‘T’ is for Trotskyite

Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as though the world is being viewed through a high-resolution lens. His subject matter, as well as his complete lack of sentimentality, means that much of what is brought into focus is horrifying or pitiful. Yet his capacity to capture and distil the experience, moment by moment, has an exhilarating effect, like that of the frozen bilberries he picked in the depths of the Siberian winter: ‘bright blue, wrinkled like empty leather purses, containing a dark, bluish-black juice… I ate the berries myself, my tongue carefully and eagerly pressing each one to my palate. The sweet, aromatic juice of each squashed berry intoxicated me for a second.’

In 1929, aged 22, Shalamov was arrested and deported to the Northern Urals for three years. This, however, was only a taster. In 1936 he was re-arrested and sent to the gold-mining area of Kolyma, the terror of the entire Soviet camp system. With the deadly ‘T’ for Trotskyite on his papers, he was not expected to survive. He clung on by a thread through six years of slavery in the gold mines until he was able to train as a paramedic. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 was he finally permitted to return to Moscow. The rest of his life was spent writing his ‘endless recollection’ in the form of verse, short stories and drama. The New York Review of Books is now publishing the short stories in English in their entirety for the first time (this is the first volume of two), in an excellent new translation by Donald Rayfield.

‘I hate literature,’ Shalamov wrote. ‘I try to write not a short story, but something that would not be literature.’