Life and art.
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov(June 5 (June 18), 1907 - January 17, 1982) - Russian prose writer and poet of the Soviet era. Creator of one of the literary cycles about the Soviet camps.
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 5 (June 18), 1907 in Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolaevich Shalamov. Varlam Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was a housewife. In 1914 he entered the gymnasium, but completed his secondary education after the revolution. In 1923, after graduating from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, he came to Moscow, worked for two years as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. From 1926 to 1929 he studied at the Faculty of Soviet Law of Moscow State University.
In his autobiographical story about childhood and youth, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his convictions were formed, how his thirst for justice and determination to fight for it strengthened. His youthful ideal is the People's Will - the sacrifice of their feat, the heroism of the resistance of all the might of the autocratic state. Already in childhood, the boy's artistic talent is evident - he passionately reads and "loses" all the books for himself - from Dumas to Kant.
Repression
On February 19, 1929, Shalamov was arrested for participating in an underground Trotskyist group and distributing an addendum to Lenin's Testament. Out of court as socially dangerous element”was sentenced to three years in the camps. He served his sentence in the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, worked in departmental journals, published articles, essays, feuilletons.
In January 1937, Shalamov was again arrested for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He was sentenced to five years in the camps and spent this period in Kolyma (SVITL). Shalamov went through gold mines, taiga business trips, worked at the mines "Partizan", Black Lake, Arkagala, Dzhelgala, several times ended up in a hospital bed due to the difficult conditions of Kolyma. On June 22, 1943, he was re-convicted to ten years for anti-Soviet agitation, which consisted - in the words of the writer himself - in calling Bunin a Russian classic.
"... I was sentenced to war for the statement that Bunin is a Russian classic."
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp, but at first he could not return to Moscow. Since 1946, having completed eight-month medical assistant courses, he began working at the Central Hospital for Prisoners on the left bank of the Kolyma in the village of Debin and on a forest "business trip" of lumberjacks until 1953. Shalamov owes his career as a paramedic to the doctor A.M. Pantyukhov, who, risking his career as a prisoner doctor, personally recommended Shalamov for paramedic courses. Then he lived in the Kalinin region, worked in Reshetnikovo. The results of the repressions were the disintegration of the family and poor health. In 1956, after rehabilitation, he returned to Moscow.
Creativity, participation in cultural life
In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow after his first term and began to publish in Moscow publications as a journalist. He also published several short stories. One of the first major publications - the story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" - in the magazine "October" (1936).
In 1949, on the key of Duskanya, for the first time in Kolyma, being a prisoner, he began to write down his poems.
After his release in 1951, Shalamov returned to literary activity. However, he could not leave Kolyma. It was not until November 1953 that permission to leave was received. Shalamov arrives in Moscow for two days, meets with Pasternak, with his wife and daughter. However, he cannot live in large cities, and he left for the Kalinin region, where he worked as a foreman in peat extraction, a supply agent. And all this time he obsessively wrote one of his main works - Kolyma stories. The writer created Kolyma Tales from 1954 to 1973. They were published as a separate edition in London in 1978. In the USSR, they were mainly published in 1988-1990. The writer himself divided his stories into six cycles: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "The Shovel Artist", as well as "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch" and "Glove, or KR-2". They are completely collected in the two-volume Kolyma Tales in 1992 in the series "The Way of the Cross of Russia" by the publishing house "Soviet Russia".
In 1962, he wrote to A. I. Solzhenitsyn:
“Remember, the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person - neither the chief nor the prisoner needs to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be ... For my part, I decided a long time ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this particular truth.
He met with B. L. Pasternak, who spoke highly of Shalamov's poetry. Later, after the government forced Pasternak to refuse to accept Nobel Prize their paths diverged.
He completed the collection of poems "Kolyma Notebooks" (1937-1956).
... Mr. Solzhenitsyn, I willingly accept your funeral joke about my death. It is with great feeling and pride that I consider myself the first victim of the Cold War who fell at your hands...
(From an unsent letter from V. T. Shalamov to A. I. Solzhenitsyn)
Since 1956, Shalamov lived in Moscow, first on Gogolevsky Boulevard, since the late 1950s - in one of the writers' wooden cottages on Khoroshevsky Highway (house 10), since 1972 - on Vasilyevskaya Street (house 2, building 6 ). He published in the journals Yunost, Znamya, Moskva, talked a lot with N. Ya. he was a frequent guest at the house of the famous philologist V. N. Klyueva (35 Arbat Street). Both in prose and in Shalamov's poetry (collection Flint, 1961, Rustle of Leaves, 1964, Road and Fate, 1967, etc.), which expressed the hard experience of the Stalinist camps, the theme of Moscow also sounds (poetry collection " Moscow clouds", 1972). In the 1960s he met A. A. Galich.
From 1973 until 1979, when Shalamov moved to live in the Home for the Disabled and the Elderly, he kept workbooks, the analysis and publication of which is still continued by I.P. Sirotinskaya, to whom V.T. Shalamov transferred the rights to all his manuscripts and essays.
Russian poet and writer Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, a prisoner of Stalin's camps, is called by critics "Dostoevsky of the 20th century". He spent half his life behind the barbed wire of the Kolyma camps - and only miraculously escaped death. Later came rehabilitation, and fame, and short-lived international fame, and the Freedom Award of the French PEN Club ... and the lonely death of a forgotten person ... The main thing remains - the work of Shalamov's life, made on a documentary basis and embodying a terrible testimony Soviet history. In Kolyma Tales, with stunning clarity and truthfulness, the author describes the camp experience, the experience of living in conditions incompatible with human life. The strength of Shalamov's talent is that he makes you believe in the story "not as information, but as an open heart wound."
Last years
The last three years of the life of a seriously ill Shalamov spent in the Literary Fund's Home for the Disabled and Elderly (in Tushino). However, even there he continued to write poetry. Probably the last publication of Shalamov took place in the Parisian magazine "Vestnik RHD" No. 133, 1981. In 1981, the French branch of the Pen Club awarded Shalamov with the Freedom Prize.
On January 15, 1982, after a superficial examination by a medical commission, Shalamov was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronics. During transportation, Shalamov caught a cold, fell ill with pneumonia and died on January 17, 1982.
“A certain role in this transfer was played by the noise that a group of his well-wishers raised around him from the second half of 1981. Among them, of course, there were really kind people, there were also those who worked out of self-interest, out of a passion for sensation. After all, it was from them that Varlam Tikhonovich discovered two posthumous “wives”, who, with a crowd of witnesses, besieged the official authorities. His poor, defenseless old age became the subject of a show.
Despite the fact that Shalamov had been an unbeliever all his life, E. Zakharova, one of those who were next to Shalamov, insisted on his funeral during the last year of his life. Funeral service for Varlam Shalamov Fr. Alexander Kulikov, now rector of the Church of St. Nicholas in Klenniki (Maroseyka).
Shalamov is buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow. About 150 people attended the funeral. A. Morozov and F. Suchkov read Shalamov's poems.
Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolaevich Shalamov. He received his secondary education at the Vologda gymnasium. Left at the age of 17 hometown and went to Moscow. In the capital, the young man first got a job as a tanner at a tannery in Setun, and in 1926 he entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Soviet Law. The independently thinking young man, like all people with such a temperament, had a hard time. Quite rightly, fearing the Stalinist regime and what it might entail, Varlam Shalamov began to distribute Lenin's Letter to the Congress. For this, the young man was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. Having fully served his term of imprisonment, the aspiring writer returned to Moscow, where he continued literary activity: worked in small trade union magazines. In 1936, one of his first stories, The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino, was published in the October magazine. The writer's love of freedom, read between the lines of his works, haunted the authorities, and in January 1937 he was again arrested. Now Shalamov was sentenced to five years in the camps. Freed, he began to write again. But his stay at liberty did not last long: after all, he attracted the closest attention of the relevant authorities. And after the writer called Bunin a Russian classic in 1943, he was sentenced for another ten years. In total, Varlam Tikhonovich spent 17 years in the camps, and most of this time in Kolyma, in the most severe conditions of the North. The prisoners, emaciated and suffering from diseases, worked in the gold mines even in forty degrees of frost. In 1951, Varlam Shalamov was released, but he was not allowed to leave Kolyma immediately: he had to work as a paramedic for another three years. Finally, he settled in the Kalinin region, and after rehabilitation in 1956 he moved to Moscow. Immediately upon his return from prison, the cycle "Kolyma Tales" was born, which the writer himself called "an artistic study of a terrible reality." Work on them continued from 1954 to 1973. The works created during this period were divided by the author into six books: Kolyma Tales, The Left Bank, The Spade Artist, Essays on the Underworld, The Resurrection of the Larch, and The Glove, or KR-2. Shalamov's prose was based on the terrible experience of the camps: numerous deaths, the pangs of hunger and cold, endless humiliations. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who argued that such an experience can be positive, ennobling, Varlam Tikhonovich is convinced of the opposite: he claims that the camp turns a person into an animal, into a downtrodden, despicable creature. In the story "Dry Ration", a prisoner who was transferred to lighter work due to illness cuts off his fingers - if only he would not be returned to the mine. The writer is trying to show that the moral and physical powers of a person are not unlimited. In his opinion, one of the main characteristics of the camp is corruption. Dehumanization, says Shalamov, begins precisely with physical torment - this thought runs like a red thread through his stories. The consequences of extreme states of a person turn him into an animal-like creature. The writer superbly shows how camp conditions affect different people: beings with a low soul descend even more, and freedom-loving ones do not lose their presence of mind. In the story "Shock Therapy" the image of a fanatic doctor, a former prisoner, is central, making every effort and knowledge in medicine to expose the prisoner, who, in his opinion, is a malingerer. At the same time, he is completely indifferent to future fate unfortunate, he is pleased to demonstrate his professional qualifications. A completely different character in spirit is depicted in the story " Last Stand Major Pugachev". It is about a prisoner who gathers freedom-loving people like him around him and dies while trying to escape. Another theme of Shalamov's work is the idea of the similarity of the camp to the rest of the world. "Camp ideas only repeat the ideas of will transmitted by order of the authorities. .. The camp reflects not only the struggle of political cliques replacing each other in power, but the culture of these people, their secret aspirations, tastes, habits, repressed desires. "Unfortunately, during his lifetime, the writer was not destined to publish these works in his homeland. Even in during the Khrushchev thaw, they were too bold to be published.But Shalamov's stories began to appear in emigre publications since 1966. The writer himself moved to a nursing home in May 1979, from where in January 1982 he was forcibly sent to a boarding school for psychochronics - to the last exile. But he failed to reach his destination: having caught a cold, the writer dies on the way. "Kolyma stories" in our country for the first time e saw the light only five years after the death of the author, in 1987.
Years of life: from 06/05/1907 to 01/16/1982
Soviet poet and prose writer. He spent more than 17 years in the camps, and it was the description of camp life that became central theme his creativity. The bulk literary heritage Shalamova was published in the USSR and Russia only after the death of the writer.
Varlam (birth name - Varlaam) Shalamov was born in Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolaevich Shalamov. Varlam Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was a housewife. In 1914 he entered the gymnasium. During the revolution, the gymnasium was transformed into a unified labor school of the second stage. which the writer completed in 1923.
Over the next two years, he worked as a messenger, a tanner at a tannery in the Moscow region. In 1926, he entered the faculty of Soviet law at Moscow State University, from where he was expelled two years later - "for concealing his social origin."
On February 19, 1929, Shalamov was arrested during a raid on an underground printing house while printing leaflets called Lenin's Testament. Condemned by the Special Meeting of the Collegium of the OGPU as a socially harmful element to three years in a concentration camp. He served his sentence in the Vishera forced labor camp in the Urals. He worked on the construction of the Berezniki chemical plant. In the camp he meets G.I. Gudz, his future first wife. In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, in 1932-37. worked as a literary worker, editorial, head methodological department in the trade union magazines "For shock work", "For mastery of technology", "For industrial personnel". In 1934 he married G.I. Gudz (divorced in 1954), in 1935 they had a daughter. In 1936 Shalamov's first short story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" was published in the magazine "October".
In January 1937, Shalamov was again arrested for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He was sentenced to five years in the camps. Shalamov worked at various gold mines (as a digger, a boilerman, an assistant topographer), in coal faces and, finally, at the “penalty” mine “Dzhelgala”.
On June 22, 1943, following a denunciation by fellow camp members, he was again sentenced to ten years for anti-Soviet agitation. Over the next 3 years, Shalamov was hospitalized three times in a dying state. In 1945, he made an attempt to escape, for which he again went to the “penalty” mine. In 1946 he was sent to study at paramedic courses, after graduation he worked in camp hospitals.
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp, but at first he could not return to Moscow. For two years he worked as a paramedic in the Oymyakon region. At this time, Shalamov sends his poems and correspondence begins between them. In 1953, Shalamov arrived in Moscow, through B. Pasternak he contacted literary circles. But until 1956, Shalamov did not have the right to live in Moscow and he lived in the Kalinin region, worked as a supply agent at the Reshetnikovsky peat enterprise. At this time, Shalamov began to write "Kolyma stories" (1954-1973) - the work of his life.
In 1956, Shalamov was rehabilitated "for lack of corpus delicti", he returned to Moscow and married O.S. Neklyudova (divorced in 1966). He worked as a freelance correspondent, reviewer, published in the magazines "Youth", "Znamya", "Moscow". In 1956-1977 Shalamov published several collections of poems, in 1972 he was accepted into the Writers' Union, but his prose was not published, which the writer himself experienced very hard. Shalamov became a well-known figure among the "dissidents", his "Kolyma Tales" were distributed in samizdat.
In 1979, already seriously ill and completely helpless, Shalamov, with the help of a few friends and the Writers' Union, was assigned to the Literary Fund's Home for the Disabled and Elderly. On January 15, 1982, after a superficial examination by a medical commission, Shalamov was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronics. During transportation, Shalamov caught a cold, fell ill with pneumonia and died on January 17, 1982. Shalamov is buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow.
According to the memoirs of V. Shalamov himself, in 1943 he "was convicted ... for a statement that he was a Russian classic."
In 1972 Kolyma Tales were published abroad. V. Shalamov writes an open letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta protesting against unauthorized illegal publications. It is not known how sincere this protest of Shalamov was, but many fellow writers perceive this letter as a renunciation and betrayal and break off relations with Shalamov.
Property left after the death of V. Shalamov: “An empty cigarette case from prison work, an empty wallet, a torn wallet. There are several envelopes in the wallet, receipts for the repair of a refrigerator and a typewriter for 1962, a coupon for an optometrist at the Litfond polyclinic, a note in very large letters: “ In November, you will still be given an allowance of one hundred rubles. union card, a library card to Leninka, that's all." (from the memoirs of I.P. Sirotinskaya)
Writer's Awards
"Liberty Award" of the French PEN Club (1980). Shalamov never received the award.
Bibliography
Collections of poems published during his lifetime
(1961)
Rustle of Leaves (1964)
Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich
And - even if not a tenant in the world -
I am a petitioner and plaintiff
Inexhaustible grief.
I am where the pain is, I am where the groan is,
In the eternal litigation of two sides,
In this old dispute. /"Atomic Poem"/
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 18 (July 1), 1907 in Vologda.
Shalamov's father, Tikhon Nikolaevich, the cathedral priest, was a prominent figure in the city, since he not only served in the church, but also was actively involved in social activities. According to the writer, his father spent eleven years in the Aleutian Islands as an Orthodox missionary, he was a European-educated man, adhering to free and independent views.
The relationship of the future writer with his father was not easy. The youngest son in a large large family often did not find a common language with a categorical father. “My father was from the darkest wilderness of the Ust-Sysolsk wilderness, from a hereditary priestly family, whose ancestors until recently were several generations of Zyryansk shamans, from a shamanic family, who imperceptibly and naturally replaced a tambourine with a censer, still in the power of paganism, the shaman himself and a pagan in the depths of his Zyryansk soul ... ”- this is how V. Shalamov wrote about Tikhon Nikolaevich, although the archives testify to his Slavic origin.
Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was busy with housekeeping and cooking, but she loved poetry, and was closer to Shalamov. A poem is dedicated to her, beginning like this: "My mother was a savage, a dreamer and a cook."
In his autobiographical story about childhood and youth, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his convictions were formed, how his thirst for justice and determination to fight for it strengthened. The Narodnaya Volya became his ideal. He read a lot, especially highlighting the works of Dumas before Kant.
In 1914, Shalamov entered the Alexander Blessed Gymnasium. In 1923, he graduated from the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, which, as he wrote, "did not instill in me a love for either poetry or fiction, did not bring up taste, and I made discoveries myself, advancing in zigzags - from Khlebnikov to Lermontov, from Baratynsky to Pushkin, from Igor Severyanin to Pasternak and Blok.
In 1924, Shalamov left Vologda and got a job as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. In 1926, Shalamov entered Moscow State University at the Faculty of Soviet Law.
At this time, Shalamov wrote poems, which were positively evaluated by N. Aseev, participated in the work of literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes.
Shalamov sought to actively participate in public life countries. He established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in the demonstration of the opposition on the 10th anniversary of October under the slogans "Down with Stalin!", "Let's fulfill Lenin's testament!"
On February 19, 1929, he was arrested. Unlike many for whom the arrest was really a surprise, he knew why: he was among those who distributed the so-called testament of Lenin, his famous "Letter to the Congress." In this letter, Lenin, who is seriously ill and actually removed from business, gives brief characteristics to his closest associates in the party, in whose hands the main power was concentrated by that time, and, in particular, points to the danger of its concentration with Stalin - due to his unattractive human qualities. It was precisely this letter, hushed up in every possible way at that time, declared a fake after Lenin's death, that refuted the myth that had been intensively propagated about Stalin as the only, indisputable and most consistent successor to the leader of the world proletariat.
In Vishera, Shalamov wrote: "I was a representative of those people who opposed Stalin - no one ever believed that Stalin and Soviet power were one and the same." And then he continues: “The testament of Lenin, hidden from the people, seemed to me a worthy application of my strength. Of course, I was still a blind puppy then. But I was not afraid of life and boldly entered the fight against it in the form in which the heroes of my childhood and youth, all Russian revolutionaries, fought with life and for life. Later, in his autobiographical prose The Vishera Anti-Roman (1970–1971, unfinished), Shalamov wrote: “I consider this day and hour to be the beginning of my social life, the first true test under harsh conditions.”
Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Butyrka prison, which he later described in detail in an essay of the same name. And he perceived his first imprisonment, and then a three-year term in the Vishera camps, as an inevitable and necessary test given to him to test his moral and physical strength, to test himself as a person: “Do I have enough moral strength to go my own way as a some unit, - that's what I was thinking about in the 95th cell of the male solitary corps of the Butyrka prison. There were excellent conditions for thinking about life, and I thank the Butyrka prison for the fact that in search of the necessary formula for my life, I found myself alone in a prison cell. The image of the prison in Shalamov's biography may even seem attractive. For him, it was a truly new and, most importantly, feasible experience, which instilled in his soul confidence in his own strengths and unlimited possibilities of internal spiritual and moral resistance. Shalamov will emphasize the cardinal difference between a prison and a camp.
According to the writer, prison life in 1929 and 1937, in any case, in Butyrki remained much less cruel compared to the camp. A library even functioned here, “the only library in Moscow, and perhaps the country, that did not experience all sorts of seizures, destruction and confiscations that in Stalin’s time forever destroyed the book stocks of hundreds of thousands of libraries” and prisoners could use it. Some studied foreign languages. And after lunch, time was allotted for "lectures", everyone had the opportunity to tell something interesting to others.
Shalamov was sentenced to three years, which he spent in the Northern Urals. He later said: “Our car was sometimes unhooked, then hitched to trains going either to the north or to the northeast. We were in Vologda - my father and my mother lived there twenty minutes walk. I didn't dare leave the note. The train went south again, then to Kotlas, to Perm. It was clear to the experienced - we were going to the 4th department of USLON on Vishera. End railway track- Solikamsk. It was March, Ural March. In 1929, there was only one camp in the Soviet Union - SLON - the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps. We were taken to the 4th department of the ELEPHANT on Vishera. In the camp of 1929 there were a lot of "products", a lot of "sucking", a lot of positions that a good owner did not need at all. But the camp of that time was not a good host. Work was not asked at all, only a way out was asked, and it was for this way out that the prisoners received their rations. It was believed that more could not be asked of a prisoner. There were no offsets for working days, but every year, following the example of the Solovetsky "unloading", lists were submitted for release by the camp authorities themselves, depending on the political wind that blew that year - either the killers were released, then the White Guards, then the Chinese. These lists were considered by the Moscow commission. On Solovki, from year to year, such a commission was headed by Ivan Gavrilovich Filippov, a member of the NKVD collegium, a former Putilov turner. There is such documentary"Solovki". In it, Ivan Gavrilovich is filmed in his most famous role: the chairman of the unloading commission. Subsequently, Filippov was the head of the camp on Vishera, then on Kolyma, and died in Magadan prison ... The lists reviewed and prepared by the visiting commission were taken to Moscow, and she claimed or did not claim, sending an answer after a few months. "Unloading" was the only way to get early release at the time."
In 1931 he was released and reinstated.
Shalamov Varlam Shalamov 5
Until 1932, he worked on the construction of a chemical plant in the city of Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937, he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, For Industrial Personnel. In 1936, his first publication took place - the story "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino" was published in the magazine "October".
On June 29, 1934, Shalamov married G.I. Gudz. April 13, 1935 their daughter Elena is born.
On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was re-arrested "for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years in camps with heavy physical labor. Shalamov was already in the pre-trial detention center when his story "The Pava and the Tree" was published in the journal Literaturny Sovremennik. The next publication of Shalamov (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place twenty years later - in 1957.
Shalamov said: “In 1937, in Moscow, during the second arrest and investigation, at the very first interrogation of the probationary investigator Romanov, my profile was embarrassing. I had to call some colonel, who explained to the young investigator that “then, in the twenties, they gave it like that, don’t be embarrassed,” and, turning to me:
What exactly are you arrested for?
- For the printing of Lenin's will.
- Exactly. So write in the protocol and put it in the memorandum: “I printed and distributed a fake known as the Testament of Lenin.”
The conditions in which the prisoners were in Kolyma were designed for quick physical destruction. Shalamov worked in the faces of a gold mine in Magadan, fell ill with typhus, got into earthworks, in 1940–1942 he worked in a coal face, in 1942–1943 at a penal mine in Dzhelgala. In 1943, Shalamov received a new 10-year sentence "for anti-Soviet agitation", calling Bunin a Russian classic. He ended up in a punishment cell, after which he miraculously survived, worked in a mine and as a lumberjack, tried to escape, after which he ended up in the penalty area. His life often hung in the balance, but he was helped by people who treated him well. Boris Lesnyak, also a convict, who worked as a paramedic in the Belichya hospital of the Northern Mining Administration, and Nina Savoyeva, the head doctor of the same hospital, which the patients called Black Mom, became such for him.
Here, in Belichya, Shalamov ended up as a goner in 1943. His condition, according to Savoyeva, was deplorable. As a man of large build, he always had a particularly difficult time on more than meager camp rations. And who knows, Kolyma Tales would have been written if their future author had not been in the hospital of Nina Vladimirovna.
In the mid-1940s, Savoyeva and Lesnyak helped Shalamov stay as a cult trader at the hospital. Shalamov remained at the hospital as long as his friends were there. After they left her and Shalamov was again threatened with hard labor, where he would hardly have survived, in 1946 the doctor Andrey Pantyukhov saved Shalamov from the stage and helped him get a paramedic course at the Central Hospital for Prisoners. Upon completion of the courses, Shalamov worked in the surgical department of this hospital and as a paramedic in the village of lumberjacks.
In 1949, Shalamov began to write down poems that made up the collection Kolyma Notebooks (1937–1956). The collection consisted of 6 sections, entitled Shalamov "Blue Notebook", "Postman's Bag", "Personally and Confidentially", "Golden Mountains", "Fireweed", "High Latitudes".
I swear to death
take revenge on these vile bitches.
Whose vile science I have fully comprehended.
I will wash my hands with the blood of the enemy,
When that blessed moment comes.
Publicly, in Slavonic
I'll drink from the skull
From an enemy skull
as did Svyatoslav.
Arrange this feast
in the former Slavic taste
More expensive than all the afterlife,
any posthumous glory.
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp as having served time, but for another two years he was forbidden to leave Kolyma, and he worked as a paramedic of the camp and left only in 1953. His family had broken up by then. adult daughter did not know his father, his health was undermined by the camps, and he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent at peat extraction in the village of Turkmen, Kalinin region.
In 1952, Shalamov sent his poems to Boris Pasternak, who gave them high marks. In 1954, Shalamov began work on the stories that made up the collection Kolyma Tales (1954–1973). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of stories and essays - "Kolyma stories", "Left Bank", "Artist of a shovel", "Essays on the underworld", "Resurrection of a larch", "Glove, or KR-2".
All stories have a documentary basis, they contain the author - either under his own name, or called Andreev, Golubev, Krist. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it unacceptable to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but the inner world of the characters was created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means. The author spoke more than once about the confessional nature of " Kolyma stories". He called his narrative style "new prose", emphasizing that "it is important for him to resurrect the feeling, extraordinary new details are needed, descriptions in a new way to make believe in the story, in everything else not as information, but as an open heart wound.” The camp world appears in Kolyma Tales as an irrational world.
In 1956, Shalamov was rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti, moved to Moscow and married Olga Neklyudova. In 1957, he became a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, at the same time his poems were published. At the same time, he became seriously ill and became disabled. In 1961, a book of his poems "Flint" was published. The last decade of life, especially the most last years were not easy and cloudless for the writer. Shalamov had an organic lesion of the central nervous system, which predetermined the non-regulatory activity of the limbs. He needed treatment - neurological, and he was threatened with psychiatric.
On February 23, 1972, in Literaturnaya Gazeta, where international information gets in the way, a letter was published by Varlam Shalamov, in which he protested against the appearance of his Kolyma Tales abroad. Philosopher Y. Schreider, who met with Shalamov a few days after the letter appeared, recalls that the writer himself treated this publication as a clever trick: it seemed like he tricked everyone, deceived his superiors, and thereby was able to protect himself. "Do you think it's that easy to speak in a newspaper?" - he asked either really sincerely, or checking the impression of the interlocutor.
This letter was perceived in intellectual circles as a renunciation. The image of the inflexible author of the Kolyma Tales that were on the lists was crumbling. Shalamov was not afraid to lose his leading position - he had never had such a thing; he was not afraid of losing his income - he managed with a small pension and infrequent fees. But to say that he had nothing to lose - does not turn the tongue.
Any person always has something to lose, and in 1972 Shalamov turned sixty-five. He was a sick, rapidly aging man who had been robbed of the best years of his life. Shalamov wanted to live and create. He wanted, dreamed that his stories, paid for with his own blood, pain, flour, would be published in home country who has endured and suffered so much.
In 1966, the writer divorced Neklyudova. Many thought he was already dead.
And Shalamov walked around Moscow in the 70s - he was met on Tverskaya, where he sometimes went out for food from his closet. His appearance was terrible, he staggered like a drunk, he fell. The police were on the alert, Shalamov was raised, and he, who did not take a single gram of alcohol in his mouth, took out a certificate of his illness - Meniere's disease, which worsened after the camps and was associated with impaired coordination of movements. Shalamov began to lose his hearing and vision
In May 1979, Shalamov was placed in a nursing home on Vilis Latsis Street in Tushino. His official pajamas made him look very much like a prisoner. Judging by the stories of people who visited him, he again felt like a prisoner. He took the home for the disabled as a prison. Like forced isolation. He didn't want to interact with the staff. He tore off the linen from the bed, slept on a bare mattress, tied a towel around his neck as if it could be stolen from him, rolled up the blanket and leaned on it with his hand. But Shalamov was not insane, although he could probably make such an impression. Doctor D.F. Lavrov, a psychiatrist, recalls that he was going to Shalamov's nursing home, to which he was invited by the literary critic A. Morozov, who was visiting the writer.
Lavrov was struck not by the state of Shalamov, but by his position - the conditions in which the writer was. As for the condition, there were speech, motor disorders, a severe neurological disease, but he did not find dementia, which alone could give a reason for moving a person to a boarding school for psychochronics, in Shalamov. He was finally convinced of such a diagnosis by the fact that Shalamov - in his presence, right before his eyes - dictated two of his new poems to Morozov. His intellect and memory were intact. He composed poetry, memorized it - and then A. Morozov and I. Sirotinskaya wrote it down after him, in the full sense they took it from his lips. It was not an easy job Shalamov repeated a word several times in order to be understood correctly, but in the end the text formed. He asked Morozov to make a selection from the recorded poems, gave it the name "Unknown Soldier" and expressed the wish that it be taken to magazines. Morozov went and offered. To no avail.
The poems were published abroad in the Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement with Morozov's note on Shalamov's situation. The goal was one - to attract the attention of the public to help find a way out. The goal was achieved in a sense, but the effect was the opposite. After this publication, foreign radio stations started talking about Shalamov. Such attention to the author of Kolyma Tales, a large volume of which was published in Russian in 1978 in London, began to disturb the authorities, and the corresponding department began to take an interest in Shalamov's visitors.
Meanwhile, the writer suffered a stroke. In early September 1981, a commission met to decide whether the writer could continue to be kept in a nursing home. After a short meeting in the director's office, the commission went up to Shalamov's room. Elena Khinkis, who was present there, says that he did not answer questions - most likely he simply ignored it, as he could do it. But the diagnosis was made to him - exactly the one that Shalamov's friends feared: senile dementia. In other words, dementia. Friends who visited Shalamov tried to play it safe: the medical staff were left with phone numbers. New, 1982, A. Morozov met in a nursing home together with Shalamov. At the same time, the last photograph of the writer was taken. On January 14, eyewitnesses said that when Shalamov was being transported, there was a scream. He still tried to resist. He was rolled out in an armchair, half-dressed loaded into a cold car and through all the snowy, frosty, January Moscow - a long way lay from Tushino to Medvedkovo - sent to a boarding school for psychochronics No. 32.
Memories of the last days of Varlam Tikhonovich were left by Elena Zakharova: “.. We approached Shalamov. He was dying. It was obvious, but still I took out a phonendoscope. V.T. died of pneumonia, developed heart failure. I think that everything was simple - stress and hypothermia. He lived in prison, they came for him. And they drove through the whole city, in winter, he didn’t have outerwear, because he couldn’t go out into the street. So, most likely, they threw a blanket over their pajamas. He probably tried to fight, threw off the blanket. I knew very well what the temperature was in the rafiks working on transportation, I myself traveled for several years, working on an ambulance.
On January 17, 1982, Varlam Shalamov died of lobar pneumonia. It was decided not to organize a civil memorial service in the Writers' Union, which turned away from Shalamov, but to sing him, as the son of a priest, according to the Orthodox rite in the church.
The writer was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery, not far from the grave of Nadezhda Mandelstam, in whose house he often visited in the 60s. There were many who came to say goodbye.
In June 2000, in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, a monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown persons tore off and carried away the bronze head of the writer, leaving a lone granite pedestal. Thanks to the help of fellow metallurgists of JSC "Severstal" in 2001, the monument was restored.
A documentary film was made about Varlam Shalamov.
Andrey Goncharov //
The biography of Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich, a Russian Soviet writer, begins on June 18 (July 1), 1907. He comes from Vologda, from the family of a priest. Remembering his parents, his childhood and youth, he subsequently wrote the autobiographical prose The Fourth Vologda (1971). Varlam began his studies in 1914 at the gymnasium. Then he studied at the Vologda school of the 2nd stage, which he graduated in 1923. Having left Vologda in 1924, he became an employee of a tannery in the city of Kuntsevo, in the Moscow region. He worked as a tanner. Since 1926 - student of the Moscow State University, faculty of Soviet law.
During this period, Shalamov wrote poems, took part in the work of various literary circles, was a student of O. Brik’s literary seminar, participated in disputes and various literary evenings led an active social life. He was associated with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, took part in the opposition demonstration under the slogan "Down with Stalin!", timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of October, which led to his arrest on February 19, 1929. Subsequently, in his autobiographical prose entitled "The Vishera Anti-Roman," he will write that this very moment he considers the beginning of his social life and the first real test.
Shalamov was sentenced to three years. He served his term in the Vishera camp in the northern Urals. He was released and reinstated in 1931. Until 1932, he helped build a chemical plant in Berezniki, after which he returned to the capital. Until 1937, as a journalist, he worked in such magazines as "For Industrial Personnel", "For Mastering Technology", "For Shock Work". In 1936, the magazine "October" published his story under the title "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino".
On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was again arrested for counter-revolutionary activities and received a 5-year sentence. He served his sentence in camps where they used physical work. When he was already in the pre-trial detention center, the magazine "Literary Contemporary" published his story "The Pava and the Tree." The next time it was published in 1957 - the Znamya magazine published his poems.
Shalamov was sent to work in the faces of the Magadan gold mine. Then he received another term and was transferred to earthworks. From 1940 to 1942, his place of work was a coal face, and from 1942 to 1943, a penal mine in Jelgale. "For anti-Soviet agitation" in 1943 he was again convicted, already for 10 years. He worked as a miner and lumberjack, after an unsuccessful escape attempt he ended up in the penalty area.
Doctor A.M. Pantyukhov actually saved Shalamov's life by sending him to study at paramedic courses opened at the hospital for prisoners. After graduating, Shalamov became an employee of the surgical department of the same hospital, and later a paramedic in a lumberjack settlement. Since 1949, he has been writing poetry, which will then be included in the collection Kolyma Notebooks (1937-1956). The collection will include 6 sections.
In his poems, this Russian writer and poet saw himself as the “plenipotentiary representative” of the prisoners. His poetic work “A Toast for the Ayan-Uryakh River” became a kind of anthem for them. In his work, Varlam Tikhonovich sought to show how strong-willed a person can be, who, even in camp conditions, is able to love and remain faithful, able to think about art and history, about good and evil. Important poetic image used by Shalamov - elfin, a Kolyma plant that survives in a harsh climate. A cross-cutting theme of his poems is the relationship between man and nature. In addition, biblical motifs are visible in Shalamov's poetry. The author called the poem “Abvakum in Pustozersk” one of his main works, since it combined historical image, landscape and features of the author's biography.
Shalamov was released in 1951, but for another two years he did not have the right to leave Kolyma. All this time he worked as a paramedic in the camp medical center and was able to leave only in 1953. Without a family, with poor health and not having the right to live in Moscow - this is how Shalamov left Kolyma. He was able to find work in Turkmen of the Kalinin region in peat extraction as a supply agent.
Since 1954, he worked on stories, which were then included in the collection "Kolyma stories" (1954-1973) - the main work of the author's life. It consists of six collections of essays and stories - "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Artist of the Shovel", "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch", "Glove, or KR-2". All stories have a documentary basis, and each author is present personally, or under the names of Golubev, Andreev, Krist. However, these works cannot be called camp memoirs. According to Shalamov, when describing the living environment in which the action takes place, it is unacceptable to deviate from the facts. However, to create inner peace he used heroes not documentaries, but artistic means. The style of the writer chose emphatically antipathetic. There is a tragedy in Shalamov's prose, despite the fact that there are a few satirical images.
According to the author, there is also a confessional character in the Kolyma stories. He gave the name "new prose" to his narrative style. In the Kolyma stories, the camp world appears irrational.
Varlam Tikhonovich denied the need for suffering. He was convinced from his own experience that the abyss of suffering does not cleanse, but corrupts human souls. Corresponding with AI Solzhenitsyn, he wrote that the camp is a negative school for anyone, from the first to the last day.
In 1956, Shalamov waited for rehabilitation and was able to move to Moscow. The following year, he was already working as a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine. In 1957, his poems were published, and in 1961 a book of his poems called "The Flint" was published.
Since 1979, due to a serious condition (loss of sight and hearing, difficulty in independent movement), he was forced to settle in a boarding house for the disabled and the elderly.
Books of poems by the author Shalamov were published in the USSR in 1972 and 1977. The collection "Kolyma Tales" was published abroad in Russian in London in 1978, in French in Paris in 1980-1982, on English language in New York in 1981-1982. These publications brought Shalamov worldwide fame. In 1980 he received the Liberty Prize from the French branch of PEN.
We draw your attention to the fact that the biography of Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich presents the most basic moments from life. Some minor life events may be omitted from this biography.
