STRUCTURE OF “KOLYMA STORIES” The writer divided his stories into six cycles: “Kolyma Stories”, “Left Bank”, “The Shovel Artist”, “Sketches of the Underworld”, “Resurrection of Larch” and “The Glove, or KR-2”.
FEATURES OF “KOLYMA STORIES” The stories reflect the spiritual experience of the writer, the author’s individual artistic thinking, which has features of both existential and mythological consciousness.
Central problem. Main motives. The central problem is the problem of the destruction of personality in the camp and the possibility of a person’s spiritual rebirth. Main motives: motive of the absurd world, motive of loneliness, motive of doom, motive of resurrection.
One of the most important means of creating an artistic model of the world in “ Kolyma stories"V. T. Shalamov are natural-cosmic mythologemes (earth, water, fire, air), thanks to which the work combines elements of ancient archaic thinking and individual author's myth-making.
What is common in the theme of state unfreedom in L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn, S. D. Dovlatov, V. T. Shalamov 1. Particular attention is paid to the description of the work and life of prisoners, the influence of difficult conditions is explored life on a person’s personality. 2. One subject of the image (prison, camp, hard labor). 3. Specific typology of characters (prisoners, authorities, guards, etc.) 4. Description of almost the same real space (barracks, barbed wire, guard towers, lanterns, etc.).
Shalamov depicted in his works the harshest camps - the Kolyma camps, in which it was almost impossible for prisoners to survive.
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW In Solzhenitsyn, the camp world did not so much destroy as it tested a person, and the trials there could also become the reason for his spiritual development. In Shalamov’s work, the camp appears as a “school of evil,” in which everything is aimed at destroying the individual: every day there poses a real threat to life. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov paid special attention to the most tragic moments of people’s lives in the camp, creating a world of “other existence.”
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In “Kolyma Stories,” unlike Dovlatov’s “Zone,” life in the camp was assessed from the point of view of the prisoner, and not the guard. But Shalamov and Dovlatov agreed that the difficult living conditions in the camp contributed not only to the physical, but also to the moral degradation of a person.
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) For Solzhenitsyn and Dovlatov, the main source of “evil” is Soviet power. For Shalamov, the source of “evil” is not only Soviet power, but also the system of violence against people in general and the power that legitimized this violence. According to Shalamov, violence has been characteristic of man at all times to a greater or lesser extent, therefore “the executions of 1937 could happen again.”
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The world is historical, history is eternal, therefore: it is no coincidence that Shalamov compares life in the camp with Egyptian slavery (“Engineer Kiselyov”), with the reign of Ivan the Terrible (“Lyosha Chekanov, or Fellow Dealers in Kolyma”). One of the important theses of the writer: the camp is “world-like”, the camp is a “model of the world”.
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Shalamov refuses detailed characteristics of characters, descriptions of their portraits, verbose monologues, significant descriptions of nature, etc. However, in each Shalamov's text there are always several artistic details “hidden” in the text or, conversely, allocated close up, carrying an increased semantic load, giving the story deep philosophical overtones and psychologism (“Napredstavku”, “Condensed Milk”, “The First Chekist”, etc.).
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The absurdity of the camp world is shown in both Solzhenitsyn and Dovlatov. A significant difference is observed in the attitude towards the absurdity of the main characters of these works: in Shalamov and Dovlatov, the absurdity of the camp world is felt by an educated, thinking person who is able to understand the hostility of the camp system; in Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” the main character is a peasant who “has gotten along” with the camp world, studied its laws and even justifies some of them. It should be noted that Solzhenitsyn deliberately distances himself from his character. He, like the reader, is amazed that a person can adapt to the world of the Gulag. Dovlatovsky Boris Alikhanov appears as an “outsider” who cannot accept the world around him, and evaluates all the events that happen to him in the camp from the outside, as if they were happening to someone else.
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In “Kolyma Stories”, two types of absurdist people are mainly presented: “rebellious” heroes (“The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”, “Silence”, “Tombstone”, etc.) and characters who do not have physical and moral strength to resist absurdity (“At Night”, “Vaska Denisov, the Pig Thief”, etc.). The main characters of “Kolyma Stories” - representatives of the intelligentsia - try to overcome the absurdity and chaos of what is happening and contrast them with “another” space, where the categories of “memory” and “creativity” are fundamental.
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Shalamov constantly models life situations in which the inner world of the characters is fully revealed: a state of loneliness, doom, awareness of imminent death. In existential literature such situations are called “borderline”. The situation of loneliness and doom modeled by Shalamov characterizes a person’s position in the world and is ontological in nature: a person is left alone with the world, cannot find support either in God or in “another” (“Bread”, “Seraphim”, etc.) , although paradoxically, loneliness can become a condition for self-knowledge and creativity (“Trail”, “Across the Snow”, etc.).
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Peculiarities of behavior of doomed people in the camp: - shock from the discrepancy between reality, as it should be, and the reality in which a person finds himself (“Single measurement”), - concentration of attention on small everyday concerns to distract from the worst (“Rain”), -inability to commit suicide (“Two Meetings”), -fatalism (“Tombstone”, “Green Prosecutor”).
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The motif of doom is emphasized by allusions to the plot of a journey to the afterlife, the analogue of which is the camp. Images of Kolyma nature play a large role in revealing the motives of doom and loneliness. Nature in “Kolyma Tales” can be hostile, “alien” to man (“Carpenters”) or “understanding,” emphasizing his spiritual communication with the world (“Kant”).
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The sign of world culture - the Word - in “Kolyma Tales” is a symbol of revival (“Sentence”, “Athens Nights”, etc.). Shalamov’s parables (“The Path”, “Across the Snow”) describe the artist’s creative path in an allegorical form. The main idea in them is that a creative gift is a great responsibility, because every artist must pave his own “path” in creativity.
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The image of the taiga tree has a positive connotation, acquiring the features of the World Tree. In mythology, the image of the World Tree is simultaneously associated with life and death, while the concept of death has a positive connotation, since it includes the idea of rebirth. In Shalamov, the archetypal meanings of the World Tree are reflected in the images of Larch and Elfin Tree. In Shalamov’s story “Graphite,” Larch becomes a symbol of sacrifice - “Virgin Mary of Kolyma,” “Virgin Mary of Kolyma,” whose “wounded” body “exudes” juice.
ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Taiga trees are associated with the motif of resurrection, rebirth, and preservation of the human in man. In this regard, they are also the embodiment of the mythology of Mother Earth as a symbol of fertility and rebirth. In the story “The Resurrection of the Larch,” where a broken, “dead” tree branch, which has made a long journey from Kolyma to Moscow, suddenly comes to life not due to the fact that it was warm and was placed in water, especially since the water in Moscow is “evil” , chlorinated”, “dead”, but because in the branch “other, secret forces have been awakened”. She is resurrected, obeying human “strength and faith”: placed in a jar of water on the anniversary of the death of the mistress’s husband, she resurrects “the memory of the dead.”
THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In this story, Shalamov uses a mythological plot about a dying and resurrecting god-man, who is his poet. The writer is convinced that there is only “one kind of immortality - art,” which is why the deceased poet appears in his story, whose memory is kept by his wife. There is a echo here of famous mythological stories, in which the main idea of the Tree of Life is connected with vitality and immortality.
I make way for the flowers... I make way for the flowers that follow me on my heels, overtake me in any land, in hell or in heaven. Let flowers protect me From the vicissitudes of every day. Like a thin vegetation cover, Consisting of mosses and flowers, Like a thin vegetation cover, I am ready to take responsibility for the earth. And a shield decorated with flowers is more reliable to me than any protection in the bright kingdom of plants, where I am also someone’s squad and family. In the fields near the flowers of the field I left my verse.
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Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus
Educational institution
"Gomel State University
named after Francysk Skaryna"
Faculty of Philology
Department of Russian and World Literature
Coursework
MORAL ISSUES
“KOLYMA STORIES” by V.T.SHALAMOVA
Executor
student of group RF-22 A.N. Solution
Scientific supervisor
senior teacher I.B. Azarova
Gomel 2016
Key words: anti-world, antithesis, archipelago, fiction, memories, ascent, Gulag, humanity, detail, documentary, prisoner, concentration camp, inhuman conditions, descent, morality, inhabitants, images-symbols, chronotope.
The object of research in this course work is a cycle of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.
As a result of the study, it was concluded that “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov was written on an autobiographical basis, raises moral questions of time, choice, duty, honor, nobility, friendship and love and is a significant event in camp prose.
The scientific novelty of this work lies in the fact that “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov is considered on the basis of the writer’s documentary experience. The stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov are systematized according to moral issues, according to the system of images and historiography, etc.
As for the scope of application of this course work, it can be used not only for writing other coursework and dissertations, but also in preparation for practical and seminar classes.
Introduction
1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary in the works of V.T. Shalamova
2.2 The rise of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
3. Figurative concepts of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Conclusion
List of sources used
Application
Introduction
Readers met Shalamov the poet in the late 50s. And the meeting with Shalamov the prose writer took place only in the late 80s. To talk about the prose of Varlam Shalamov means to talk about artistic and philosophical sense non-existence, about death as the compositional basis of the work. It would seem that there is something new: even before, before Shalamov, death, its threat, expectation and approach were often the main driving force of the plot, and the fact of death itself served as the denouement... But in “Kolyma Tales” it is different. No threats, no waiting. Here death, non-existence is the artistic world in which the plot usually unfolds. The fact of death precedes the beginning of the plot.
By the end of 1989, about a hundred stories about Kolyma had been published. Now everyone reads Shalamov - from students to prime ministers. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose seems to be dissolved in a huge wave of documentaries - memories, notes, diaries about the era of Stalinism. In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Tales” became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of an original aesthetics based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world.
Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. V.T. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox and symbolism.
The camp theme is growing into a large and very important phenomenon, within the framework of which writers strive to fully comprehend the terrible experience of Stalinism and at the same time not forget that behind the dark curtain of decades it is necessary to discern a person.
True poetry, according to Shalamov, is original poetry, where each line is provided by the talent of a lonely soul that has suffered a lot. She is waiting for her reader.
In the prose of V.T. Shalamov, not only the Kolyma camps are depicted, fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which free people live, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where those living in it are doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.
There is a large amount of literature dedicated to V.T. Shalamov and his work. The subject of research of this course work is the moral issues of “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, therefore the main source of information is the monograph by N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky (“In a blizzard freezing age”: About “Kolyma Stories”), which tells about the established way of life, about the order, scale of values and social hierarchy of the country “Kolyma”, and also shows the symbolism that the author finds in the everyday realities of prison life. Particular importance was attached to various articles in magazines. Researcher M. Mikheev (“On the “new” prose of Varlam Shalamov”) in his work showed that every detail in Shalamov, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and high, naturalistically rough and spiritual, and also described the laws of time, which are taken beyond the natural course. I. Nichiporov (“Prose, suffered as a document: V. Shalamov’s Kolyma epic”) expresses his opinion on the documentary basis of stories about Kolyma, using the works of V. T. Shalamov himself. But G. Nefagina (“The Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants”) in her work pays attention to the spiritual and psychological side of the stories, showing the choice of a person in unnatural conditions. Researcher E. Shklovsky (“About Varlam Shalamov”) examines the denial of traditional fiction in “Kolyma Tales” in the author’s desire to achieve something unattainable, to explore the material from the point of view of the biography of V.T. Shalamov. Great assistance in writing this course work was also provided by the scientific publications of L. Timofeev (“Poetics of camp prose”), in which the researcher compares the stories of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko to identify similarities and differences in the poetics of camp prose from various authors of the 20th century; and E. Volkova (“Varlam Shalamov: The Duel of the Word with the Absurd”), who drew attention to the phobias and feelings of prisoners in the story “Sentence.”
When revealing the theoretical part of the course project, various information from history was drawn upon, and considerable attention was also paid to information gleaned from various encyclopedias and dictionaries (dictionary by S.I. Ozhegov, “Literary encyclopedic dictionary"edited by V.M. Kozhevnikova).
The topic of this course work is relevant because it is always interesting to return to that era, which shows the events of Stalinism, the problems of human relationships and the psychology of an individual in concentration camps, in order to prevent the repetition of the terrible stories of those years. This work takes on particular urgency in the present time, in an era of people’s lack of spirituality, misunderstanding, disinterest, indifference to each other, and unwillingness to come to the aid of a person. The same problems remain in the world as in Shalamov’s works: the same heartlessness towards each other, sometimes hatred, spiritual hunger, etc.
The novelty of the work is that the gallery of images is systematized, moral issues are identified and the historiography of the issue is presented. The consideration of stories on a documentary basis gives a special uniqueness.
This course project aims to study the originality of V.T. Shalamov’s prose using the example of “Kolyma Tales”, to reveal the ideological content and artistic features of V.T. Shalamov’s stories, and also to expose acute moral problems in concentration camps in his works.
The object of research in the work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.
Some individual stories were also subjected to literary criticism.
The objectives of this course project are:
1) study of the historiography of the issue;
2) research of literary critical materials about the creativity and fate of the writer;
3) consideration of the features of the categories “space” and “time” in Shalamov’s stories about Kolyma;
4) identifying the specifics of the implementation of images-symbols in “Kolyma Stories”;
When writing the work, comparative historical and systematic methods were used.
The course work has the following architecture: introduction, main part, conclusion and list of sources used, appendix.
The introduction outlines the relevance of the problem, historiography, discusses discussions on this topic, defines the goals, object, subject, novelty and objectives of the course work.
The main part consists of 3 sections. The first section examines the documentary basis of the stories, as well as the denial of traditional fiction by V.T. Shalamov in “Kolyma Stories”. The second section examines the Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants: a definition of the term “country of Kolyma” is given, the low and high in the stories are considered, and a parallel is drawn with other authors who created camp prose. The third section studies figurative concepts in “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, namely the antitheses of image-symbols, the religious and psychological side of the stories.
The conclusion summarizes the work done on the stated topic.
The list of sources used contains the literature on which the author of the course project relied in his work.
1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary
in the works of V.T. Shalamova
In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Stories” (1954 - 1982) by V.T. Shalamov became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of original aesthetics, based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world, opening the way to a generalizing comprehension of man in inhuman circumstances, to the awareness of the camp as a model of historical, social existence, and the world order as a whole. Shalamov informs readers: “The camp is world-like. There is nothing in it that would not exist in the wild, in its structure, social and spiritual.” The fundamental postulates of the aesthetics of artistic documentaryism are formulated by Shalamov in the essay “On Prose,” which serves as the key to the interpretation of his stories. The starting point here is the judgment that in the modern literary situation “the need for the art of the writer has been preserved, but trust in fiction has been undermined.” The Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following definition of fiction. Fiction - (from the French belles lettres - elegant literature) fiction. The willfulness of creative fiction must give way to a memoir, a documentary in its essence, recreation of the artist’s personal experience, for “today’s reader argues only with the document and is convinced only by the document.” Shalamov substantiates the idea of “literature of fact” in a new way, believing that “it is necessary and possible to write a story that is indistinguishable from a document,” which will become a living “document about the author,” “a document of the soul” and will present the writer “not as an observer, not as a spectator, but a participant in the drama of life."
Here is Shalamov’s famous programmatic opposition to 1) a report of events and 2) their description - 3) the events themselves. This is how the author himself speaks about his prose: “New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description. That is, a document, the direct participation of the author in life events. Prose experienced as a document." Judging by this and the previously quoted statements, Shalamov’s understanding of the document itself, of course, was not entirely traditional. Rather, it is some kind of volitional act or action. In the essay “On Prose,” Shalamov informs his reader: “When people ask me what I write, I answer: I don’t write memoirs. There are no memories 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 the prose labored through as a document.”
Here are more fragments reflecting Shalamov’s original, but very paradoxical views on “new prose”, with the denial of traditional fiction - in an effort to achieve something seemingly unattainable.
The writer’s desire to “explore his material with his own skin” leads to the establishment of his special aesthetic relationship with the reader, who will believe in the story “not as information, but as an open heart wound.” Approaching the definition of his own creative experience, Shalamov emphasizes the intention to create “something that would not be literature,” since his “Kolyma Stories” “offers new prose, the prose of living life, which at the same time is a transformed reality, a transformed document.” In the “prose that the writer seeks, labored through as a document,” there is no room left for descriptiveness in the spirit of Tolstoy’s “writing commandments.” Here the need for capacious symbolization, intensely affecting the reader’s detailing, increases, and “details that do not contain a symbol seem superfluous in the artistic fabric of the new prose.” At the level of creative practice, the identified principles of artistic writing receive multifaceted expression from Shalamov. The integration of document and image takes on various forms and has a complex impact on the poetics of “Kolyma Tales”. Shalamov’s method of in-depth knowledge of camp life and the psychology of a prisoner is sometimes the introduction of a private human document into the discursive space.
In the story “Dry Rations”, the narrator’s intense psychological observations about the “great indifference” that “possessed us”, about how “only anger was housed in an insignificant muscular layer ...”, turn into a portrait of Fedya Shchapov - the “Altai teenager”, “ the widow’s only son,” who was “tried for illegal slaughter of livestock.” His contradictory position as a “goneer”, who, however, retains a “healthy peasant beginning” and is alien to the general camp fatalism, is concentratedly revealed in the final psychological touch to the incomprehensible paradoxes of camp life and consciousness. This is a compositionally isolated fragment of a human document, snatched from the stream of oblivion, which captures - more clearly than any external characteristics - a desperate attempt at physical and moral stability: “Mom,” Fedya wrote, “Mom, I live well. Mom, I’m dressed for the season...” As Shklovsky E.A. believes: “Shalamov’s story sometimes appears as an invariant of the writer’s manifesto, becoming “documentary” evidence of the hidden facets of the creative process.”
In the story “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova”, noteworthy is the flashing auto-commentary that in “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” “every letter is documented.” In the story “The Tie” there is a scrupulous recreation life paths Marusya Kryukova, who was arrested upon returning from Japanese emigration, who was broken by the camp and capitulated to the regime of the artist Shukhaev, commenting on the slogan “Work is a matter of honor…” posted on the gates of the camp - allows us to present the biography of the characters, Shukhaev’s creative output, and the many different signs of the camp as components holistic documentary discourse. Shklovsky E.A. states: “The core of this multi-level human document becomes the author’s creative self-reflection, implanted into the narrative series, about his search for “a special kind of truth,” about the desire to make this story “a thing of prose of the future,” about the fact that future writers are not writers, but truly “people of the profession” who know their environment will “tell only about what they know and have seen. Authenticity is the strength of the literature of the future."
The author’s references to his own experience throughout Kolyma prose emphasize his role not just as an artist, but as a documentary witness. In the story “Lepers,” these signs of direct authorial presence perform an expositional function in relation to both the main action and individual links in the event series: “Immediately after the war, another drama was played before my eyes in the hospital”; “I also walked in this group, slightly bent over, along the high basement of the hospital...”. The author sometimes appears in “Kolyma Tales” as a “witness” of the historical process, its bizarre and tragic turns. The story “The Best Praise” is based on a historical excursion, in which the origins and motivations of Russian revolutionary terror are artistically comprehended, portraits of revolutionaries are drawn that “lived heroically and died heroically.” The vivid impressions of the narrator’s communication with his acquaintance from Butyrskaya prison, Alexander Andreev, a former Socialist-Revolutionary and general secretary of the society of political prisoners, turn in the final part into a strictly documentary recording of information about historical figure, her revolutionary and prison path - in the form of a “reference from the magazine “Katorga and exile”. Such an overlay reveals the mysterious depths of a documentary text about private human existence, revealing irrational twists of fate behind formalized biographical data.
In the story " Gold medal» significant layers are reconstructed through symbolically capacious fragments of St. Petersburg and Moscow “texts” historical memory. The fate of the revolutionary Natalya Klimova and her daughter, who went through Soviet camps, becomes the starting point in the artistic whole of the story. historical narrative about the trials of revolutionary terrorists at the beginning of the century, about their “sacrifice, self-denial to the point of namelessness,” their readiness to “seek the meaning of life passionately, selflessly.” The narrator acts here as a documentary researcher who “held in his hands” the verdict of the members of a secret revolutionary organization, noting in its text indicative “literary errors”, and personal letters from Natalya Klimova “after the bloody iron broom of the thirties.” Here there is a deep feeling for the very “matter” of a human document, where the features of handwriting and punctuation recreate the “manner of conversation” and indicate the vicissitudes of the relationship of the individual with the rhythms of history. The narrator comes to an aesthetic generalization about the story as a kind of material document, “a living, not yet dead thing that saw the hero,” for “writing a story is a search, and the smell of a scarf, a scarf, lost by the hero or heroine must enter into the vague consciousness of the brain.” .
In private documentary observations, the author’s historiosophical intuition crystallizes about how, in social upheavals, “the best people of the Russian revolution” were torn apart, as a result of which “there were no people left to lead Russia” and a “crack was formed along which time split - not only Russia , but a world where on one side is all the humanism of the nineteenth century, its sacrifice, its moral climate, its literature and art, and on the other - Hiroshima, the bloody war and concentration camps." The combination of the “documentary” biography of the hero with large-scale historical generalizations is also achieved in the story “The Green Prosecutor”. The “text” of the camp fate of Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshey, a non-party engineer, collector of antiques, convicted of embezzling government funds and managing to escape from Kolyma, leads the narrator to a “documentary” reconstruction of the history of Soviet camps from the point of view of those changes in attitude towards fugitives, in the prism of which are drawn internal transformations of the punitive system.
Sharing his experience of “literary” development of this topic (“in my early youth I had the opportunity to read about Kropotkin’s escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress”), the narrator establishes areas of inconsistency between literature and camp reality, creates his own “chronicle of escapes,” scrupulously tracing how by the end of the 30s x years “Kolyma was turned into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyists,” and if earlier “no sentence was given for escape,” then from now on “escape was punishable by three years.” Many stories of the Kolyma cycle are characterized by the special quality of Shalamov’s artistry observed in “The Green Prosecutor”, based primarily not on the modeling of fictional reality, but on figurative generalizations that grow on the basis of documentary observations, sketch narration about various fields prison life, specific social-hierarchical relationships among prisoners (“Combat Teams”, “Bathhouse”, etc.). The text of an official document in Shalamov’s story can act as a constructively significant element of the narrative. In “The Red Cross”, the prerequisite for artistic generalizations about camp life is the narrator’s appeal to the absurdist “large printed notices” on the walls of the barracks called “Rights and Responsibilities of a Prisoner,” where it is fatal “many responsibilities and few rights.” The prisoner’s “right” to medical care, declared by them, leads the narrator to think about the saving mission of medicine and the doctor as the “sole defender of the prisoner” in the camp. Relying on a “documented” recorded, personally suffered experience (“for many years I took stages in a large camp hospital”), the narrator recalls tragic stories the fate of the camp doctors and comes to generalizations, honed to the point of aphorisms, as if snatched from a diary, about the camp as “a negative school of life entirely and completely,” that “every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.” The story “Injector” is based on the reproduction of a small fragment of intra-camp official correspondence, where the author’s word is completely reduced, with the exception of a brief remark about the “clear handwriting” of the resolution imposed by the head of the mine on the report of the head of the site. The report on “poor performance of the injector” in the Kolyma frosts “over fifty degrees”” evokes an absurd, but at the same time formally rational and systemic resolution on the need to “transfer the case to the investigative authorities in order to bring the Injector to legal responsibility.” Through the suffocating network of official words placed in the service of repressive paperwork, one can see the fusion of the fantastic grotesque and reality, as well as the total violation of common sense, which allows the camp’s all-suppression to extend its influence even to the inanimate world of technology.
In Shalamov’s depiction, the relationship between a living person and an official document appears filled with dark collisions. In the story “Echo in the Mountains,” where a “documentary” reconstruction of the biography of the central character, clerk Mikhail Stepanov, takes place, it is on such collisions that the plot outline is tied. The profile of Stepanov, who was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party since 1905, his “thin matter in a green cover,” which contained information about how, when he was the commander of a detachment of armored trains, he released from custody Antonov, with whom he was once imprisoned in Shlisselburg, - make a decisive revolution in his subsequent “Solovetsky” fate. The milestones of history aggressively invade the individual biography here, giving rise to a vicious circle of destructive relationships between the individual and historical time. Man as a powerless hostage of an official document also appears in the story “The Birds of Onge.” The “typist’s mistake,” who “numbered” the prisoner’s criminal nickname (aka Berdy) as the name of another person, forces the authorities to declare the random Turkmen Toshaev a “fugitive” Onzhe Berdy and doom him to camp hopelessness, to being “listed in the group” for life “unaccounted persons” - persons imprisoned without documents." In this, according to the author’s definition, “an anecdote that has turned into a mystical symbol,” the position of the prisoner - the bearer of the notorious nickname - is noteworthy. “Having fun” with the game of prison paperwork, he concealed the identity of the nickname, since “everyone is happy about the embarrassment and panic in the ranks of the authorities.”
In “Kolyma Stories,” the sphere of everyday detail is often used as a means of documentary and artistic capturing of reality. In the story “Graphite”, through the title subject image, the entire picture of the world created here is symbolized, and the discovery of ontological depth in it is outlined. As the narrator records, for documents and tags for the deceased, “only a black pencil, simple graphite is allowed”; not a chemical pencil, but certainly graphite, “which can write down everything that he knew and saw.” Thus, wittingly or unwittingly, the camp system preserves itself for the subsequent judgment of history, for “graphite is nature”, “graphite is eternity”, “neither rain nor underground springs will wash away the personal file number”, and with the awakening of historical memory among the people the realization will also come that “all guests of the permafrost are immortal and are ready to return to us.” Bitter irony permeates the narrator’s words that “a tag on the leg is a sign of culture” - in the sense that “a tag with a personal file number stores not only the place of death, but also the secret of death. This number on the tag is written in graphite." Even the physical state of a former prisoner can become a “document” opposing unconsciousness, especially actualized when “the documents of our past are destroyed, the guard towers are cut down.” With pellagra, a common disease among camp inmates, the skin peels off the hand, forming a kind of “glove,” which more than eloquently acts, according to Shalamov, as “prose, accusation, protocol,” “a living exhibit for the museum of the history of the region.”
The author emphasizes that “if the artistic and historical consciousness of the 19th century. characterized by a tendency to “interpret an event”, “a thirst for an explanation of the inexplicable”, then in the half of the twentieth century the document would have supplanted everything. And they would only believe the document."
I saw everything: sand and snow,
Blizzard and heat.
What can a person endure...
I have experienced everything.
And the butt broke my bones,
Someone else's boot.
And I bet
That God will not help.
After all, God, God, why
Galley slave?
And nothing can help him,
He is exhausted and weak.
I lost my bet
Risking my head.
Today - whatever you say,
I am with you - and alive.
Thus, the synthesis of artistic thinking and documentary is the main “nerve” aesthetic system author of "Kolyma Tales". The weakening of artistic fiction opens up in Shalamov other original sources of figurative generalizations, based not on the construction of conventional spatio-temporal forms, but on empathizing with the contents of various kinds of private, official, historical documents truly preserved in the personal and national memory of camp life. Mikheev M.O. says that “the author appears in the “Kolyma” epic both as a sensitive documentary artist, and as a biased witness of history, convinced of the moral need to “remember all the good things for a hundred years, and all the bad things for two hundred years,” and as the creator of the original concept of a “new prose”, acquiring before the reader’s eyes the authenticity of a “transformed document”. That revolutionary “exit beyond literature” that Shalamov so strived for did not take place. But even without it, which is hardly feasible at all, without this breakthrough beyond what is permitted by nature itself, Shalamov’s prose certainly remains valuable for humanity, interesting for study - precisely as a unique fact of literature. His texts are unconditional evidence of the era:
Not indoor begonia
The trembling of a petal
And the trembling of human agony
I remember the hand.
And his prose is a document of literary innovation.
2. Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants
According to E.A. Shklovsky: “It is difficult to write about the work of Varlam Shalamov. It is difficult, first of all, because his tragic fate, which is largely reflected in the famous “Kolyma Stories” and many poems, seems to require commensurate experience. An experience that even your enemy will not regret." Almost twenty years of prison, camps, exile, loneliness and neglect in the last years of his life, a miserable nursing home and, in the end, death in a psychiatric hospital, where the writer was forcibly transported to soon die from pneumonia. In the person of V. Shalamov, in his gift as a great writer, a national tragedy is shown, which received its witness-martyr with his own soul and paid with blood for terrible knowledge.
Kolyma Stories is the first collection of stories by Varlam Shalamov, which reflects the life of Gulag prisoners. Gulag - the main directorate of the camps, as well as an extensive network of concentration camps during mass repressions. The collection was created from 1954 to 1962, after Shalamov returned from Kolyma. Kolyma stories are an artistic interpretation of everything Shalamov saw and experienced during the 13 years he spent in prison in Kolyma (1938-1951).
V.T. Shalamov formulated the problems of his work as follows: ““Kolyma Tales” is an attempt to raise and solve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. The ability to rely on forces other than hope."
As G.L. Nefagina wrote: “Realistic works about the Gulag system were devoted, as a rule, to the lives of political prisoners. They depicted camp horrors, torture, and abuse. But in such works (A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko) the victory of the human spirit over evil was demonstrated.”
Today it is becoming more and more obvious that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox, symbolism, a brilliant mastery of the word in its semantic, sound form, a subtle strategy of the master.
The Kolyma wound constantly bled, and while working on stories, Shalamov “screamed, threatened, cried” - and wiped away his tears only after the story was finished. But at the same time, he never tired of repeating that “the work of an artist is precisely the form,” working with words.
Shalamovskaya Kolyma is a set of island camps. It was Shalamov, as Timofeev claimed, who found this metaphor - “camp-island”. Already in the story “The Snake Charmer,” the prisoner Platonov, “a film scriptwriter in his first life,” speaks with bitter sarcasm about the sophistication of the human mind, which came up with “such things as our islands with all the improbability of their life.” And in the story “The Man from the Steamboat,” the camp doctor, a man of a sharp sardonic mind, expresses a secret dream to his listener: “...If only our islands - would you understand me? “Our islands have sunk through the ground.”
Islands, an archipelago of islands - this is the exact and highest degree expressive image. He “captured” the forced isolation and at the same time the connection by a single slave regime of all these prisons, camps, settlements, “business trips” that were part of the GULAG system. An archipelago is a group of sea islands located close to each other. But for Solzhenitsyn, “archipelago,” as Nefagina argued, is primarily a conventional term-metaphor denoting the object of research. For Shalamov, “our islands” are a huge holistic image. He is not subject to the narrator, he has epic self-development, he absorbs and subordinates everything, absolutely everything to his ominous whirlwind, his “plot” - the sky, snow, trees, faces, destinies, thoughts, executions...
There is nothing else that would be located outside of “our islands” in “Kolyma Tales”. That pre-camp, free life is called the “first life”; it ended, disappeared, melted, it no longer exists. And did she exist? The prisoners of “our islands” themselves think of it as a fabulous, unrealizable land that lies somewhere “beyond the blue seas, behind the high mountains,” as, for example, in “The Snake Charmer.” The camp swallowed up any other existence. He subjected everything and everyone to the ruthless dictates of his prison rules. Having grown limitlessly, it became an entire country. The concept of “the country of Kolyma” is directly stated in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “In this country of hopes, and therefore, the country of rumors, guesses, assumptions, hypotheses.”
A concentration camp that has replaced the entire country, a country turned into a huge archipelago of camps—this is the grotesque-monumental image of the world that is formed from the mosaic of “Kolyma Tales.” It is orderly and expedient in its own way, this world. This is what the prison camp looks like in the “Golden Taiga”: “The small zone is a transfer. A large zone - a mining administration camp - endless barracks, prison streets, a triple fence of barbed wire, winter-style guard towers that look like birdhouses.” And then it follows: “The architecture of the Small Zone is ideal.” It turns out that this is a whole city, built in full accordance with its purpose. And there is architecture here, and even one to which the highest aesthetic criteria are applicable. In a word, everything is as it should be, everything is “like with people.”
Brewer M. reports: “This is the space of the “country of Kolyma.” The laws of time also apply here. True, in contrast to the hidden sarcasm in the depiction of a seemingly normal and expedient camp space, camp time is openly taken outside the framework of the natural course, it is a strange, abnormal time.”
“Months in the Far North are considered years - so great is the experience, the human experience acquired there.” This generalization belongs to the impersonal narrator from the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev.” And here is the subjective, personal perception of time by one of the prisoners, the former doctor Glebov, in the story “At Night”: “The minute, the hour, the day from getting up to lights out was real - he didn’t guess further and didn’t find the strength to guess. Like everyone else."
In this space and in this time, the life of a prisoner passes for years. It has its own way of life, its own rules, its own scale of values, its own social hierarchy. Shalamov describes this way of life with the meticulousness of an ethnographer. Here are the details of everyday life: how, for example, a camp barracks are built (“a sparse fence in two rows, the gap is filled with pieces of frosty moss and peat”), how the stove in the barracks is heated, what a homemade camp lamp is like - a gasoline “kolyma” ... The social structure of the camp is also the subject of careful description. Two poles: “blatars”, they are also “friends of the people” - on one, and on the other – political prisoners, they are also “enemies of the people”. Union of thieves' laws and government regulations. The vile power of all these Fedechkas, Senechekas, served by a motley crew of “masks”, “crows”, “heel scratchers”. And no less merciless oppression of a whole pyramid of official bosses: foremen, accountants, supervisors, guards...
This is the established and established order of life on “our islands.” In a different regime, the GULAG would not be able to fulfill its function: to absorb millions of people, and in return “give out” gold and timber. But why do all these Shalamov “ethnographies” and “physiologies” evoke a feeling of apocalyptic horror? Just recently, one of the former Kolyma prisoners reassuringly said that “the winter there, in general, is a little colder than Leningrad” and that on Butugychag, for example, “mortality was actually insignificant,” and appropriate treatment and preventive measures were carried out to combat scurvy , like forced drinking of dwarf extract, etc.
And Shalamov has information about this extract and much more. But he does not write ethnographic essays about Kolyma, he creates the image of Kolyma as the embodiment of an entire country turned into a Gulag. The apparent outline is only the “first layer” of the image. Shalamov goes through “ethnography” to the spiritual essence of Kolyma; he looks for this essence in the aesthetic core of real facts and events.
In the anti-world of Kolyma, where everything is aimed at trampling and trampling the dignity of the prisoner, the liquidation of personality occurs. Among the “Kolyma Stories” there are those that describe the behavior of creatures that have descended to almost complete loss of human consciousness. Here is the short story “At Night”. Former doctor Glebov and his partner Bagretsov commit what, according to generally accepted moral standards, has always been considered extreme blasphemy: they tear up the grave, undress the corpse of their partner in order to then exchange his pathetic underwear for bread. This is already beyond the limit: the personality is no longer there, only a purely animal vital reflex remains.
However, in the anti-world of Kolyma, not only is mental strength exhausted, not only is reason extinguished, but such a final phase begins when the very reflex of life disappears: a person no longer cares about his own death. This state is described in the story “Single Measurement”. Student Dugaev, still very young - twenty-three years old, is so crushed by the camp that he no longer even has the strength to suffer. All that remains is - before the execution - a dull regret, “that I worked in vain, suffered this last day in vain.”
As Nefagina G.L. points out: “Shalamov writes brutally and harshly about the dehumanization of man by the Gulag system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Shalamov’s sixty Kolyma stories and his “Sketches of the Underworld,” noted: “Shalamov’s camp experience was bitterer and longer than mine, and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not me, who got to touch that bottom of brutality and despair, to which the whole camp life pulled us."
In “Kolyma Tales” the object of comprehension is not the System, but a person in the millstones of the System. Shalamov is not interested in how the repressive machine of the Gulag works, but in how the human soul “works,” which this machine is trying to crush and grind. And what dominates in “Kolyma Stories” is not the logic of the concatenation of judgments, but the logic of the concatenation of images - the primordial artistic logic. All this is directly related not only to the dispute about the “image of the uprising,” but much more broadly to the problem of adequate reading of the “Kolyma Tales”, in accordance with their own nature and the creative principles that guided their author.
Of course, everything humane is extremely dear to Shalamov. He sometimes even tenderly “extracts” from the gloomy chaos of Kolyma the most microscopic evidence that the System has not been able to completely freeze out in human souls - that primary moral feeling, which is called the ability to compassion.
When the doctor Lidia Ivanovna in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” in her quiet voice confronts the paramedic for yelling at Andreev, he remembered her “for the rest of his life” - “for kind word, said on time." When an elderly tool maker in the story “Carpenters” covers for two incompetent intellectuals who called themselves carpenters, just to spend at least a day in the warmth of a carpentry workshop, and gives them his own turned ax handles. When the bakers from the bakery in the story “Bread” try first of all to feed the camp goons sent to them. When the prisoners, embittered by fate and the struggle for survival, in the story “The Apostle Paul” burn a letter and a statement from the old carpenter’s only daughter renouncing her father, then all these seemingly insignificant actions appear as acts of high humanity. And what the investigator does in the story “Handwriting” - he throws into the oven the case of Christ, who was included in the next list of those sentenced to death - this is, by existing standards, a desperate act, a real feat of compassion.
So, a normal “average” person in completely abnormal, absolutely inhumane circumstances. Shalamov explores the process of interaction between the Kolyma prisoner and the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious, on that border strip where the Gulag winepress pushed a person - on the precarious line between a person who still retains the ability to think and suffer , and that impersonal being who no longer controls himself and begins to live by the most primitive reflexes.
2.1 The descent of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions.
What truth about the man was revealed to Shalamov in the camp? Golden N. believed: “The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and 99% of people could not stand this test. Those who could stand it died along with those who could not stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves.” “A great experiment in the corruption of human souls” - this is how Shalamov characterizes the creation of the Gulag archipelago.
Of course, his contingent had very little to do with the problem of eradicating crime in the country. According to Silaikin’s observations from the story “Courses,” “there are no criminals at all, except for thieves. All the other prisoners behaved in freedom just like all the others - they stole just as much from the state, made just as many mistakes, violated the law just as much as those who were not convicted under the articles of the Criminal Code and each continued to do his own work. The thirty-seventh year emphasized this with particular force - by destroying any guarantee among the Russian people. It became impossible to get around the prison, no one could get around it.”
The overwhelming majority of prisoners in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “were not enemies of the authorities and, dying, did not understand why they had to die. The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral fortitude of the prisoners; they immediately learned not to stand up for each other, not to support each other. This is what the management was striving for."
At first they are still like people: “the lucky one who caught the bread divided it among everyone who wanted it - a nobility that after three weeks we weaned off forever.” “He shared the last piece, or rather, he shared some more. This means that he never managed to live to a time when no one had the last piece, when no one shared anything with anyone.”
Inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. Shalamov states: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards... Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot there that a person should not know, should not see, and if he has seen, it is better for him to die... It turns out that you can do mean things and still live. You can lie and live. Not keeping promises - and still living... Skepticism is still good, this is even the best of the camp heritage.”
The bestial nature in a person is extremely exposed, sadism no longer appears as a perversion of human nature, but as an integral property of it, as an essential anthropological phenomenon: “for a person there is no better feeling than realizing that someone is even weaker, even worse... Power is molestation. The beast unleashed from the chain, hidden in the human soul, seeks greedy satisfaction of its eternal human essence - in beatings, in murders.” The story “Berries” describes the cold-blooded murder by a guard, nicknamed Seroshapka, of a prisoner who was picking berries for a “smoke break” and, unnoticed by himself, crossed the border of the work area marked with markers; after this murder, the guard turns to the main character of the story: “I wanted you,” said Seroshapka, “but he didn’t show up, you bastard!” . In the story “The Parcel,” the hero’s bag of food is taken away: “someone hit me on the head with something heavy, and when I jumped up and came to my senses, the bag was gone. Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with evil joy. The entertainment was of the best kind. In such cases, we were doubly happy: firstly, someone felt bad, and secondly, it wasn’t me who felt bad. This is not envy, no."
But where are those spiritual gains that are believed to be almost directly related to material deprivation? Aren’t the prisoners similar to ascetics, and, dying of hunger and cold, didn’t they repeat the ascetic experience of past centuries?
The likening of prisoners to holy ascetics is, in fact, repeatedly found in Shalamov’s story “Dry Rations”: “We considered ourselves almost saints - thinking that during the camp years we had atoned for all our sins... Nothing worried us anymore, life was easy for us at the mercy of someone else's will. We didn’t even care about saving our lives, and even if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the camp daily routine. The peace of mind achieved by the dullness of our feelings was reminiscent of the supreme freedom of the barracks that Lawrence dreamed of, or Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil - someone else’s will was always guarding our peace of mind.”
However, the dispassion achieved by camp prisoners bore little resemblance to the dispassion to which ascetics of all times and peoples aspired. It seemed to the latter that when they were freed from feelings - these transitory states of theirs, the most important, central and lofty things would remain in their souls. Alas, on personal experience Kolyma ascetic slaves were convinced of the opposite: the last thing that remains after the death of all feelings is hatred and malice. “The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person goes into oblivion.” “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - left us with the meat that we lost during our long fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling.” Hence the constant quarrels and fights: “A prison quarrel breaks out like a fire in a dry forest.” “When you have lost strength, when you have weakened, you want to fight uncontrollably. This feeling - the fervor of a weakened person - is familiar to every prisoner who has ever gone hungry... There are an infinite number of reasons for a quarrel to arise. The prisoner is irritated by everything: the authorities, the upcoming work, the cold, the heavy tool, and the comrade standing next to him. The prisoner argues with the sky, with a shovel, with a stone and with the living thing that is next to him. The slightest dispute is ready to escalate into a bloody battle.”
Friendship? “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those “difficult” living conditions that, as fairy tales tell us, fiction, are a prerequisite for friendship to form, they are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need brought people together and gave birth to friendship, it means that this need is not extreme and the misfortune is not great. Grief is not acute and deep enough if you can share it with friends. In real need, only one’s own mental and physical strength is learned, the limits of one’s “possibilities,” physical endurance and moral strength are determined.”
Love? “Those who were older did not allow the feeling of love to interfere with the future. Love was too cheap a bet in the camp game."
Nobility? “I thought: I won’t play at being noble, I won’t refuse, I’ll leave, I’ll fly away. Seventeen years of Kolyma are behind me."
The same applies to religiosity: like other high human feelings, it does not arise in the nightmare of a camp. Of course, the camp often becomes the place of the final triumph of faith, its triumph, but for this “it is necessary that its strong foundation be laid when the conditions of life have not yet reached the final limit, beyond which there is nothing human in a person, but only mistrust.” , malice and lies." “When you have to wage a cruel, minute-by-minute struggle for existence, the slightest thought about God, about that life means a weakening of the willpower with which the embittered prisoner clings to this life. But he is unable to tear himself away from this damned life, just like a person struck by an electric current cannot take his hands off a high-voltage wire: to do this, additional strength is needed. Even suicide turns out to require some excess energy, which is absent from the “goons”; sometimes it accidentally falls from the sky in the form of an extra portion of gruel, and only then does a person become capable of committing suicide. Hunger, cold, hated labor, and finally, direct physical impact - beatings - all this revealed “the depths of the human essence - and how vile and insignificant this human essence turned out to be. Under the cane, inventors discovered new things in science, wrote poems and novels. A spark of creative fire can be knocked out with an ordinary stick.”
So, the highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Moreover, this highest thing itself - speech, thinking - is material, as in the story “Condensed Milk”: “It was not easy to think. For the first time, the materiality of our psyche appeared to me in all its clarity, in all its perceptibility. It was painful to think about. But I had to think." Once upon a time, to find out whether energy was spent on thinking, an experimental person was placed for many days in a calorimeter; It turns out that there is absolutely no need to conduct such painstaking experiments: it is enough to place the inquisitive scientists themselves for many days (or even years) in places not so remote, and they will own experience will be convinced of the complete and final triumph of materialism, as in the story “Chasing Locomotive Smoke”: “I crawled, trying not to make a single unnecessary thought, thoughts were like movements - energy should not be spent on anything else but on scratching, waddling, dragging my own body forward along the winter road,” “I was saving my strength. The words were pronounced slowly and difficultly - it was like a translation from foreign language. I forgot everything. I’m out of the habit of remembering.”
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Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus
Educational institution
"Gomel State University
named after Francysk Skaryna"
Faculty of Philology
Department of Russian and World Literature
Coursework
MORAL ISSUES
“KOLYMA STORIES” by V.T. SHALAMOVA
Executor
student of group RF-22 A.N. Solution
Scientific supervisor
senior teacher I.B. Azarova
Gomel 2016
Abstract
Key words: anti-world, antithesis, archipelago, fiction, memories, ascent, Gulag, humanity, detail, documentary, prisoner, concentration camp, inhuman conditions, descent, morality, inhabitants, images-symbols, chronotope.
The object of research in this course work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.
As a result of the study, it was concluded that “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov was written on an autobiographical basis, raises moral questions of time, choice, duty, honor, nobility, friendship and love and is a significant event in camp prose.
The scientific novelty of this work lies in the fact that “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov is considered on the basis of the writer’s documentary experience. The stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov are systematized according to moral issues, according to the system of images and historiography, etc.
As for the scope of application of this course work, it can be used not only for writing other coursework and dissertations, but also in preparation for practical and seminar classes.
Introduction
Aesthetics of artistic documentary in the works of V.T. Shalamova
Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants
1 The Descent of Heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
2 The Rise of Heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Imaginative concepts of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Conclusion
List of sources used
Application
Introduction
Readers met Shalamov the poet in the late 50s. And the meeting with Shalamov the prose writer took place only in the late 80s. To talk about the prose of Varlam Shalamov means to talk about the artistic and philosophical meaning of non-existence, about death as the compositional basis of the work. It would seem that there is something new: even before, before Shalamov, death, its threat, expectation and approach were often the main driving force of the plot, and the fact of death itself served as the denouement... But in “Kolyma Tales” it is different. No threats, no waiting. Here death, non-existence is the artistic world in which the plot usually unfolds. The fact of death precedes the beginning of the plot.
By the end of 1989, about a hundred stories about Kolyma had been published. Now everyone reads Shalamov - from students to prime ministers. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose seems to be dissolved in a huge wave of documentaries - memories, notes, diaries about the era of Stalinism. In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Tales” became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of an original aesthetics based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world.
Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. V.T. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox and symbolism.
The camp theme is growing into a large and very important phenomenon, within the framework of which writers strive to fully comprehend the terrible experience of Stalinism and at the same time not forget that behind the dark curtain of decades it is necessary to discern a person.
True poetry, according to Shalamov, is original poetry, where each line is provided by the talent of a lonely soul that has suffered a lot. She is waiting for her reader.
In the prose of V.T. Shalamov, not only the Kolyma camps are depicted, fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which free people live, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where those living in it are doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.
There is a large amount of literature dedicated to V.T. Shalamov and his work. The subject of research of this course work is the moral issues of “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, therefore the main source of information is the monograph by N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky (“In a blizzard freezing age”: About “Kolyma Stories”), which tells about the established way of life, about the order, scale of values and social hierarchy of the country “Kolyma”, and also shows the symbolism that the author finds in the everyday realities of prison life. Particular importance was attached to various articles in magazines. Researcher M. Mikheev (“On the “new” prose of Varlam Shalamov”) in his work showed that every detail in Shalamov, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and high, naturalistically rough and spiritual, and also described the laws of time, which are taken beyond the natural course. I. Nichiporov (“Prose, suffered as a document: V. Shalamov’s Kolyma epic”) expresses his opinion on the documentary basis of stories about Kolyma, using the works of V. T. Shalamov himself. But G. Nefagina (“The Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants”) in her work pays attention to the spiritual and psychological side of the stories, showing the choice of a person in unnatural conditions. Researcher E. Shklovsky (“About Varlam Shalamov”) examines the denial of traditional fiction in “Kolyma Tales” in the author’s desire to achieve something unattainable, to explore the material from the point of view of the biography of V.T. Shalamov. Great assistance in writing this course work was also provided by the scientific publications of L. Timofeev (“Poetics of camp prose”), in which the researcher compares the stories of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko to identify similarities and differences in the poetics of camp prose from various authors of the 20th century; and E. Volkova (“Varlam Shalamov: The Duel of the Word with the Absurd”), who drew attention to the phobias and feelings of prisoners in the story “Sentence.”
When revealing the theoretical part of the course project, various information from history was drawn upon, and considerable attention was also paid to information gleaned from various encyclopedias and dictionaries (dictionary by S.I. Ozhegov, “Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary” edited by V.M. Kozhevnikova).
The topic of this course work is relevant because it is always interesting to return to that era, which shows the events of Stalinism, the problems of human relationships and the psychology of an individual in concentration camps, in order to prevent the repetition of the terrible stories of those years. This work takes on particular urgency in the present time, in an era of people’s lack of spirituality, misunderstanding, disinterest, indifference to each other, and unwillingness to come to the aid of a person. The same problems remain in the world as in Shalamov’s works: the same heartlessness towards each other, sometimes hatred, spiritual hunger, etc.
The novelty of the work is that the gallery of images is systematized, moral issues are identified and the historiography of the issue is presented. The consideration of stories on a documentary basis gives a special uniqueness.
This course project aims to study the originality of V.T. Shalamov’s prose using the example of “Kolyma Tales”, to reveal the ideological content and artistic features of V.T. Shalamov’s stories, and also to expose acute moral problems in concentration camps in his works.
The object of research in the work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.
Some individual stories were also subjected to literary criticism.
The objectives of this course project are:
) study of the historiography of the issue;
2) research of literary critical materials about the creativity and fate of the writer;
3) consideration of the features of the categories “space” and “time” in Shalamov’s stories about Kolyma;
4) identifying the specifics of the implementation of images-symbols in “Kolyma Stories”;
When writing the work, comparative historical and systematic methods were used.
The course work has the following architecture: introduction, main part, conclusion and list of sources used, appendix.
The introduction outlines the relevance of the problem, historiography, discusses discussions on this topic, defines the goals, object, subject, novelty and objectives of the course work.
The main part consists of 3 sections. The first section examines the documentary basis of the stories, as well as the denial of traditional fiction by V.T. Shalamov in “Kolyma Stories”. The second section examines the Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants: a definition of the term “country of Kolyma” is given, the low and high in the stories are considered, and a parallel is drawn with other authors who created camp prose. The third section studies figurative concepts in “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, namely the antitheses of image-symbols, the religious and psychological side of the stories.
The conclusion summarizes the work done on the stated topic.
The list of sources used contains the literature on which the author of the course project relied in his work.
1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary
in the works of V.T. Shalamova
In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Stories” (1954 - 1982) by V.T. Shalamov became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of original aesthetics, based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world, opening the way to a generalizing comprehension of man in inhuman circumstances, to the awareness of the camp as a model of historical, social existence, and the world order as a whole. Shalamov informs readers: “The camp is world-like. There is nothing in it that would not exist in the wild, in its structure, social and spiritual.” The fundamental postulates of the aesthetics of artistic documentaryism are formulated by Shalamov in the essay “On Prose,” which serves as the key to the interpretation of his stories. The starting point here is the judgment that in the modern literary situation “the need for the art of the writer has been preserved, but trust in fiction has been undermined.” The Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following definition of fiction. Fiction - (from the French belles lettres - belles lettres) fiction. The willfulness of creative fiction must give way to a memoir, a documentary in its essence, recreation of the artist’s personal experience, for “today’s reader argues only with the document and is convinced only by the document.” Shalamov substantiates the idea of “literature of fact” in a new way, believing that “it is necessary and possible to write a story that is indistinguishable from a document,” which will become a living “document about the author,” “a document of the soul” and will present the writer “not as an observer, not as a spectator, but a participant in the drama of life."
Here is Shalamov’s famous programmatic opposition to 1) a report of events and 2) their description - 3) the events themselves. This is how the author himself speaks about his prose: “New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description. That is, a document, the direct participation of the author in life events. Prose experienced as a document." Judging by this and the previously quoted statements, Shalamov’s understanding of the document itself, of course, was not entirely traditional. Rather, it is some kind of volitional act or action. In the essay “On Prose,” Shalamov informs his reader: “When people ask me what I write, I answer: I don’t write memoirs. There are no memories 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 the prose labored through as a document.”
Here are more fragments reflecting Shalamov’s original, but very paradoxical views on “new prose”, with the denial of traditional fiction - in an effort to achieve something seemingly unattainable.
The writer’s desire to “explore his material with his own skin” leads to the establishment of his special aesthetic relationship with the reader, who will believe in the story “not as information, but as an open heart wound.” Approaching the definition of his own creative experience, Shalamov emphasizes the intention to create “something that would not be literature,” since his “Kolyma Stories” “offers new prose, the prose of living life, which at the same time is a transformed reality, a transformed document.” In the “prose that the writer seeks, labored through as a document,” there is no room left for descriptiveness in the spirit of Tolstoy’s “writing commandments.” Here the need for capacious symbolization, intensely affecting the reader’s detailing, increases, and “details that do not contain a symbol seem superfluous in the artistic fabric of the new prose.” At the level of creative practice, the identified principles of artistic writing receive multifaceted expression from Shalamov. The integration of document and image takes on various forms and has a complex impact on the poetics of “Kolyma Tales”. Shalamov’s method of in-depth knowledge of camp life and the psychology of a prisoner is sometimes the introduction of a private human document into the discursive space.
In the story “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova”, noteworthy is the flashing auto-commentary that in “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” “every letter is documented.” In the story “Tie”, a scrupulous reconstruction of the life paths of Marusya Kryukova, who was arrested upon returning from Japanese emigration, the artist Shukhaev, who was broken by the camp and capitulated to the regime, commenting on the slogan “Work is a matter of honor ...” posted on the gates of the camp - allow both the biography of the characters and creative production Shukhaev, and present the various signs of the camp as components of a holistic documentary discourse. Shklovsky E.A. states: “The core of this multi-level human document becomes the author’s creative self-reflection, implanted into the narrative series, about his search for “a special kind of truth,” about the desire to make this story “a thing of prose of the future,” about the fact that future writers are not writers, but truly “people of the profession” who know their environment will “tell only about what they know and have seen. Authenticity is the strength of the literature of the future."
The author’s references to his own experience throughout Kolyma prose emphasize his role not just as an artist, but as a documentary witness. In the story “Lepers,” these signs of direct authorial presence perform an expositional function in relation to both the main action and individual links in the event series: “Immediately after the war, another drama was played before my eyes in the hospital”; “I also walked in this group, slightly bent over, along the high basement of the hospital...”. The author sometimes appears in “Kolyma Tales” as a “witness” of the historical process, its bizarre and tragic turns. The story “The Best Praise” is based on a historical excursion, in which the origins and motivations of Russian revolutionary terror are artistically comprehended, portraits of revolutionaries are drawn that “lived heroically and died heroically.” The vivid impressions of the narrator’s communication with his acquaintance from Butyrskaya prison, Alexander Andreev, a former Socialist-Revolutionary and general secretary of the society of political prisoners, turn in the final part into a strictly documentary recording of information about the historical figure, her revolutionary and prison path - in the form of a “certificate from the magazine “Katorga and exile” . Such an overlay reveals the mysterious depths of a documentary text about private human existence, revealing irrational twists of fate behind formalized biographical data.
In the story “Gold Medal”, significant layers of historical memory are reconstructed through symbolically capacious fragments of St. Petersburg and Moscow “texts”. The fate of the revolutionary Natalya Klimova and her daughter, who passed through the Soviet camps, becomes in the artistic whole of the story the starting point of the historical narrative about the trials of revolutionary terrorists at the beginning of the century, about their “sacrifice, self-denial to the point of namelessness,” their readiness to “seek the meaning of life passionately, selflessly ". The narrator acts here as a documentary researcher who “held in his hands” the verdict of the members of a secret revolutionary organization, noting in its text indicative “literary errors”, and personal letters from Natalya Klimova “after the bloody iron broom of the thirties.” Here there is a deep feeling for the very “matter” of a human document, where the features of handwriting and punctuation recreate the “manner of conversation” and indicate the vicissitudes of the relationship of the individual with the rhythms of history. The narrator comes to an aesthetic generalization about the story as a kind of material document, “a living, not yet dead thing that saw the hero,” for “writing a story is a search, and the smell of a scarf, a scarf, lost by the hero or heroine must enter into the vague consciousness of the brain.” .
In private documentary observations, the author’s historiosophical intuition crystallizes about how, in social upheavals, “the best people of the Russian revolution” were torn apart, as a result of which “there were no people left to lead Russia” and a “crack was formed along which time split - not only Russia , but a world where on one side is all the humanism of the nineteenth century, its sacrifice, its moral climate, its literature and art, and on the other - Hiroshima, the bloody war and concentration camps." The combination of the “documentary” biography of the hero with large-scale historical generalizations is also achieved in the story “The Green Prosecutor”. The “text” of the camp fate of Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshey, a non-party engineer, collector of antiques, convicted of embezzling government funds and managing to escape from Kolyma, leads the narrator to a “documentary” reconstruction of the history of Soviet camps from the point of view of those changes in attitude towards fugitives, in the prism of which are drawn internal transformations of the punitive system.
Sharing his experience of “literary” development of this topic (“in my early youth I had the opportunity to read about Kropotkin’s escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress”), the narrator establishes areas of inconsistency between literature and camp reality, creates his own “chronicle of escapes,” scrupulously tracing how by the end of the 30s x years “Kolyma was turned into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyists,” and if earlier “no sentence was given for escape,” then from now on “escape was punishable by three years.” Many stories from the Kolyma cycle are characterized by the special quality of Shalamov’s artistry observed in “The Green Prosecutor,” based primarily not on the modeling of a fictional reality, but on figurative generalizations that grow on the basis of documentary observations, sketch narration about various spheres of prison life, and specific social-hierarchical relations among prisoners (“Combat Teams”, “Bath”, etc.). The text of an official document in Shalamov’s story can act as a constructively significant element of the narrative. In “The Red Cross”, the prerequisite for artistic generalizations about camp life is the narrator’s appeal to the absurdist “large printed notices” on the walls of the barracks called “Rights and Responsibilities of a Prisoner,” where it is fatal “many responsibilities and few rights.” The prisoner’s “right” to medical care, declared by them, leads the narrator to think about the saving mission of medicine and the doctor as the “sole defender of the prisoner” in the camp. Relying on the “documented” recorded, personally suffered experience (“for many years I attended stages in a large camp hospital”), the narrator resurrects the tragic stories of the destinies of camp doctors and comes to generalizations about the camp, honed to the point of aphorisms, as if snatched from a diary: “ negative school of life entirely and completely”, that “every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.” The story “Injector” is based on the reproduction of a small fragment of intra-camp official correspondence, where the author’s word is completely reduced, with the exception of a brief remark about the “clear handwriting” of the resolution imposed by the head of the mine on the report of the head of the site. The report on “poor performance of the injector” in the Kolyma frosts “over fifty degrees”” evokes an absurd, but at the same time formally rational and systemic resolution on the need to “transfer the case to the investigative authorities in order to bring the Injector to legal responsibility.” Through the suffocating network of official words placed in the service of repressive paperwork, one can see the fusion of the fantastic grotesque and reality, as well as the total violation of common sense, which allows the camp’s all-suppression to extend its influence even to the inanimate world of technology.
In Shalamov’s depiction, the relationship between a living person and an official document appears filled with dark collisions. In the story “Echo in the Mountains,” where a “documentary” reconstruction of the biography of the central character, clerk Mikhail Stepanov, takes place, it is on such collisions that the plot outline is tied. The profile of Stepanov, who was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party since 1905, his “thin matter in a green cover,” which contained information about how, when he was the commander of a detachment of armored trains, he released from custody Antonov, with whom he was once imprisoned in Shlisselburg, - make a decisive revolution in his subsequent “Solovetsky” fate. The milestones of history aggressively invade the individual biography here, giving rise to a vicious circle of destructive relationships between the individual and historical time. Man as a powerless hostage of an official document also appears in the story “The Birds of Onge.” The “typist’s mistake,” who “numbered” the prisoner’s criminal nickname (aka Berdy) as the name of another person, forces the authorities to declare the random Turkmen Toshaev a “fugitive” Onzhe Berdy and doom him to camp hopelessness, to being “listed in the group” for life “unaccounted persons” - persons imprisoned without documents." In this, according to the author’s definition, “an anecdote that has turned into a mystical symbol,” the position of the prisoner - the bearer of the notorious nickname - is noteworthy. “Having fun” with the game of prison paperwork, he concealed the identity of the nickname, since “everyone is happy about the embarrassment and panic in the ranks of the authorities.”
In “Kolyma Stories,” the sphere of everyday detail is often used as a means of documentary and artistic capturing of reality. In the story “Graphite”, through the title subject image, the entire picture of the world created here is symbolized, and the discovery of ontological depth in it is outlined. As the narrator records, for documents and tags for the deceased, “only a black pencil, simple graphite is allowed”; not a chemical pencil, but certainly graphite, “which can write down everything that he knew and saw.” Thus, wittingly or unwittingly, the camp system preserves itself for the subsequent judgment of history, for “graphite is nature”, “graphite is eternity”, “neither rain nor underground springs will wash away the personal file number”, and with the awakening of historical memory among the people the realization will also come that “all guests of the permafrost are immortal and are ready to return to us.” Bitter irony permeates the narrator’s words that “a tag on the leg is a sign of culture” - in the sense that “a tag with a personal file number stores not only the place of death, but also the secret of death. This number on the tag is written in graphite." Even the physical state of a former prisoner can become a “document” opposing unconsciousness, especially actualized when “the documents of our past are destroyed, the guard towers are cut down.” With pellagra, a common disease among camp inmates, the skin peels off the hand, forming a kind of “glove,” which more than eloquently acts, according to Shalamov, as “prose, accusation, protocol,” “a living exhibit for the museum of the history of the region.”
The author emphasizes that “if the artistic and historical consciousness of the 19th century. characterized by a tendency to “interpret an event”, “a thirst for an explanation of the inexplicable”, then in the half of the twentieth century the document would have supplanted everything. And they would only believe the document."
I saw everything: sand and snow,
Blizzard and heat.
What can a person endure -
I have experienced everything.
And the butt broke my bones,
Someone else's boot.
And I bet
That God will not help.
After all, God, God, why
Galley slave?
And nothing can help him,
He is exhausted and weak.
I lost my bet
Risking my head.
Today - no matter what you say,
I'm with you - and alive.
Thus, the synthesis of artistic thinking and documentary is the main “nerve” of the aesthetic system of the author of “Kolyma Tales”. The weakening of artistic fiction opens up in Shalamov other original sources of figurative generalizations, based not on the construction of conventional spatio-temporal forms, but on empathizing with the contents of various kinds of private, official, historical documents truly preserved in the personal and national memory of camp life. Mikheev M.O. says that “the author appears in the “Kolyma” epic both as a sensitive documentary artist, and as a biased witness of history, convinced of the moral need to “remember all the good things for a hundred years, and all the bad things for two hundred years,” and as the creator of the original concept of a “new prose”, acquiring before the reader’s eyes the authenticity of a “transformed document”. That revolutionary “exit beyond literature” that Shalamov so strived for did not take place. But even without it, which is hardly feasible at all, without this breakthrough beyond what is permitted by nature itself, Shalamov’s prose certainly remains valuable for humanity, interesting for study - precisely as a unique fact of literature. His texts are unconditional evidence of the era:
Not indoor begonia
The trembling of a petal
And the trembling of human agony
I remember the hand.
And his prose is a document of literary innovation.
2. Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants
According to E.A. Shklovsky: “It is difficult to write about the work of Varlam Shalamov. It is difficult, first of all, because his tragic fate, which is largely reflected in the famous “Kolyma Stories” and many poems, seems to require commensurate experience. An experience that even your enemy will not regret." Almost twenty years of prison, camps, exile, loneliness and neglect in the last years of his life, a miserable nursing home and, in the end, death in a psychiatric hospital, where the writer was forcibly transported to soon die from pneumonia. In the person of V. Shalamov, in his gift as a great writer, a national tragedy is shown, which received its witness-martyr with his own soul and paid with blood for terrible knowledge.
Kolyma Stories - the first collection of stories by Varlam Shalamov<#"justify">V.T. Shalamov formulated the problems of his work as follows: ““Kolyma Tales” is an attempt to raise and solve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. The ability to rely on forces other than hope."
As G.L. Nefagina wrote: “Realistic works about the Gulag system were devoted, as a rule, to the lives of political prisoners. They depicted camp horrors, torture, and abuse. But in such works (A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko) the victory of the human spirit over evil was demonstrated.”
Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox, symbolism, a brilliant command of the word in its semantic, sound form, a subtle strategy of the master.
The Kolyma wound constantly bled, and while working on stories, Shalamov “screamed, threatened, cried” - and wiped away his tears only after the story was finished. But at the same time, he never tired of repeating that “the work of an artist is precisely form,” working with words.
Shalamovskaya Kolyma is a set of island camps. It was Shalamov, as Timofeev claimed, who found this metaphor - “camp-island”. Already in the story “The Snake Charmer,” the prisoner Platonov, “a film scriptwriter in his first life,” speaks with bitter sarcasm about the sophistication of the human mind, which came up with “such things as our islands with all the improbability of their life.” And in the story “The Man from the Steamboat,” the camp doctor, a man of a sharp sardonic mind, expresses a secret dream to his listener: “...If only our islands - would you understand me? “Our islands have sunk through the ground.”
Islands, an archipelago of islands, are a precise and highly expressive image. He “captured” the forced isolation and at the same time the connection by a single slave regime of all these prisons, camps, settlements, “business trips” that were part of the GULAG system. An archipelago is a group of sea islands located close to each other. But for Solzhenitsyn, “archipelago,” as Nefagina argued, is primarily a conventional term-metaphor denoting the object of research. For Shalamov, “our islands” are a huge holistic image. He is not subject to the narrator, he has epic self-development, he absorbs and subordinates to his ominous whirlwind, his “plot” everything, absolutely everything - the sky, snow, trees, faces, destinies, thoughts, executions...
There is nothing else that would be located outside of “our islands” in “Kolyma Tales”. That pre-camp, free life is called the “first life”; it ended, disappeared, melted, it no longer exists. And did she exist? The prisoners of “our islands” themselves think of it as a fabulous, unrealizable land that lies somewhere “beyond the blue seas, behind the high mountains,” as, for example, in “The Snake Charmer.” The camp swallowed up any other existence. He subjected everything and everyone to the ruthless dictates of his prison rules. Having grown limitlessly, it became an entire country. The concept of “the country of Kolyma” is directly stated in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “In this country of hopes, and therefore, the country of rumors, guesses, assumptions, hypotheses.”
A concentration camp that has replaced the entire country, a country turned into a huge archipelago of camps - this is the grotesque-monumental image of the world that is formed from the mosaic of “Kolyma Tales”. It is orderly and expedient in its own way, this world. This is what the prison camp looks like in the “Golden Taiga”: “The small zone is a transfer. A large zone - a mining administration camp - endless barracks, prison streets, a triple fence of barbed wire, winter-style guard towers that look like birdhouses." And then it follows: “The architecture of the Small Zone is ideal.” It turns out that this is a whole city, built in full accordance with its purpose. And there is architecture here, and even one to which the highest aesthetic criteria are applicable. In a word, everything is as it should be, everything is “like with people.”
Brewer M. reports: “This is the space of the “country of Kolyma.” The laws of time also apply here. True, in contrast to the hidden sarcasm in the depiction of a seemingly normal and expedient camp space, camp time is openly taken outside the framework of the natural course, it is a strange, abnormal time.”
“Months in the Far North are considered years - so great is the experience, the human experience acquired there.” This generalization belongs to the impersonal narrator from the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev.” And here is the subjective, personal perception of time by one of the prisoners, the former doctor Glebov, in the story “At Night”: “The minute, the hour, the day from getting up to lights out was real - he didn’t make any further guesses and didn’t find the strength to make a guess. Like everyone else."
In this space and in this time, the life of a prisoner passes for years. It has its own way of life, its own rules, its own scale of values, its own social hierarchy. Shalamov describes this way of life with the meticulousness of an ethnographer. Here are the details of everyday life: how, for example, a camp barracks are built (“a sparse fence in two rows, the gap is filled with pieces of frosty moss and peat”), how the stove in the barracks is heated, what a homemade camp lamp is like - a gasoline “kolyma”. .. The social structure of the camp is also the subject of a careful description. Two poles: “blatars”, they are also “friends of the people” - on one, and on the other - political prisoners, they are also “enemies of the people”. Union of thieves' laws and government regulations. The vile power of all these Fedechkas, Senechekas, served by a motley crew of “masks”, “crows”, “heel scratchers”. And no less merciless oppression of a whole pyramid of official bosses: foremen, accountants, supervisors, guards...
This is the established and established order of life on “our islands.” In a different regime, the GULAG would not be able to fulfill its function: to absorb millions of people, and in return “give out” gold and timber. But why do all these Shalamov “ethnographies” and “physiologies” evoke a feeling of apocalyptic horror? Just recently, one of the former Kolyma prisoners reassuringly said that “the winter there, in general, is a little colder than Leningrad” and that on Butugychag, for example, “mortality was actually insignificant,” and appropriate treatment and preventive measures were carried out to combat scurvy , like forced drinking of dwarf extract, etc.
And Shalamov has information about this extract and much more. But he does not write ethnographic essays about Kolyma, he creates the image of Kolyma as the embodiment of an entire country turned into a Gulag. The apparent outline is only the “first layer” of the image. Shalamov goes through “ethnography” to the spiritual essence of Kolyma; he looks for this essence in the aesthetic core of real facts and events.
In the anti-world of Kolyma, where everything is aimed at trampling and trampling the dignity of the prisoner, the liquidation of personality occurs. Among the “Kolyma Stories” there are those that describe the behavior of creatures that have descended to almost complete loss of human consciousness. Here is the short story “At Night”. Former doctor Glebov and his partner Bagretsov commit what, according to generally accepted moral standards, has always been considered extreme blasphemy: they tear up the grave, undress the corpse of their partner in order to then exchange his pathetic underwear for bread. This is already beyond the limit: the personality is no longer there, only a purely animal vital reflex remains.
However, in the anti-world of Kolyma, not only are mental strength exhausted, not only is reason extinguished, but such a final phase begins when the very reflex of life disappears: a person no longer cares about his own death. This state is described in the story “Single Measurement”. Student Dugaev, still very young - twenty-three years old, is so crushed by the camp that he no longer even has the strength to suffer. All that remains is - before the execution - a dull regret, “that I worked in vain, suffered this last day in vain.”
As Nefagina G.L. points out: “Shalamov writes brutally and harshly about the dehumanization of man by the Gulag system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Shalamov’s sixty Kolyma stories and his “Sketches of the Underworld,” noted: “Shalamov’s camp experience was bitterer and longer than mine, and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not me, who got to touch that bottom of brutality and despair, to which the whole camp life pulled us."
In “Kolyma Tales” the object of comprehension is not the System, but a person in the millstones of the System. Shalamov is not interested in how the repressive machine of the Gulag works, but in how the human soul “works,” which this machine is trying to crush and grind. And what dominates in “Kolyma Stories” is not the logic of the concatenation of judgments, but the logic of the concatenation of images - the original artistic logic. All this is directly related not only to the dispute about the “image of the uprising,” but much more broadly to the problem of adequate reading of the “Kolyma Tales”, in accordance with their own nature and the creative principles that guided their author.
Of course, everything humane is extremely dear to Shalamov. He sometimes even tenderly “extracts” from the gloomy chaos of Kolyma the most microscopic evidence that the System failed to completely freeze out in human souls - that primary moral feeling, which is called the ability to compassion.
When the doctor Lidia Ivanovna in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” in her quiet voice confronts the paramedic for yelling at Andreev, he remembered her “for the rest of his life” - “for the kind word spoken on time.” When an elderly tool maker in the story “Carpenters” covers for two incompetent intellectuals who called themselves carpenters, just to spend at least a day in the warmth of a carpentry workshop, and gives them his own turned ax handles. When the bakers from the bakery in the story “Bread” try first of all to feed the camp goons sent to them. When the prisoners, embittered by fate and the struggle for survival, in the story “The Apostle Paul” burn a letter and a statement from the old carpenter’s only daughter renouncing her father, then all these seemingly insignificant actions appear as acts of high humanity. And what the investigator does in the story “Handwriting” - he throws into the oven the case of Christ, who was included in the next list of those sentenced to death - this is, by existing standards, a desperate act, a real feat of compassion.
So, a normal “average” person in completely abnormal, absolutely inhumane circumstances. Shalamov explores the process of interaction between the Kolyma prisoner and the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious, on that border strip where the Gulag winepress pushed a person - on the precarious line between a person who still retains the ability to think and suffer, and that impersonal being who no longer controls himself and begins to live by the most primitive reflexes.
1 The Descent of Heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions.
What truth about the man was revealed to Shalamov in the camp? Golden N. believed: “The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and 99% of people could not stand this test. Those who could stand it died along with those who could not stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves.” “A great experiment in the corruption of human souls” - this is how Shalamov characterizes the creation of the Gulag archipelago.
Of course, his contingent had very little to do with the problem of eradicating crime in the country. According to Silaikin’s observations from the story “Courses,” “there are no criminals at all, except for thieves. All the other prisoners behaved in freedom just like all the others - they stole just as much from the state, made just as many mistakes, violated the law just as much as those who were not convicted under the articles of the Criminal Code and each continued to do his own work. The thirty-seventh year emphasized this with particular force - by destroying any guarantee among the Russian people. It became impossible to get around the prison, no one could get around it.”
The overwhelming majority of prisoners in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “were not enemies of the authorities and, dying, did not understand why they had to die. The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral fortitude of the prisoners; they immediately learned not to stand up for each other, not to support each other. This is what the management was striving for."
At first they are still like people: “the lucky one who caught the bread divided it among everyone who wanted it - a nobility that after three weeks we weaned off forever.” “He shared the last piece, or rather, he shared some more. This means that he never managed to live to a time when no one had the last piece, when no one shared anything with anyone.”
Inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. Shalamov states: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards... Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot there that a person should not know, should not see, and if he has seen, it is better for him to die... It turns out that you can do mean things and still live. You can lie and live. Not keeping promises - and still living... Skepticism is still good, this is even the best of the camp heritage.”
The bestial nature in a person is extremely exposed, sadism no longer appears as a perversion of human nature, but as an integral property of it, as an essential anthropological phenomenon: “for a person there is no better feeling than realizing that someone is even weaker, even worse... Power is molestation. The beast unleashed from the chain, hidden in the human soul, seeks greedy satisfaction of its eternal human essence - in beatings, in murders.” The story “Berries” describes the cold-blooded murder by a guard, nicknamed Seroshapka, of a prisoner who was picking berries for a “smoke break” and, unnoticed by himself, crossed the border of the work area marked with markers; after this murder, the guard turns to the main character of the story: “I wanted you,” said Seroshapka, “but he didn’t show up, you bastard!” . In the story “The Parcel,” the hero’s bag of food is taken away: “someone hit me on the head with something heavy, and when I jumped up and came to my senses, the bag was gone. Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with evil joy. The entertainment was of the best kind. In such cases, we were doubly happy: firstly, someone felt bad, and secondly, it wasn’t me who felt bad. This is not envy, no."
But where are those spiritual gains that are believed to be almost directly related to material deprivation? Aren’t the prisoners similar to ascetics, and, dying of hunger and cold, didn’t they repeat the ascetic experience of past centuries?
The likening of prisoners to holy ascetics is, in fact, repeatedly found in Shalamov’s story “Dry Rations”: “We considered ourselves almost saints - thinking that during the camp years we had atoned for all our sins... Nothing worried us anymore, life was easy for us at the mercy of someone else's will. We didn’t even care about saving our lives, and even if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the camp daily routine. The peace of mind achieved by the dullness of our feelings was reminiscent of the supreme freedom of the barracks that Lawrence dreamed of, or Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil - someone else’s will was always guarding our peace of mind.”
However, the dispassion achieved by camp prisoners bore little resemblance to the dispassion to which ascetics of all times and peoples aspired. It seemed to the latter that when they were freed from feelings - these transitory states of theirs, the most important, central and lofty things would remain in their souls. Alas, from personal experience, the Kolyma ascetic slaves were convinced of the opposite: the last thing that remains after the death of all feelings is hatred and malice. “The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person goes into oblivion.” “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - left us with the meat that we lost during our long fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling.” Hence the constant quarrels and fights: “A prison quarrel breaks out like a fire in a dry forest.” “When you have lost strength, when you have weakened, you want to fight uncontrollably. This feeling - the fervor of a weakened person - is familiar to every prisoner who has ever gone hungry... There are an infinite number of reasons for a quarrel to arise. The prisoner is irritated by everything: the authorities, the upcoming work, the cold, the heavy tool, and the comrade standing next to him. The prisoner argues with the sky, with a shovel, with a stone and with the living thing that is next to him. The slightest dispute is ready to escalate into a bloody battle.”
Friendship? “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those “difficult” conditions of life that, as fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need brought people together and gave birth to friendship, it means that this need is not extreme and the misfortune is not great. Grief is not acute and deep enough if you can share it with friends. In real need, only one’s own mental and physical strength is learned, the limits of one’s “possibilities,” physical endurance and moral strength are determined.”
Love? “Those who were older did not allow the feeling of love to interfere with the future. Love was too cheap a bet in the camp game."
Nobility? “I thought: I won’t play at being noble, I won’t refuse, I’ll leave, I’ll fly away. Seventeen years of Kolyma are behind me."
The same applies to religiosity: like other high human feelings, it does not arise in the nightmare of a camp. Of course, the camp often becomes the place of the final triumph of faith, its triumph, but for this “it is necessary that its strong foundation be laid when the conditions of life have not yet reached the final limit, beyond which there is nothing human in a person, but only mistrust.” , malice and lies." “When you have to wage a cruel, minute-by-minute struggle for existence, the slightest thought about God, about that life means a weakening of the willpower with which the embittered prisoner clings to this life. But he is unable to tear himself away from this damned life, just like a person struck by an electric current cannot take his hands off a high-voltage wire: to do this, additional strength is needed. Even suicide turns out to require some excess energy, which is absent from the “goons”; sometimes it accidentally falls from the sky in the form of an extra portion of gruel, and only then does a person become capable of committing suicide. Hunger, cold, hated labor, and finally, direct physical impact - beatings - all this revealed “the depths of the human essence - and how vile and insignificant this human essence turned out to be. Under the cane, inventors discovered new things in science, wrote poems and novels. A spark of creative fire can be knocked out with an ordinary stick.”
So, the highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Moreover, this highest thing itself - speech, thinking - is material, as in the story “Condensed Milk”: “It was not easy to think. For the first time, the materiality of our psyche appeared to me in all its clarity, in all its perceptibility. It was painful to think about. But I had to think." Once upon a time, to find out whether energy was spent on thinking, an experimental person was placed for many days in a calorimeter; It turns out that there is absolutely no need to conduct such painstaking experiments: it is enough to place the inquisitive scientists themselves for many days (or even years) in places not so remote, and they will be convinced from their own experience of the complete and final triumph of materialism, as in the story “The Pursuit of locomotive smoke": "I crawled, trying not to make a single unnecessary thought, thoughts were like movements - energy should not be spent on anything else but scratching, waddle, dragging my own body forward along the winter road," “I saved my strength. The words were pronounced slowly and difficultly - it was like translating from a foreign language. I forgot everything. I’m out of the habit of remembering.”
Not limiting himself to evidence about human nature, Shalamov also reflects on its origins, on the question of its origin. He expresses his opinion, the opinion of an old prisoner, on such a seemingly academic problem as the problem of anthropogenesis - as it is seen from the camp: “man became a man not because he was God’s creation, and not because he had an amazing great finger on each hand. But because he was physically stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced his spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle,” “it often seems, and it probably is, that this is why man rose” from the animal kingdom, became a man... that he was physically tougher than any animal. It was not the hand that humanized the monkey, not the embryo of the brain, not the soul - there are dogs and bears that act smarter and more morally than humans. And not by subjugating the power of fire - all this happened after the main condition of transformation was fulfilled. All other things being equal, at one time man turned out to be stronger and physically more resilient than any animal. He was tenacious “like a cat” - this saying when applied to a person is incorrect. It would be more correct to say about a cat: this creature is tenacious, like a person. A horse cannot stand even a month of such winter life here in a cold room with many hours of hard work in the cold... But a person lives. Maybe he lives with hopes? But he has no hopes. If he is not a fool, he cannot live in hopes. That's why there are so many suicides. But the sense of self-preservation, tenacity to life, precisely physical tenacity, to which his consciousness is also subject, saves him. He lives in the same way that a stone, a tree, a bird, a dog lives. But he clings to life more tightly than they do. And he is tougher than any animal."
Leiderman N.L. writes: “These are the most bitter words about a person that have ever been written. And at the same time - the most powerful: in comparison with them, literary metaphors like “this is steel, this is iron” or “if you made nails out of these people, there would be no stronger nails in the world” - pathetic nonsense.
As we see, inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. The highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions. The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and many could not stand it. Those who could stand it died along with those who could not stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves.
2 The Rise of Heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
This is how, over the course of almost a thousand pages, the author-convict persistently and systematically deprives the reader-“fraer” of all illusions, all hopes - just as his camp life eroded them for decades. And yet - although the “literary myth” about man, about his greatness and divine dignity seems to be “exposed” - still hope does not leave the reader.
Hope can be seen from the fact that a person does not lose the feeling of “up” and “down”, rise and fall, the concept of “better” and “worse” until the very end. Already in this fluctuation of human existence there is a guarantee and promise of change, improvement, resurrection to a new life, which is shown in the story “Dry Rations”: “We realized that life, even the worst, consists of a change of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and don’t be afraid that there are more failures than successes.” Such heterogeneity and inequality of different moments of existence gives rise to the possibility of their biased sorting, directed selection. Such selection is carried out by memory, or more precisely, by something standing above memory and controlling it from an inaccessible depth. And this invisible action is truly saving for a person. “Man lives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to forget the bad and remember only the good.” “Memory does not at all indifferently “give out” the entire past in a row. No, she chooses what is more joyful and easier to live with. This is like a protective reaction of the body. This property of human nature is essentially a distortion of the truth. But what is truth? .
The discontinuity and heterogeneity of existence in time also corresponds to the spatial heterogeneity of existence: in the general world (and for Shalamov’s heroes - the camp) organism, it manifests itself in the variety of human situations, in the gradual transition from good to evil, as in the story “The Washed Photograph”: “One One of the most important feelings in the camp is the vastness of humiliation, but also the feeling of consolation that there is always, in any circumstances, someone worse than you. This gradation is varied. This consolation is saving, and perhaps the main secret of a person is hidden in it. This feeling is saving, and at the same time it is reconciliation with the irreconcilable.”
How can one prisoner help another? He has neither food nor property, and usually no strength for any action. However, there remains inaction, that very “criminal inaction”, one of the forms of which is “non-reporting”. Those cases when this help goes a little further than silent sympathy are remembered for a lifetime, as shown in the story “The Diamond Key: “Where I am going and from where - Stepan did not ask. I appreciated his delicacy - forever. I never saw him again. But even now I remember the hot millet soup, the smell of burnt porridge, reminiscent of chocolate, the taste of the stem of the pipe, which Stepan, having wiped with his sleeve, handed to me when we said goodbye, so that I could “smoke” on the way. A step to the left, a step to the right, I consider it an escape - a step march! - and we walked, and one of the jokers, and they are always there in any difficult situation, because irony is the weapon of the unarmed, - one of the jokers repeated the eternal camp joke: “I consider a jump up as agitation.” This evil wit was suggested inaudibly to the guard. She brought encouragement, gave a second, tiny relief. We received warnings four times a day... and each time, after the familiar formula, someone prompted a remark about the jump, and no one got tired of it, no one got annoyed. On the contrary, we were ready to hear this witticism a thousand times.”
There are not so few ways to remain human, as Shalamov testifies. For some, it is stoic calm in the face of the inevitable, as in the story “May”: “For a long time he did not understand what they were doing to us, but in the end he understood and began to calmly wait for death. He had enough courage." For others, it is an oath not to be a brigadier, not to seek salvation in dangerous camp positions. For still others, it is faith, as shown in the story “Courses”: “I have not seen more worthy people in the camps than religious people. Corruption gripped the souls of everyone, and only the religious held out. This was the case 15 and 5 years ago."
Finally, the most decisive, the most ardent, the most irreconcilable go to open resistance to the forces of evil. Such are Major Pugachev and his friends - front-line convicts, whose desperate escape is described in the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev." Having attacked the guards and seized weapons, they try to make their way to the airfield, but die in an unequal battle. Having slipped out of encirclement, Pugachev, not wanting to capitulate, commits suicide, taking refuge in some forest den. His last thoughts are Shalamov’s hymn to man and at the same time a requiem for all those who died in the fight against totalitarianism - the most monstrous evil of the 20th century: “And no one betrayed them,” thought Pugachev, “until the last day. Of course, many in the camp knew about the proposed escape. People were selected for several months. Many with whom Pugachev spoke frankly refused, but no one ran to the watch with a denunciation. This circumstance reconciled Pugachev with life... And, lying in the cave, he remembered his life - the difficult life of a man, a life that now ends on the bear taiga path... many, many people with whom fate brought him together, he remembered. But best of all, most worthy of all were his 11 deceased comrades. None of those other people in his life suffered so much disappointment, deception, and lies. And in this northern hell they found the strength to believe in him, Pugachev, and stretch out their hands to freedom. And die in battle. Yes, these were the best people of his life."
Shalamov himself, one of the main characters of the monumental camp epic he created, belongs to such real people. In "Kolyma Tales" we see him in different periods life, but he is always true to himself. Here he is, as a novice prisoner, protesting against the beating by a convoy of a sectarian who refuses to stand for verification in the story “The First Tooth”: “And suddenly I felt my heart become burning hot. I suddenly realized that everything, my whole life, would be decided now. And if I don’t do something - and what exactly I don’t know myself, then it means that I came to this stage in vain, I lived my 20 years in vain. The burning shame for my own cowardice faded from my cheeks - I felt my cheeks become cold and my body light. I broke ranks and said in a trembling voice: “Don’t you dare hit a person.” Here he reflects after receiving a third term in the story “My Trial”: “What is the use of human experience... guessing that this person is an informer, an informer, and that one is a scoundrel... that it is more profitable, more useful, more saving for me to deal with them friendship, not enmity. Or, at least, keep quiet... What’s the point if I can’t change my character, my behavior?.. All my life I can’t bring myself to call a scoundrel an honest person.” Finally, wised by many years of camp experience, he, as it were, sums up the final camp summary of his life through the lips of his lyrical hero in the story “Typhoid Quarantine”: “It was here that he realized that he had no fear and did not value life. He also understood that he had been tested by a great test and survived... He was deceived by his family, deceived by his country. Love, energy, abilities - everything was trampled, broken... It was here, on these cyclopean bunks, that Andreev realized that he was worth something, that he could respect himself. Here he is still alive and has not betrayed or sold anyone either during the investigation or in the camp. He managed to tell a lot of the truth, he managed to suppress his fear.”
It becomes obvious that a person does not lose the feeling of “up” and “down”, rise and fall, the concept of “better” and “worse” until the very end. We realized that life, even the worst one, consists of alternating joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and we should not be afraid that there are more failures than successes. One of the most important feelings in camp is the feeling of consolation that there is always, in any circumstances, someone worse than you.
3. Figurative concepts of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
However, the main semantic load in Shalamov’s short stories is not carried by these moments, even those very dear to the author. A much more important place in the system of reference coordinates of the artistic world of “Kolyma Tales” belongs to the antitheses of image-symbols. The Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following definition of antithesis. Antithesis - (from Greek. antithesis - opposition) a stylistic figure based on a sharp contrast of images and concepts. Among them is perhaps the most significant: the antithesis of seemingly incompatible images - the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree. In the system of moral references of the Kolyma Tales, there is nothing lower than stooping to the position of a heel scratcher. And when Andreev from the story “Typhoid Quarantine” saw that Schneider, a former sea captain, “an expert on Goethe, an educated Marxist theorist,” “a merry fellow by nature,” who supported the morale of the cell in Butyrki, is now, in Kolyma, fussy and helpful scratches the heels of some Senechka the thug, then he, Andreev, “didn’t want to live.” The theme of the Heel Scratcher becomes one of the ominous leitmotifs of the entire Kolyma cycle. But no matter how disgusting the figure of the Heel Scratcher is, the author does not brand him with contempt, for he knows very well that “a hungry man can be forgiven a lot, a lot.” Maybe precisely because a person exhausted by hunger does not always manage to retain the ability to completely control his consciousness. Shalamov poses as the antithesis of the Heel Comber not another type of behavior, not a person, but a tree, a persistent, tenacious Northern Tree. Shalamov's most revered tree is dwarf. In “Kolyma Tales” a separate miniature is dedicated to him, pure water a poem in prose: paragraphs with their clear internal rhythm are similar to stanzas, the grace of details and details, their metaphorical halo: “In the Far North, at the junction of taiga and tundra, among dwarf birches, low-growing rowan bushes with unexpectedly large watery berries, among six-hundred-year-old larches, that reach maturity at three hundred years, there lives a special tree - dwarf. This is a distant relative of the cedar, cedar - evergreen coniferous bushes with thicker trunks human hand, two to three meters long. It is unpretentious and grows by clinging its roots to cracks in the rocks of the mountain slope. He is courageous and stubborn, like all northern trees. His sensitivity is extraordinary." This is how this prose poem begins. And then it describes how the elfin tree behaves: how it spreads out on the ground in anticipation of cold weather and how it “gets up before everyone else in the North” - “he hears the call of spring that we cannot catch.” “The dwarf dwarf tree has always seemed to me to be the most poetic Russian tree, better than the famous weeping willow, plane tree, cypress...” - this is how Varlam Shalamov ends his poem. But then, as if ashamed beautiful phrase, adds the soberly everyday: “And wood from elfin wood is hotter.” However, this everyday decline not only does not detract, but, on the contrary, enhances the poetic expression of the image, because those who passed through Kolyma know well the price of heat... The image of the Northern Tree - dwarf, larch, larch branch - is found in the stories "Dry Rations ", "Resurrection", "Kant", "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev." And everywhere it is filled with symbolic and sometimes downright didactic meaning. The images of the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree are a kind of emblems, signs of moral poles that are polarly opposed to each other. But no less important in the system of cross-cutting motifs of “Kolyma Tales” is another, even more paradoxical pair of antipodal images, which denote two opposite poles of human psychological states. This is an image of Malice and an image of the Word. Anger, Shalamov proves, is the last feeling that smolders in a person who is being ground by the millstones of Kolyma. This is shown in the story “Dry Rations”: “In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling.” Or in the story “Sentence”: “Anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones.” Or in the story “The Train”: “He lived only with indifferent malice.” The characters in “Kolyma Tales” most often find themselves in this state, or rather, the author finds them in this state. And anger is not hatred. Hatred is still a form of resistance. Anger is total bitterness towards the whole world, blind hostility towards life itself, towards the sun, towards the sky, towards the grass. Such separation from being is already the end of the personality, the death of the spirit. And at the opposite pole states of mind Shalamov's hero stands for the feeling of the word, the worship of the Word as the bearer of spiritual meaning, as an instrument of spiritual work. According to E.V. Volkova: “One of Shalamov’s best works is the story “Sentence.” Here is presented a whole chain of mental states through which the prisoner of Kolyma passes, returning from spiritual non-existence to human form. The initial stage is anger. Then, as physical strength was restored, “indifference appeared - fearlessness. Behind indifference came fear, not very strong fear - fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of the boiler, the high cold sky and the aching pain in worn-out muscles.” And after the return of the vital reflex, envy returned - as a revival of the ability to assess one’s position: “I envied my dead comrades - the people who died in '38.” Love did not return, but pity returned: “Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.” And finally, the highest thing - the return of the Word. And how it is described! “My language, the rough language of the mines, was poor - just as poor were the feelings still living near the bones... I was happy that I did not have to look for any other words. Whether these other words existed, I did not know. I couldn't answer this question. I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, right here - I remember it clearly - under the right parietal bone, a word was born that was not at all suitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades. I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity. Maxim! Maxim! - And I burst out laughing. - Sentence! - I yelled straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, not yet understanding the meaning of this word born within me. And if this word has returned, been found again - so much the better! So much the better! Great joy filled my entire being - maxim!” The very process of restoring the Word appears in Shalamov as a painful act of liberation of the soul, making its way from a dark prison to the light, to freedom. And yet he is making his way - in spite of Kolyma, in spite of hard labor and hunger, in spite of the guards and informers. Thus, having gone through all mental states, having re-mastered the entire scale of feelings - from the feeling of anger to the feeling of the word, a person comes to life spiritually, restores his connection with the world, returns to his place in the universe - to his place homo sapiens, a thinking being. And maintaining the ability to think is one of the most important concerns of Shalamov’s hero. He is afraid, as in the story “The Carpenters”: “If the bones can freeze, the brain could freeze and become dull, the soul could freeze.” Or “Dry rations”: “But the most ordinary verbal communication is dear to him as a thinking process, and he says, “rejoicing that his brain is still mobile.” Nekrasova I. informs the reader: “Varlam Shalamov is a man who lived by culture and created culture with the highest concentration. But such a judgment would be incorrect in principle. Rather, on the contrary: Shalamov adopted from his father, a Vologda priest, a highly educated person, and then consciously cultivated in himself, starting from his student years, a system of life attitudes, where spiritual values \u200b\u200bare in the first place - thought, culture, creativity, it was in Kolyma that he realized as the main one, moreover, as the only defense belt that can protect the human personality from decomposition and decay.” To protect not just Shalamov, a professional writer, but any normal person turned into a slave of the System, to protect not only in the Kolyma “archipelago”, but everywhere, in any inhumane circumstances. And a thinking person who protects his soul with a belt of culture is able to understand what is happening around him. An understanding person is the highest assessment of personality in the world of “Kolyma Tales”. There are very few such characters here - and in this Shalamov is also true to reality, but the narrator’s attitude towards them is the most respectful. Such, for example, is Alexander Grigorievich Andreev, “former general secretary society of political prisoners, a right-wing Socialist Revolutionary who knew both tsarist penal servitude and Soviet exile.” An integral, morally impeccable personality, not compromising one iota of human dignity even in the interrogation cell of the Butyrka prison in 1937. What holds it together from the inside? The narrator feels this strength in the story “The First Chekist”: “Andreev - he knows some truth unfamiliar to the majority. This truth cannot be told. Not because it is a secret, but because it cannot be believed.” In communication with people like Andreev, people who had left everything outside the prison gates, who had lost not only the past, but also hope for the future, found what they did not have even in freedom. They also began to understand. Like that simple-minded, honest “first security officer” - the head of the fire brigade, Alekseev: “It was as if he had been silent for many years - and then the arrest, the prison cell returned the power of speech to him. He found here the opportunity to understand the most important thing, to guess the passage of time, to see his own destiny and understand why... To find the answer to that huge thing hanging over his entire life and destiny, and not only over his life and the destiny of hundreds of thousands others, a huge, gigantic “why”. And for Shalamov’s hero there is nothing higher than enjoying the act of mental communication in a joint search for truth. Hence the psychological reactions that are strange at first glance, paradoxically at odds with everyday common sense. For example, he remembers with joy the “high-pressure conversations” during long prison nights. And the most deafening paradox in “Kolyma Tales” is the Christmas dream of one of the prisoners (and the hero-narrator, alter ego of the author) to return from Kolyma not home, not to his family, but to a pre-trial detention cell. Here are his arguments, which are described in the story “Funeral Word”: “I would not like to return to my family now. They will never understand me there, they will never be able to understand me. What seems important to them, I know is a trifle. What is important to me - the little that I have left - is not given to them to understand or feel. I will bring them a new fear, one more fear to add to the thousand fears that fill their lives. What I saw is not necessary to know. Prison is a different matter. Prison is freedom. This is the only place I know where people said what they thought without fear. Where they rested their souls. We rested our bodies because we didn’t work. There, every hour of existence was meaningful.” The tragic comprehension of “why”, the digging here, in prison, behind bars, to the secret of what is happening in the country - this is the insight, this is the spiritual gain that is given to some of the heroes of “Kolyma Stories” - those who wanted and knew how to think . And with their understanding of the terrible truth, they rise above time. This is their moral victory over the totalitarian regime, for the regime managed to replace freedom with prison, but failed to deceive people with political demagoguery and hide the true roots of evil from the inquisitive mind. And when a person understands, he is able to make the most correct decisions even in absolutely hopeless circumstances. And one of the characters in the story “Dry Rations,” the old carpenter Ivan Ivanovich, chose to commit suicide, and another, student Savelyev, to cut off his fingers rather than return from a “free” forest trip back behind the wire, into the camp hell. And Major Pugachev, who raised his comrades to escape with rare courage, knows that they will not be able to escape from the iron ring of a numerous and heavily armed raid. But “if you don’t run away at all, then die free,” that’s what the major and his comrades were going for. These are the actions of people who understand. Neither the old carpenter Ivan Ivanovich, nor the student Savelyev, nor Major Pugachev and his eleven comrades are looking for justification from the System, which condemned them to Kolyma. They no longer harbor any illusions; they themselves have understood the deeply anti-human essence of this political regime. Condemned by the System, they have risen to the consciousness of judges above it and pronounce their sentence on it - an act of suicide or a desperate escape, tantamount to collective suicide. In those circumstances, this is one of two forms of conscious protest and human resistance to the omnipotent state evil. What about the other one? And the other is to survive. To spite the System. Don't let a machine specially created to destroy a person crush you - neither morally nor physically. This is also a battle, as Shalamov’s heroes understand it - “a battle for life.” Sometimes unsuccessful, as in “Typhoid Quarantine,” but to the end. It is not by chance that the proportion of details and details in “Kolyma Stories” is so great. And this is the writer’s conscious attitude. We read in one of Shalamov’s fragments “On Prose”: “Details must be introduced and planted into the story - unusual new details, descriptions in a new way.<...>This is always a symbol-detail, a sign-detail that transfers the entire story to a different plane, giving a “subtext” that serves the will of the author, an important element of artistic decision, artistic method» . Moreover, in Shalamov, almost every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and the high, the naturalistically rough and the spiritual collide. Sometimes a writer takes an ancient, sacred image-symbol and grounds it in the physiologically rough “Kolyma context”, as in the story “Dry Rations”: “Each of us is used to breathing the sour smell of a worn dress, sweat - it’s also good that there are no tears smell." Even more often, Shalamov makes the opposite move: he transforms a seemingly random detail of prison life by association into a series of high spiritual symbols. The symbolism that the author finds in the everyday realities of camp or prison life is so rich that sometimes the description of this detail develops into an entire micronovel. Here is one of these micronovels in the story “The First Chekist”: “The lock rang, the door opened, and a stream of rays burst out of the chamber. Through the open door, it became visible how the rays crossed the corridor, rushed through the window of the corridor, flew over the prison yard and crashed on the window panes of another prison building. All sixty residents of the cell managed to see all this in the short time the door was open. The door slammed shut with a melodious ringing sound, similar to the ringing of ancient chests when the lid is slammed shut. And immediately all the prisoners, eagerly following the throw of the light stream, the movement of the beam, as if it were a living creature, their brother and comrade, realized that the sun was again locked up with them.” This micronovel - about an escape, about the failed escape of the sun's rays - organically fits into the psychological atmosphere of the story about people languishing in the cells of the Butyrka investigative prison. Moreover, such traditional literary images-symbols that Shalamov introduces into his stories (tears, sunbeams, candles, crosses and the like), like clots of energy accumulated by centuries-old culture, electrify the picture of the world-camp, permeating it with boundless tragedy. But even stronger in “Kolyma Stories” is the aesthetic shock caused by the details, these little things of everyday camp existence. Particularly creepy are the descriptions of the prayerful, ecstatic consumption of food: “He doesn’t eat herring. He licks it and licks it, and little by little the tail disappears from his fingers”; “I took the pot, ate and licked the bottom until it shined according to mine habit”; “He woke up only when food was given, and then, having carefully and carefully licked his hands, he slept again.” And all this together with a description of how a person bites his nails and gnaws “dirty, thick, slightly softened skin piece by piece,” how scurvy ulcers heal, how pus flows out of frostbitten toes - all this that we have always attributed to the department of gross naturalism, takes on a special, artistic meaning in “Kolyma Tales”. There is some kind of strange inverse relationship here: the more specific and reliable the description, the more unreal, chimerical this world, the world of Kolyma, looks. This is no longer naturalism, but something else: the principle of articulation of the vitally reliable and the illogical, nightmarish, which is generally characteristic of the “theater of the absurd,” is at work here. Indeed, the world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov’s stories as a genuine “theater of the absurd.” Administrative madness rules here: here, for example, because of some bureaucratic nonsense, people are transported across the winter Kolyma tundra hundreds of kilometers to verify a fantastic conspiracy, as in the story “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy.” And reading at morning and evening inspections the lists of those sentenced to death, sentenced for nothing. This is clearly shown in the story “How It Began”: “Saying out loud that the work is hard is enough to get you shot. For any, even the most innocent, remark addressed to Stalin - execution. To remain silent when they shout “hurray” for Stalin is also enough to be shot, reading by smoky torches, framed by a musical carcass?” . What is this if not a wild nightmare? “It all seemed alien, too scary to be reality.” This Shalamov phrase is the most accurate formula of the “absurd world.” And in the center of the absurd world of Kolyma, the author places an ordinary, normal person. His names are Andreev, Glebov, Krist, Ruchkin, Vasily Petrovich, Dugaev, “I”. Volkova E.V. states that “Shalamov does not give us any right to look for autobiographical traits in these characters: undoubtedly, they actually exist, but autobiographicalism is not aesthetically significant here. On the contrary, even “I” is one of the characters, equated with all prisoners like him, “enemies of the people.” All of them are different hypostases of the same human type. This is a person who is not famous for anything, was not a member of the party elite, was not a major military leader, did not participate in factions, and did not belong to either the former or the current “hegemons”. This is an ordinary intellectual - a doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist, film scriptwriter, student. It is this type of person, neither a hero nor a villain, an ordinary citizen, that Shalamov makes the main object of his research. We can conclude: V.T. Shalamov attaches great importance to details and details in “Kolyma Stories”. An important place in the artistic world of “Kolyma Tales” is occupied by antitheses of images and symbols. The world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov’s stories as a genuine “theater of the absurd.” Administrative madness reigns here. Every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and the high, the naturalistically rough and the spiritual collide. Sometimes a writer takes an ancient, sacred image-symbol and grounds it in the physiologically rough “Kolyma context.” Conclusion Kolyma story of Shalamov This course work examined the moral issues of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamov. The first section presents a synthesis of artistic thinking and documentaryism, which is the main “nerve” of the aesthetic system of the author of “Kolyma Tales”. The weakening of artistic fiction opens up in Shalamov other original sources of figurative generalizations, based not on the construction of conventional spatio-temporal forms, but on empathizing with the contents of various kinds of private, official, historical documents truly preserved in the personal and national memory of camp life. Shalamov's prose certainly remains valuable for humanity and interesting to study - precisely as a unique fact of literature. His texts are an unconditional testimony of the era, and his prose is a document of literary innovation. The second section examines Shalamov’s process of interaction between the Kolyma prisoner and the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious. The highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions. The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and many could not stand it. Those who could stand it died along with those who could not stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves. Life, even the worst, consists of alternating joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there is no need to be afraid that there are more failures than successes. One of the most important feelings in camp is the feeling of consolation that there is always, in any circumstances, someone worse than you. The third section is devoted to the antitheses of image-symbols, leitmotifs. The images of the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree were chosen for analysis. V.T. Shalamov attaches great importance to details and details in “Kolyma Stories”. Administrative madness reigns here. Every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and the high, the naturalistically rough and the spiritual collide. Sometimes a writer takes an ancient, sacred image-symbol and grounds it in the physiologically rough “Kolyma context.” It is also necessary to draw some conclusions from the results of the study. An important place in the artistic world of “Kolyma Tales” is occupied by antitheses of images and symbols. The world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov’s stories as a genuine “theater of the absurd.” Shalamov V.T. appears in the “Kolyma” epic both as a sensitive documentary artist, and as a biased witness of history, convinced of the moral necessity of “remembering all the good things for a hundred years, and all the bad things for two hundred years,” and as the creator of the original concept of “new prose”, which gains in the eyes of the reader, the authenticity of the “transformed document”. The heroes of the stories do not lose the feeling of “up” and “down,” rise and fall, the concept of “better” and “worse” until the very end. Thus, it seems possible to develop this topic or some of its directions. List of sources used 1 Shalamov, V.T. About prose / V.T. Shalamov // Varlam Shalamov [Electronic resource]. - 2008. - Access mode:<#"justify">5 Shalamov, V.T. Kolyma stories / V.T.Shalamov. - Mn: Transitbook, 2004. - 251 p. 6 Shklovsky, E.A. Varlam Shalamov / E.A. Shklovsky. - M.: Knowledge, 1991. - 62 p. 7 Shalamov, V.T. Boiling point / V.T.Shalamov. - M.: Sov. writer, 1977. - 141 p. 8 Ozhegov, S.I., Shvedova, N.Yu. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language: 80,000 words and phraseological expressions / S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. - 4th ed. - M.: LLC "IT TECHNOLOGIES", 2003. - 944 p. 9 Nefagina, G.L. Russian prose of the second half of the 80s - early 90s of the XX century / G.L. Nefagina. - Mn: Economypress, 1998. - 231 p. Poetics of camp prose / L. Timofeev // October. - 1992. - No. 3. - P. 32-39. 11 Brewer, M. Image of space and time in camp literature: “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “Kolyma Tales” / M. Brewer // Varlam Shalamov [Electronic resource]. - 2008. - Access mode: 12 Golden, N. “Kolyma Tales” by Varlam Shalamov: formalist analysis/ N. Golden // Varlam Shalamov [Electronic resource]. - 2008. - Access mode: 13 Leiderman, N.L. Russian literature of the 20th century: in 2 volumes / N.L. Leiderman, M.N. Lipovetsky. - 5th ed. - M.: Academy, 2010. - T.1: In the blizzard freezing age: About the “Kolyma stories”. - 2010. - 412 p. 14 Literary encyclopedic dictionary / under general. ed. V.M. Kozhevnikova, P.A. Nikolaeva. - M.: Sov. encyclopedia, 1987. - 752 p. 15 Varlam Shalamov: The duel of words with absurdity / E.V. Volkova // Questions of literature. - 1997. - No. 6. - P. 15-24. 16 Nekrasova, I. The fate and creativity of Varlam Shalamov / I. Nekrasova // Varlam Shalamov [Electronic resource]. - 2008. - Access mode: Shalamov, V.T. Memories. Notebooks. Correspondence. Investigative cases / V. Shalamov, I. P. Sirotinskaya; edited by I.P. Sirotinskaya M.: EKSMO, 2004. 1066 p. To talk about the prose of Varlam Shalamov means to talk about the artistic and philosophical meaning of non-existence. About death as the compositional basis of the work. About the aesthetics of decay, decomposition, separation... It would seem that there is nothing new: even before, before Shalamov, death, its threat, expectation and approach were often the main driving force of the plot, and the fact of death itself served as the denouement... But in “Kolyma stories" - otherwise. No threats, no waiting! Here death, non-existence is the artistic world in which the plot usually unfolds. The fact of death precedes the beginning of the plot. The line between life and death was forever crossed by the characters even before the moment when we opened the book and, having opened it, thereby started the clock counting down artistic time. The most artistic time here is the time of non-existence, and this feature is perhaps the main one in Shalamov’s writing style... But here we immediately doubt: do we have the right to understand precisely the artistic style of a writer whose works are now read primarily as a historical document? Isn't this blasphemous indifference to the real destinies of real people? And Shalamov spoke more than once about the reality of destinies and situations, about the documentary background of the “Kolyma Tales”. And I wouldn’t say so—the documentary basis is already obvious. So shouldn’t we first of all recall the sufferings of the prisoners of Stalin’s camps, the crimes of the executioners, some of them are still alive, and the victims cry out for vengeance... We are going to Shalamov’s texts with analysis, we are going to talk about the creative manner, about artistic discoveries. And, let’s say right away, not only about discoveries, but also about some aesthetic and moral problems of literature... Do we have the right to use this material, Shalamov’s, camp, still bleeding material? Is it possible to analyze a mass grave? But Shalamov himself was not inclined to consider his stories a document indifferent to artistic form. A brilliant artist, he apparently was not satisfied with how his contemporaries understood him, and wrote a number of texts explaining precisely the artistic principles of the Kolyma Tales. “New prose” he called them. “In order for prose or poetry to exist—it’s the same—art requires constant novelty.” He wrote, and to comprehend the essence of this novelty is precisely a literary task. Let's say more. If “Kolyma Tales” is a great document of the era, then we will never understand what it communicates if we do not comprehend what its artistic novelty is. “The work of the artist is precisely the form, because otherwise the reader, and the artist himself, can turn to an economist, to a historian, to a philosopher, and not to another artist, in order to surpass, defeat, surpass the master, the teacher,” wrote Shalamov . In a word, we need to understand not only and not so much Shalamov the prisoner, but first of all Shalamov the artist. It is necessary to understand the soul of the artist. After all, it was he who said: “I am the chronicler of my own soul. No more." And without understanding the soul of the artist, how can a person understand the essence and meaning of history, the essence and meaning of what is happening to him? Where else are these meanings and meanings hidden, if not in great works of literature! But it is difficult to analyze Shalamov’s prose because it is truly new and fundamentally different from everything that has been in world literature so far. That is why some previous methods of literary analysis are not suitable here. For example, retelling - a common method of literary criticism when analyzing prose - is not always sufficient here. We have to quote a lot, as happens when it comes to poetry... So, first let's talk about death as the basis of artistic composition. The story “Sentence” is one of the most mysterious works of Varlam Shalamov. By the will of the author himself, it was placed last in the body of the book “Left Bank”, which, in turn, generally completes the trilogy of “Kolyma Tales”. This story is, in essence, the finale, and, as happens in a symphony or novel, where only the finale finally harmonizes the entire previous text, so here only last story gives the final harmonious meaning to the entire thousand-page narrative... For a reader already familiar with the world of “Kolyma Tales,” the first lines of “Sentence” do not promise anything unusual. As in many other cases, the author, at the very beginning, puts the reader on the edge of the bottomless depths of the other world, and from these depths the characters, the plot, and the very laws of plot development appear to us. The story begins energetically and paradoxically: “People arose from oblivion - one after another. stranger lay next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night...” The main thing is that from oblivion. Non-existence and death are synonyms. Did people emerge from death? But we are already accustomed to these Shalamov paradoxes. Having picked up “Kolyma Tales”, we quickly cease to be surprised at the vagueness or even the complete absence of boundaries between life and non-existence. We get used to characters emerging from death and going back to where they came from. There are no living ones here. There are prisoners here. The line between life and death disappeared for them at the moment of arrest... No, the word itself arrest- inaccurate, inappropriate here. An arrest is part of the living legal lexicon, but what is happening has nothing to do with the law, with the harmony and logic of law. Logic fell apart. The man was not arrested, he took. They took him quite arbitrarily: almost by accident - they could have taken someone other than him - a neighbor... There are no sound logical justifications for what happened. Wild chance destroys the logical harmony of existence. They took it, removed it from life, from the list of residents, from the family, separated the family, and the emptiness left after the removal was left to gape ugly... That’s it, there is no person. Was it or wasn’t - no. Alive - disappeared, disappeared... And the plot of the story includes a dead man who came from nowhere. He forgot everything. After they dragged him through the unconsciousness and delirium of all these senseless actions performed on him in the first weeks and called interrogation, investigation, verdict - after all this, he finally woke up in another, unknown to him, unreal world - and realized that he would forever . He might have thought that it was all over and that there was no return from here, if he had remembered exactly what had ended and where there was no return. But no, he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember his wife’s name, God’s word, or himself. What was is gone forever. His further circling around the barracks, transfers, “hospitals”, camp “business trips” - all this is already otherworldly... Really, in the understanding that people enter into the plot of the story (and, in particular, into the plot of “Sentence”) from death, there is nothing that would contradict the general meaning of Shalamov’s texts. People arise from oblivion and seem to show some signs of life, but it still turns out that their state will be more understandable to the reader if we talk about them as dead: “A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth, and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were dead, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command.” So, leaving neither warmth nor human image in memory, they disappear from the narrator’s field of vision, from the plot of the story: “A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day—there were many coal exploration sites—and disappeared forever.” The hero-narrator himself is also a dead man. At least the story begins with us meeting the dead man. How else can we understand the state in which the body does not contain heat, and the soul not only does not distinguish between truth and lies, but the person itself is not interested in this distinction: “I don’t know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: “Ask not and you will not be lied to.” I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies.” At first glance, both the plot and theme of the story are simple and quite traditional. (The story has long been noticed by critics: see, for example: M. Geller. The world of concentration and modern literature. OPI, London. 1974, pp. 281-299.) It seems that this is a story about how a person changes, how a person comes to life when several the conditions of his camp life are improving. It seems that we are talking about resurrection: from moral non-existence, from the disintegration of personality to high moral self-awareness, to the ability to think - step by step, event by event, act by act, thought by thought - from death to life... But what are the extreme points of this movement? What, in the author’s understanding, is death and what is life? The hero-narrator no longer speaks about his existence in the language of ethics or psychology - such a language cannot explain anything here - but using the vocabulary of the simplest descriptions of physiological processes: “I didn’t have much heat. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings... And, keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life.” Everything is shifted in the artistic world of Kolyma Tales. The usual meanings of words are not suitable here: they do not make up the logical ones so familiar to us. formulas life. It's easy for Shakespeare's readers, they know what it means be So what - not to be, they know what the hero chooses between and what, and empathize with him, and choose with him. But for Shalamov, what is life? what is anger? what is death? What happens when a person is tortured less today than yesterday - well, at least they stop beating him every day, and for that reason - that's the only reason! - death is postponed and he passes into another existence, to which no formulas? Resurrection? But is that so? are resurrected? The hero’s acquisition of the ability to perceive the surrounding life, as it were, repeats the development of the organic world: from the perception of a flatworm to simple human emotions... There is a fear that the delay in death will suddenly be short; envy of the dead, who already died in 1938, and to living neighbors - chewing, smoking. Pity for animals, but not yet pity for people... And finally, following the feelings, the mind awakens. An ability awakens that distinguishes a person from the natural world around him: the ability to recall words from memory stores and with the help of words to give names to creatures, objects, events, phenomena - the first step towards ultimately finding logical formulas life: “I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, here - I remember this clearly - under the right parietal bone - a word was born that was completely unsuitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades. I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity: - Sentence! Maxim! And he started laughing... - Sentence! - I yelled straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, I yelled, not yet understanding the meaning of this word that was born in me. And if this word has returned, been found again - so much the better, so much the better! Great joy filled my entire being... For a week I didn’t understand what the word “maximum” meant. I whispered this word, shouted it, scared and made my neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from the sky, a solution, an explanation, a translation... And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy. Fear - because I was afraid of returning to that world where I had no return. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will. Many days passed until I learned to summon more and more new words from the depths of my brain, one after another...” Risen? Returned from oblivion? Have you found freedom? But is it possible to go back, go back all this way - with arrest, interrogations, beatings, experiencing death more than once - and be resurrected? Leave the other world? Free yourself? And what is liberation? Rediscovering the ability to formulate logical formulas using words? Using logical formulas to describe the world? The very return to this world, subject to the laws of logic? Against the gray background of the Kolyma landscape, what fiery word will be saved for subsequent generations? Will this all-powerful word denoting the order of this world be LOGIC! But no, “maximum” is not a concept from the dictionary of Kolyma reality. Life here doesn't know logic. It is impossible to explain what is happening with logical formulas. Absurd case is the name of the local fate. What is the use of the logic of life and death if, sliding down the list, the finger of a stranger, an unfamiliar (or, conversely, familiar and hates you) contractor accidentally stops on your last name - and that’s it, you’re not there, you ended up on a disastrous business trip and a few days later your body, twisted by the frost, will be hastily thrown with stones in the camp cemetery; or it turns out by chance that the local Kolyma “authorities” themselves invented and themselves uncovered some kind of “conspiracy of lawyers” (or agronomists, or historians), and suddenly you remember that you have a legal (agricultural or historical) education - and now your name is already on the firing squad list; or without any lists, the glance of a criminal who lost at cards accidentally caught your eye - and your life becomes the bet of someone else’s game - and that’s it, you’re gone. What a resurrection, what a liberation: if this absurdity is not only behind you, but also ahead - always, forever! However, we must immediately understand: it is not the fatal accident that interests the writer. And not even the exploration of a fantastic world, entirely consisting of an interweaving of wild accidents, which could captivate an artist with the temperament of Edgar Poe or Ambroise Bierce. No, Shalamov is a writer of the Russian psychological school, brought up on the great prose of the 19th century, and in the wild collision of accidents he is interested in precisely certain patterns. But these patterns are outside the logical, cause-and-effect series. These are not formal logical, but artistic laws. Death and eternity cannot be described by logical formulas. They simply defy such description. And if the reader perceives Shalamov’s final text as a major psychological study and, in accordance with the logic familiar to modern Soviet people, expects that the hero is about to return to normal life, and just look, suitable ones will be found from him formulas, and he rises to the point of denouncing the “crimes of Stalinism”, if the reader perceives the story this way (and with it all the “Kolyma Stories” as a whole), then he will be disappointed, since none of this happens (and cannot happen in Shalamov’s work!). And the whole thing ends very mysteriously... with music. Not at all an accusatory maxim, not a call for revenge, not a formulation historical meaning of the horror experienced, the tragedy of “Kolyma Tales” ends, but with hoarse music, a random gramophone on a huge larch stump, a gramophone that “...played, overcoming the hiss of the needle, played some kind of symphonic music. And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraers, foremen and hard workers. And the boss stood nearby. And the expression on his face was as if he himself had written this music for us, for our remote taiga business trip. The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up in all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring twisted for three hundred years...” That's all! Here's the finale for you. Regularity and logic are not synonyms at all. Here the very absence of logic is natural. And one of the main, most important patterns is that there is no return from the otherworldly, irrational world. In principle... Shalamov has repeatedly stated that it is impossible to resurrect: “... Who would have figured it out then, whether it took us a minute or a day, or a year, or a century to return to our previous body - we did not expect to return back to our previous soul. And they didn’t return, of course. Nobody returned." No one returned to a world that could be explained using logical formulas... But what then is the story “Sentence” about, which occupies such an important place in the general corpus of Shalamov’s texts? What does music have to do with it? How and why does her divine harmony arise in the ugly world of death and decay? What secret does this story reveal to us? What key is given for understanding the entire multi-page volume of “Kolyma Tales”? And one more thing. How close are the concepts? logics life and harmony peace? Apparently, it is these questions that we have to look for answers to in order to understand Shalamov’s texts, and with them, perhaps, many events and phenomena both in history and in our lives. “The world of barracks was squeezed by a narrow mountain gorge. Limited by the sky and stone...” - this is how one of Shalamov’s stories begins, but this is how we could begin our notes on artistic space in “Kolyma Stories.” The low sky here is like a punishment cell ceiling - it also limits freedom, it also puts pressure... Everyone has to get out of here themselves. Or die. Where are all those fenced spaces and closed territories that the reader finds in Shalamov’s prose located? Where does that hopeless world exist or have existed, in which the profound lack of freedom of everyone is conditioned by the complete lack of freedom of everyone? Of course, those bloody events took place in Kolyma that forced the writer Shalamov, who survived them and miraculously survived, to create the world of his stories. The events took place in a famous geographical area and deployed in a certain historical time... But the artist, contrary to widespread prejudice - from which, however, he himself is not always free - does not recreate either real events, much less “real” space and time. If we want to understand Shalamov’s stories as an artistic fact (and without such an understanding we cannot comprehend them at all - we cannot comprehend them either as a document, or as a psychological phenomenon or a philosophical discovery of the world - in any way), then if we want to understand at least something in Shalamov’s texts, then first of all it is necessary to see what the meaning of these “sort of physical” categories - time and space - is in the poetics of the Kolyma Tales. Let’s be careful, nothing can be missed here... Let’s say, why at the very beginning of the story “To the Exhibition”, when designating the “scene of action,” did the author need an obvious allusion: “We played cards at Naumov’s horse-driver”? What is behind this appeal to Pushkin? Just irony, shading the gloomy flavor of one of the last circles of the camp hell? A parodic attempt to “reduce” the tragic pathos of “The Queen of Spades”, jealously contrasting it with... no, not even another tragedy, but something beyond the limits of any tragedy, beyond the limits of the human mind and, perhaps, something generally beyond the limits of art?.. The opening phrase of Pushkin’s story is a sign of the easy freedom of the characters, freedom in space and time: “Once we were playing cards with the horse guard Narumov. The long winter night passed unnoticed; We sat down to dinner at five o’clock in the morning...” We sat down for dinner at five, or could have been at three or six. The winter night passed unnoticed, but the summer night could have passed just as unnoticed... And in general, the owner could not have been the horse guard Narumov - in the rough drafts the prose is not at all so strict: “About 4 years ago we gathered in P<етер>B<урге>several young people connected by circumstances. We led a rather chaotic life. We dined at Andrie's without appetite, drank without cheerfulness, went to S.<офье>A<стафьевне>to infuriate the poor old woman with feigned legibility. They spent the day somehow, and in the evening they took turns gathering at each other’s place.” It is known that Shalamov had an absolute memory for literary texts. The intonational similarity of his prose to Pushkin’s prose cannot be accidental. This is a calculated move. If in Pushkin’s text there is open space, the free flow of time and the free movement of life, then in Shalamov there is a closed space, time seems to stop and it is no longer the laws of life, but death that determines the behavior of the characters. Death is not an event, but as a name to the world in which we find ourselves when we open the book... “We played cards at Naumov’s horse-driver’s. The guards on duty never looked into the barracks of the horsemen, rightly believing that their main service was monitoring those convicted under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by counter-revolutionaries. True, the practical bosses quietly grumbled: they were losing their best, most caring workers, but the instructions on this matter were definite and strict. In a word, the horsemen were the safest place, and every night the thieves gathered there for their card fights. In the right corner of the barracks, on the lower bunks, multi-colored cotton blankets were spread out. A burning “stick”—a homemade gasoline-powered light bulb—was screwed to the corner post with wire. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of a tin can - that’s all the device was. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, the gasoline was heated, steam rose through the tubes, and the gasoline gas burned, lit with a match. A dirty down pillow lay on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs tucked in Buryat style, sat the “partners” - the classic pose of a prison card battle. There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards: it was a homemade prison deck, which is made by masters of these crafts at an unusual speed... Today's cards were just cut out from a volume of Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone in the office yesterday... Me and Garkunov, a former textile engineer, were sawing wood for the Naumov barracks...” There is a clear designation of space in each of Shalamov’s short stories, and always - always without exception! - this space is completely closed. One might even say that the sepulchral enclosure of space is a constant and persistent motif of the writer’s work. Here are the opening lines introducing the reader to the text of just a few stories: “All day long there was a white fog so thick that you couldn’t see a person two steps away. However, there was no need to walk far alone. Few directions—the canteen, the hospital, the watch—were guessed by an unknown, acquired instinct, akin to that sense of direction that animals fully possess and which, under suitable conditions, awakens in humans.” “The heat in the prison cell was such that not a single fly was visible. The huge windows with iron bars were wide open, but this did not provide relief - the hot asphalt of the yard sent hot air waves upward, and it was even cooler in the cell than outside. All clothes had been thrown off, and hundreds of naked bodies, blazing with a heavy, damp heat, were tossing and turning, leaking sweat, on the floor—it was too hot on the bunks.” “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 pairs of eyes looked at him from everywhere: from below - from under the bunks, directly, from the side, from above - from the height of four-story bunks, where those who still retained their strength climbed up a ladder.” “The “Small Zone” is a transfer, the “Big Zone” is a camp of the Mining Department - endless squat barracks, prison streets, a triple fence of barbed wire, guard towers that look like birdhouses in winter. In the “Small Zone” there are even more towers, locks and latches...” It would seem that there is nothing special there: if a person writes about a camp and a prison, then where can he get at least something open-ended! That's all true... But what we're looking at is not the camp itself. Before us is only a text about the camp. And here it depends not on the security, but only on the author, how exactly it will be organized.” art space" What will be the philosophy of space, how the author will make the reader perceive its height and extent, how often he will make him remember towers, locks and latches, and so on and so forth. The history of literature knows enough examples when, by the will of the author, life, seemingly completely closed, closed (even in the same camp zone) easily communicates with life flowing within other boundaries. Well, there are some ways from the special camp where Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Shukhov was imprisoned, to Shukhov’s native Temgenevo. It’s okay that these paths - even for Shukhov himself - are traversable only mentally. One way or another, having gone through all these paths (say, remembering the letters received with the hero), we learn about the life of Ivan’s family, and about affairs on the collective farm, and in general about the country outside the zone. And Ivan Denisovich himself, although he tries not to think about the future life - he would like to survive in today's life - is still connected with it, the future, albeit with rare letters, and cannot give up the temptation to think briefly about the tempting business that It would be worthwhile to start painting carpets using stencils after my release. Solzhenitsyn’s man is not alone in the camp, he lives in proximity to his contemporaries, in the same country, next to humanity, according to the laws of humanity - in a word, although in deep captivity, a man lives in the world of people. It’s different with Shalamov. The abyss separates man from everything that is usually called “modernity.” If a letter arrives here, it is only to be destroyed to the drunken laughter of the warden even before it is read; after death, letters are not received. Deaf! In the other world, everything takes on otherworldly meanings. And the letter does not unite, but - not received - separates people even more. Why talk about letters, if even the sky (as we already recalled) does not broaden one’s horizons, but limits his. Even doors or gates, although open, will not open up the space, but will only emphasize its hopeless limitation. Here you seem to be forever fenced off from the rest of the world and hopelessly alone. There is no continent in the world, no family, no free taiga. Even on the bunk you are not living next to a person, but to a dead person. Even an animal will not stay with you for long, and a dog to which you have become attached will be shot dead by a guard... Just reach for a growing berry outside this closed space - and you will immediately fall dead, the guard will not miss: “...ahead there were hummocks with rose hips, blueberries, and lingonberries... We saw these hummocks a long time ago... Rybakov pointed to the jar, which was not yet full, and to the sun descending towards the horizon and slowly began to approach the enchanted berries. The shot clicked dryly, and Rybakov fell face down between the hummocks. Greyshapka, waving a rifle, shouted: - Leave where you are, don’t come closer! Grayshapka pulled back the shutter and fired again. We knew what that second shot meant. Greyshapka knew this too. There should be two shots - the first is a warning. Rybakov lay unexpectedly small between the hummocks. The sky, the mountains, the river were huge, and God knows how many people could be placed in these mountains on the paths between the hummocks. Rybakov's jar rolled far away, I managed to pick it up and hide it in my pocket. Maybe they will give me bread for these berries...” Only then do the sky, the mountains, and the river open up. And only for the one who fell, burying his face between the taiga hummocks. Freed! For another, a survivor, the sky is still no different from other realities of camp life: barbed wire, the walls of a barracks or cells, at best the hard beds of a camp hospital, but more often - bunks, bunks, bunks - this is the real space of Shalamov’s short stories. And here, as the cosmos is, so is the luminary: “A dim electric sun, fouled by flies and enclosed by a round grating, was attached high above the ceiling.” (However, the sun - as it appears in the text of “Kolyma Tales” - could become the topic of a separate, very voluminous study, and we will have the opportunity to touch on this topic.) Everything is deaf and closed, and no one is allowed to leave, and there is nowhere to run. Even those desperate ones who decide to escape - and run! — with incredible efforts it is possible to only slightly stretch the boundaries of the grave world, but no one has ever been able to completely break or open them. In “Kolyma Stories” there is a whole cycle of short stories about escapes from the camp, united by one title: “The Green Prosecutor”. And all these are stories about unsuccessful escapes. It’s not that there aren’t any successful ones: in principle, they cannot exist. And those who fled - even those who fled far away, somewhere to Yakutsk, Irkutsk or even Mariupol - all the same, as if it were some kind of demonic obsession, as if running in a dream, always remain within the confines of the grave world, and the running goes on and on , continues, and sooner or later a moment comes when the boundaries, which had been stretched far, instantly tighten again, are pulled into a noose, and a person who believed himself to be free wakes up in the cramped walls of a camp punishment cell... No, this is not just a dead space fenced off with barbed wire or the walls of a barracks or poles in the taiga - a space into which some doomed people find themselves, but outside of which more fortunate people live according to different laws. This is the monstrous truth that everything that Seems existing outside of this space is actually involved, drawn into the same abyss. It seems that everyone is doomed - everyone in the country, and maybe even in the world. Here is some kind of monstrous funnel, equally sucking in, sucking in the righteous and thieves, healers and lepers, Russians, Germans, Jews, men and women, victims and executioners - everyone, everyone without exception! German pastors, Dutch communists, Hungarian peasants... Among Shalamov’s characters, not a single one is even mentioned - not a single one! - about whom one could say that he is certainly outside these limits - and safe... Man no longer belongs to the era, to modernity - but only to death. Age loses all meaning, and the author sometimes admits that he himself does not know how old the character is - and who cares! All time perspective is lost, and this is another, most important, constantly recurring motif of Shalamov’s stories: “The time when he was a doctor seemed very far away. And was there ever such a time? Too often that world beyond the mountains, beyond the seas seemed to him like some kind of dream, an invention. The minute, the hour, the day from getting up to going out was real - he didn’t think further, he couldn’t find the strength to guess. Like everyone else." Like everyone else... There is no hope even for the passage of time - it will not save! In general, time here is special: it exists, but it cannot be defined in familiar words - past, present, future: tomorrow, they say, we will be better, we will not be there and not the same as yesterday... No, here today is not at all not an intermediate point between “yesterday” and “tomorrow”. “Today” is a very uncertain part of what is called the word Always. Or more correctly to say - never... The cruel writer Shalamov. Where did he take the reader? Does he know how to get out of here? However, he himself apparently knows: his own creative imagination knew, and, therefore, overcome conditioned closedness of space. After all, this is exactly what he states in his notes “On Prose”: “The Kolyma stories are an attempt to raise and resolve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. An opportunity to rely on forces other than hope.” Perhaps... opportunity... Yes, really, does it exist where, say, the possibility of looting - pulling a corpse out of a shallow grave, barely covered with stones, stealing his underpants and undershirt - is considered a great success: the underwear can be sold , trade for bread, maybe even get some tobacco? (“At night”). The one in the grave is a dead man. But aren’t those in the night above his grave, or those in the prison camp, in the barracks, on the bunks, really dead? Isn’t a person without moral principles, without memory, without will, a dead person? “I gave my word a long time ago that if I was hit, that would be the end of my life. I'll hit the boss and they'll shoot me. Alas, I was a naive boy. When I weakened, my will and my reason weakened. I easily persuaded myself to endure it and did not find the mental strength to retaliate, to commit suicide, to protest. I was the most ordinary goner and lived according to the laws of the psyche of goons.” What “moral questions” can be resolved by describing this closed grave space, this time that has stopped forever: by talking about beatings that change a person’s gait, his plasticity; about hunger, about dystrophy, about cold that deprives one of reason; about people who have forgotten not only their wife’s name, but who have completely lost their own past; and again about beatings, bullying, executions, which are spoken of as liberation - the sooner the better. Why do we need to know all this? Don’t we remember the words of Shalamov himself: “Andreev was a representative of the dead. And his knowledge, the knowledge of a dead man, could not be useful to them, while still alive.” The cruel artist Varlam Shalamov. Instead of immediately showing the reader direct answers, direct, happy exits from the abyss of evil, Shalamov places us deeper and deeper into this closed other world, into this death, and not only does not promise quick release, but, it seems, does not seek to give any at all - at least in the text. But we no longer have life without a solution. We are seriously drawn into this hopeless space. Here you can’t get away with talking about the documentary, and therefore the temporary, passing problems of stories. Even if Stalin and Beria are gone and the order in Kolyma has changed... but the stories, here they are, live on. And we live in them along with the characters. Who will say that the problems of “War and Peace” have now been removed due to the remoteness of the events of 1812? Who will put aside Dante's Tencines because, supposedly, their documentary background has long lost its relevance? Humanity cannot exist otherwise than by solving the great mysteries of great artists. And we don't understand own life, as it seems, is far from the Kolyma reality - cannot be understood without solving the riddle of Shalamov’s texts. Let's not stop halfway. It seems that we have only one chance left to escape from the abyss of Shalamov’s world - one and only, but true and well-learned literary criticism technique: to go beyond the limits of literary fact and turn to the facts of history, sociology, and politics. The very possibility that Vissarion Belinsky suggested to Russian literary criticism one hundred and fifty years ago and which has since fed more than one generation of literary scholars and critics: the possibility of calling a literary work an “encyclopedia” of some life and thus securing the right to interpret it one way or another, depending on how we understand “life” itself and the historical “phase” of its development in which the critic places us together with the author. This possibility is all the more tempting since Shalamov himself, in one of his self-comments, speaks about the state machine, and in another he mentions it in connection with the “Kolyma Tales” historical events of that time - wars, revolutions, fires of Hiroshima... Maybe if we weave the Kolyma reality into the historical context, it will be easier for us to find the answer to Shalamov’s world? Like, there was such a time: revolutions, wars, fires - the forest is cut down, the wood chips fly. After all, be that as it may, we are analyzing the text written following based on real events, not the author’s imagination, not science fiction. Not even artistic exaggeration. It’s worth remembering once again: there is nothing in the book that does not have documentary evidence. Where did Varlam Shalamov find such a closed world? After all, other authors who wrote about Kolyma reliably tell us about the normal, natural, or, as learned psychologists say, “adequate” reaction of prisoners to historical events that occurred simultaneously with the terrible events of Kolyma life. No one has ceased to be a man of his time. Kolyma was not cut off from the world and from history: “- Germans! Fascists! Crossed the border... - Our people are retreating... - Can't be! How many years have they been saying: “We won’t give up even five of our lands!” The Elgen barracks do not sleep until the morning... No, now we are not sawyers, not carters from a convoy, not nannies from an orphanage. With extraordinary brightness we suddenly remembered “who is who”... We argue until we are hoarse. We try to grasp the perspectives. Not your own, but common ones. People, desecrated, tormented by four years of suffering, we suddenly recognize ourselves as citizens of our country. For her, for our Motherland, we now tremble, her rejected children. Someone has already got hold of the paper and with a stub of a pencil writes: “Please direct me to the most dangerous section of the front. I have been a member of the Communist Party since the age of sixteen...” (E. Ginzburg. Steep route. N.-Y. 1985, book 2, p. 17) Alas, let’s say right away, Shalamov does not leave us even this last chance. Well, yes, he remembers historical events... but how! “It seems to me that a man of the second half of the twentieth century, a man who survived wars, revolutions, the fires of Hiroshima, the atomic bomb, betrayal, and the most important thing that crowns everything(italics mine.— L.T.), - the shame of Kolyma and the ovens of Auschwitz, man... - and after all, everyone’s relative died either in the war or in the camp - a person who survived the scientific revolution simply cannot help but approach issues of art differently than before.” Of course, both the author of “Kolyma Tales” and his heroes did not cease to be people of their time, of course, in Shalamov’s texts there is a revolution, and a war, and a story about the “victorious” May 1945... But in all cases, everything is historical events - both great and small - turn out to be just an insignificant everyday episode in a series of other events, the most important- camp. “Listen,” said Stupnitsky, “The Germans bombed Sevastopol, Kyiv, Odessa. Andreev listened politely. The message sounded like news of a war in Paraguay or Bolivia. What does Andreev have to do with this? Stupnitsky is well-fed, he is a foreman - so he is interested in such things as war. Grisha the Greek, the thief, approached. — What are machine guns? - Don't know. Like machine guns, probably. “A knife is more terrible than any bullet,” Grisha said instructively. “That’s right,” said Boris Ivanovich, a surgeon from the prisoners, “a knife in the stomach is a sure infection, there is always a danger of peritonitis.” A gunshot wound is better, cleaner... “A nail is best,” said Grisha the Greek. - Stand up! We lined up and went from the mine to the camp...” So we talked about the war. What does the camp prisoner have in it?.. And the point here is not some biographical grievances of the author, who, due to a judicial error, was removed from participation in the main event of our time - no, the point is that the author is convinced: it was his tragic fate that made him a witness to the main events. Wars, revolutions, even atomic bomb- only private atrocities of History - a grandiose unseen in centuries and millennia spill of evil. No matter how strong it is - to the point of prejudice! — the habit of Russian public consciousness to operate with the categories of dialectics; here they are powerless. The Kolyma stories do not want to be woven into the general fabric of “historical development.” No political mistakes and abuses, no deviations from the historical path can explain the comprehensive victory of death over life. On the scale of this phenomenon, all sorts of Stalins, Berias and others are just figures, nothing more. The idea here is bigger than Lenin’s... No, the reality of Shalamov’s world is not the “reality of the historical process” - they say, yesterday it was like this, tomorrow it will be different... Here nothing changes “with the passage of time”, nothing disappears from here, nothing goes into oblivion, because the world of “Kolyma Tales” is itself nothingness. And that is why it is simply broader than any conceivable historical reality and cannot be created by a “historical process.” From this non-existence there is nowhere to return, nothing to resurrect. An idyllic ending, like in “war and peace,” is unthinkable here. There is no hope left that there is another life somewhere. Everything is here, everything is drawn into the dark depths. And the “historical process” itself with all its “phases” slowly circles in the funnel of the camp, prison world. In order to make any excursion into recent history, the author and his heroes need not strive beyond the camp fence or prison bars. The whole story is nearby. And the fate of every camp inmate or cellmate is its crown, its main event. “Prisoners behave differently during arrest. Breaking the mistrust of some is a very difficult matter. Little by little, day by day, they get used to their fate and begin to understand something. Alekseev was of a different type. It was as if he had been silent for many years - and then the arrest, the prison cell returned to him the power of speech. He found here an opportunity to understand the most important things, to guess the passage of time, to guess his own destiny and understand why. Find the answer to that huge, gigantic “why” that hangs over his entire life and destiny, and not only his life and destiny, but also hundreds of thousands of others.” The very possibility of finding the answer appears because the “passage of time” has stopped, fate ends as it should - with death. At the Last Judgment, revolutions, wars, executions float into the prison cell, and only comparison with non-existence, with eternity, clarifies their true meaning. From this point on, history has a reverse perspective. In general, isn’t non-existence itself the final answer - that only, terrible answer that we can only extract from the entire course of the “historical process” - the answer that leads to despair the simple-minded, deceived by crafty agitators, and makes those who think deeply I have not yet lost this ability: “... Alekseev suddenly broke free, jumped onto the windowsill, grabbed the prison bars with both hands and shook it, shook it, swearing and growling. Alekseev’s black body hung on the bars like a huge black cross. The prisoners tore Alekseev’s fingers from the bars, straightened his palms, and hurried, because the sentry on the tower had already noticed a fuss at the open window. And then Alexander Grigorievich Andreev, general secretary of the society of political prisoners, said, pointing to a black body sliding from the bars: Shalamov’s reality is an artistic fact of a special kind. The writer himself has repeatedly stated that he strives for new prose, for the prose of the future, which will speak not on behalf of the reader, but on behalf of the material itself - “stone, fish and cloud”, in the language of the material. (The artist is not an observer studying events, but a participant in them, their witness- in the Christian meaning of this word, which is a synonym for the word martyr). Artist - “Pluto, rising from hell, and not Orpheus, descending into hell” (“On prose”) And the point is not that before Shalamov there was no master capable of coping with such a creative task, but that there was no still on earth “the most important, crowning all” evil. And only now, when evil had swallowed up all the previous crafty hopes for the final victory of the human mind in its historical development, the artist was able to rightfully declare: “There is no rational basis for life - this is what our time proves.” But the absence of a reasonable (in other words, logically explainable) basis in life does not mean the absence of what we, in fact, are looking for - truth in the artist’s texts. This truth, apparently, is not where we are accustomed to looking for it: not in rational theories that “explain” life, and not even in the moral maxims that so habitually interpret what is good and what is evil. How close are one concept to another? logics life and harmony peace? Perhaps it is not the earthly word “logic” that will shine against the background of the Kolyma night, but the divine one – LOGOS? According to the testimony of Mikhail Geller, who carried out the most complete edition of “Kolyma Stories,” a letter from Frida Vigdorova to Shalamov was circulated in samizdat at the same time as Shalamov’s texts: “I read your stories. They are the most brutal I have ever read. The most bitter and merciless. There are people there without a past, without a biography, without memories. It says that adversity does not unite people. That a person thinks only about himself, about surviving. But why do you close the manuscript with faith in honor, goodness, human dignity? It’s mysterious, I can’t explain it, I don’t know how it happens, but it’s like that.” Remember the mysterious whirling of the shellac record and the music at the end of the story “Sentence”? Where does this come from? The sacrament to which Shalamov introduces us is art. And Vigdorova was right: comprehend This sacrament is not given to anyone at all. But the reader is given something else: when joining the sacrament, he strives to understand himself. And this is possible, since not only the events of history, but also all of us - the living, the dead, and the unborn - all the characters in Shalamov’s stories, the inhabitants of his mysterious world. Let's take a closer look at ourselves there. Where are we there? Where is our place? The discovery of the Self by a simple person in the radiance of art is similar to the materialization of sunlight... “A beam of red sun rays was divided by the binding of the prison bars into several smaller beams; somewhere in the middle of the chamber, the beams of light again merged into a continuous stream, red and gold. In this stream of light, motes of dust were thickly golden. Flies caught in the strip of light themselves became golden, like the sun. The rays of the sunset beat directly on the door, bound in gray glossy iron. The lock clinked - a sound that any prisoner, awake or sleeping, hears in a prison cell at any hour. There is no conversation in the cell that could drown out this sound, there is no sleep in the cell that could distract from this sound. There is no thought in the cell that could... No one can concentrate on anything so as to miss this sound, not to hear it. Everyone's heart skips a beat when he hears the sound of a lock, the knock of fate on the cell door, on souls, on hearts, on minds. This sound fills everyone with anxiety. And it cannot be confused with any other sound. The lock jingled, the door opened, and a stream of rays burst out of the chamber. Through the open door, it became visible how the rays crossed the corridor, rushed through the window of the corridor, flew over the prison yard and crashed on the window panes of another prison building. All sixty residents of the cell managed to see all this in the short time the door was open. The door slammed shut with a melodious ringing sound, similar to the ringing of ancient chests when the lid is slammed shut. And immediately all the prisoners, eagerly following the throw of the light stream, the movement of the beam, as if it were a living creature, their brother and comrade, realized that the sun was again locked up with them. And only then did everyone see that a man was standing at the door, receiving a stream of golden sunset rays onto his wide black chest, squinting from the harsh light.” We intended to talk about the sun in Shalamov's stories. Now the time has come for this. The sun of “Kolyma Tales,” no matter how bright and hot it may appear at times, is always the sun of the dead. And next to him there are always other luminaries, much more important: “There are few sights as expressive as the red-faced figures of the camp authorities standing next to each other, red-faced from alcohol, well-fed, overweight, heavy with fat, in shiny, like the sun(hereinafter italics are mine. - L.T.), brand new, smelly sheepskin coats... Fedorov walked along the face, asked something, and our foreman, bowing respectfully, reported something. Fedorov yawned, and his golden, well-maintained teeth reflected sun rays. The sun was already high...” When this obliging sun of the guards sets, or the autumn rain clouds cover it, or an impenetrable frosty fog rises, the prisoner will be left with only the already familiar “dim electric sun, polluted with flies and chained with a round lattice...” One could say that the lack of sunlight is a purely geographical feature of the Kolyma region. But we have already found out that geography cannot explain anything to us in Shalamov’s stories. It's not a matter of seasonal changes in sunrise and sunset times. The point is not that there is not enough warmth and light in this world, the point is that there is no movement from darkness to light or back. There is no light of truth, and nowhere to find it. There are no reasonable reasons and no logical consequences. There is no justice. Unlike, say, Dante's Hell, the souls imprisoned here do not suffer reasonable punishments, they do not know their guilt, and therefore know neither repentance nor hope of ever, having atone for their guilt, changing their situation... “The late Alighieri would have made the tenth circle of hell out of this,” Anna Akhmatova once said. And she was not the only one inclined to correlate Russian reality of the 20th century with pictures of Dante’s horrors. But with such a ratio, it became obvious every time that the latest horrors in the camps were stronger than those that seemed extremely possible for the greatest artist of the 14th century - and you can’t cover it in nine circles. And, apparently understanding this, Akhmatova does not look for anything similar in literary texts already created, but evokes the genius of Dante, brings him closer, makes him a recently departed contemporary, calling him “the late Alighieri” - and, it seems, only such a contemporary is able to comprehend everything recently experienced by humanity. The point, of course, is not to follow a rational, even numerical order, in which nine circles of hell appear to us, then seven - purgatory, then nine heavens... It is the rational ideas about the world revealed by the text “ Divine Comedy”, the structure of this text, are questioned, if not completely refuted by the experience of the 20th century. And in this sense, Varlam Shalamov’s worldview is a direct negation of the philosophical ideas of Dante Alighieri. Let us remember that in the ordered world of the Divine Comedy the sun is an important metaphor. And the “carnal” sun, in the depths of which reside the shining, emitting light, pouring flame souls of philosophers and theologians (King Solomon, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi), and the “Sun of Angels”, which the Lord appears to us. One way or another, Sun, Light, Reason are poetic synonyms. But if in Dante’s poetic consciousness the sun never goes out (even in hell, when there is dense darkness all around), if the path from hell is the path to the luminaries and, having gone out to them, the hero, on occasion, does not forget to notice how and in what direction his shadow lies , then in Shalamov’s artistic world there is no light or shadow at all, there is no customary and generally understandable boundary between them. Here, for the most part, there is a thick, deathly twilight - a twilight without hope and without truth. In general, without any source of light, it is lost forever (and was it even there?). And there is no shadow here, because there is no sunlight - in the usual sense of these words. The prison sun and the camp sun of “Kolyma Tales” are not at all the same thing as simply Sun. It is not present here as a natural source of light and life. for everyone, but as some kind of secondary inventory, if not belonging to death, then having nothing to do with life. No, there still comes a moment—rarely, but it still happens—when the bright and sometimes hot sun makes its way into the world of the Kolyma prisoner. However, it never shines for everyone. From the dull twilight of the camp world, like a strong ray directed from somewhere outside, it always snatches out one person’s figure (say, the “first security officer” Alekseev, already familiar to us) or one person’s face, reflected in the eyes of one person. And always - always! - this is the figure or face, or eyes of the finally doomed. “...I was completely calm. And I had nowhere to rush. The sun was too hot - it burned my cheeks, unaccustomed to the bright light and fresh air. I sat down by the tree. It was nice to sit outside, breathe in the elastic wonderful air, the smell of blooming rose hips. My head was spinning... I was confident in the severity of the sentence - killing was a tradition of those years.” Although we have quoted the same story twice here, the sun that illuminates the face of the doomed prisoner is not at all the same as that which was reflected in the sheepskin coats of the guards and in the gold teeth of the guards a few pages earlier. This distant, as if otherworldly light falling on the face of a man who is ready to die is well known to us from other stories. There is a certain peace in it, perhaps a sign of reconciliation with Eternity: “The fugitive lived in the village bathhouse for three whole days, and finally, cut, shaved, washed, well-fed, he was taken away by the “operatives” for investigation, the outcome of which could only be execution. The fugitive himself, of course, knew about this, but he was an experienced, indifferent prisoner, who had long since crossed that line of life in prison when every person becomes a fatalist and lives “with the flow.” There were guards and “security guards” around him all the time; they didn’t allow him to talk to anyone. Every evening he sat on the porch of the bathhouse and looked at the cherry blossom sunset. The fire of the evening sun rolled into his eyes, and the eyes of the fugitive seemed to be burning - a very beautiful sight.” Of course, we could turn to the Christian poetic tradition and say that it is the directed light of love that meets the soul leaving this world... But no, we perfectly remember Shalamov’s statement: “God is dead...” And one more thing: “I lost my faith in God a long time ago, at the age of six... And I am proud that from the age of six until I was sixty, I did not resort to his help either in Vologda, or in Moscow, or in Kolyma.” And yet, despite these statements, the absence of God in the artistic picture otherworldly the Kolyma world is not at all a simple and self-evident fact. This topic, with its contradictions, constantly worries the author and again and again attracts attention. There is no God... but there are believers in God, and it turns out that these are the most worthy people I met in Kolyma: “The irreligion in which I lived my conscious life did not make me a Christian. But I have never seen more worthy people than religious people in the camps. Corruption gripped the souls of everyone, and only the religious held out. This was the case fifteen and five years ago.” But at the same time, having spoken about the mental fortitude of “religious people,” Shalamov seems to pass by, not showing much attention to the nature of this fortitude, as if everything is clear to him (and, presumably, to the reader) and this way of “holding on” interests him little . (“Is there only a religious way out of human tragedies?” asks the hero-narrator in the story “Unconverted”). Moreover, Shalamov, as if by a specially calculated technique, removes traditional ideas about God and religion from his artistic system. The story “The Cross” serves precisely this purpose - a story about an old blind priest, although he does not live in Kolyma or even in a camp, but still in the same Soviet conditions of constant deprivation, humiliation, and outright bullying. Left with an old and sick wife, just like himself, completely without funds, the priest breaks and cuts up a gold pectoral cross for sale. But not because he lost faith, but because “that’s not what God is in.” The story does not seem to belong to the “Kolyma Tales” either by its setting or plot, but by subtle artistic calculation it is included by the author in the general body and turns out to be extremely important in the composition of the volume. When entering the other world, it is like a sign of prohibition for any traditional humanistic values, including those of the Christian sense. When it is said that there is no rational basis in this life, this means the Divine Mind too - or even such a mind in the first place! But at the same time, here’s a completely different twist on the topic: one of Shalamov’s lyrical heroes, an undoubted alter ego, bears the name Krist. If the author is looking for a “non-religious way out,” then what exactly draws him to the Son of Man? Is there really a thought here about an atoning sacrifice? And if there is, then whose sacrifice is the author, the hero, all those who died in Kolyma? And what sins are atoned for? Isn’t it the same temptation, dating back to Dante’s times (or even more ancient - from the times of St. Augustine, or even from Plato’s, pre-Christian times?) temptation to build a just world order - according to human understanding, fair - a temptation that turned into “the shame of Kolyma and the ovens of Auschwitz” ? And if we are talking about redemption, then “in whose name”? Whose if God is not in the artistic system of Varlam Shalamov? We are not talking about an ordinary person, not about the religious views of one of thousands of Kolyma residents, finding out who had an easier time surviving in the camps - a “religious” or an atheist. No, we are interested in the creative method of the artist, the author of “Kolyma Tales”. Shalamov wrote, as if objecting to doubters or those who were unable to discern this triumph. But if good triumphs, then what is it, this very good? It’s not science to fasten your fly in the Kolyma frost!.. Shalamov consciously rejects the literary tradition with all its fundamental values. If in the center of the artistic world of Dante Alighieri is the Light of the Divine Mind, and this world is arranged rationally, logically, in justice, and Reason triumphs, then in the center of Shalamov’s artistic system... yes, by the way, is there anything here at all that could be called center, system-forming beginning? Shalamov seems to reject everything that he offers him as such started literary tradition: the concept of God, the idea of a rational structure of the world, dreams of social justice, the logic of legal law... What remains for a person when he has nothing left? What remains to the artist, when the tragic experience of the past century forever buried the ideological foundations of traditional art? Which new prose he will offer to the reader - is he obliged to offer?! “Why am I, a professional who has been writing since childhood, publishing since the early thirties, who has been thinking about prose for ten years, cannot bring anything new to the stories of Chekhov, Platonov, Babel and Zoshchenko? - wrote Shalamov, asking the same questions that are tormenting us now. — Russian prose did not stop with Tolstoy and Bunin. The last great Russian novel is Bely's Petersburg. But “Petersburg,” no matter what colossal influence it had on Russian prose of the twenties, on the prose of Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Vesyoly, is also only a stage, only a chapter in the history of literature. And in our time, the reader is disappointed in Russian classical literature. The collapse of her humanistic ideas, the historical crime that led to Stalin’s camps, to the ovens of Auschwitz, proved that art and literature are zero. When faced with real life, this is the main motive, the main question of time. The scientific and technological revolution does not answer this question. She can't answer. The probabilistic aspect and motivation provide multifaceted, multivalued answers, while the human reader needs a “yes” or “no” answer, using the same two-valued system that cybernetics wants to apply to the study of all humanity in its past, present and future. There is no rational basis for life - this is what our time proves. The fact that Chernyshevsky’s “Favorites” are sold for five kopecks, saving waste paper from Auschwitz, is symbolic to the highest degree. Chernyshevsky ended when the hundred-year era completely discredited itself. We do not know what stands behind God - behind faith, but behind unbelief we clearly see - everyone in the world - what stands. Therefore, such a craving for religion is surprising for me, the heir of completely different beginnings.” There is a deep meaning in the reproach that Shalamov throws at the literature of humanistic ideas. And this reproach was deserved not only by Russian literature of the 19th century, but also by all European literature - sometimes Christian in outward appearance (of course, it is said: love your neighbor as yourself), but seductive in essence in its tradition of dreams, which always boiled down to one thing : to take away from God and transfer into the hands of human creations of History. Everything is for man, everything is for the good of man! It was these dreams - through the utopian ideas of Dante, Campanella, Fourier and Owen, through the “Communist Manifesto”, through the dreams of Vera Pavlovna, which “plowed” Lenin’s soul - that led to Kolyma and Auschwitz... This sinful tradition - with all possible consequences sin - Dostoevsky also saw. It is not for nothing that at the very beginning of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, the name of Dante is mentioned as if by chance... But art is not a school of philosophy and politics. Or at least not only or even not so much school. And the “late Alighieri” would still rather create the tenth circle of hell than the program of a political party. “Dante’s poetry is characterized by all types of energy known to modern science,” wrote Osip Mandelstam, a sensitive researcher of The Divine Comedy. “The unity of light, sound and matter constitutes its inner nature. Reading Dante is, first of all, an endless labor, which, as we progress, moves us further away from our goal. If the first reading only causes shortness of breath and healthy fatigue, then stock up on a pair of unwearable Swiss shoes with nails for the next one. I seriously wonder how many soles, how many ox soles, how many sandals did Alighieri wear during his poetic work, traveling along the goat paths of Italy.” Logical formulas and political, religious, etc. doctrine is the result of only the “first reading” literary works, only the first acquaintance with art. Then art itself begins - not formulas, but music... Shocked by the dependence of Kolyma reality on texts that seem to have nothing to do with it, realizing that the “shame of Kolyma” is a derivative of these texts, Shalamov creates “new prose”, which from the very The beginning does not contain any doctrines or formulas - nothing that could be easily grasped on a “first reading”. It seems to remove the very possibility of a “first reading” - there is no healthy shortness of breath, no satisfaction. On the contrary, the first reading leaves only bewilderment: what is it about? What does music have to do with it? Is the shellac plate in the story “Sentence” really the system-forming metaphor of “Kolyma Tales”? It is not the Sun, not Reason, not Justice that he places at the center of his artistic world, but just a hoarse shellac record with some kind of symphonic music? Masters of the “first readings,” we are not immediately able to discern the relationship between the “late Alighieri” and the late Shalamov. Hear the kinship and unity of their music. “If we learned to hear Dante,” Mandelstam wrote, “we would hear the maturation of the clarinet and trombone, we would hear the transformation of the viola into a violin and the lengthening of the horn valve. And we would be listening to how the foggy core of the future homophonic three-part orchestra was formed around the lute and theorbo.” “There are thousands of truths in the world (and truths-truths, and truths-justices) and there is only one truth of talent. Just as there is one kind of immortality - art." Having completed the analysis, we ourselves must now seriously question our work or even cross it out completely... The fact is that the very text of the “Kolyma Tales” - the text of those publications to which we turned in our work - raises doubts. It’s not that anyone isn’t sure whether Varlam Shalamov wrote these or those stories—this, thank God, is undeniable. But what genre is the entire collection of his “Kolyma” works, how large is his text, where is its beginning and where is its end, what is the composition - this not only does not become clear over time, but even seems to become more and more incomprehensible. We have already referred to the nine-hundred-page volume of the Paris edition of Kolyma Tales. The volume opens with the “Kolyma Tales” cycle itself, here called “The First Death”. This series is a harsh introduction to artistic world Shalamov. It is here that we first find both a dull closed space and stopped time - nothingness- Kolyma camp “reality”. (It is here that death-bed indifference, the mental dullness that comes after torture by hunger, cold, and beatings are first spoken of.) This cycle is a guide to that Kolyma nothingness, where the events of the next books will unfold. A guide to the souls of the inhabitants of this hell - the prisoners. It is here that you understand that surviving (staying alive, saving life - and teaching the reader how to survive) is not at all the author’s task, which he solves together with his “lyrical hero”... If only because none of the characters already did not survive - everyone (and the reader along with everyone) is immersed in Kolyma oblivion. This cycle is, as it were, an “exposition” of the author’s artistic principles, well, like “Hell” in the “Divine Comedy”. And if we are talking about the six currently known cycles of stories as a single work - and this is precisely what everyone who has interpreted Shalamov’s compositional principles is inclined to do - then it is impossible to imagine any other beginning of the entire grandiose epic than the cycle entitled in the Paris volume (and which, by the way, is subject to further discussion) “The First Death.” But now a volume of Shalamov’s stories “Left Bank” (Sovremennik, 1989) is finally being published in Moscow... and without the first cycle! It couldn't be worse. Why, what were the publishers guided by? No explanation... In the same year, but in a different publishing house, another book of Shalamov’s stories was published - “The Resurrection of the Larch”. Thank God, it begins with the first cycle, with “Kolyma Tales” itself, but then (again, it couldn’t be worse!) greatly and completely arbitrarily cut down, by half or more, “The Shovel Artist” and “The Left Bank”. Moreover, here they have changed places both in comparison with the Paris edition, and in comparison with the just published collection “Left Bank”. Why, on what basis? But no, only at first glance it seems unclear why all these manipulations are being carried out. It’s not difficult to figure it out: different sequences of stories mean different artistic impressions. Shalamov is being strenuously adjusted to the traditional (and repeatedly refuted by him with such force and certainty) principle of the Russian humanistic school: “from darkness to light”... But it is enough to look back a few dozen lines to see that this principle, in the opinion of Shalamov himself , there is something decidedly incompatible with his “new prose.” I. Sirotinskaya herself, the publisher of both books, seems to express the right thoughts: “The stories of V.T. Shalamov’s works are connected by an inextricable unity: this is fate, soul, thoughts of the author himself. These are branches of a single tree, streams of a single creative stream - the epic of Kolyma. The plot of one story grows into another story, some characters appear and act under the same or different names. Andreev, Golubev, Krist are the incarnations of the author himself. There is no fiction in this tragic epic. The author believed that the story about this transcendental world is incompatible with fiction and should be written in a different language. But not in the language of psychological prose of the 19th century, which is no longer adequate to the world of the 20th century, the century of Hiroshima and concentration camps.” That's right! But artistic language is not only, and often not so much words, as rhythm, harmony, and composition of an artistic text. How can one, understanding that “the plot of one story develops into another story,” fail to understand that the plot of one cycle also develops into another! They cannot be arbitrarily shortened or rearranged. Moreover, there is a sketch by the writer himself order arrangement of stories and cycles - it was used by Parisian publishers. Thinking with respect and love about Shalamov, we extend our respect to those to whom the will of the artist bequeathed to be his executors. Their rights are unshakable... But to dispose of the text genius artist- an impossible task for one person. The task of qualified specialists should be to prepare the publication of a scientific edition of “Kolyma Stories” - in full accordance with the creative principles of V. Shalamov, so clearly set out in the recently published (for which I bow to I.P. Sirotinskaya) letters and notes... Now that there seems to be no censorship interference, God forbid that we, contemporaries, should offend the artist’s memory with considerations of political or commercial circumstances. Life and work of V.T. Shalamova is an atoning sacrifice for our common sins. His books are the spiritual treasure of Russia. This is how we should treat them. Among the literary figures discovered by the era of glasnost, the name of Varlam Shalamov, in my opinion, is one of the most tragic names in Russian literature. This writer left his descendants a legacy of amazing depth of artistry - “Kolyma Tales,” a work about life and human destinies in the Stalinist Gulag. Although the word “life” is inappropriate when talking about pictures of human existence depicted by Shalamov. It is often said that “Kolyma Stories” is the writer’s attempt to raise and resolve the most important moral questions of the time: the question of the legitimacy of a person’s struggle with the state machine, the ability to actively influence one’s destiny, and the ways to preserve human dignity in inhuman conditions. I imagine the task of a writer depicting hell on earth called “GULAG” differently. I think Shalamov’s work is a slap in the face to the society that allowed this to happen. “Kolyma Tales” is a spit in the face of the Stalinist regime and everything that personifies this bloody era. What ways of preserving human dignity, which Shalamov allegedly talks about in “Kolyma Stories,” can we talk about in this material, if the writer himself calmly states the fact that all human concepts - love, respect, compassion, mutual assistance - seemed to the prisoners “comic concepts” " He is not looking for ways to preserve this very dignity; the prisoners simply did not think about it, did not ask such questions. One can only be amazed at how inhumane the conditions were in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people found themselves, if every minute of “that” life was filled with thoughts of food, clothing that could be obtained by taking it off a recently deceased person. I think that the issues of a person’s control over his own destiny and maintaining his dignity are more applicable to the work of Solzhenitsyn, who also wrote about Stalin’s camps. In Solzhenitsyn's works, the characters really reflect on moral issues. Alexander Isaevich himself said that his heroes were placed in milder conditions than Shalamov’s heroes, and explained this by the different conditions of imprisonment in which they, the author-eyewitnesses, found themselves. It is difficult to imagine how much emotional stress these stories cost Shalamov. I would like to dwell on the compositional features of “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". The book “Kolyma Stories” includes 33 stories, arranged in a strictly defined order, but not tied to chronology. This construction is aimed at depicting Stalin's camps in history and development. Thus, Shalamov’s work is nothing more than a novel in short stories, despite the fact that the author has repeatedly declared the death of the novel as a literary genre in the 20th century. The stories are narrated in third person. The main characters of the stories are different people (Golubev, Andreev, Krist), but they are all extremely close to the author, since they are directly involved in what is happening. Each of the stories resembles the confession of a hero. 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. Severely, succinctly, without any attempts at psychological analysis, the writer even talks about what is happening somewhere documented. I think Shalamov achieves a stunning effect on the reader by contrasting the calmness of the author’s unhurried, calm narrative and the explosive, terrifying content. The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as absolute evil. “The camp is 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 carry out 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... But death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person in the camp. More often it becomes a salvation from torment for the one who died, and an opportunity to gain some benefit if another died. Here it is worth turning again to the episode of the camp workers digging up a freshly buried corpse from the frozen ground: all that the heroes experience is the joy that the dead man’s linen can be exchanged tomorrow for bread and tobacco (“Night”), The main feeling that pushes the heroes to do terrible things is the feeling of constant hunger. This feeling is the most powerful of all feelings. Food is what sustains life, so the writer describes in detail the process of eating: the prisoners eat very quickly, without spoons, over the side of the plate, licking the bottom clean with their tongue. In the story “Domino,” Shalamov portrays a young man who ate the meat of human corpses from the morgue, cutting out “non-fat” pieces of human flesh. Shalamov depicts the life of prisoners - another circle of hell. The prisoners' housing is huge barracks with multi-story bunks, where 500-600 people are accommodated. Prisoners sleep on mattresses stuffed with dry branches. Everywhere there is complete unsanitary conditions and, as a result, diseases. Shalamova views the Gulag as an exact copy of the model of Stalin’s totalitarian society: “...The camp is not a contrast between hell and heaven. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like.” In one of his diary notebooks from 1966, Shalamov explains the task he set in “Kolyma Stories”: “I am not writing so that what is described will not be repeated. It doesn’t happen like that... I write so that people know that such stories are being written, and they themselves decide to do some worthy act...”First reading of “Kolyma Stories” by V. Shalamov
M. "October". 1991, no. 3, pp. 182-195
Notes