Substitution, transformation was achieved not only by mounting documents. "Injector" is not only a landscape gasket like "Stlanik". In fact, it is not landscape at all, because there is no landscape lyrics, but there is only a conversation between the author and his readers.

"Stlanik" is needed not as landscape information, but as a state of mind necessary for the fight in "Shock Therapy", "Conspiracy of Lawyers", "Typhoid Quarantine".

This -<род>landscape lining.

All the repetitions, all the slips of the tongue, in which readers reproached me, were not made by me by accident, not out of negligence, not out of haste ...

They say an ad is more memorable if it contains a spelling mistake. But this is not the only reward for negligence.

Authenticity itself, primacy, requires this kind of error.

Stern's "Sentimental Journey" breaks off in mid-sentence and does not elicit disapproval from anyone.

Why, then, in the story “How It Started,” do all readers add, correct by hand the phrase “We are still working ...” that I did not finish?

The use of synonyms, verbs-synonyms and synonyms-nouns, serves the same dual purpose - to emphasize the main thing and create musicality, sound support, intonation.

When a speaker gives a speech, a new phrase is formed in the brain while synonyms come out into the language.

The extraordinary importance of preserving the first option. Editing is not allowed. It is better to wait for another upsurge of feeling and write the story again with all the rights of the first option.

Everyone who writes poetry knows that the first option is the most sincere, the most direct, subject to haste to express the most important thing. The subsequent finishing - editing (in different meanings) - is control, the violence of thought over feeling, the intervention of thought. I can guess from any Russian great poet in 12-16 lines of a poem - which stanza was written first. He guessed without error what was the main thing for Pushkin and Lermontov.

So for this prose, conditionally called "new", it is extremely important luck first option.<…>

They will say that all this is not necessary for inspiration, for insight.

God is always on the side of the big battalions. By Napoleon. These great battalions of poetry are lining up and marching, learning to shoot from cover, in the depths.

The artist is always working, and the processing of the material is always, constantly. Illumination is the result of this constant work.

Of course, there are secrets in art. These are the secrets of talent. No more and no less.

Editing, "finishing" any of my stories is extremely difficult, because it has special tasks, stylistic.

You correct it a little, and the power of authenticity, primacy is violated. So it was with the story "Conspiracy of Lawyers" - the deterioration in quality after editing was immediately noticeable (N.Ya.).

Is it true that the new prose is based on new material and this material is strong?

Of course, there are no trifles in Kolyma Tales. The author thinks, perhaps mistakenly, that the point is not only in the material, and not even so much in the material ...

Why camp theme. The camp theme in its broad interpretation, in its fundamental understanding, is the main, main issue of our days. Isn't the destruction of a person with the help of the state the main issue of our time, our morality, which has entered the psychology of every family? This question is many more important than the topic war. War in a sense plays the role of psychological camouflage here (history says that during the war the tyrant draws closer to the people). Behind the statistics of the war, statistics of all kinds, they want to hide the "camp theme".

When people ask me what I write, I answer: I do not write memoirs. There are no reminiscences in Kolyma Tales. I don't write stories either - or rather, I try to write not a story, but something that would not be literature.

Not the prose of a document, but prose suffered as a document.

Kolyma stories

How do they trample the road on virgin snow? A man walks ahead, sweating and swearing, barely moving his legs, constantly getting bogged down in loose deep snow. The man goes far, marking his way with uneven black pits. He gets tired, lies down on the snow, lights up, and shag smoke spreads like a blue cloud over the white shiny snow. The man has already gone further, and the cloud still hangs where he rested - the air is almost still. Roads are always laid in quiet days so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. A person himself outlines landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree - a person guides his body through the snow in the same way as a helmsman guides a boat along the river from cape to cape.

Five or six people in a row, shoulder to shoulder, move along the laid narrow and unreliable trail. They step near the track, but not in the track. Having reached the place planned in advance, they turn back and again go in such a way as to trample the virgin snow, the place where no human foot has yet set foot. The road has been broken. People, sleigh carts, tractors can walk along it. If you follow the path of the first track to track, there will be a noticeable, but barely passable narrow path, a stitch, and not a road - pits that are more difficult to get through than virgin soil. 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 footprint. And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses.

<1956>

For the show

We played cards at Naumov's konogon. The guards on duty never looked into the horse barracks, rightly considering their main service in monitoring the convicts under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by counter-revolutionaries. True, the practical bosses grumbled in secret: they were losing the best, most caring workers, but the instructions on this score were definite and strict. In a word, the konogons were the safest of all, and every night the thieves gathered there for their card fights.

In the right corner of the hut on the lower bunks were spread multi-colored wadded blankets. A burning “kolyma” was fastened to the corner post with a wire - a home-made light bulb on gasoline steam. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of the can - that's all the device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was heated, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs tucked up in Buryat style, the partners were sitting - the classic pose of a prison card battle. There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards, this was a home-made prison deck, which is made by the masters of these crafts at an extraordinary speed. To make it, you need paper (any book), a piece of bread (to chew it and rub it through a rag to get starch - glue sheets), a stub of chemical pencil (instead of printing ink) and a knife (for cutting and stenciling suits, and the cards themselves).

Today's maps have just been cut out of a volume of Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone yesterday in the office. The paper was dense, thick - the sheets did not have to be glued together, which is done when the paper is thin. In the camp, during all searches, chemical pencils were rigorously selected. They were also selected when checking the received parcels. This was done not only to suppress the possibility of making documents and stamps (there were many artists and such), but to destroy everything that could compete with the state card monopoly. Ink was made from a chemical pencil, and patterns were applied to the card with ink through a paper stencil - ladies, jacks, tens of all suits ... The suits did not differ in color - and the player does not need a difference. The jack of spades, for example, corresponded to the image of spades in two opposite corners of the map. The arrangement and shape of the patterns have been the same for centuries - the ability to make cards with one's own hand is included in the program of the "chivalrous" education of a young blatar.

The plot of the stories of V. Shalamov is a painful description of the prison and camp life of the prisoners of the Soviet Gulag, they are similar to each other tragic fates in which chance reigns, merciless or merciful, helper or murderer, arbitrariness of bosses and thieves. 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.

Gravestone

The author recalls by name his comrades in the camps. Calling to mind a mournful martyrology, he tells who died and how, who suffered and how, who hoped for what, who and how behaved in this Auschwitz without ovens, as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, few managed to survive and remain morally unbroken.

Life of engineer Kipreev

Having never betrayed or sold anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for actively protecting his existence: a person can only consider himself a person and survive if he is ready to commit suicide at any moment, ready to die. However, later he realizes that he only built himself a comfortable shelter, because it is not known what you will be like at a decisive moment, whether you just have enough physical strength, and not just mental. Arrested in 1938, the engineer-physicist Kipreev not only withstood the beating during interrogation, but even rushed at the investigator, after which he was put in a punishment cell. However, they still try to get him to sign false testimony, intimidating him with the arrest of his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continued to prove to himself and others that he was a man, and not a slave, as all prisoners are. Thanks to his talent (he invented a way to restore burnt out light bulbs, repaired an X-ray machine), he manages to avoid the most difficult work, but not always. He miraculously survives, but the moral shock remains in him forever.

For the show

Camp corruption, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and took place in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is played down and asks to play for a "representation", that is, in debt. At some point, irritated by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, who happened to be among the spectators of their game, to give a woolen sweater. He refuses, and then one of the thieves "finishes" him, and the sweater still goes to the thieves.

At night

Two prisoners sneak to the grave where the body of their deceased comrade was buried in the morning, and take off the linen from the dead man in order to sell it or exchange it for bread or tobacco the next day. The initial squeamishness about the removed clothes is replaced by a pleasant thought that tomorrow they might be able to eat a little more and even smoke.

Single metering

Camp labor, unequivocally defined by Shalamov as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. A goner-prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand the sixteen-hour working day. He drives, turns, pours, again drives and again turns, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures Dugaev's work with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev to be very large, his calves are aching, his arms, shoulders, head are unbearably sore, he even lost his sense of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he regrets only that the last day was in vain.

Rain

Sherry Brandy

A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He dies for a long time. Sometimes some thought comes - for example, that they stole bread from him, which he put under his head, and it is so scary that he is ready to swear, fight, search ... But he no longer has the strength for this, and the thought of bread also weakens. When a daily ration is put into his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucks it, tries to tear and gnaw with scurvy loose teeth. When he dies, they don’t write him off for another two days, and inventive neighbors manage to get bread for the dead man as if it were alive during the distribution: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself at common work, feels that he is gradually losing. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by the escorts, they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed, and the rib grew together, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness at will. Remembering the mine, aching cold, a bowl of empty soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be convicted of deceit and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, was not a blunder. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing the fakers. This amuses his vanity: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite the year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a simulator and looks forward to the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him roush anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov's body can be straightened, and a week later, the procedure of the so-called shock therapy, the effect of which is similar to an attack of violent madness or an epileptic seizure. After it, the prisoner himself asks for an extract.

Typhoid Quarantine

Prisoner Andreev, ill with typhus, is quarantined. Compared to general work in the mines, the position of the patient gives a chance to survive, which the hero almost no longer hoped for. And then he decides, by hook or by crook, to stay here as long as possible, in transit, and there, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where there is hunger, beatings and death. At the roll call before the next dispatch to work of those who are considered recovered, Andreev does not respond, and thus he manages to hide for quite a long time. The transit is gradually emptying, and the line finally reaches Andreev as well. But now it seems to him that he has won his battle for life, that now the taiga is full, and if there are shipments, then only for nearby, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms passes the line separating short trips from long ones, he realizes with an internal shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.

aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “goal” prisoners is quite tantamount to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered as such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, is admitted to the hospital. Beauty, she immediately liked the doctor on duty Zaitsev, and although he knows that she is in close relations with his acquaintance, prisoner Podshivalov, the head of the circle amateur performances, ("serf theater", as the head of the hospital jokes), nothing prevents him from trying his luck in turn. He begins, as usual, with a medical examination of Głowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest is quickly replaced by a purely medical concern. He finds an aortic aneurysm in Glovatsky, a disease in which any careless movement can cause death. The authorities, who took it as an unwritten rule to separate lovers, had already once sent Glovatskaya to a penal female mine. And now, after the doctor’s report about the prisoner’s dangerous illness, the head of the hospital is sure that this is nothing more than the machinations of the same Podshivalov, who is trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but already when loading into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

Major Pugachev's last fight

Among the heroes of Shalamov's prose there are those who not only strive to survive at any cost, but are also able to intervene in the course of circumstances, to stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941-1945. prisoners who fought and passed German captivity began to arrive in the northeastern camps. These are people of a different temper, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and scouts...”. But most importantly, they possessed the instinct of freedom, which the war awakened in them. They shed their blood, sacrificed their lives, saw death face to face. They were not corrupted by camp slavery and were not yet exhausted to the point of losing their strength and will. Their “guilt” was that they were surrounded or captured. And it is clear to Major Pugachev, one of these people who have not yet been broken: “they were brought to their death - to change these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers prisoners who are just as determined and strong, to match, ready to either die or become free. In their group - pilots, scout, paramedic, tanker. They realized that they were innocently doomed to death and that they had nothing to lose. All winter they are preparing an escape. Pugachev realized that only those who bypassed the general work could survive the winter and then run away. And the participants in the conspiracy, one by one, advance into the service: someone becomes a cook, someone a cultist who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But spring is coming, and with it the day ahead.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The attendant lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who, as usual, has come for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the duty officer is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with another, who returned a little later on duty. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, take possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Leaving the camp, they stop the 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. At night - the first night free after long months bondage - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from the German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, accusation of espionage and a sentence of twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of the emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet authorities all of them, who were captured, are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He lovingly looks over the sleeping comrades who believe in him and stretch out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "the best, worthy of all." And a little later, a fight ensues, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in a bear's lair, that he will be found anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

retold

Mikhail Yurievich Mikheev allowed me to blog a chapter from his forthcoming book "Andrey Platonov ... and others. Languages ​​of Russian literature of the XX century.". I am very grateful to him.

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

I About the miniature "In the Snow"

The miniature-sketch "In the Snow" (1956), which opens " Kolyma stories”, Franciszek Apanovich, in my opinion, very accurately called it “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 ride really necessary?) Now, it seems that no reader and altruistic benefit is no longer visible or provided. Here you can catch a certain psychological shift. Or even - the intentional departure of the author from the reader.

II Recognition - in school essay

Oddly enough, Shalamov's own views on what "new prose" should be like and what, in fact, should be aimed at contemporary writer, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks and not in treatises, but - in an essay, or simply a “school essay”, written in 1956 - behind Irina Emelyanova, daughter of Olga Ivinskaya (since last Shalamov was familiar since the 30s), 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.<…># Hemingway's landscape 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, on which no human foot had yet set foot. 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