Notebooks" began to take shape in 1949, back in Kolyma, long before the "Kolyma Tales".
Until (and when) there was no need to conceptually clear the field for "new prose", Shalimov rehabilitated art and literature. Prose itself is evidence of this. "Sherry Brandy", "Sentence", "Marcel Proust", "For a Letter", "Athenian Nights".
Former values ​​are not cancelled. On the contrary, their price is being recognized and sharply increased. Reading poems in a park or in a punishment cell, writing them in a cozy office or in a camp are really different things. One has to live after Kolyma fully understanding the fragility and importance of what has been created over millennia.
"The Spade Artist", the third collection of the KR, is a book of return, a look at the Kolyma experience is already somewhat from the outside.
Structurally, compositionally, the beginnings of all five Shalamov's books are of the same type: a lyrical epigraph novel with a key, symbolic motif stands in front. Here, as in the Left Bank, this is the motive of memory. But, unlike the "Procurator of Judea", the chronotope of "The Seizure" goes beyond the Kolyma. The action takes place in a neurological institute, where, having lost consciousness, the narrator falls into the past, recalls the only camp day off in half a year, on which, nevertheless, all the prisoners were driven for firewood and which ended in the same attack of sweet nausea. “The doctor asked me something. I answered with difficulty. I wasn't afraid of the memories."
The tension between the essay and novelistic structures seems to increase in the third book.
On the one hand, there are more essays in the collection, and lengthy ones at that (“How It Started”, “Courses”, “In the Bathhouse”, “The Green Prosecutor”, “Echo in the Mountains”). On the other hand, short stories stop mimicking a document, revealing their literary quality.
The literary subtext of "Protezov" has already been mentioned. But the book also contains the grotesque "Caligula" with a final quote from Derzhavin, and the dramatic "RUR" with a comparison of the workers of the reinforced security company with "Chapek's robots from the Ruhr", as well as the counterpoint of times (as in "The Seizure"), "However, “Which of us thought in 1938 about Capek, about the coal Ruhr? Only twenty or thirty years later there are forces for comparison, in an attempt to resurrect time, colors and a sense of time.
“Chasing Locomotive Smoke” and “The Train”, which complete the third book, are directly stories about returning from the world of Kolyma “to the mainland” (as they said in the camp), where you can think about Chapek, remember Tynyanov.
The novels are built like a kaleidoscope of episodes-scenes at the last stage of the road home: walking through the Kolyma bureaucratic labyrinths of an already civilian paramedic - painful surrender of cases - a breakthrough by plane to Yakutsk ("No, Yakutsk was not yet a city, it was not the mainland. It did not there was locomotive smoke") - the Irkutsk railway station - a bookstore ("Hold books in your hands, stand near the counter of a bookstore - it was like a good meat borscht ...").
In The Artist of the Shovel, the cross-cutting plot of the Kolyma stories is, in essence, exhausted. But the inhibited memory is chained to the Kolyma, like a convict to a wheelbarrow. The endless painful memory gives rise to new texts, which most often turn out to be variations of what has already been written.
"The Resurrection of the Larch", as usual, begins with the lyric-symbolic "Path" and "Graphite". The motif of the first short story (a private path laid in the taiga, on which poems were well written) is reminiscent of “In the Snow”. The theme of "Graphite" (the immortality of the Kolyma dead) has already sounded powerfully in the short story "By Lend-Lease". The concluding collection also symbolic "Resurrection of the Larch" refers to "Stlanik". "Roundup" grows out of "Typhoid Quarantine". "Brave Eyes" and "Nameless Cat" renew the motif of pity for animals found in "Tamara the Bitch". "Marcel Proust" seems to be a more straightforward variation of "Sentence": what is depicted there is only named here. “I, a Kolyma resident, a convict, was also transferred to a long-lost world, into other habits, forgotten, unnecessary ... Kalitinsky and I - we both remembered our world, our lost time.”
In The Resurrection of the Larch, Shalamov professes the principle formulated by him on the example of Proust: “Before memory, as before death, everyone is equal, and the right of the author to remember the dress of the servant and forget the jewels of the mistress.”
“Whether to write five stories, excellent, which will always remain, will be included in some kind of golden fund, or write one hundred and fifty - of which each is important as a witness to something extremely important, missed by everyone, and by no one but me, not recoverable” - formulates Shalamov problem after the completion of "The Spade Artist" ("On My Prose"). And, apparently, he chooses the second, extensive option. In The Glove, or KR-2, the thoughtful composition of the first books disappears altogether. Most of the texts included in the collection are essays-portraits of Kolyma prisoners, chiefs, doctors or physiological sections of camp life, based not so much on imagination and memory, but on the memory of their former texts (it should not be forgotten that for all twenty years Shalamov’s stories have not are published, and the author is deprived of the opportunity to look at them from the outside, almost devoid of reader feedback, deprived of a sense of the creative path). The Glove is a book of great weariness. In structure, it is not similar to CR-1, but to Essays on the Underworld. Separate texts (“Wheelbarrow 1”, “Lieutenant Colonel of the Medical Service”, “Lessons of Love”), it seems, have not been completed, and the entire collection has remained unfinished, which has its own, no longer consciously artistic, but biographically bitter symbolism. “I did not hold by the effort of the pen Everything that seemed to be yesterday. I thought this: what nonsense! I will write poetry anytime. The reserve of feelings will last for a hundred years - And an indelible mark on the soul. As soon as the right hour comes, Everything will be resurrected - as on the retina of the eyes. But the past, lying at the feet, Spilled through the fingers, like sand, And the living reality is overgrown with the past. Unconsciousness, oblivion, forgetfulness, ”he predicted back in 1963.
Shalamov's last work - already pure memories of Kolyma, with an indisputable author's "I", a linear chronological sequence, direct journalism - broke off at the very beginning.
The movement from “new prose experienced as a document” to a simple document, from a short story and poetic structure to an essay and a simple memoir, from a symbol to a direct word, also opens up some new facets of the “late” Shalamov. It can be said that the author of "The Resurrection of the Larch" and "The Gloves" is becoming both more publicistic and philosophical at the same time.
The constant metaphor of the Kolyma "hell" is unfolding. Shalamov inscribes it in culture, finds a place for it even in the Homeric picture of the world. “The world where gods and heroes live is one world. There are events that are equally terrible for both people and gods. Homer's formulas are very true. But in Homeric times there was no criminal underworld, the world of concentration camps. Pluto's dungeon seems like heaven, heaven compared to this world. But this world of ours is only a floor below Pluto; people rise from there to heaven, and the gods sometimes descend, go down the stairs - below hell ”(“ Exam ”). On the other hand, this “hell” receives a specific historical registration: “Kolyma is the Stalinist extermination camp ... Auschwitz without ovens” (“The Life of Engineer Kipreev”); “Kolyma is a special camp like Dachau” (“Riva Rocci”). However, this comparison, which destroys the Soviet system, has its limits. Shalamov forever retained the pathos and hopes of the early twenties. He was first arrested for distributing the so-called "Lenin's testament" (a letter with a request to replace Stalin), ended up in a camp with the indelible stigma of "Trotskyist" (see "Handwriting"), always respectfully remembered the Socialist-Revolutionaries and their predecessors - the People's Will. Until the end of his life, he professed the idea of ​​a betrayed revolution, a stolen victory, a historically missed opportunity, when everything could still be changed.
“The best people of the Russian revolution made the greatest sacrifices, died young, nameless, shook the throne - they made such sacrifices that at the time of the revolution this party had no strength left, no people left to lead Russia along with them” (“Gold Medal”).
The final formula-aphorism was found in late unfinished memoirs in the chapter titled “Storm of the Sky”: “The October Revolution, of course, was a world revolution ... I was a participant in a huge lost battle for a real renewal of life.”
The late Shalamov ceases to insist on the uniqueness of the Kolyma experience and suffering. The transition from large scale to private destiny makes it impossible to weigh the pain. In "The Resurrection of a Larch" there is a reflection on the fate of the Russian princess, who in 1730 went into exile with her husband there, to the Far North.
“The larch, whose branch, branch breathed on the Moscow table, is the same age as Natalia Sheremeteva-Dolgorukova and can remind her of her sad fate: the vicissitudes of life, fidelity and firmness, mental stamina, physical, moral torment, no different from torment thirty-seventh year ... Why not the eternal Russian plot? The larch, which saw the death of Natalia Dolgorukova and saw millions of corpses - immortal in the permafrost of Kolyma, which saw the death of the Russian poet (Mandelstam. - I. S), the larch lives somewhere in the North, to see, to scream that nothing has changed in Russia - no fate, no human malice, no indifference.
This idea is brought to the clarity of a formula in the anti-novel Vishera. "The camp is not an opposition of hell to paradise, but a mold of our life... The camp... is world-like."
The chapter where this aphorism is minted is called "There are no guilty ones in the camp." But the late Shalamov, peering with enlightened memory at this cast of Russian life, comes across another, opposite thought: "There are no innocents in the world."
The end-to-end hero of the CD on the second round of the camp fate also turns out to be a person in whose hands the fate of others is in his hands. And his position of victim and judge is suddenly transformed.
In The Washed Out Photo, the fall is almost imperceptible. Having got to the hospital like a goner, and having received a place as a nurse, whom new patients look at “as their fate, as a deity”, Krist agrees to the offer of one of them to wash his tunic and loses his main value, the only letter and photograph of his wife.
Having turned into a paramedic, “a true, not a fictitious Kolyma deity”, it is no longer Krist, but the narrator who begins his independent work by sending several prisoners who are stale in the hospital, who seem to him to be simulators, to general work. The next day, a suicide is found in the stable.
Shalamov gives an existential refraction of this theme not on the Kolyma material, building the plot on the basis of childhood memories (there is a mention of a similar episode - but without any philosophical overtones - in the autobiographical "The Fourth Vologda"). In a quiet provincial town, there are three main entertainment-spectacles: fires, squirrel hunting and revolution. "But no revolution in the world stifles the craving for traditional folk fun." And now a huge crowd, seized with a "passionate thirst for murder", with a whistle, howling, hooting, pursues a lonely victim jumping through the trees and, finally, reaches its goal.
Only this dead animal is not guilty of anything, but the man is still guilty...
"Kolyma Tales" and "The Gulag Archipelago" were written almost simultaneously. The two chroniclers of the camp world closely followed each other's work.
Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn unanimously opposed oblivion, hushing up of real history, against artistic crafts and speculation on the camp theme, and in their work they overcame the tradition of "simply memoirs."
Soviet literature about the camp world was a "literature of bewilderment" (M. Geller). Memoirists more or less truthfully told "what I saw", unconsciously or carefully avoiding the questions "how?" and why?". Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, starting from their own experience, tried to "guess the passage of time", to find the answer to the huge, gigantic "why" ("First Chekist"), which changed the fate of millions of people, of the entire vast country. But their answers did not agree on almost one point. The discrepancies that became especially obvious after the publication of Shalamov's letters and diary entries are too fundamental to be explained by petty everyday circumstances.
The genre of his main book Solzhenitsyn designated as "the experience of artistic research." The last definition is still more important: artistry in the "Archipelago ..." turned out to be on the premises of the concept, document, evidence. – Shalamov's "new prose" (by design, in principle) overcame the document, melting it into an image. To paraphrase Tynyanov, the author of the CD could say: I continue where the document ends.
Solzhenitsyn inherited from the classical realism of the middle of the 19th century the belief in the novel as a mirror of life and a literary pinnacle. His narrative is broad and horizontal. It creeps, unfolds, includes thousands of details, trying - again, in principle! - to become equal in size to the object (a map of the archipelago the size of the Gulag itself). Therefore, Solzhenitsyn's main idea, The Red Wheel, turned into a cyclopean series stretching to infinity. – Shalamov continues the lateral line of harsh, lapidary, poetic prose, presented at the beginning and end of the century (Pushkin, Chekhov) and further in Russian modernism and prose of the twenties. His main genre is the short story, striving for clear boundaries, for the vertical, for the compression of meaning to an all-explaining episode, symbol, aphorism.
Shalamov insisted on the uniqueness of Kalyma as the most terrible island of the archipelago. - Solzhenitsyn seems to agree with this in the preamble to the third part - "Destroying Labor": "Perhaps, in Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, the reader will more accurately feel the ruthlessness of the spirit of the Archipelago and the edge of human despair." But in the text itself (Chapter 4 of the same part), arguing that Kolyma, which deserves separate descriptions, will hardly be touched upon in his book, he puts Shalamov’s texts in a series of pure memoirs: “Yes, Kolyma and“ lucky ”: Varlam Shalamov survived there and already wrote a lot; Evgenia Ginzburg, O. Sliozberg, N. Surovtseva, N. Grankina survived there - and they all wrote memoirs, ”and makes the following note to this fragment:“ Why did such a condensation come about, and there are almost no non-Kolyma memoirs? Is it because the flower of the prison world was really brought to Kolyma? Or, oddly enough, did they die out more amicably in the “nearby” camps?” The question, which in poetics is called rhetorical, presupposes a positive answer. The exclusivity of Kolyma for the author of "The Archipelago ..." is in great doubt.
Shalamov argued that literature in general, and he in particular, could not and did not want to teach anyone anything. He wanted to be a poet - and only a private person, a loner. “You can't teach people. Teaching people is an insult... Art has no "teaching" power. Art does not ennoble, it does not "improve"... Great literature is created without fans. I am not writing to prevent what has been described from happening again. This does not happen, and no one needs our experience. I write so that people know that such stories are being written, and they themselves decide on some worthy deed - not in the sense of a story, but in anything, in some small plus ”(notebooks). – The preaching pathos of the writer Solzhenitsyn is evident in everything he does: in books, in their “breakthrough”, in the history of their publication, in open letters and speeches... His artistic message is initially focused on fans, addressed to the city and the world.
Solzhenitsyn portrayed the Gulag as life next to life, as a general model of Soviet reality: “This archipelago cut through and dotted another, including a country, crashed into its cities, hung over its streets ...” He blessed the prison for the elevation of a person, ascent (although he added in brackets: “And from the graves they answer me: “It’s good for you to say when you are still alive!”). – The world of Shalamov is an underground hell, the kingdom of the dead, life after life, in everything opposite to existence on the mainland (although, as we have seen, the logic of the image made significant adjustments to the original setting). This experience of corruption and fall is practically inapplicable to life in freedom.
Solzhenitsyn considered the coming to God to be the main event of his hard labor life. - Shalamov, the son of a priest, noting that the "religious" were the best in the camp, left religion as a child and stoically insisted on his belief in unbelief until his last days. “I am not afraid to leave this world, even though I am a perfect atheist” (notebooks, 1978). In the KR, "The Unconverted" is specifically dedicated to this topic. Having received the Gospel from a sympathetic and, it seems, in love with him female doctor, the hero asks with difficulty, causing pain to the brain cells: “Is there only a religious way out of human tragedies?” The novella's pointe gives a different, Shalamov's answer; “I went out, putting the Gospel in my pocket, thinking for some reason not about the Corinthians, and not about the Apostle Paul, and not about the miracle of human memory, an inexplicable miracle that had just happened, but about something completely different. And, imagining this “other”, I realized that I had returned to the camp world again, to the familiar camp world, the possibility of a “religious exit” was too accidental and too unearthly. Putting the Gospel in my pocket, I thought only about one thing: will they give me dinner tonight. Here is another world. Soldering is more important than the sky. But miraculously, as in the "Sentence", it turns out the return of "long-forgotten words", and not the only Word.
Solzhenitsyn showed the captivating nature of even forced labor camp. - Shalamov denounced him as an eternal damnation.
Solzhenitsyn denounced "the lies of all the revolutions in history." – Shalamov remained faithful to his revolution and its defeated heroes.
Solzhenitsyn also chooses the Russian muzhik, the "non-literate" Ivan Denisovich, as the measure of things in "The Archipelago ...". - Shalamov believes that the writer is obliged to protect and glorify, first of all, Ivanov Ivanovich. “And let them not “sing” to me about the people. They don't "sing" about the peasantry. I know what is it. Let the swindlers and businessmen sing that the intelligentsia is guilty before someone. The intelligentsia is not to blame for anyone. The case is just the opposite. The people, if such a concept exists, are indebted to their intelligentsia” (“The Fourth Vologda”).
One of the main colors in Solzhenitsyn's artistic palette was laughter - satire, humor, irony, anecdote. - Shalamov considered laughter to be incompatible with the subject of the image. “The camp theme cannot be a subject for comedy. Our fate is not a subject for humor. And it will never be a subject of humor - not tomorrow, not in a thousand years. It will never be possible to approach with a smile to the ovens of Dachau, to the gorges of the Serpentine. ("Athenian Nights"). Although strange laughter in homeopathic doses also penetrates the world of KR (“Injector”, “Caligula”, the story about cropped trousers in “Ivan Bogdanov”).
Even in naming the main characters of their prose, the authors of the KR and The Archipelago ... fundamentally diverged. “By the way, why “zek” and not “zek”? After all, this is how it is written: s/k and declines: convict, convict,” Shalamov asked after reading “Ivan Denisovich”. Solzhenitsyn responded to this in Archipelago, just in the mockingly ironic chapter “Zeks as a Nation”: ze-ka ze-ka). This was said very often by the guardians of the natives, it was heard by everyone, everyone was used to it. However, a state-born word could not decline not only by cases, but even by numbers, it was a worthy child of a dead and illiterate era. The lively ear of the intelligent natives could not put up with this ... The lively word began to decline in cases and numbers. (And in the Kolyma, Shalamov insists, that was how the “zek” was kept in conversation. One can only regret that the Kolyma people’s ears were numb from frost.)
Correspondence of the word and writer's fate is not an empty thing. It seems that the style and genre of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's and Varlam Shalamov's prose was reflected in their destinies. The author of The Gulag Archipelago lived, waited, survived, returned... A winner?!
"The humiliating thing is life."
“They don’t like suffering. Suffering will never be loved."
Working with this heavy material, endlessly talking about corruption, death, inhumanity, hell, he carefully collects his “little things”: a woman’s smile, a doctor’s saving referral, a letter with Pasternak’s flying handwriting, a carefree play of a nameless cat, a green dwarf paw rising towards the warmth.
Written after the main body of the KR, “The Fourth Vologda” ends with a story about a father and mother thrown out of their home, starving. They are saved by miserable money sent by the monk Joseph Schmalz, who replaced the priest Tikhon Shalamov in Alaska. "Why am I writing this down? I don't believe in miracles, good deeds, or the next world. I am writing this just to thank the long-dead monk Joseph Schmalz and all the people from whom he collected this money. There were no donations, just cents from a church mug. I, who do not believe in an afterlife, do not want to be indebted to this unknown monk.”
Declaring his disbelief in God and the devil, in history and literature, in the cruel state and the treacherous West, in progressive humanity and the common man, in the so-called humanistic tradition, he nevertheless seemed to believe in the inevitability of suffering and the resurrection of larch.
“Send this rigid, flexible branch to Moscow.
When sending a branch, the person did not understand, did not know, did not think that the branch would be revived in Moscow, that it, resurrected, would smell like Kolyma, bloom on a Moscow street, that the larch would prove its strength, its immortality; six hundred years of larch life is the practical immortality of man; that the people of Moscow will touch this rough, unpretentious, hard branch with their hands, they will look at its dazzling green needles, its rebirth, resurrection, they will inhale its smell - not as a memory of the past, but as a living life.

© L.V. Zharavin, 2006

V. SHALAMOV AND N. GOGOL (BY THE MATERIAL OF THE STORY "PACKAGE")

L.V. Zharavin

The complex and sometimes frankly negative attitude of Varlam Shalamov towards the literary tradition is well known. Considering himself “an innovator of tomorrow”1, he emphasized: “... I had such a reserve of novelty that I was not afraid of any repetition ... I simply did not need to use someone else’s scheme, someone else’s comparisons, someone else’s plot, someone else’s idea if I could and did show my own literary passport”2. And at the same time, the writer was aware that a true artist cannot do without relying on tradition, since history repeats itself, therefore, “any execution of the thirty-seventh year can be repeated”3.

Of course, it is not the job of the researcher to "catch" the author on contradictions, to which a great artist has the right. We can only talk about the development of methods for analyzing the text, to a certain extent adequate to the originality and at the same time the organic nature of the artistic concept in a broad historical and cultural context. And Shalamov himself determined the path along which research thought should be directed, dropping the phrase: “A story is a palimpsest that keeps all its secrets”4.

Indeed, literary scholars have repeatedly emphasized the complex intertextual game behind Shalamov’s short and sonorous phrase “like a slap in the face”, the presence of archetypical matrices and symbols. widespread intertext. In our opinion, they correlate with each other as private and general: a palimpsest is a kind of intertext, its specific form, which, in addition to broad allusion, citation, dialogism and other well-known characteristics, implies clearly expressed structural features of the work. Namely: the phenomenon of palimpsest is formed on the basis of the meaning

mental self-enrichment mainly on the principle of a paradigm (not a syntagma). Through the contours of the present, the contours of the other-time appear, spiraling deepening the artistic image. This is similar to the phenomenon of permafrost (a layered "pie" of earth and ice), the circles of Dante's hell arranged helically - one under the other, etc. In the aspect of our problem, it is advisable to refer to the semantic method developed by Y. Kristeva, based on emphasizing precisely the vertical “text-forming axis”: ““ Text ” - be it poetic, literary or any other - drills through the surface of speaking a certain vertical, on which one should look for models of that signifying activity that ordinary representative and communicative speech does not talk about , although it marks them...”6. We will have in mind such an undeclared, not written literally, but nevertheless marked, and therefore outlined semantic vertical, noting the “presence” of Gogol in Shalamov’s Kolyma prose.

To some extent, Shalamov's prose can also be approached in the light of the phenomenon of "white" ("zero") writing (R. Bart), which implies the rejection of the author from stereotypes while it is objectively impossible to function outside of them. The "secondary memory of the word" permeates the new material with "residual magnetic currents"7. So the Kolyma epic is written by Shalamov on not completely “scraped off” pretexts, which not only come to life in a different historical and artistic dimension, but also allow us to translate the language of humiliation and destruction of the 20th century into the language of universal concepts.

As an example of a palimpsest “with an eye” on Gogol, we have chosen a short story “The Parcel”, the plot of which is expediently reproduced in three key moments.

The main character, on behalf of whom the story is being told, received a long-awaited package, which unexpectedly contained not sugar and mainland shag, but pilot's cloaks and two or three handfuls of prunes. Burki had to be sold: they would have taken it anyway. With the proceeds, the prisoner bought bread and butter, and wanted to share a meal with the former assistant of Kirov, Semyon Sheinin. But when he, delighted, ran for boiling water, the hero was hit on the head with something heavy. When he woke up, he no longer saw his bag. “Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with malicious joy” (vol. 1, p. 25). Having again come to the stall and begging only for bread, the prisoner returned to the barracks, "melted the snow" and, no longer sharing with anyone, began to cook parcel prunes. However, at this time the doors opened, "from the cloud of frosty steam" came the head of the camp and the head of the mine. Rushing to the stove and waving a pick, one of them knocked over all the bowlers, breaking through the bottom of them. After the departure of the authorities, they began to collect "each his own": "We ate everything at once - it was the most reliable way." After swallowing a few berries, the hero fell asleep: “The dream was like oblivion” (vol. 1, p. 26). Thus ended the main story. But the story is not over: another storyline develops in parallel. In the middle of the night, foremen burst into the room and throw something “not moving” on the floor (vol. 1, p. 26). It was Efremov, the barrack duty officer beaten for stealing firewood, who, after lying quietly for many weeks on the bunk, “died in an invalid town. He was beaten off “inside” - there were many masters of this business at the mine ”(vol. 1, p. 27).

It would seem that the initial situation - receiving a package with cloaks - is extremely extraordinary. In fact, the events described (theft, beatings, the evil joy of "comrades" from the fact that someone is worse off, the aggressive cynicism of the camp authorities, finally, death from beatings) is not something exceptional, but cruel everyday life, in principle, is not at all associated with obtaining rare and expensive shoes. “Why do I need burqas? You can wear burkas here only on holidays - there were no holidays. If only reindeer pims, torbasas or ordinary felt boots…” the character thought in bewilderment (vol. 1, p. 24). In the same way, readers may naturally be perplexed: what does the cloaks have to do with it? Why are the questions of good and evil, freedom and violence so persistently associated by the author with an unusual object, thing?

The answer to this question is quite simple. The unifying power of the camp was that it was impossible to distinguish a former party worker, member of the Comintern, a hero of the Spanish war from a Russian writer or an illiterate collective farmer: “indistinguishable from each other neither in clothes, nor in voice, nor frostbite spots on the cheeks, nor frostbite blisters on the fingers ”(vol. 2, p. 118), with the same hungry gleam in his eyes. Homo sapiens has become Homo somatis - the camp man. Nevertheless, there was a difference, and it was, paradoxically, a property difference. It would seem, what kind of property can we talk about, if even after death the prisoners could not claim the last clothes - a coffin, which is popularly called a "wooden sheepskin coat"? Nevertheless, a sweater, scarf, felt boots, underwear, a blanket and other things that were preserved or sent from the outside acquired magical significance, became almost the main source of life. Firstly, they exuded warmth, and secondly, they were easily exchanged for bread and smoke (“Night”) and therefore were not only an object of envy and profit, but also the cause of the death of the prisoner (“For a show”). And even the gloves of the chief Anisimov, depending on the season - leather or fur, with which he used to beat in the face, turned out to be more humane than fists, sticks, lashes, and the like, if only because they did not leave bruises on the prisoners' faces ("Two meetings"; vol. 2, pp. 119-120). Unlike A. Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov did not harbor any illusions about the possibility of a heroic opposition of the individual to general corruption, not seeing a fundamental difference between the ideal and the material, consciousness and being. The humiliation of the flesh by exhausting labor, cold and hunger led directly to the corruption of the spirit. And therefore, in his artistic world, elementary material attributes, in particular dress and shoes, are organically inscribed in the system of the most complex intellectual and ethical categories. And not only in art. “On his return (from the camp. - LJ) he saw that he had to buy gloves and boots for a number more, and a cap for a number less”8 - this fact was perceived by the author as direct evidence of intellectual degradation. Shalamov also expressed his negative attitude towards abstract (liberal) humanism with a “reified” aphorism: “How

As soon as I hear the word “good,” I take my hat and leave.”9

But the point is not only in the peculiarities of Shalamov's camp experience: from time immemorial, a Russian person called property good without dividing the narrow material and broad spiritual content. Attire (clothing, clothes), deed (good deed, good deed), virtue are words of the same root. A good touch of the Good 10 materializes through the outer garments. Clothing and shoes, as it were, become localizers of the highest metaphysical meaning, conductors of a miracle, which the biblical tradition insistently emphasizes. “Fortress and beauty are her clothes” - it is said in the Proverbs of Solomon (31:25); “... He clothed me in garments of salvation, clothed me with a robe of righteousness...” (Isaiah 61:10); “Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet in readiness to proclaim peace” (Eph. 6:14-15), etc. Finally, let us remember that the bleeding woman was healed by touching the edge of the Savior’s tunic, “... for she said: even if I touch His clothes, I will be healed. And immediately her fountain of blood dried up...” (Mark 5:28-29).

Thus, it turns out that the removal of only the initial, lying on the surface layer (layer) of Shalamov's narrative (cloaks sent from the will) reveals the semantic multi-stage artistic reality in everyday, cultural and religious aspects.

But that's not all. Most of the prisoners, especially those from another stage, were not called by their last names (vol. 2, p. 118), and this was natural. But the act of nominating a wearable item, elevating it to the level of a proper name (the stories "Tie", "Princess Gagarina's Necklace", "Glove", "Gold Medal", "Cross", the analyzed text could well have been called "Burki") do it is expedient to use Gogol's "Overcoat" as a pretext. Shalamov, of course, does not have any hint of this story. Nevertheless, in the light of the palimpsest phenomenon, it is quite possible to capture the general outlines of the situation recreated by Gogol in the space of Shalamov's narrative.

Indeed, in Kolyma, Shalamov's character needs warm, reliable footwear just as much as Gogol's Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin needs a new overcoat. They have a common enemy that needs to be fought: "our northern frost" not only gives "strength

sharp and prickly clicks indiscriminately on all noses”11, but it is also a synonym for death: to go “into the cold” means to go into oblivion (vol. 2, p. 113). In the conditions of the St. Petersburg winter, a warm new thing is long-awaited, like a parcel from the mainland, but it is stolen, just as food was stolen from a prisoner. Barely alive, the latter hastily swallows prunes scattered in the mud, as he once “hurriedly slurped his cabbage soup ... without noticing their taste at all, ate it all with flies” (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 180) Akaky Akakievich. Employees of the department mocked the poor official to their heart's content, not hearing the piercing cry of his soul: "I am your brother" (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 178). And for the Kolyma prisoners, the loss of a bag of groceries was "the best entertainment." Even thirty years later, Shalamov's character clearly remembered the "evil joyful faces" of his "comrades" (vol. 1, p. 26), as he once "shuddered many times ... then in his lifetime, seeing how much inhumanity is in a person ... ”, a young clerk, touched by the defenselessness of the Gogol official (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 178). Shalamov's story also develops the idea of ​​"one's own place" beloved by Gogol. Akaky Akakievich behaved in the highest degree unreasonable, not "according to order", bypassing intermediate instances and turning with a request directly to a "significant person", for which he was punished with a deadly fever. In the Kolyma camp, a similar logic of "one's own place" operates, the sacred mysticism of the rank. Thus, the character of the "Parcel", knowing full well that it is "too chic for him to walk in pilot's cloaks "with rubber soles" ... This is not befitting" (vol. 1, p. robbed or beaten.

Yes, and the head of the mine, Ryabov, is functionally the same significant person: by his grace, Akaki Akakievich fell into a fever and delirium, and the Shalamov prisoners lost their last crumbs of food. Describing his sudden appearance in the barracks, Shalamov again returns to the theme of the ill-fated cloaks: it suddenly seemed to the hero that Ryabov was in his aviation cloaks - “in my cloaks!” (vol. 1, p. 26).

It turns out that the “replacement” of the title of Shalamov’s story “The Parcel” with the proposed “Burki” is possible for at least two reasons: firstly, for the role that the thing plays in the plot organization of the text; secondly, in the tone of the name Bashmachkin beaten by Gogol: “Already by the very name

it is clear that it once descended from a shoe ... ”(Gogol; vol. 3, p. 175). Of course, there is a difference: in the reality of Kolyma, of course, there would be many “hunters” for the “legacy” of Akaky Akakievich: three pairs of socks, a worn-out hood, ten sheets of official paper, two or three buttons from pantaloons, yes, probably , and a bunch of goose feathers (Gogol; v. 3, p. 211). And in the light of the story “At Night” (two prisoners are digging up a fresh burial in order to remove underwear from a dead man), the assumption of a secondary robbery of a poor official is not at all absurd - already in the grave.

But the point, of course, is not in the manipulation of quotations and not only in individual plot-figurative convergences, but in the very concept of being, formulated by Gogol harshly and unambiguously: the misfortune that "unbearably fell" on the head of a little man is similar to the troubles that fall "on the kings and rulers of the world” (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 212). In Shalamov, through the most complex system of associations, Scythian settlements are transferred “to the stones of Kolyma” and the same parallel arises: “... the Scythians buried kings in mausoleums, and millions of nameless hard workers closely lay down in the mass graves of Kolyma” (vol. 2, p. 324 ). As a result, an impossible conclusion arises at the first reading of the Kolyma Tales: “all this is thoroughly saturated with the smell of Akaky Akakievich’s “overcoat”” (a characterization given by N.G. Chernyshevsky to stories from the folk life of Grigorovich and Turgenev)12.

However, in the light of the theory of palimpsest and the methodology of semantic analysis, Shalamov's texts, as noted above, are paradigmatic, that is, the general artistic meaning is distributed vertically and the same event at different levels of the paradigm can have different meanings, which makes possible mutually exclusive interpretations. Gogol's story, which "shines through" Shalamov's lines, first of all, provides a traditional anthropological and humanistic key to the narrative, which coincides with the general Christian orientation of Russian culture. In this regard, indeed: "We all came out of the Overcoat." Nevertheless, "Kolyma Tales" reproduces many situations that involve active rethinking, and sometimes open polemics with traditional humanism.

This is evidenced by the fate of the secondary character of the story - the duty officer

Yefremov, who was beaten to death for stealing firewood needed to heat the barracks. If for the prisoners “to receive a parcel was a miracle of miracles” (vol. 1, p. 23), an event that excites the imagination of others, then the death of anyone was perceived indifferently, as something quite expected and natural. And the point is not only in the atrophy of the moral sense, but also in the peculiarities of camp ideas about crime and punishment, which sometimes do not agree with Christian morality and go into the depths of herd psychology. For example, according to the mythology of many Slavic peoples, arson and theft of bees was a great (mortal) sin, but the murder of the abductor himself was not included in this category of mortal sins, on the contrary, it was encouraged, since it was not people who took revenge, but nature itself - a blind ruthless element. Shalamov has, in essence, a similar logic: beating for theft, committed not for personal reasons, but for the sake of the common good (to heat the stove so that everyone is warm), does not cause indignation either in others or in the beaten man himself: “He did not complain - he lay and groaned softly” (vol. 1, p. 27). “He will know how to steal other people’s firewood” (vol. 1, p. 27), the foremen clearly agreed with this measure of punishment, “people in white sheepskin coats, smelling from newness, unwornness” (vol. 1, p. 26). Let us pay attention: not only is the Christian semantics of the dress, which was mentioned above, not only re-emphasized, but also changed. New white sheepskin coats stink of being unworn, thus revealing that their wearers are goats in sheep's clothing, false pastors dressed in white robes of justice. However, at the same time, the behavior of Efremov himself, resigned to his fate, is an indicator of irreversible mental changes that devalue the personality. Let us recall that Akaky Akakievich, even being in a delirium of a fever, protested as best he could: accompanying Your Excellency's appeal with "the most terrible words", after which the old housewife was baptized (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 211). “Something alive, grunting”, a “lump of dirty rags” dumped on the floor (vol. 1, p. 26) is a creature that has lost its human form in the act of sacrifice to Moloch (as evidenced by the seme of fire - the need to kindle the furnace). Moreover, there was a "replacement" of the victim - a pure lamb for an unclean pig, a despised animal. But then naturally

that in such a context, no one could have thought of universal brotherhood, as it came to the mind of a young clerk who took pity on Akaky Akakievich, and even mockery of a small official against Shalamov’s background seems to be only stupid jokes of youngsters.

Moreover, in the light of the situation described by Shalamov, poor Akaki Akakievich appears as a completely extraordinary person in his, even if ridiculous, dream of becoming a step higher in the social hierarchy: “Fire sometimes showed in his eyes, even the most daring and courageous thoughts flashed in his head: not to put a marten on the collar for sure, ”as befits a general (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 193). The audacity of Shalamov's character was also originally truly heroic: "I will smoke, I will treat everyone, everyone, everyone ..." (vol. 1, pp. 23-24). But there was no shag in the package, so the prisoner decided to share bread and butter with an equally hungry brother. When this attempt failed, the idea of ​​further division of miserable crumbs could no longer enter anyone's head.

So who are the characters of the Kolyma Tales - martyrs, sufferers, innocent victims of a bloody historical experiment or people who have long crossed the "last line", beyond which, according to the author, "there is nothing human in a person, but only mistrust , malice and lies” (vol. 1, p. 21)?

The answer to this question is variable and depends on the level of paradigm at which Shalam's text is considered. But after all, Gogol's "The Overcoat" is no less problematic in this regard. Already during the life of the author, the work in defense of the humiliated and offended was perceived by one of them - the hero of Dostoevsky (the novel "Poor People") - as a "libel", a "malicious book", where "everything is printed, read, ridiculed, slandered"13 . N.G. Chernyshevsky, without denying that Bashmachkin was a victim of the insensitivity, vulgarity and rudeness of those around him, at the same time added that he was “a total ignoramus and a complete idiot, incapable of anything,” although “it’s useless and shameless to tell the whole truth about Akaky Akakievich”14 . In the future, they tried to tell the whole truth. V.V. Rozanov made of Gogol the antipode of Pushkin, who threw "a brilliant and criminal slander on human nature", and wrote about the "animal" Akaki Akaki-

15. According to Andrey Bely, Bashmachkin, with his idea of ​​an eternal overcoat on thick cotton wool, is "exhibited in the inhumanity of his ideals"16. B.M. Eikhenbaum insisted that the famous "humane place" is nothing more than a "difference in intonation", "intonation pause", compositional and playful device 17. On the contrary, literary critics of the Soviet period emphasized in every possible way that Gogol's story is "a humane manifesto in defense of man 18 or they created a myth about Bashmachkin as a "terrible avenger" similar to Captain Kopeikin19. The Italian scholar C. de Lotto proposed an interesting version of reading the "Overcoat" through the prism of patristic writings. The “Ladder of Paradise” by St. John of the Ladder and the “Ustav” by Nil Sorsky, in particular, make it possible to interpret the classic work as a story of the physical and spiritual death of a servant of God who succumbed to demons and changed his purpose - to be simple and humble20. L.V. Karasev, on the contrary, believes that “from an ontological point of view” the story tells only “about the problems of the body” and it is the overcoat, as a “different form of the body”, and not its owner, that is the bearer of “vital meaning”21.

Who, then, is Akaky Akakievich - a saint, meekly carrying the cross laid by God, or a sinner deceived by the devil? Homo sapiens or "perfect idiot"? Mannequin for an overcoat? And the problem here, as with Shalamov, is not the choice of one parameter: Gogol's story is the same paradigmatic text as Kolyma's prose. But if the paradigmality of Kolyma prose is clearly realized in the "layer cake" of permafrost, then the multi-stage "Overcoat" is really a ladder ("ladder"), which was repeatedly said by the Gogol-ladies. But in both cases, both in Gogol and in Shalamov, the possibility of semantic movement up or down is open, although not unlimited.

And here we come to, perhaps, the most difficult question - about the nature of Shalamov's anthropologism, about its relationship with Christian humanism, the consistent bearer of which Gogol is rightly considered.

A. Solzhenitsyn's associate D. Panin (Sologdin's prototype) expressed his "distrust" of Kolyma prose sharply and unequivocally: "...the most important thing is missing - details, and there are no thoughts that meet

such painful experiences, as if he [Sha-lamov] were describing horses”22. But hardly anyone could say more harshly than the writer himself: “Man is an infinitely insignificant creature, humiliatingly vile, cowardly ... The limits of meanness in man are unlimited. A cat can change the world, but not a person. It would seem unfair and wrong. But after all, Gogol, in the first edition of The Overcoat, called his character "a very kind animal" (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 476), and later, touchingly describing the death of "a creature not protected by anyone, dear to anyone," did not fail to add : not interesting even for a natural scientist, “who does not miss putting an ordinary fly on a pin and examining it through a microscope” (Gogol; vol. 3, pp. 211-212). According to this logic, the hero of "The Overcoat" is "even smaller than a fly" (as it is said on another occasion in "Dead Souls"). It would seem, what kind of God-calling of a Homo sapiens in such cases it is expedient to speak, if a horse, a cat, a fly (it is easy to continue the series) are not only more interesting, but also, as other animals, according to Shalamov, are made “of the best material ... "(vol. 4, p. 361). And yet there is nothing blasphemous in such comparisons.

“A characteristic feature of Christian anthropology is the refusal to perceive a person as “naturally good”, as well as the rejection of such a view of a person who considers him as a being vicious by his very nature,” writes a modern theologian. 24 good”, starting from Charles Darwin and drawing a distinction between people and animals as different levels of a single created world on the basis of a moral feeling, singled out the emotions inherent in a person: shame, pity, reverence 25. Anthropologist Max Scheler, deeply revered by Christian theology, put forward another fundamental postulate: “Compared to the animal, which always says “yes” to real being, even if it gets scared and runs, a person is the one who can say “no”...”26. Of course, this does not mean demonically inspired rebellion - in the spirit of Ivan Karamazov, but the ability to dispose of the highest gift - freedom given to a person by the act of birth.

But again, is this what we see in the Kolyma world with its lost or altered values? Feelings of shame and compassion are atrophied in the majority.

From freedom, understood as the need to say "no" not only to lentils, but to any stew, Homo somatis, of course, voluntarily refused. Three weeks later, the people of Kolyma “weaned forever” from the noble motives brought from freedom (vol. 2, p. 110). But still, the third component of the phenomenon of humanity remained - reverence for the inexplicable and higher: for the conscientiousness and professionalism of such doctors as Fyodor Efimovich Loskutov (the story "Courses"), the spiritual fortress of the "churchmen" who served mass in a snowy forest ("Day off") , and, of course, before the mercy of nature, which, living according to its own laws, but being also the creation of God, did not leave man in his inhumanity. Shalamov called the tree of hope the only evergreen dwarf in the Far North, courageous and stubborn. Speaking “about the south, about warmth, about life,” he extended this life: “dwarf firewood is hotter” (vol. 1, p. 140). “Nature is subtler than man in its sensations” (vol. 1, p. 140), and therefore there is no contradiction in the fact that the mountains, in the faces of which thousands of hard workers perished, “stood around, like those praying on their knees” (vol. 2, p. 426).

Of course, the abyss between the God-striving of the Christian dogma and the base reality of "human tragedies" was infinitely great. “Putting the Gospel in my pocket, I thought only about one thing: would they give me dinner today” (vol. 1, pp. 237-238), - the autobiographical character of the story “The Unconverted” admits without any cunning. However, it was probably no coincidence that he managed to see “Roman stars” through a worn blanket and compare the incomparable: the “drawing of the starry sky” of the Far North with the gospel (vol. 2, p. 292). This is not about a game of imagination, but about spiritual insight, the presence of which is proved in the story "Athenian Nights" by referring to the fifth, not taken into account by any forecasters, the need for poetry, which brought the heroes almost physiological bliss (vol. 2, p. 405 -406). But after all, Akakiy Akakievich’s “bestiality”, “idiocy”, “inhumanity” of interests, and the like - from a religious point of view - are spiritually filled phenomena, behind which stand mildness, non-genderism, evangelical poverty of spirit, the height of dispassion and, as a result, “inability to comprehend the strategy of evil."27 The latter is also true in relation to the Kolyma residents. Outwit the camp authorities, that is, the devil himself, with

no one succeeded in making their existence easier: those who took care of themselves by cunning, deceit, and denunciation perished before others. And poor Akaky Akakievich, like the Shalamov martyrs, was distinguished by "signs" incomprehensible to most. This is a small bald spot on the forehead, wrinkles on both sides of the cheeks and a complexion that is called "hemorrhoidal" (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 174). Kolyma-chan is doomed to wear "a stain of frostbite, an indelible brand, an indelible brand!" (vol. 2, p. 114). These are, no doubt, signs of slavish humiliation, but the one pointed to by the Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). Christian humanism is not exhausted by the elementary emotion of mercy, and the apophatic form of its manifestations is equal to the cataphatic one.

From here, one more plot-emotional turn in the story "The Parcel" becomes explainable. Excluding on the part of fellow camps the emotion of pity towards a person in a “state of trans-humanity” (vol. 4, p. 374), Shalamov accentuates the author’s sympathy for the “suffering” of a plywood box: , fell to the floor, split” (vol. 1, p. 23). The parcel from the outside is the same "bright guest" as the overcoat for Akaky Akakievich; not just an object of desire, but an object-subject, spiritualized and individualized: split plywood broke, cracked, screamed in a special “not such a voice” as “local trees” (vol. 1, p. 23).

And here again a parallel arises not in favor of the camp man: the cracked box "screams", that is, it has its own voice, while the mercilessly beaten camp prisoner who collapsed to the floor, without complaining, "quietly" groans and imperceptibly dies. If the package is an “unexpected joy” from another, full-fledged life, then Efremov is a “package” from hell, personifying death. His “inside” was also beaten off, but unlike the food that spilled out from the “skillfully” thrown plywood boxes, which became the property of people “with clean hands in overly neat military uniforms” (vol. 1, p. 23), Efremov’s “inside” no one didn't care. The character, as it was, remained a thing in itself, forever hiding the names of its killers. Comparing two stories that are not related to each other causally, but correspond to each other, we have an almost adequate illustration of

G. Bachelard's judgments about the significance of the theme of boxes, chests, locks and the like in literature: "here, truly, is the organ of the secret life of the soul", "the model of the innermost", directly correlated with the inner world of a literary hero 28.

However, Akaky Akakievich also had a small box “with a hole cut in the lid”, where he used to set aside a penny from each spent ruble (Gogol; vol. 3, p. 191). But the hero nevertheless took his main secret with him into a pine coffin (box-domovina) - the secret of his true "I": either this is a harmless official who turned into a formidable robber a few days after his death, or a demon in human form, or really the living dead, materialized in the imagination of frightened townsfolk? Indeed, in essence, on the basis of a similar emotional-psychological matrix, the wilted (officially accepted name) peasant souls materialize in Gogol's poem. They will have fun in the wild, drinking and cheating the bar, "jumping" out of Chichikov's cherished box.

So, in the aspect of the Shalamov-Gogol parallel, the story of the mailbox gives grounds to move from The Overcoat to Dead Souls. Sacralization touched not only the Chichikovo casket with a double bottom, secret places for papers and money, many partitions, etc. In essence, the theme of the box as a keeper of good or bad news runs through the entire work. "The grace of God in the boxes of fat officials" - not at all ironically noticed by the author (Gogol; vol. 5, p. 521). In "tender conversations" some wives called their successful husbands "pods" (v. 5, p. 224). A drawer, among other rubbish, snatched out the sharp eye of Pavel Ivanovich in Plyushkin's house. At the housekeeping Nastasya Petrovna, chests of drawers were securely covered with many sacks of money. But this heroine with a “talking” surname should be discussed separately. The box, moreover, “club-headed”, that is, as if closed with a heavy oak coffin lid, is the main casket, reliably protected from prying eyes and at the same time voluntarily “split” under the pressure of a secret bursting from the inside: after all, it was she who initiated the exposure Chichikov the swindler.

Varlam Shalamov considered it appropriate to divide literature into two categories: literary

ru "prostheses" and the literature of the "magic crystal". The first comes from "straightforward realism" and, according to the writer, is not capable of reflecting the tragic state of the world. Only the “magic crystal” makes it possible to see the “incompatibility of phenomena”, their irresolvable conflict conjugation: “A tragedy where nothing is corrected, where a crack goes through the very core”29. In Shalamov, as in Gogol, realities and associations of different levels (socio-historical, religious, literary and artistic, etc.), subordinated to each being self-sufficient, are distributed along the central axis of the “magic crystal”. As a result, it turns out - from the “split” Korobochka, which flooded the city with fears and horrors, from the opened pine coffin, from which Akaky Akakiyevich got up, really or virtually, in order to regain his own, from Maxim Telyatnikov and Abakum Fyrov, who despised the locks of the Chichikov box (of the same coffin), to Shalamov's Efremov with a beaten "inside" and a split parcel, groaning like a human, the emotional, artistic and historical distance is not so great. The split that runs through the “core” of individual destinies is an expression of the existential tragedy of Russia.

NOTES

1 Shalamov V.T. New book: Memoirs. Notebooks. Correspondence. Investigative cases. M., 2004. S. 358.

2 Ibid. S. 839.

3 Ibid. S. 362.

4 Shalamov V.T. Sobr. cit.: In 4 vols. Vol. 2. M., 1998. S. 219. Further references to this edition are given in the text in parentheses, indicating the volume and page number.

5 See: Alanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales // IV Shalamov Readings. M., 1997. S. 40-52; Volkova E.V. Aesthetic phenomenon of Varlam Shalamov // Ibid. pp. 7-8; Leiderman N. "... In a blizzard chilling age": About the "Kolyma stories" // Ural. 1992. No. 3. S. 171-182; Mikhailik E. Another coast.

"The Last Fight of Major Pugachev": the Problem of Context // New Literary Review. 1997. No. 28. pp. 209-222; and etc.

6 Kristeva Y. Destruction of aesthetics: Fav. tr.: Per. from fr. M., 2004. S. 341.

7 Bart R. Zero degree of writing // Semiotics: Anthology / Comp. Yu.S. Stepanov. M.; Yekaterinburg, 2001, pp. 330-334.

8 Shalamov V.T. New book ... S. 270.

9 Ibid. S. 881.

10 Kolesov V.V. Ancient Rus': heritage in the word. In 5 books. Book. 2. Good and evil. SPb., 2001. S. 64.

11 Gogol N.V. Collected works of art: In 5 vols. T. 3. M., 1952. S. 182. Further references to this edition are given in the text, indicating the volume and page numbers in parentheses.

12 Chernyshevsky N.G. Literary criticism: In 2 vols. T. 2. M., 1981. S. 217.

13 Dostoevsky F.M. Full coll. cit.: In 30 vols. T. 1. L., 1972. S. 63.

14 Chernyshevsky N.G. Decree. op. S. 216.

15 Rozanov V.V. How did the type of Akaky Akakievich originate // Russian Bulletin. 1894. No. 3. S. 168.

16 Bely A. Gogol's Mastery: Research. M., 1996. S. 30.

17 Eikhenbaum B.M. About prose: Sat. Art. L., 1969. S. 320-323.

18 Makogonenko G.P. Gogol and Pushkin. L., 1985. S. 304.

19 History of Russian Literature: In 4 vols. T. 2. L., 1981. S. 575.

20 Lotto Ch. de. Ladder "Overcoat": [Foreword. to publ. I.P. Zolotussky] // Questions of Philosophy. 1993. No. 8. S. 58-83.

21 Karasev L.V. The substance of literature. M., 2001.

22 Panin D.M. Sobr. cit.: In 4 vols. T. 1. M., 2001. S. 212.

23 Shalamov V.T. New book ... S. 884.

24 Philaret, Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsk. Orthodox doctrine of man // Orthodox doctrine of man: Selected. Art. M.; Klin, 2004, p. 15.

25 Soloviev V.S. Sobr. cit.: In 2 vols. T. 1. M., 1988. S. 124 et seq.

26 Scheler M. The position of man in space // The problem of man in Western European philosophy. M., 1988. S. 65.

27 Lotto Ch. de. Decree. op. S. 69.

28 Bashlyar G. Poetics of Space: Selected. M., 2000. S. 23.

29 Shalamov V.T. New book ... S. 878.