Let's look at Shalamov's collection, on which he worked from 1954 to 1962. Let us describe its brief content. " Kolyma stories" - a collection, the plot of which is a description of the camp and prison life of Gulag prisoners, their tragic destinies, similar to one another, in which chance rules. The author’s focus is constantly on hunger and satiety, painful dying and recovery, exhaustion, moral humiliation and degradation. You will learn more about the problems raised by Shalamov by reading the summary. “Kolyma Stories” is a collection that is an understanding of what the author experienced and saw during the 17 years he spent in prison (1929-1931) and Kolyma (from 1937 to 1951). The author's photo is presented below.

Funeral word

The author recalls his comrades from the camps. We will not list their names, since we are making a brief summary. "Kolyma Stories" is a collection in which fiction and documentary are intertwined. However, all killers are given a real last name in the stories.

Continuing the narrative, the author describes how the prisoners died, what torture they endured, talks about their hopes and behavior in “Auschwitz without ovens,” as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, and only a few managed to survive and not break morally.

"The Life of Engineer Kipreev"

Let us dwell on the following interesting story, which we could not help but describe when compiling a summary. “Kolyma Stories” is a collection in which the author, who has not sold or betrayed anyone, says that he has developed for himself a formula for protecting his own existence. It consists in the fact that a person can survive if he is ready to die at any moment, he can commit suicide. But later he realizes that he only built a comfortable shelter for himself, since it is unknown what you will become at the decisive moment, whether you will have enough not only mental strength, but also physical strength.

Kipreev, a physics engineer arrested in 1938, was not only able to withstand interrogation and beating, but even attacked the investigator, as a result of which he was put in a punishment cell. But still they are trying to get him to give false testimony, threatening to arrest his wife. Kipreev nevertheless continues to prove to everyone that he is not a slave, like all prisoners, but a human being. Thanks to his talent (he fixed a broken one and found a way to restore burnt out light bulbs), this hero manages to avoid the most difficult work, but not always. It is only by a miracle that he survives, but the moral shock does not let him go.

"To the show"

Shalamov, who wrote “Kolyma Stories,” a brief summary of which interests us, testifies that camp corruption affected everyone to one degree or another. It was carried out in various forms. Let us describe in a few words another work from the collection “Kolyma Tales” - “To the Show”. Summary its plot is as follows.

Two thieves are playing cards. One loses and asks to play in debt. Enraged at some point, he orders an unexpectedly imprisoned intellectual, who happened to be among the spectators, to give up his sweater. He refuses. One of the thieves “finishes” him, but the sweater goes to the thieves anyway.

"At night"

Let's move on to the description of another work from the collection "Kolyma Stories" - "At Night". Its summary, in our opinion, will also be interesting to the reader.

Two prisoners sneak towards the grave. The body of their comrade was buried here in the morning. They take off the dead man's linen in order to exchange it for tobacco or bread tomorrow or sell it. Disgust for the clothes of the deceased is replaced by the thought that perhaps tomorrow they will be able to smoke or eat a little more.

There are a lot of works in the collection "Kolyma Stories". "The Carpenters", a summary of which we have omitted, follows the story "Night". We invite you to familiarize yourself with it. The product is small in volume. The format of one article, unfortunately, does not allow us to describe all the stories. Also a very small work from the collection "Kolyma Tales" - "Berry". A summary of the main and, in our opinion, most interesting stories is presented in this article.

"Single metering"

Defined by the author as slave labor in camps, it is another form of corruption. The prisoner, exhausted by it, cannot work out his quota; labor turns into torture and leads to slow death. Dugaev, a prisoner, is becoming increasingly weaker due to the 16-hour working day. He pours, picks, carries. In the evening, the caretaker measures what he has done. The figure of 25% mentioned by the caretaker seems very large to Dugaev. His hands, head, and calves ache unbearably. The prisoner no longer even feels hungry. Later he is called to the investigator. He asks: “First name, last name, term, article.” Every other day, soldiers take the prisoner to a remote place surrounded by a fence with barbed wire. At night you can hear the noise of tractors from here. Dugaev realizes why he was brought here and understands that his life is over. He only regrets that he suffered an extra day in vain.

"Rain"

You can talk for a very long time about such a collection as “Kolyma Stories”. The summary of the chapters of the works is for informational purposes only. We bring to your attention the following story - "Rain".

"Sherry Brandy"

The prisoner poet, who was considered the first poet of the 20th century in our country, dies. He lies on the bunks, in the depths of their bottom row. It takes a long time for a poet to die. Sometimes a thought comes to him, for example, that someone stole bread from him, which the poet put under his head. He is ready to search, fight, swear... However, he no longer has the strength to do this. When the daily ration is placed in his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his might, sucks it, tries to gnaw and tear with his loose, scurvy-infested teeth. When a poet dies, he is not written off for another 2 days. During the distribution, the neighbors manage to get bread for him as if he were alive. They arrange for him to raise his hand like a puppet.

"Shock therapy"

Merzlyakov, one of the heroes of the collection “Kolma Stories”, a brief summary of which we are considering, is a convict of large build, and in general work he understands that he is failing. He falls, cannot get up and refuses to take the log. First his own people beat him, then his guards. He is brought to camp with lower back pain and a broken rib. After recovery, Merzlyakov does not stop complaining and pretends that he cannot straighten up. He does this in order to delay discharge. He is sent to surgical department central hospital, and then to the nervous for research. Merzlyakov has a chance to be released due to illness. He tries his best not to be exposed. But Pyotr Ivanovich, a doctor, himself a former prisoner, exposes him. Everything human in him replaces the professional. He spends most of his time exposing those who are simulating. Pyotr Ivanovich anticipates the effect that the case with Merzlyakov will produce. The doctor first gives him anesthesia, during which he manages to straighten Merzlyakov’s body. A week later, the patient is prescribed shock therapy, after which he asks to be discharged himself.

"Typhoid quarantine"

Andreev ends up in quarantine after falling ill with typhus. The patient's position, compared to working in the mines, gives him a chance to survive, which he almost did not hope for. Then Andreev decides to stay here as long as possible, and then, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where there is death, beatings, and hunger. Andreev does not respond to the roll call before sending those who have recovered to work. He manages to hide in this way for quite a long time. The transit bus gradually empties, and finally it’s Andreev’s turn. But it seems to him now that he has won the battle for life, and if there are any deployments now, it will only be on local, short-term business trips. But when a truck with a group of prisoners who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms crosses the line separating long- and short-term business trips, Andreev realizes that fate has laughed at him.

The photo below shows the house in Vologda where Shalamov lived.

"Aortic aneurysm"

In Shalamov's stories, illness and hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, ends up in the hospital. Zaitsev, the doctor on duty, immediately liked this beauty. He knows that she is in a relationship with prisoner Podshivalov, an acquaintance of his who runs a local amateur art group, but the doctor still decides to try his luck. As usual, he begins with a medical examination of the patient, listening to the heart. However, male interest is replaced by medical concern. In Glowacka he discovers this is a disease in which every careless movement can provoke death. The authorities, who have made it a rule to separate lovers, have once already sent the girl to a penal women's mine. The head of the hospital, after the doctor’s report about her illness, is sure that this is the machinations of Podshivalov, who wants to detain his mistress. The girl is discharged, but during loading she dies, which is what Zaitsev warned about.

"The Last Battle of Major Pugachev"

The author testifies that after the Great Patriotic War Prisoners who fought and went through captivity began to arrive at the camps. These people are of a different kind: they know how to take risks, they are brave. They only believe in weapons. Camp slavery did not corrupt them; they were not yet exhausted to the point of losing their will and strength. Their “fault” was that these prisoners were captured or surrounded. It was clear to one of them, Major Pugachev, that they had been brought here to die. Then he gathers strong and determined prisoners to match himself, who are ready to die or become free. The escape is prepared all winter. Pugachev realized that only those who managed to avoid general work could escape after surviving the winter. One by one, the participants in the conspiracy are promoted to service. One of them becomes a cook, another becomes a cult leader, the third repairs weapons for security.

One spring day, at 5 am, there was a knock on the watch. The duty officer lets in the prisoner cook, who, as usual, has come to get the keys to the pantry. The cook strangles him, and another prisoner dresses in his uniform. The same thing happens to other duty officers who returned a little later. Then everything happens according to Pugachev’s plan. The conspirators burst into the security room and seize weapons, shooting the guard on duty. They stock up on provisions and put on military uniform, holding the suddenly awakened soldiers at gunpoint. Having left the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, disembark the driver and drive until the gas runs out. Then they go into the taiga. Pugachev, waking up at night after many months of captivity, recalls how in 1944 he escaped from a German camp, crossed the front line, survived interrogation in a special department, after which he was accused of espionage and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He also remembers how in German camp emissaries of General Vlasov arrived and recruited Russians, convincing them that the captured soldiers were traitors to the Motherland for the Soviet regime. Pugachev did not believe them then, but soon became convinced of this himself. He looks lovingly at his comrades sleeping nearby. A little later, a hopeless battle ensues with the soldiers who surrounded the fugitives. Almost all of the prisoners die, except one, who is nursed back to health after being seriously wounded in order to be shot. Only Pugachev manages to escape. He is hiding in a bear's den, but he knows that they will find him too. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot is at himself.

So, we looked at the main stories from the collection, authored by Varlam Shalamov (“Kolyma Stories”). A summary introduces the reader to the main events. You can read more about them on the pages of the work. The collection was first published in 1966 by Varlam Shalamov. "Kolyma Stories", a brief summary of which you now know, appeared on the pages of the New York publication "New Journal".

In New York in 1966, only 4 stories were published. The following year, 1967, 26 stories by this author, mainly from the collection of interest to us, were published in translation into German in the city of Cologne. During his lifetime, Shalamov never published the collection “Kolyma Stories” in the USSR. A summary of all the chapters, unfortunately, is not included in the format of one article, since there are a lot of stories in the collection. Therefore, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the rest.

"Condensed milk"

In addition to those described above, we will tell you about one more work from the collection “Kolyma Stories” - Its summary is as follows.

Shestakov, an acquaintance of the narrator, did not work at the mine face, because he was a geological engineer, and he was hired into the office. He met with the narrator and said that he wanted to take the workers and go to the Black Keys, to the sea. And although the latter understood that this was impracticable (the path to the sea is very long), he nevertheless agreed. The narrator reasoned that Shestakov probably wants to hand over all those who will participate in this. But the promised condensed milk (to overcome the journey, he had to refresh himself) bribed him. Going to Shestakov, he ate two jars of this delicacy. And then he suddenly announced that he had changed his mind. A week later, other workers fled. Two of them were killed, three were tried a month later. And Shestakov was transferred to another mine.

We recommend reading other works in the original. Shalamov wrote “Kolyma Tales” very talentedly. The summary ("Berries", "Rain" and "Children's Pictures" we also recommend reading in the original) conveys only the plot. The author's style and artistic merits can only be assessed by becoming familiar with the work itself.

Not included in the collection "Kolyma Stories" "Sentence". We did not describe the summary of this story for this reason. However, this work is one of the most mysterious in Shalamov’s work. Fans of his talent will be interested in getting to know him.

Brief review of V. Shalamov’s story “Alien Bread”

The story was written in 1967, after V.T. Shalamov left the camp. The author spent a total of eighteen years in prison, and all of his work is devoted to the theme of camp life.

A distinctive feature of his heroes is that they no longer hope for anything and do not believe in anything. They lost all human feelings, except hunger and cold. It is in the story of ChKh that this characteristic of the camp inmate manifests itself especially clearly. A friend entrusted the main character with a bag of bread.

It was extremely difficult for him to restrain himself from touching the rations: +I did not sleep+ because I had bread in my head+ You can imagine how difficult it was for the camp inmate then.

But the main thing that helped me survive was self-respect. You cannot compromise your pride, conscience and honor under any circumstances. AND main character showed not only all these qualities, but also strength of character, will, and endurance. He did not eat his comrade’s bread, and thus, as if he did not betray him, he remained faithful to him. I believe that this act is important primarily for the hero himself. He remained faithful not so much to his comrade as to himself: And I fell asleep, proud that I had not stolen my comrade’s bread.

This story made a great impression on me. It fully reflects the terrible, unbearable conditions in which the camp inmate lived. And yet the author shows that the Russian people, no matter what, do not deviate from their beliefs and principles. And this helps him survive to some extent.

References

To prepare this work, materials were used from the site http://www.coolsoch.ru/

The huge double door opened and a distributor entered the transit barracks. He stood in a wide strip of morning light reflected by the blue snow. Two thousand eyes looked at him from everywhere: from below - from under the bunks, directly, from the side and from above - from the height of four-story bunks, where those who still retained strength climbed up a ladder. Today was herring day, and behind the dispenser they carried a huge plywood tray, sagging under a mountain of herrings, cut in half. Behind the tray was the guard on duty in a white sheepskin sheepskin coat that sparkled like the sun. The herring was given out in the morning - half every other day. No one knew what calculations of proteins and calories were made here, and no one was interested in such scholasticism. The whispers of hundreds of people repeated the same word: ponytails. Some wise chief, taking into account the psychology of the prisoners, ordered that either herring heads or tails be issued at the same time. The advantages of both were discussed many times: the tails seemed to contain more fish meat, but the head gave more pleasure. The process of food absorption lasted while the gills were sucked and the head was eaten away. The herring was given out uncleaned, and everyone approved of this: after all, they ate it with all the bones and skin. But the regret about the fish heads flickered and disappeared: the tails were a given, a fact. In addition, the tray was approaching, and the most exciting moment came: what size scraps would be received, it was impossible to change, it was impossible to protest, too, everything was in the hands of luck - the card in this game with hunger. A person who carelessly cuts herrings into portions does not always understand (or simply forgot) that ten grams more or less - ten grams that seem ten grams to the eye - can lead to drama, to bloody drama, perhaps. There is nothing to say about tears. Tears are frequent, they are understandable to everyone, and those who cry are not laughed at.
While the distributor is approaching, everyone has already calculated which piece will be handed to him by this indifferent hand. Everyone had already become upset, rejoiced, prepared for a miracle, and reached the brink of despair if he had made a mistake in his hasty calculations. Some closed their eyes, unable to control their excitement, in order to open them only when the distributor pushed him and handed him a herring ration. Grabbing the herring with dirty fingers, stroking it, squeezing it quickly and tenderly to determine whether the portion was dry or fatty (however, Okhotsk herrings are not fatty, and this movement of the fingers is also an expectation of a miracle), he cannot resist looking around quickly the hands of those who surround him and who also stroke and knead the herring pieces, afraid to rush to swallow this tiny tail. He doesn't eat herring. He licks it and licks it, and little by little the tail disappears from his fingers. What remains are the bones, and he chews the bones carefully, chews carefully, and the bones melt and disappear. Then he starts eating bread - five hundred grams are given per day in the morning - he plucks off a tiny piece and puts it in his mouth. Everyone eats the bread at once - so no one will steal it and no one will take it away, and there is no strength to save it. Just don’t rush, don’t wash it down with water, don’t chew it. You have to suck it like sugar, like candy. Then you can take a mug of tea - lukewarm water, blackened with burnt crust.
The herring was eaten, the bread was eaten, the tea was drunk. It immediately becomes hot and you don’t want to go anywhere, you want to lie down, but you already have to get dressed - pull on the tattered padded jacket that was your blanket, tie the soles with ropes to the torn burkas made of quilted cotton wool, the burkas that were your pillow, and you have to hurry, because the doors are open again and behind the barbed wire fence of the courtyard there are guards and dogs...

We are in quarantine, in typhus quarantine, but we are not allowed to idle. They send us to work - not according to lists, but simply count out high fives at the gate. There is a fairly reliable way to get a relatively profitable job every day. All you need is patience and endurance. A profitable job is always a job that hires few people: two, three, four. Work that takes twenty, thirty, or a hundred is hard work, mostly earthwork. And although the place of work is never announced to the prisoner in advance, he learns about it already on the way, luck in this terrible lottery goes to people with patience. You have to huddle behind them, in other people’s ranks, move to the side and rush forward when they form a small group. For large parties, the most profitable thing is sorting vegetables in a warehouse, a bakery, in a word, all those places where work is connected with food, future or present - there are always leftovers, fragments, scraps of what can be eaten.

We were lined up and led along a muddy April road. The guards' boots splashed cheerfully through the puddles. We were not allowed to break formation within the city limits - no one avoided the puddles. My feet were getting damp, but they didn’t pay attention to it - they weren’t afraid of colds. We've caught the cold a thousand times already, and the worst thing that could happen - pneumonia, say - would have led to the desired hospital. Through the rows they whispered abruptly:
- To the bakery, listen, you, to the bakery!
There are people who always know everything and guess everything. There are also those who want to see the best in everything, and their sanguine temperament, in the most difficult situations, always looks for some kind of formula for agreement with life. For others, on the contrary, events are developing for the worse, and they perceive any improvement with distrust, as some kind of oversight of fate. And this difference in judgments depends little on personal experience: it is, as it were, given in childhood - for life...

Our wildest hopes came true - we stood in front of the gates of the bakery. Twenty people, with their hands in their sleeves, stomped around, exposing their backs to the piercing wind. The guards stepped aside and lit cigarettes. A man without a hat and in a blue robe came out of a small door cut into the gate. He talked to the guards and came up to us. Slowly he looked around everyone. Kolyma turns everyone into a psychologist, and he had to figure out a lot in one minute. Among the twenty ragamuffins, it was necessary to choose two to work inside the bakery, in the workshops. It is necessary that these people be stronger than others, so that they can carry a stretcher with broken bricks left after re-building the stove. So that they don’t be thieves, thieves, because then the working day will be spent on all sorts of meetings, passing on “xiv” - notes, and not on work. It is necessary that they do not reach the border beyond which anyone can become a thief from hunger, because no one will guard them in the workshops. They must not be prone to escape. Necessary...
And all this had to be read on twenty prisoners’ faces in one minute, immediately selected and decided.
“Come out,” the man without a hat told me. “And you,” he poked my freckled, omniscient neighbor. “I’ll take these,” he said to the guard.
“Okay,” he said indifferently. Envious glances followed us.

In humans, all five human senses are never active at the same time with full intensity. I can't hear the radio when I read carefully. Lines jump before my eyes when I listen attentively to a radio broadcast, although the automaticity of reading remains, I move my eyes along the lines, and suddenly it turns out that I don’t remember anything from what I just read. The same thing happens when you think about something else while reading - it’s some kind of internal switches at work. The popular saying - when I eat, I am deaf and dumb - is known to everyone. One could add: “and blind,” because the function of vision when eating with such appetite is focused on helping the perception of taste. When I feel something with my hand deep in the closet and the perception is localized at the tips of my fingers, I see and hear nothing, everything is repressed by the tension of the tactile sensation. So now, having crossed the threshold of the bakery, I stood, not seeing the sympathetic and friendly faces of the workers (both former and current prisoners worked here), and did not hear the words of the foreman, a familiar man without a hat, explaining that we had to take the broken bricks out into the street that we shouldn’t go to other workshops, shouldn’t steal, that he’ll give us bread anyway - I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t even feel the warmth of the hotly heated workshop, the warmth that my body had yearned for so much during the long winter.
I inhaled the smell of bread, the thick aroma of loaves, where the smell of burning oil mixed with the smell of toasted flour. I greedily caught the tiniest part of this overwhelming aroma in the mornings, pressing my nose to the crust of the ration that had not yet been eaten. But here it was in all its thickness and power and seemed to be tearing my poor nostrils apart.
The master interrupted the charm.
“Looked at it,” he said. - Let's go to the boiler room. We went down to the basement. In the cleanly swept boiler room, my partner was already sitting at the fireman’s table. A fireman in the same blue robe as the master’s was smoking at the stove, and through the holes in the cast-iron door of the firebox one could see how the flames were rushing and sparkling inside - sometimes red, sometimes yellow, and the walls of the boiler were trembling and humming from the spasms of the fire.
The master put a teapot on the table, a mug of jam, and a loaf of white bread.
“Give them something to drink,” he said to the fireman. - I'll come in about twenty minutes. Just don’t delay, eat faster. In the evening we will give you more bread, break it into pieces, otherwise they will take it away from you in the camp.
The master left.
“Look, bitch,” said the fireman, twirling the loaf in his hands. - I regretted thirty, you bastard. Well, wait.
And he went out after the master and returned a minute later, tossing a new loaf of bread in his hands.
“It’s warm,” he said, throwing the loaf to the freckled guy. - From thirty. Otherwise, you see, I wanted to get off half-white! Give it here. - And, taking in his hands the loaf that the master had left for us, the fireman opened the door of the boiler and threw the loaf into the humming and howling fire. And, slamming the door, he laughed. “That’s it,” he said cheerfully, turning to us.
“Why is this,” I said, “it would be better if we took it with us.”
“We’ll give you some more,” said the fireman. Neither I nor the freckled guy could break the loaves.
- Do you have a knife? - I asked the fireman.
- No. Why a knife?
The fireman took the loaf in both hands and easily broke it. Hot fragrant steam came from the broken rug. The fireman poked his finger into the crumb.
“Fedka bakes well, well done,” he praised. But we didn’t have time to find out who Fedka was. We began to eat, burning ourselves with both the bread and the boiling water in which we mixed the jam. Hot sweat poured from us in a stream. We were in a hurry - the master came back for us.
He had already brought a stretcher, dragged it to a pile of broken bricks, brought shovels and filled the first box himself. We got to work. And suddenly it became clear that the stretcher was unbearably heavy for both of us, that it was pulling on the veins, and that the arm suddenly weakened, losing strength. Our heads were spinning and we were shaking. I loaded the next stretcher and put in half the weight of the first load.
“Enough, enough,” said the freckled guy. He was even paler than me, or his freckles emphasized his pallor.
“Get some rest, guys,” a baker passing by said cheerfully and not at all mockingly, and we obediently sat down to rest. The master passed by, but didn’t say anything to us.
Having rested, we set to work again, but after every two stretchers we sat down again - the pile of garbage did not decrease.
“Have a smoke, guys,” said the same baker, appearing again.
- There is no tobacco.
- Well, I'll give you a cigarette each. Just need to get out. Smoking is not allowed here.
We shared the shag, and each one lit his own cigarette - a luxury long forgotten. I took several slow puffs, carefully extinguished the cigarette with my finger, wrapped it in paper and hid it in my bosom.
“That’s right,” said the freckled guy. - I didn’t even think about it.
By lunchtime we had become so comfortable that we looked into the neighboring rooms with the same baking ovens. Everywhere iron molds and sheets came out of the ovens with a squeal, and bread and bread lay on the shelves everywhere. From time to time a trolley on wheels would arrive, the baked bread would be loaded and taken away somewhere, just not to where we had to return in the evening - it was white bread.
Through the wide window without bars it was clear that the sun had moved towards sunset. There was a chill coming from the door. The master has arrived.
- Well, stop it. Leave the stretcher in the trash. They didn't do enough. You won't be able to move this pile in a week, little workers.
They gave us a loaf of bread, we broke it into pieces, stuffed our pockets... But how much could go into our pockets?
“Hide it right in your trousers,” the freckled guy commanded.
We went out into the cold evening courtyard - the party was already being built - and they led us back. During the camp watch they did not search us - no one was carrying bread in their hands. I returned to my place, shared the bread I had brought with my neighbors, lay down and fell asleep as soon as my wet, cold feet warmed up.
All night long, loaves of bread and the mischievous face of the fireman flashed in front of me, throwing bread into the fiery mouth of the furnace.

Analysis of several stories from the series “Kolyma Tales”

General analysis of “Kolyma Tales”

It is difficult to imagine how much mental stress these stories cost Shalamov. I would like to stop at compositional features"Kolyma Tales". The plots of the stories at first glance are unrelated to each other, however, they are compositionally integral. “Kolyma Stories” consists of 6 books, the first of which is called “Kolyma Stories”, followed by the books “Left Bank”, “Shovel Artist”, “Sketches of the Underworld”, “Resurrection of the Larch”, “The Glove, or KR-2".

In V. Shalamov’s manuscript “Kolyma Stories” there are 33 stories - both very small (1 to 3 pages), and larger ones. You can immediately feel that they were written by a qualified, experienced writer. Most are read with interest, have a sharp plot (but also the plotless short stories are constructed thoughtfully and interestingly), written in a clear and figurative language (and even, although they tell mainly about the “thieves’ world,” the manuscript does not feel carried away by argotisms). So, if we are talking about editing in the sense of stylistic corrections, “tweaking” the composition of stories, etc., then the manuscript, in essence, does not need such revision.

Shalamov is a master of naturalistic descriptions. Reading his stories, we are immersed in the world of prisons, transit points, and camps. The stories are narrated in third person. The collection is like an eerie mosaic, each story is a photographic piece of the everyday life of prisoners, very often “thieves”, thieves, swindlers and murderers in prison. All of Shalamov’s heroes are different people: military and civilian, engineers and workers. They got used to camp life and absorbed its laws. Sometimes, looking at them, we don’t know who they are: whether they are intelligent creatures or animals in which only one instinct lives - to survive at all costs. The scene from the story “Duck” seems comical to us, when a man tries to catch a bird, and it turns out to be smarter than him. But we gradually understand the tragedy of this situation, when the “hunt” led to nothing but forever frostbitten fingers and lost hopes about the possibility of being crossed off from the “ominous list.” But people still have ideas about mercy, compassion, and conscientiousness. It’s just that all these feelings are hidden under the armor of the camp experience, which allows you to survive. Therefore, it is considered disgraceful to deceive someone or eat food in front of hungry companions, as the hero of the story “Condensed Milk” does. But the strongest thing in prisoners is the thirst for freedom. Let it be for a moment, but they wanted to enjoy it, feel it, and then die is not scary, but in no case be captured - there is death. Because the main character of the story “ Last Stand Major Pugachev” prefers to kill himself rather than surrender.

“We have learned humility, we have forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, selfishness, selfishness, and jealousy and passion seemed to us Martian concepts, and, moreover, trifles,” wrote Shalamov.

The author describes in great detail (by the way, there are a number of cases when the same - literally, word for word - descriptions of certain scenes appear in several stories) - how they sleep, wake up, eat, walk, dress, work, “ prisoners having fun; how brutally the guards, doctors, and camp authorities treat them. Each story talks about constantly sucking hunger, about constant cold, illness, about backbreaking hard labor that makes you fall off your feet, about continuous insults and humiliations, about the fear that does not leave the soul for a minute of being offended, beaten, maimed, stabbed to death by “thieves.” ”, of whom the camp authorities are also afraid. Several times V. Shalamov compares the life of these camps with Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the House of the Dead” and each time comes to the conclusion that Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead” is an earthly paradise compared to what the characters in “Kolyma Tales” experience. The only people who prosper in the camps are thieves. They rob and kill with impunity, terrorize doctors, pretend, do not work, give bribes left and right - and live well. There is no control over them. Constant torment, suffering, exhausting work that drives you to the grave - this is the lot honest people who were driven here on charges of counter-revolutionary activities, but in fact are people innocent of anything.

And here we see “frames” of this terrible narrative: murders during a card game (“At the Presentation”), digging up corpses from graves for robbery (“At Night”), insanity (“Rain”), religious fanaticism (“Apostle Paul” ), death (“Aunt Polya”), murder (“First Death”), suicide (“Seraphim”), the unlimited dominion of thieves (“Snake Charmer”), barbaric methods of identifying simulation (“Shock Therapy”), murders of doctors (“Snake Charmer”). Red Cross"), killing prisoners by convoy ("Berry"), killing dogs ("Bitch Tamara"), eating human corpses ("Golden Taiga") and so on and everything in the same spirit.

Moreover, all descriptions are very visible, very detailed, often with numerous naturalistic details.

Basic emotional motives run through all the descriptions - a feeling of hunger that turns every person into a beast, fear and humiliation, slow dying, boundless tyranny and lawlessness. All this is photographed, strung together, horrors are piled up without any attempt to somehow comprehend everything, to understand the causes and consequences of what is being described.

If we talk about the skill of Shalamov the artist, about his style of presentation, then it should be noted that the language of his prose is simple, extremely precise. The intonation of the narration is calm, without strain. Stern, concise, without any attempt psychological analysis, even somewhere a documentary writer talks about what is happening. Shalamov achieves a stunning effect on the reader by contrasting the calmness of the author’s unhurried, calm narrative and the explosive, terrifying content

What is surprising is that the writer never falls into a pathetic breakdown, nowhere does he crumble into curses against fate or power. He leaves this privilege to the reader, who, willy-nilly, will shudder while reading each new story. After all, he will know that all this is not the author’s imagination, but the cruel truth, albeit clothed in artistic form.

The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as absolute evil. Shalamova views the GULAG as an exact copy of the model of totalitarian Stalinist society: “...The camp is not a contrast between hell and heaven. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like.” Camp - hell - is a constant association that comes to mind while reading “Kolyma Tales”. This association arises not even because you are constantly faced with the inhuman torment of prisoners, but also because the camp seems to be the kingdom of the dead. Thus, the story “Funeral Word” begins with the words: “Everyone died...” On every page you encounter death, which here can be named among the main characters. All heroes, if we consider them in connection with the prospect of death in the camp, can be divided into three groups: the first - heroes who have already died, and the writer remembers them; the second - those who will almost certainly die; and the third group are those who may be lucky, but this is not certain. This statement becomes most obvious if we remember that the writer in most cases talks about those whom he met and whom he experienced in the camp: a man who was shot for failure to fulfill the plan by his site, his classmate, whom he met 10 years later in the Butyrskaya cell prison, a French communist whom the foreman killed with one blow of his fist...

Varlam Shalamov lived through his entire life again, writing a rather difficult work. Where did he get his strength from? Perhaps everything was so that one of those who remained alive would convey in words the horrors of the Russian people on their own land. My idea of ​​life as a blessing, as happiness, has changed. Kolyma taught me something completely different. The principle of my age, my personal existence, my entire life, a conclusion from my personal experience, a rule learned by this experience, can be expressed in a few words. First you need to return the slaps and only secondly the alms. Remember evil before good. To remember all the good things is for a hundred years, and all the bad things are for two hundred years. This is what distinguishes me from all Russian humanists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (V. Shalamov)

Main theme main plot Shalamov’s biography, all the books of his “Kolyma Stories” are a search for the answer to the question: can a person survive in extreme conditions and remain human? What is the price and what is the meaning of life if you have already been “on the other side”? Revealing his understanding of this problem, Varlam Shalamov helps the reader more accurately understand the author's concept, actively applying the principle of contrast.

The ability to “be combined in a single material as a contradiction, mutual reflection of different values, destinies, characters, and at the same time represent a certain whole” - one of the stable properties of artistic thought. Lomonosov called this “conjugation of distant ideas,” P. Palievsky - “thinking with the help of living contradiction.”

Contradictions are rooted within the material and are extracted from it. But from all their complexity, from the threads cleverly intertwined by life itself, the writer isolates a certain dominant, a driving emotional nerve, and it is this that he makes the content of a work of art based on this material.

Both paradox and contrast, so abundantly used by Shalamov, contribute to the most active emotional perception of a work of art. And in general, “the imagery, freshness, and novelty of his works largely depend on how strong an artist’s ability is to combine heterogeneous and incompatible things.” .

Shalamov makes the reader shudder, remembering the lieutenant of the tank forces Svechnikov (“Domino”), who at the mine “was caught eating the meat of human corpses from the morgue.” But the effect is enhanced by the author due to purely external contrast: this cannibal is a “gentle, rosy-cheeked young man”, calmly explaining his passion for “non-fat, of course” human flesh!

Or the narrator’s meeting with the Comintern figure Schneider, a most educated man, an expert on Goethe (“Typhoid Quarantine”). In the camp he is in the retinue of thieves, in the crowd of beggars. Schneider is happy that he has been entrusted with scratching the heels of the leader of the thieves, Senechka.

Understanding the moral degradation and immorality of Svechnikov and Schneider, victims of the Gulag, is achieved not by verbose arguments, but by using the artistic device of contrast. Thus, contrast performs communicative, meaningful, and artistic functions in the structure of a work of art. It makes you see and feel the world around you in a sharper, new way.

Shalamov attached great importance to the composition of his books and carefully arranged the stories in a certain sequence. Therefore, the appearance side by side of two contrasting in their artistic and emotional essence works is not an accident.

The plot basis of the story “Shock Therapy” is paradoxical: a doctor, whose vocation and duty is to help those in need, directs all his strength and knowledge to exposing the convict-malingerer, who experiences “horror of the world from where he came to the hospital and where he I was afraid to go back." The story is filled with a detailed description of the barbaric, sadistic procedures carried out by doctors in order to prevent the exhausted, exhausted “goner” from being “free”. Next in the book is the story “Stlanik”. This lyrical short story gives the reader the opportunity to take a break, to move away from the horrors of the previous story. Nature, unlike people, is humane, generous and kind.

Shalamov’s comparison of the natural world and the human world is always not in favor of man. In the story “Bitch Tamara” the head of the site and the dog are contrasted. The boss put the people subordinate to him in such conditions that they were forced to inform on each other. And next to him is a dog, whose “moral firmness especially touched the residents of the village who had seen the sights and been in all troubles.”

In the story “Bears” we encounter a similar situation. In the conditions of the Gulag, each prisoner cares only about himself. The bear encountered by the prisoners clearly took the danger upon itself,ort, a male, sacrificed his life to save his girlfriend, he distracted death from her, he covered her escape.”

The camp world is essentially antagonistic. Hence Shalamov’s use of contrast at the level of the image system.

The hero of the story “Aortic Aneurysm,” doctor Zaitsev, a professional and humanist, is contrasted with the immoral head of the hospital; in the story “The Descendant of the Decembrist”, essentially contrasting characters constantly collide: the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, “a knight, a clever man, a man of immense knowledge, whose word did not diverge from deeds”, and his direct descendant, the immoral and selfish Sergei Mi -Khailovich Lunin, doctor at the camp hospital. The difference between the heroes of the story “Ryabokon” is not only internal, essential, but also external: “The huge body of the Latvian looked like a drowned man - blue-white, swollen, swollen from hunger... Ryabokon did not look like a drowned man. Huge, bony, with withered veins.” People of different life orientations collided at the end of their lives in a common hospital space.

“Sherry Brandy,” a story about the last days of Osip Mandelstam’s life, is permeated with contrasts. The poet dies, but life enters him again, giving birth to thoughts. He was dead and became alive again. He thinks about creative immortality, having already crossed, in essence, the life line.

A dialectically contradictory chain is built: life - death - resurrection - immortality - life. The poet remembers, writes poetry, philosophizes - and then cries that he didn’t get the crust of bread. The one who just quoted Tyutchev “bite bread with scurvy teeth, his gums were bleeding, his teeth were loose, but he did not feel pain. With all his might he pressed the bread to his mouth, stuffed it into his mouth, sucked it, tore it, gnawed it...” Such duality, internal dissimilarity, and inconsistency are characteristic of many of Shalamov’s heroes who find themselves in the hellish conditions of the camp. Zeka often recalls with surprise himself - different, former, free.

It’s scary to read the lines about the camp horse-driver Glebov, who became famous in the barracks for “forgetting the name of his wife a month ago.” In his “free” life, Glebov was... a professor of philosophy (the story “The Funeral Oration”).

In the story “The First Tooth” we learn the story of the sectarian Peter the Hare - a young, black-haired, black-browed giant. The “lame, gray-haired old man coughing up blood” met by the storyteller some time later—that’s him.

Such contrasts within the image, at the level of the hero - not only artistic technique. This is also an expression of Shalamov’s conviction that normal person unable to withstand the hell of GU-LAG. The camp can only be trampled and destroyed. In this, as is known, V. Shalamov disagreed with Solzhenitsyn, who was convinced of the possibility of remaining a man in the camp.

In Shalamov’s prose, the absurdity of the Gulag world is often manifested in the discrepancy between a person’s real situation and his official status. For example, in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” there is an episode when one of the heroes achieves an honorable and very profitable job... as a barracks sanitation worker.

The plot of the story “Aunt Polya” is based on a similar contrasting discrepancy. The heroine is a prisoner taken as a servant by the authorities. She was a slave in the house and at the same time “a secret arbiter in quarrels between husband and wife,” “a person who knows the shadow sides of the house.” She feels good in slavery, she is grateful to fate for the gift. Aunt Polya, who is ill, is placed in a separate ward, from which “ten half-dead corpses were first dragged out into a cold corridor to make room for the orderly chief.” The military and their wives came to Aunt Polya in the hospital asking her to put in a good word for them. forever. And after her death, the “all-powerful” Aunt Polya deserved only a wooden tag with a number on her left shin, because she was just a “prisoner,” a slave. Instead of one orderly, another will come, equally familyless, with only a personal file number behind her. The human person is worthless in the conditions of the camp nightmare.

It has already been noted that the use of contrast activates the reader’s perception.

Shalamov, as a rule, is stingy with detailed, detailed descriptions. When they are used, for the most part they are a detailed opposition.

Extremely indicative in this regard is the description in the story “My Trial”: “There are few sights as expressive as the red-faced figures of the camp authorities standing side by side, red-faced from alcohol, the well-fed, overweight, heavy with fat, figures of the camp authorities in shiny new clothes like the sun.” , stinking sheepskin short fur coats, in fur-painted Yakut malakhai and “gaiter” mittens with a bright pattern - and the figures of “goners”, tattered “wicks” with “smoking” shreds of cotton wool from worn padded jackets, “goners” with the same dirty, bony faces and the hungry gleam of sunken eyes.”

Hyperbole and emphasis on negatively perceived details in the guise of the “camp authorities” are especially noticeable in comparison with the dark, dirty mass of “goons”.

There is a similar kind of contrast in the description of the bright, colorful, sunny Vladivostok and the rainy, gray-dull landscape of Nagaevo Bay (“Hell’s Pier”). Here the contrasting landscape expresses the differences in the hero’s internal state - hope in Vladivostok and expectation of death in Nagaevo Bay.

An interesting example of a contrasting description is in the story “Marcel Proust.” A small episode: the imprisoned Dutch communist Fritz David was sent velvet trousers and a silk scarf in a parcel from home. Exhausted Fritz David died of hunger in these luxurious, but useless clothes in the camp, which “even for bread at the mine could not be exchanged.” This contrasting detail in the strength of its emotional impact can be compared with the horrors in the stories of F. Kafka or E. Poe. The difference is that Shalamov did not invent anything, did not construct an absurd world, but only remembered what he witnessed.

Characterizing the different ways of using the artistic principle of contrast in Shalamov’s stories, it is appropriate to consider its implementation at the level of words.

Verbal contrasts can be divided into two groups. The first includes words whose very meaning is contrasting, contrasted and out of context, and the second includes words whose combinations create a contrast, a paradox already in a specific context.

First, examples from the first group. “They immediately transport prisoners in neat, orderly batches up into the taiga, and in dirty heaps of discards from above, back from the taiga” (“Conspiracy of Lawyers”). The double opposition (“clean” - “dirty”, “up” - “from above”), aggravated by the diminutive suffix, on the one hand, and the reduced phrase “heap of garbage”, on the other, creates the impression a picture of two oncoming human streams seen in reality.

“I rushed, that is, trudged to the workshop” (“Handwriting”). Apparently contradictory lexical meanings are equal to each other here, telling the reader about the extreme degree of exhaustion and weakness of the hero much more clearly than any lengthy description. In general, Shalamov, recreating the absurd world of the Gulag, often combines, rather than contrasts, words and expressions that are antinomic in their meaning. Several works (in particular, the stories “Brave Eyes” and “Resurrection of the Larch”) equatesmoldering, moldAndspring, lifeAnddeath:”...the mold also seemed to spring, green, seemed alive too, and the dead trunks gave off the smell of life. Green mold ... seemed like a symbol of spring. But in fact it is the color of decrepitude and decay. But Kolyma asked us more difficult questions, and the similarity of life and death did not bother us”.

Another example of contrasting similarity: 'Graphite is eternity. The highest hardness turned into the highest softness” (“Graphite”).

The second group of verbal contrasts are oxymorons, the use of which gives rise to a new semantic quality. The “upside down” world of the camp makes possible such expressions: “a fairy tale, the joy of solitude”, “a dark cozy punishment cell”, etc.

The color palette of Shalamov's stories is not very intense. The artist sparingly paints the world of his works. It would be excessive to say that a writer always consciously chooses one color or another. He uses color in an unintentional, intuitive way. And, as a rule, the paint has a natural, natural function. For example: “the mountains turned red from lingonberries, blackened from dark blue blueberries, ... large, watery rowan trees filled with yellow...” (“Kant”). But in a number of cases, color in Shalamov’s stories carries a meaningful and ideological load, especially when a contrasting color scheme is used. This is what happens in the story “Children’s Pictures.” While clearing out a garbage heap, the prisoner narrator found in it a notebook with children's drawings. The grass on them is green, the sky is blue, the sun is scarlet. The colors are clean, bright, without halftones. Typical palette children's drawing But: “People and houses... were surrounded by smooth yellow fences entwined with black lines of barbed wire.”

The childhood impressions of a little Kolyma resident run into yellow fences and black barbed wire. Shalamov, as always, does not lecture the reader, does not indulge in reasoning on this matter. The clash of colors helps the artist to enhance the emotional impact of this episode, to convey the author’s idea about the tragedy not only of the prisoners, but also of the Kolyma children who became adults at an early age.

The artistic form of Shalamov’s works is also interesting for other manifestations of the paradoxical. I noticed a contradiction, which is based on a discrepancy between the manner, pathos, “tonality” of the narrative and the essence of what is being described. This artistic technique is adequate to Shalamov’s camp world, in which all the values ​​are literally upside down.

There are many examples of “mixing styles” in stories. A characteristic technique for the artist is to speak pathetically and sublimely about everyday events and facts. For example, about eating. For a prisoner, this is by no means an ordinary event of the day. This is a ritual action that gives a “passionate, selfless feeling” (“At Night”).

The description of the breakfast at which herring is distributed is striking. Artistic time here it is stretched to the limit, as close to the real as possible. The writer noted all the details and nuances of this exciting event: “While the distributor was approaching, everyone had already calculated which piece would be held out by this indifferent hand. Everyone has already become upset, rejoiced, prepared for a miracle, reached the brink of despair if he was mistaken in his hasty calculations” (“Bread”). And this whole range of feelings is caused by the anticipation of the herring ration!

The can of condensed milk the narrator saw in a dream is grandiose and majestic, and he compared it to the night sky. ''The milk seeped out and flowed in a wide stream Milky Way. And I easily reached with my hands to the sky and ate thick, sweet, star milk” (“Condensed Milk”). Not only comparison, but also inversion (“and I got it easily”) help here to create solemn pathos.

A similar example is in the story “How It Began”, where the guess that “shoe lubricant is fat, oil, nutrition” is compared with Archimedes’ “eureka”.

Sublime and delightful description of the berries touched by the first frost (“Berries”).

Awe and admiration in the camp are caused not only by food, but also by fire and warmth. In the description in the story “The Carpenters” there are truly Homeric notes, the pathos of the sacred rite: “Those who came knelt before the open door of the stove, before the god of fire, one of the first gods of humanity... They stretched out their hands to the warmth...”

The tendency to elevate the ordinary, even the low, is also manifested in those stories by Shalamov, where we're talking about about deliberate self-harm in the camp. For many prisoners, this was the only, last chance to survive. Making yourself a cripple is not at all easy. Long preparation was required. ''The stone should have fallen and crushed my leg. And I am forever disabled! This passionate dream was subject to calculation... The day, hour and minute were appointed and came” (“Rain”).

The beginning of the story “A Piece of Meat” is full of sublime vocabulary; Richard III, Macbeth, Claudius are mentioned here. The titanic passions of Shakespeare's heroes are equated with the feelings of prisoner Golubev. He sacrificed his appendix to escape a hard labor camp in order to survive. “Yes, Golubev made this bloody sacrifice. A piece of meat is cut from his body and thrown at the feet of the almighty god of the camps. To appease God... Life repeats Shakespearean plots more often than we think.”

In the writer's stories, the elevated perception of a person often contrasts with his true essence, usually low status. A fleeting meeting with “some former or current prostitute” allows the narrator to talk “about her wisdom, about her great heart,” and compare her words with Goethe’s lines about mountain peaks (“Rain”). The distributor of herring heads and tails is perceived by the prisoners as an almighty giant (“Bread”); The doctor on duty at the camp hospital is likened to an “angel in a white coat” (“The Glove”). In the same way, Shalamov shows the reader the camp world of Kolyma that surrounds the heroes. The description of this world is often elevated, pathetic, which contradicts the essential picture of reality. “In this white silence I did not hear the sound of the wind, I heard a musical phrase from the sky and a clear, melodic, ringing human voice...” (“Chasing the locomotive smoke”).

In the story “The Best Praise” we find a description of the sounds in the prison: “This special ringing, and also the rattle of the door lock, which is locked twice, ... and the clicking of the key on the copper belt buckle ... these are the three elements of the symphony.” “concrete” prison music that is remembered for a lifetime.”

The unpleasant metallic sounds of a prison are compared to the rich sound of a symphony orchestra. I note that the above examples of the “sublime” tone of the narrative are taken from those works in which the hero either has not yet been to the terrible camp (prison and loneliness are positive for Shalamov), or is no longer there (the narrator has become a paramedic). In works specifically about camp life, there is practically no room for pathos. The exception is, perhaps, the story of Bogdanov. The action in it takes place in 1938, the most terrible year for both Shalamov and millions of other prisoners. It so happened that the NKVD commissioner Bogdanov tore into shreds the letters of his wife, from whom the narrator had no information for two terrible Kolyma years. To convey his strong shock, Shalamov, recalling this episode, resorts to pathos that is, in general, unusual for him. An ordinary incident grows into a true human tragedy. “Here are your letters, fascist bastard!” “Bogdanov tore into shreds and threw into the burning oven letters from my wife, letters that I had been waiting for for more than two years, waiting for in blood, in executions, in beatings of the gold mines of Kolyma.”

In his Kolyma epic, Shalamov also uses the opposite technique. It consists of an everyday, even reduced tone of narration about exceptional facts and phenomena, tragic in their consequences. These descriptions are marked by epic calm. “This calmness, slowness, inhibition is not only a technique that allows us to take a closer look at this transcendental world... The writer does not allow us to turn away, not to see” .

It seems that the epically calm narrative also reflects the prisoners’ habit of death, of the cruelty of camp life. To what E. Shklovsky called “ordinary agony” }