In a tragic chorus of voices singing the horrors of the Stalinist camps, Varlam Shalamov sings one of the first parts. Autobiographical "Kolyma Tales" tells about inhuman ordeals that have befallen a whole generation. Having survived the circles of hell of totalitarian repressions, the writer refracted them through the prism of the literary word and became one of the classics of Russian literature of the 20th century.
Childhood and youth
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born in Vologda on June 5, 1907. He came from a hereditary family of priests. His father, like grandfather and uncle, was a pastor of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tikhon Nikolayevich was engaged in missionary work, preached to Aleutian tribes on distant islands (now the territory of Alaska) and knew English perfectly. The writer's mother was engaged in raising children, and in the last years of her life she worked at a school. Varlam was the fifth child in the family.
The boy learned to read at the age of 3 and eagerly devoured everything that came across in the family library. Literary predilections became more complex with age: he moved from adventure to philosophical writing. The future writer had a fine artistic taste, critical thinking and a desire for justice. Under the influence of books, ideals close to those of Narodnaya Volya were formed early in him.
Already in childhood, Varlam wrote his first poems. At the age of 7, the boy is sent to a gymnasium, but education is interrupted by the revolution, so he will finish school only in 1924. The writer summarizes the experience of childhood and adolescence in the "Fourth Vologda" - a story about the early years of life.
After graduating from school, the guy goes to Moscow and joins the ranks of the capital's proletariat: he goes to the factory and for 2 years hones the skill of a tanner in the tannery. And from 1926 to 1928 he received higher education at Moscow State University, studying Soviet law. But he was expelled from the university, having learned from the denunciations of fellow students about his “socially undesirable” origin. This is how the repressive machine first invades the biography of the writer.
In his student years, Shalamov attends a literary circle organized by the New LEF magazine, where he meets and communicates with progressive writing youth.
Arrests and imprisonment
In 1927, Shalamov takes part in a protest action timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. As part of a group of underground Trotskyists, he speaks with the slogans "Down with Stalin!" and calls for a return to true covenants. In 1929, for his participation in the activities of the Trotskyist grouping, Varlam Shalamov was first taken into custody and "without trial or investigation" sent to correctional camps for 3 years as a "socially harmful element."
Since that time, his long-term prison ordeals began, which lasted until 1951. The writer is serving his first term in Vishlag, where in April 1929 he arrives in a convoy from the Butyrka prison. In the north of the Urals, prisoners are participating in the largest construction project of the first five-year plan - they are building a chemical plant of all-Union significance in Berezniki.
Released in 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow and earned his living as a writer, working with industrial newspapers and magazines. However, in 1936, the man is again reminded of the "dirty Trotskyist past" and accused of counter-revolutionary activities. This time he was sentenced to 5 years and in 1937 he was sent to the harsh Magadan for the most difficult work - gold-mining face mines.
The sentence ended in 1942, but they refused to release the prisoners until the end of the Great Patriotic War. In addition, Shalamov was constantly “stitched” on new terms under various articles: here both the camp “lawyers' case” and “anti-Soviet statements”. As a result, the writer's term grew to 10 years.
Over the years, he managed to change five mines in the Kolyma camps, wandered around the villages and mines as a cutter, lumberjack and excavator. He happened to lie down in the medical barracks as a "goner" who is no longer capable of any physical labor. In 1945, exhausted from unbearable conditions, with a group of prisoners he tries to escape, but only aggravates the situation and is punished in a penalty mine.
Once again in the hospital, Shalamov remains there as an assistant, and then receives a referral to courses for paramedics. After graduating in 1946, Varlam Tikhonovich worked in camp hospitals in the Far East until the end of his prison term. Having received a release, but being impaired in his rights, the writer worked in Yakutia for another year and a half and saved up money for a ticket to Moscow, where he would return only in 1953.
Creation
After serving his first sentence, Shalamov worked as a journalist for Moscow trade union publications. In 1936 his first fiction story was published in the pages of "October". The 20-year exile influenced the work of the writer, although even in the camps he does not abandon attempts to write down his poems, which will form the basis of the cycle “Kolyma Notebooks”.
Shalamov's program work is rightfully considered “Kolyma stories”. This collection is devoted to the disenfranchised years of Stalin's camps by the example of the life of the prisoners of Sevvostlag and consists of 6 cycles ("Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Essays on the Underworld", etc.).
In it, the artist describes the life experience of people broken by the system. Deprived of freedom, support and hope, exhausted by hunger, cold and backbreaking work, a person loses his face and his very humanity - the writer is deeply convinced of this. The prisoner's capacity for friendship, compassion and mutual respect atrophies when the issue of survival comes to the fore.
Shalamov was against the publication of Kolyma Tales as a separate publication, and in their complete collection they were published in Russia only posthumously. A film was made on the basis of the work in 2005.
In the 1960s and 70s, Varlam Tikhonovich published collections of poems, wrote memoirs about childhood (the story "The Fourth Vologda") and the experience of the first camp imprisonment (anti-novel "Vishera").
The last cycle of poems was published in 1977.
Personal life
The fate of the eternal prisoner did not prevent the writer from building a personal life. Gudz Shalamov meets his first wife Galina Ignatievna in the Vishera camp. There, according to him, he “recaptured” her from another prisoner whom the girl came to visit. In 1934, the couple got married, and a year later they had a daughter, Elena.
During the second arrest of the writer, his wife was also subjected to repression: Galina was exiled to a remote village of Turkmenistan, where she lived until 1946. The family gathers together only in 1953, when Shalamov returned from the Far Eastern settlements to Moscow, but already in 1954 the couple divorced.
The second wife of Varlam Tikhonovich was Olga Sergeevna Neklyudova, a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. Shalamov became her fourth and last husband. The marriage lasted 10 years, the couple had no children.
After the divorce in 1966 and until his death, the writer remains lonely.
Death
In the last years of his life, the writer's health was extremely difficult. Decades of grueling work at the limit of human resources were not in vain. Back in the late 1950s, he suffered severe attacks of Meniere's disease, and in the 70s he gradually lost his hearing and vision.
The man is unable to coordinate his own movements and can hardly move, and in 1979 friends and colleagues transport him to the Invalides. Experiencing difficulties with speech and coordination, Shalamov does not abandon attempts to write poetry.
In 1981, the writer suffered a stroke, after which a decision was made to send him to a boarding house for people suffering from chronic mental illness. There he dies on January 17, 1982, the cause of death is croupous pneumonia.
The son of a priest, Shalamov always considered himself an unbeliever, but he was buried in accordance with the Orthodox rite and was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow. Photographs from the writer's funeral have been preserved.
Several museums and exhibitions located in different parts of the country are dedicated to the name of Shalamov: in Vologda, in the author's small homeland, in Kolyma, where he worked as a medical assistant, in Yakutia, where the writer spent his last days in exile.
Bibliography
- 1936 - "The Three Deaths of Dr. Austino"
- 1949-1954 - "Kolyma notebooks"
- 1954-1973 - "Kolyma Tales"
- 1961 - "Fire"
- 1964 - Rustle of Leaves
- 1967 - Road and Destiny
- 1971 - "The Fourth Vologda"
- 1972 - Moscow Clouds
- 1973 - Vishera
- 1973 - Fyodor Raskolnikov
- 1977 - Boiling Point
Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich
And - even if not a tenant in the world -
I am a petitioner and a plaintiff
Inevitable grief.
I am where the pain is, I am where the groan is,
In the eternal litigation of two parties,
In this old dispute. / "Atomic Poem" /
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 18 (July 1) 1907 in Vologda.
Shalamov's father, Tikhon Nikolaevich, a cathedral priest, was a prominent figure in the city, since he not only served in the church, but was also engaged in active social activities. According to the writer's testimony, his father spent eleven years in the Aleutian Islands as an Orthodox missionary, was a European educated man, adhering to free and independent views.
The relationship of the future writer with his father was not easy. The youngest son in a large family with many children often did not find a common language with the categorical father. “My father was from the darkest forest of the Ust-Sysolsk wilderness, from a hereditary priestly family, whose ancestors had recently been Zyryan shamans for several generations, from a shamanic clan that imperceptibly and naturally changed a tambourine for a censer, still in the power of paganism, the shaman himself and a pagan in the depths of his Zyrian soul ... ”- this is how V. Shalamov wrote about Tikhon Nikolaevich, although the archives testify to his Slavic origin.
Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Aleksandrovna, was busy with the household and kitchen, but she loved poetry, and was closer to Shalamov. A poem is dedicated to her, beginning like this: "My mother was a savage, dreamer and cook."
In his autobiographical story about childhood and adolescence, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his beliefs were formed, how his thirst for justice and his determination to fight for it were strengthened. People's will became his ideal. He read a lot, especially highlighting the works of Dumas before Kant.
In 1914, Shalamov entered the gymnasium of Alexander the Blessed. In 1923, he graduated from the Vologda Second Stage School, which, as he wrote, “did not instill in me a love of poetry or fiction, didn’t cultivate my taste, and I made discoveries myself, moving in zigzags - from Khlebnikov to Lermontov, from Baratynsky to Pushkin, from Igor Severyanin to Pasternak and Blok. "
In 1924, Shalamov left Vologda and got a job as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. In 1926, Shalamov entered the Faculty of Soviet Law at Moscow State University.
At this time, Shalamov wrote poetry, which were positively assessed by N. Aseev, participated in the work of literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes.
Shalamov strove to actively participate in the public life of the country. He established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in the demonstration of opposition to the 10th anniversary of October under the slogans "Down with Stalin!", "Let's fulfill Lenin's will!"
On February 19, 1929, he was arrested. Unlike many for whom the arrest was really a surprise, he knew why: he was among those who circulated Lenin's so-called testament, his famous "Letter to the Congress." In this letter, gravely ill and practically suspended from affairs, Lenin gives brief descriptions of his closest associates in the party, in whose hands the main power was concentrated at that time, and, in particular, points out the danger of concentrating it in Stalin, due to his unsightly human qualities. It was this letter, then hushed up in every possible way, declared a fake after Lenin's death, which refuted the intensely implanted myth of Stalin as the only, indisputable and most consistent successor to the leader of the world proletariat.
In Vishera, Shalamov wrote: "I was, after all, a representative of those people who opposed Stalin - no one ever thought that Stalin and Soviet power are one and the same." And then he continues: “Lenin's will, hidden from the people, seemed to me a worthy application of my strength. Of course, I was still a blind puppy then. But I was not afraid of life and boldly entered the struggle with it in the form in which the heroes of my childhood and youth — all Russian revolutionaries — fought with life and for life. " Later, in his autobiographical prose "Visher's Anti-Novel" (1970-1971, not completed) Shalamov wrote: "I consider this day and hour the beginning of my public life - the first true test in harsh conditions."
Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in Butyrka prison, which he later described in detail in the essay of the same name. And his first imprisonment, and then a three-year term in the Vishera camps, he perceived as an inevitable and necessary test given to him to test his moral and physical strength, to test himself as a person: “Do I have enough moral strength to go my way as a certain unit - that's what I was thinking about in the 95th cell of the male solitary block of the Butyrka prison. There were excellent conditions for thinking about life, and I thank Butyrka prison for the fact that in search of the right formula for my life I found myself alone in a prison cell. " The image of a prison in Shalamov's biography may even seem attractive. For him, it was a truly new and, most importantly, a feasible experience that instilled in his soul confidence in his own strengths and the unlimited possibilities of internal spiritual and moral resistance. Shalamov will emphasize the cardinal difference between prison and camp.
According to the writer's testimony, prison life in 1929 and in 1937, at least in Butyrki, remained much less cruel than in the camp. There even functioned a library, "the only library in Moscow, and maybe even a country that has not experienced all kinds of seizures, destruction and confiscations that in Stalin's time forever destroyed the book collections of hundreds of thousands of libraries" and prisoners could use it. Some studied foreign languages. And in the afternoon, time was allotted to "lectures", each had the opportunity to tell something interesting to others.
Shalamov was sentenced to three years, which he spent in the Northern Urals. He later said: “Our carriage was either uncoupled or attached to trains going north or northeast. We stood in Vologda - my father and my mother lived there, twenty minutes away. I did not dare to drop a note. The train went south again, then to Kotlas, to Perm. Experienced it was clear - we are going to the 4th department of the USLON on Vishera. The end of the railway line is Solikamsk. It was March, Ural March. In 1929, there was only one camp in the Soviet Union - the SLON - the Solovetsky special purpose camps. They drove us to the 4th branch of the ELEPHANT to Vishera. In the camp of 1929, there were many "products", many "suckers", many positions that were not at all necessary for a good owner. But the camp at that time was not a good host. Work was not asked at all, only a way out was asked, and it was for this way out that the prisoners received their rations. It was believed that it was impossible to ask more from a prisoner. There were no offsets for working days, but every year, following the example of the Solovetsky "unloading", lists were submitted for release by the camp authorities themselves, depending on the political wind that blew that year - either the murderers were released, then the White Guards, then the Chinese. These lists were reviewed by a Moscow commission. On Solovki, such a commission was chaired from year to year by Ivan Gavrilovich Filippov, a member of the NKVD board, a former Putilov turner. There is such a documentary film "Solovki". In it, Ivan Gavrilovich is filmed in his most famous role: the chairman of the unloading commission. Subsequently, Filippov was the head of the camp on Vishera, then in Kolyma and died in the Magadan prison ... The lists reviewed and prepared by the visiting commission were taken to Moscow, and the latter approved or did not approve, sending an answer after a few months. "Unloading" was the only way of early release at the time. "
In 1931 he was released and reinstated.
Shalamov Varlam Shalamov 5
Until 1932 he worked at the construction of a chemical plant in the city of Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937, he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, For Industrial Personnel. In 1936 his first publication took place - the story "The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino" was published in the magazine "October".
On June 29, 1934, Shalamov married G.I. Gudz. On April 13, 1935, their daughter Elena is born.
On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was arrested again "for counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years of imprisonment in labor camps with heavy physical labor. Shalamov was already in the pre-trial detention center when his story “The Pava and the Tree” was published in the Literary Contemporary magazine. Shalamov's next publication (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place twenty years later - in 1957.
Shalamov said: “In 1937 in Moscow, during the second arrest and investigation, at the very first interrogation of the trainee investigator Romanov, my profile was confused. I had to call some colonel, who explained to the young investigator that “then, in the twenties, they gave it this way, don't be embarrassed,” and, turning to me:
- What exactly are you arrested for?
- For printing Lenin's will.
- Exactly. So write in the minutes and put in the memorandum: "He printed and distributed a fake known as" Lenin's Testament. "
The conditions in which the prisoners were in Kolyma were calculated for an early physical destruction. Shalamov worked in the face of a gold mine in Magadan, fell ill with typhus, ended up in excavation work, in 1940-1942 he worked in a coal mine, in 1942-1943 - at a penalty mine in Dzhelgal. In 1943, Shalamov received a new 10-year term "for anti-Soviet agitation," calling Bunin a Russian classic. He ended up in a punishment cell, after which he miraculously survived, worked in a mine and as a lumberjack, tried to escape, and then ended up in the penalty area. His life often hung in the balance, but people who treated him well helped him. Such were for him Boris Lesnyak, also a convict who worked as a paramedic at the Belichya hospital of the Northern Mining Administration, and Nina Savoyeva, the head physician of the same hospital that patients called Black Mama.
Here, in "Belichya", Shalamov appeared as a goner in 1943. His condition, according to Savoyeva, was deplorable. As a man of large build, he always had a particularly difficult time on the more than meager camp rations. And who knows, the Kolyma Tales would have been written if their future author had not been in Nina Vladimirovna's hospital.
In the mid-40s, Savoyeva and Lesnyak helped Shalamov to remain at the hospital as a cultural worker. Shalamov remained at the hospital while his friends were there. After they left her and Shalamov was again threatened with hard labor, on which he would hardly have survived, in 1946 doctor Andrei Pantyukhov saved Shalamov from the stage and helped to get a medical assistant course at the Central Hospital for prisoners. After completing the courses, Shalamov worked in the surgical department of this hospital and as a paramedic in the village of woodcutters.
In 1949, Shalamov began to write down poems that compiled the collection "Kolyma Notebooks" (1937-1956). The collection consisted of 6 sections entitled by Shalamov "Blue Notebook", "Postman's Bag", "Personally and Confidentially", "Golden Mountains", "Fireweed", "High Latitudes".
I swear until I die
take revenge on these vile bitches.
Whose vile science I have fully comprehended.
I will wash my hands with the blood of the enemy,
When this blessed moment comes.
Publicly, in Slavic
I'll drink from the skull,
From an enemy skull
as Svyatoslav did.
Arrange this funeral
in the former Slavic taste
More expensive than all the afterlife
any posthumous glories.
In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp as a prisoner, but for another two years he was forbidden to leave the Kolyma, and he worked as a medical assistant at the camp and only left in 1953. By that time, his family had disintegrated, the adult daughter did not know her father, his health was undermined by the camps, and he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent for peat extraction in the village of Turkmen, Kalinin region.
In 1952, Shalamov sent his poems to Boris Pasternak, who praised them highly. In 1954, Shalamov began work on stories that compiled the collection "Kolyma Stories" (1954-1973). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of stories and essays - "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch", "Glove, or KR-2".
All stories have a documentary basis, the author is present in them - either under his own surname, or called Andreyev, Golubev, Christ. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it unacceptable to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but the inner world of the heroes was created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means. The author has repeatedly spoken about the confessional nature of the Kolyma Tales. He called his narrative style "new prose", emphasizing that it is important for him to resurrect feeling, extraordinary new details, descriptions in a new way are needed to make one believe in the story, everything else is not as information, but as an open heart wound " ... The camp world appears in the "Kolyma Tales" as an irrational world.
In 1956, Shalamov was rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti, moved to Moscow and married Olga Neklyudova. In 1957 he became a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, at the same time his poems were published. At the same time, he fell seriously ill and received a disability. In 1961 the book of his poems "Flame" was published. The last decade of his life, especially the very last years, were not easy and cloudless for the writer. Shalamov had an organic lesion of the central nervous system, which predetermined the irregular activity of the limbs. He needed treatment - neurological, and he was threatened with psychiatric.
On February 23, 1972, Literaturnaya Gazeta, where international information would be obstructed, published a letter from Varlam Shalamov, in which he protested against the appearance abroad of his Kolyma Tales. The philosopher Yuri Schrader, who met with Shalamov a few days after the letter appeared, recalls that the writer himself treated this publication as a clever trick: it seemed like he cheated everyone, deceived his superiors, and thereby was able to protect himself. "Do you think it's that easy to appear in the newspaper?" he asked, either really sincerely, or checking the impression of the interlocutor.
This letter was perceived in intellectual circles as a renunciation. The image of the unyielding author of the “Kolyma stories” that appeared on the lists was crumbling. Shalamov was not afraid of losing his leadership position - he never had such a position; he was not afraid of losing his income - he did with a small pension and infrequent fees. But to say that he had nothing to lose - does not turn his tongue.
Any person always has something to lose, and Shalamov in 1972 turned sixty-five. He was a sick, rapidly aging man who had had the best years of his life. Shalamov wanted to live and create. He wanted, dreamed, that his stories, paid for with his own blood, pain, anguish, would be published in his native country, which had experienced and suffered so much.
In 1966, the writer divorced Neklyudova. Many believed he was already dead.
And Shalamov in the 70s walked around Moscow - he was met on Tverskaya, where he sometimes went out for food from his closet. His appearance was terrible, he staggered like a drunk, he fell. The police were on the alert, Shalamov was raised, and he, who did not take a single gram of alcohol in his mouth, took out a certificate of his illness - Meniere's disease, aggravated after the camps and associated with impaired coordination of movements. Shalamov began to lose his hearing and sight
In May 1979, Shalamov was placed in a home for the disabled and elderly on Vilis Latsis Street in Tushino. The bureaucratic pajamas made him look very much like a prisoner. Judging by the stories of the people who visited him, he again felt like a prisoner. He perceived the home for the disabled as a prison. Like violent isolation. He didn't want to talk to the staff. He ripped the linen out of bed, slept on a bare mattress, tied a towel around his neck, as if it could be stolen from him, rolled the blanket and leaned on it with his hand. But Shalamov was not insane, although he could probably have made such an impression. Doctor D.F. Lavrov, a psychiatrist, recalls that he went to the nursing home to Shalamov, to whom he was invited by the literary critic A. Morozov who visited the writer.
It was not Shalamov's condition that struck Lavrov, but his position - the conditions in which the writer was. As for the condition, there were speech, movement disorders, a serious neurological disease, but he did not find dementia, which alone could give a reason for the transfer of a person to a boarding school for psychochronists, in Shalamov. In this diagnosis, he was finally convinced by the fact that Shalamov - in his presence, right before his eyes - dictated two of his new poems to Morozov. His intellect and memory were intact. He wrote poems, memorized - and then A. Morozov and I. Sirotinskaya wrote down after him, in the full sense removed from his lips. It was not an easy job. Shalamov repeated a word several times in order to be understood correctly, but in the end the text came together. He asked Morozov to make a selection of the recorded poems, gave it the title "Unknown Soldier" and expressed a wish to be taken to magazines. Morozov went and offered. To no avail.
The poems were published abroad in the "Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement" with a note by Morozov about Shalamov's situation. The goal was one - to attract public attention to help, find a way out. The goal was in a sense achieved, but the effect was the opposite. After this publication, foreign radio stations started talking about Shalamov. Such attention to the author of the Kolyma Tales, a large volume of which was published in Russian in 1978 in London, began to worry the authorities, and the relevant department began to take an interest in Shalamov's visitors.
Meanwhile, the writer suffered a stroke. In early September 1981, a commission met to decide whether the writer could continue to be kept in a nursing home. After a short meeting in the director's office, the commission went up to Shalamov's room. Elena Khinkis, who was present there, says that he did not answer questions - most likely he simply ignored, as he knew how. But he was diagnosed with exactly the one that Shalamov's friends feared: senile dementia. In other words, dementia. Friends who visited Shalamov tried to play it safe: phone numbers were left to the medical staff. New, 1982 A. Morozov met in the nursing home together with Shalamov. At the same time, the last picture of the writer was taken. On January 14, eyewitnesses said that when Shalamov was being transported, there was a cry. He still tried to resist. He was rolled out in a chair, half-dressed, loaded into a chilled-out car, and across the entire snow-covered, frosty, January Moscow - a long way from Tushino to Medvedkovo - he was sent to boarding school for psychochronists No. 32.
Elena Zakharova left memories of the last days of Varlam Tikhonovich: “... We approached Shalamov. He was dying. It was obvious, but I took out the phonendoscope. V.T. died of pneumonia, heart failure developed. I think it was all simple - stress and hypothermia. He lived in prison, they came for him. And they drove through the whole city, in winter, he did not have outerwear, he could not go out into the street. So, most likely, they threw a blanket over the pajamas. He probably tried to fight, threw off the blanket. I knew very well what the temperature in the rafiks working on the transport was, I myself went for several years, working in an ambulance.
On January 17, 1982, Varlam Shalamov died of croupous pneumonia. It was decided not to arrange a civil funeral service in the Writers' Union, which turned its back on Shalamov, but to perform a funeral service for him, as the son of a priest, according to the Orthodox rite in the church.
The writer was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery, not far from the grave of Nadezhda Mandelstam, in whose house he often visited in the 60s. There were many who came to say goodbye.
In June 2000, in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, the monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown persons tore off and carried away the bronze head of the writer, leaving a lonely granite pedestal. Thanks to the help of compatriots-metallurgists of JSC "Severstal" in 2001, the monument was restored.
A documentary was made about Varlam Shalamov.
Andrey Goncharov //
The fate of a person is predetermined, as many believe, by his character. Shalamov's biography - difficult and extremely tragic - is a consequence of his moral views and beliefs, the formation of which took place already in adolescence.
Childhood and youth
Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda in 1907. His father was a priest, a person expressing progressive views. Perhaps the environment that surrounded the future writer and the parental outlook gave the first impetus to the development of this extraordinary personality. Exiled prisoners lived in Vologda, with whom Varlam's father always sought to maintain relations and provided all kinds of support.
Shalamov's biography is partially reflected in his story "The Fourth Vologda". Already at a young age, a thirst for justice and a desire to fight for it at any cost began to form in the author of this work. Shalamov's ideal in those years was the image of the People's Will. The sacrifice of his feat inspired the young man and, possibly, predetermined his entire future fate. Artistic talent manifested itself in him from an early age. At first, his gift was expressed in an irresistible urge to read. He read voraciously. The future creator of a literary cycle about the Soviet camps was interested in various prose: from adventure novels to the philosophical ideas of Immanuel Kant.
In Moscow
Shalamov's biography includes the fateful events that occurred during the first period of his stay in the capital. He left for Moscow at the age of seventeen. At first he worked as a tanner at a factory. Two years later, he entered the university at the Faculty of Law. Literary activity and jurisprudence are, at first glance, incompatible directions. But Shalamov was a man of action. The feeling that the years were going in vain tormented him already in his early youth. As a student, he was a participant in literary disputes, rallies, demonstrations and
First arrest
Shalamov's biography is all about prison sentences. The first arrest took place in 1929. Shalamov was sentenced to three years in prison. Essays, articles and many feuilletons were created by the writer during that difficult period after his return from the Northern Urals. To survive the long years in the camps, he was perhaps given strength by the conviction that all these events were a test.
Regarding the first arrest, the writer once said in autobiographical prose that it was this event that marked the beginning of a real public life. Later, with bitter experience behind his back, Shalamov changed his views. He no longer believed that suffering purifies a person. Rather, it leads to the corruption of the soul. He called the camp a school that has an extremely negative impact on anyone from the first to the last day.
But the years that Varlam Shalamov spent on Vishera, he could not help but reflect in his work. Four years later, he was arrested again. Five years in the Kolyma camps became Shalamov's sentence in the terrible 1937.
In Kolyma
One arrest followed another. In 1943, Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was taken into custody only for calling the émigré writer Ivan Bunin a Russian classic. This time, Shalamov survived thanks to the prison doctor, who at his own peril and risk sent him to the courses of paramedics. For the first time, Shalamov began to write his poems on the key of Duskanya. After his release, he could not leave Kolyma for another two years.
And only after Stalin's death Varlam Tikhonovich was able to return to Moscow. Here he met with Boris Pasternak. Shalamov's personal life did not work out. For too long, he was cut off from his family. His daughter grew up without him.
From Moscow, he managed to move to the Kalinin region and get a job as a foreman in peat mining. Varlamov Shalamov devoted all his free time from hard work to writing. "Kolyma stories", which were created in those years by a factory foreman and a supply agent, made him a classic of Russian and anti-Soviet literature. Stories entered world culture, became a monument to countless victims
Creation
In London, Paris and New York, Shalamov's stories were published earlier than in the Soviet Union. The plot of the works from the cycle "Kolyma Tales" is a painful depiction of prison life. The tragic fates of the heroes are similar to one another. They became prisoners of the Soviet Gulag by merciless chance. The prisoners are exhausted and starved. Their further fate depends, as a rule, on the arbitrariness of the chiefs and thieves.
Rehabilitation
In 1956, Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was rehabilitated. But his works have not yet been published. Soviet critics believed that there was no "labor enthusiasm" in the work of this writer, but there was only "abstract humanism." Varlamov Shalamov took such a review very hard. "Kolyma Tales" - a work created at the cost of the author's life and blood - turned out to be unnecessary for society. Only creativity and companionship supported his spirit and hope.
Poems and prose of Shalamov were seen by Soviet readers only after his death. Until the end of his days, despite his poor health, undermined by the camps, he did not stop writing.
Publication
For the first time, works from the Kolyma collection appeared in the writer's homeland in 1987. And this time his incorruptible and harsh word was necessary for the readers. It was no longer possible to safely move forward and leave in oblivion in Kolyma. That the voices of even dead witnesses can be heard publicly, this writer proved. Shalamov's books: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Sketches of the Underworld" and others are evidence that nothing has been forgotten.
Recognition and criticism
The works of this writer are one whole. Here is the unity of the soul, and the fate of people, and the thoughts of the author. The epic about Kolyma is the branches of a huge tree, small streams of a single stream. The storyline of one story flows smoothly into another. And in these works there is no fiction. There is only truth in them.
Unfortunately, domestic critics could evaluate Shalamov's work only after his death. Recognition in literary circles came in 1987. And in 1982, after a long illness, Shalamov died. But even in the post-war period, he remained an inconvenient writer. His work did not fit into the Soviet ideology, but was alien to the new time. The thing is that in the works of Shalamov there was no open criticism of the authorities, from which he suffered. Perhaps the Kolyma Tales are too unique in their ideological content to be placed on a par with other figures in Russian or Soviet literature.
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born in Vologda 5 (18) June 1907... He came from a hereditary family of priests. His father, like grandfather and uncle, was a pastor of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tikhon Nikolaevich was engaged in missionary work, preached to the Aleutian tribes on distant islands (now the territory of Alaska) and knew English perfectly. The writer's mother was engaged in raising children, and in the last years of her life she worked at a school. Varlam was the fifth child in the family.
Already in childhood, Varlam wrote his first poems. At 7 years old ( 1914 g.) the boy is sent to the gymnasium, but education is interrupted by the revolution, so he will finish school only in 1924... The writer summarizes the experience of childhood and adolescence in "The Fourth Vologda" - a story about the early years of his life. After leaving school, he arrived in Moscow, worked for two years as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. From 1926 to 1928 studied at the faculty of Soviet law at Moscow State University, then was expelled "for hiding social origin" (indicated that his father was disabled, without indicating that he was a priest) on several denunciations of fellow students. This is how the repressive machine first invades the biography of the writer.
At this time, Shalamov wrote poetry, participated in literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes. He strove to actively participate in the public life of the country. He established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in the opposition demonstration for the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution under the slogan "Down with Stalin!" 19 February 1929 was arrested. In his autobiographical prose, Vishersky's anti-novel (1970-1971, not completed) wrote: "I consider this day and hour the beginning of my social life - the first true test in harsh conditions." He served his term in the Vishersky camp (Vishlag) in the Northern Urals. Met there in 1931 with his future wife Galina Ignatievna Gudz (married in 1934), who came from Moscow to the camp to meet with her young husband, and Shalamov "repulsed" her, agreeing to meet immediately after her release. In 1935they had a daughter, Elena (Shalamova Elena Varlamovna, married Yanushevskaya, died in 1990).
In October 1931 g. released from a forced labor camp, reinstated. In 1932 g.returns to Moscow and starts working in the trade union magazines "For shock work" and "For mastery of technology", from 1934 - in the magazine "For industrial personnel".
In 1936 g. Shalamov publishes the first story "" in the magazine "October" №1. The 20-year exile influenced the work of the writer, although even in the camps he does not abandon attempts to write down his poems, which will form the basis of the cycle “Kolyma Notebooks”.
However in 1936 the man is again reminded of the "dirty Trotskyist past" and January 13, 1937the writer was arrested for participating in counterrevolutionary activities. This time he is sentenced to 5 years. He was already in a pre-trial detention center when his story "" was published in the magazine "Literary Contemporary". Shalamov's next publication (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place in 1957. 14 august with a large party of prisoners on a steamer arrives in the Nagaevo Bay (Magadan) to the gold-mining face mines ..
The term of the conviction ended in 1942, but they refused to release the prisoners until the end of the Great Patriotic War. In addition, Shalamov was constantly "stitching" new terms under various articles: here is the camp "case of lawyers" ( december 1938), and “anti-Soviet statements”. April 1939 to May 1943 works in a geological exploration party at the Chernaya Rechka mine, in the coal mines of the Kadykchan and Arkagala camps, general works at the Dzhelgala penalty mine. As a result, the writer's term grew to 10 years.
June 22, 1943 he was again unjustifiably sentenced to ten years for anti-Soviet agitation, followed by a loss of rights for 5 years, which, according to Shalamov himself, was what he called I. A. Bunin a Russian classic: “... I was sentenced to a war for a statement that Bunin is a Russian classic "and, according to the accusations of EB Krivitsky and IP Zaslavsky, false witnesses at several other trials, in" praising Hitler's weapons. "
Over the years, he managed to change five mines in the Kolyma camps, wandered around the villages and mines as a cutter, lumberjack and excavator. He happened to lie down in the medical barracks as a "goner" who is no longer capable of any physical labor. In 1945, exhausted from unbearable conditions, with a group of prisoners trying to escape, but only aggravates the situation and is punished in the penalty mine.
Once again in the hospital, Shalamov remains there as an assistant, and then receives a referral to courses for paramedics. Since 1946After completing the above-mentioned eight-month courses, he began to work in the Camp Department of the Dalstroy Central Hospital in the village of Debin on the left bank of the Kolyma River and on a forest "business trip" of lumberjacks. Appointment to the post of paramedic is obliged to the doctor A. M. Pantyukhov, who personally recommended Shalamov to the courses of paramedics.
In 1949 g. Shalamov began to write poems that compiled the collection Kolyma notebooks ( 1937–1956 ). The collection consists of 6 sections, entitled Shalamov Blue Notebook, Postman's Bag, Personally and Confidentially, Golden Mountains, Cyprus, High Latitudes.
In 1951 year Shalamov was released from the camp, but for two more years he was forbidden to leave Kolyma, he worked as a medical assistant at the camp and left only in 1953... His family fell apart, the adult daughter did not know her father. His health was undermined, he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent for peat extraction in the village. Turkmen of the Kalinin region In 1954 g. began work on the stories that compiled the collection Kolyma stories ( 1954–1973 ). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of stories and essays: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Essays of the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch" and "Glove, or KR-2". Completely they are collected in the two-volume "Kolyma Stories" in 1992 in the series "The Way of the Cross of Russia" by the publishing house "Soviet Russia". They came out as a separate edition in London in 1978... In the USSR, only in 1988-1990... All stories have a documentary basis, the author is present in them - either under his own surname, or called Andreyev, Golubev, Christ. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it unacceptable to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but the inner world of the heroes was created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means.
In 1956 Shalamov was rehabilitated and moved to Moscow. In 1957 g.became a freelance correspondent for the magazine "Moscow", at the same time his poems were published. In 1961 published a book of his poems Ognivo.
Second marriage ( 1956-1965 ) was married to Olga Sergeevna Neklyudova (1909-1989), also a writer, whose son from his third marriage (Sergei Yuryevich Neklyudov) is a well-known Mongolian and folklorist, doctor of philological sciences.
Shalamov described his first arrest, imprisonment in Butyrka prison and serving time in the Vishera camp in a series of autobiographical stories and essays early 1970s, which are united in the anti-novel "Vishera".
In 1962 he wrote to A.I.Solzhenitsyn:
Remember the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person - neither the boss nor the prisoner needs to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be.<…> For my part, I decided long ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this very truth.
Both in prose and in Shalamov's verses (collection "Flame", 1961, "Rustle of Leaves", 1964 , "Road and Destiny", 1967 , and others), expressing the difficult experience of the Stalinist camps, the theme of Moscow sounds (the collection of poems "Moscow Clouds", 1972 ). He was also engaged in poetic translations. In the 1960s he met A. A. Galich.
In 1973 was admitted to the Writers' Union. 1973 to 1979 he kept workbooks. In 1979 in serious condition he was placed in a boarding house for the disabled and the elderly. He lost sight and hearing, could hardly move. The analysis and publication of the records until his death in 2011 was continued by I.P.Sirotinskaya, to whom Shalamov transferred the rights to all his manuscripts and works.
Shalamov spent the last three years of his seriously ill life in the House of Disabled and Elderly People of the Literary Fund (in Tushino). The fact that the house of the disabled was like can be judged from the memoirs of E. Zakharova, who was next to Shalamov in the last six months of his life:
Institutions of this kind are the most terrible and most undoubted evidence of the deformation of human consciousness that occurred in our country in the 20th century. A person is deprived not only of the right to a dignified life, but also to a dignified death.
Zakharova E. From a speech at the Shalamov readings in 2002
Nevertheless, even there Varlam Tikhonovich, whose ability to move correctly and clearly articulate his speech was impaired, continued to write poetry. In the fall of 1980, A.A.Morozov somehow incredibly managed to make out and write down these last poems by Shalamov. They were published during Shalamov's lifetime in the Parisian journal Vestnik RKhD No. 133, 1981.
In 1981 the French branch of the Pen Club awarded Shalamov with the Freedom Prize.
January 15, 1982 Shalamov, after a superficial examination by the medical commission, was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronicists. During transportation, Shalamov caught a cold, fell ill with pneumonia and died January 17, 1982.
Artworks
Most of his works were published posthumously. Varlam Shalamov, who spent more than 17 years in Stalin's camps, is known not only as a writer of prison life, but also as a master of words, philosopher and thinker. And also - as a writer who left amazing portraits of his time and hometown in prose. This is a whole series of stories and the story "The Fourth Vologda", which is considered one of his most significant works.
And - even if not a tenant in the world -
I am a petitioner and a plaintiff
Inevitable grief.
I am where the pain is, I am where the groan is,
In the eternal litigation of two parties,
In this old dispute.
"Atomic Poem"
Childhood Varlama Shalamova passed in the shadow. In the shadow - in the literal and figurative sense, for the clerk's house, where the writer was born, was literally "behind the back" of the Sophia Cathedral, in its shadow, and the first memories of the future author of "Kolyma Tales" are associated with the Cold Cathedral, as Sophia was called by the Vologda residents ...
About Varlam Shalamov's parent - father Tikhon
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 5/18, 1907 in the family of the priest of the Sophia Cathedral, Father Tikhon Shalamov and his wife Nadezhda Alexandrovna. Priest Fr. Tikhon Shalamov was not quite ordinary. And the point is not even that he wore short robes, but in his peculiar view of the role of the priesthood in Russian history.
Obviously, lofty ideas about his own destiny arose in the head of Fr. Tikhon after he was ordained, for, in fact, no other paths were open to him: the son of a poor priest from a remote Zyryansk village, he could hardly count on any other field, except "Hereditary". But he started it very extravagantly: he went to missionary work in Alaska. There were born Varlam's older brothers and sisters, and he himself was born in Vologda, in the homeland of his mother, where Fr. Tikhon moved his family in 1905, attracted by "fresh revolutionary trends."
Son of a priest
Perhaps there is a certain amount of bias in Varlam Tikhonovich's attitude to his father. Old childhood grievances - grievances of the youngest late son, and not even for himself, but for his mother, "whose fate was trampled by his father," - and so ooze from the pages of "Fourth Vologda". In this bitter autobiographical account of childhood in three cramped rooms of the clergy's house, the writer constantly settles scores with his father and himself. Nevertheless, even adjusted for filial offense, Fr. Tikhon Shalamov was an exotic figure against the background of the then clergy, not to say more, as evidenced by the circle of his acquaintances: revolutionaries exiled to Vologda, as well as the future Renovationist Metropolitan Alexander (Vvedensky) (later Father Tikhon himself switched to Renovationism). At the same time, the relationship with the priesthood did not develop with the priest, and when his son Sergei was expelled from the gymnasium, he attributed this to the intrigues of enemies.
Varlaam (and in childhood Shalamov was called that way, by the correct name; he threw out the "extra" letter from him, already becoming an adult), on the contrary, studied excellently in the gymnasium. But my father had his own explanation for this. "They are afraid of me," he said, leafing through his son's diary, speckled with fives.
Writer Varlam Shalamov - "The socially dangerous element"
Shalamov graduated not from the gymnasium of Alexander the Blessed, which he entered in 1914, but from the Unified Labor School of the second stage No. 6. It was 1923. And the next year he left Vologda forever to build his own life. Not believing in God, the young man did not want to become a priest. I did not want to study medicine either, although my father insisted on this. Arriving in Moscow, he got a job as a tanner at a tannery. In 1926 he entered the faculty of Soviet law on a free admission basis. The next year, being in opposition to the existing government, he took part in a rally under the slogan "Down with Stalin!" and "Let's Fulfill Lenin's Testament!", timed to coincide with the decade of the revolution. It is strange for us now to imagine that then there could still be rallies, but - indeed, there could have been. The political atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s differed greatly.
The first arrest of a writer
Already in 1928, student Shalamov felt the growing grip of the "young Soviet regime": for concealing social origin (he did not indicate in the questionnaire that his father was a priest, having written that he was disabled, although by that time the latter was true - Father Tikhon was completely blind) he was expelled from the university. And in 1929 the first arrest followed. Shalamov was seized during a raid in an underground printing house where the leaflets "Lenin's Testament" were printed. As a "socially dangerous element" the priest's son received three years in the camps. He served his sentence in Vishlag, in the Northern Urals, and built the Berezniki chemical plant.
Varlam Shalamov in Solikamsk
Shalamov was arrested for the first time in February 1929, long before the repression became widespread. The system of camps was just being created then, so at that time in Solikamsk there was only a transit prison. Later, in the 1930s, the city will become part of Usollag, and the number of prisoners in it will be several times greater than the indigenous population.
Shalamov spent a little time in Solikamsk. He was held together with a hundred other prisoners in terrible cramped conditions in a small room. One night, the writer was forced to undress, go outside and stand in the snow for a long time, not allowing him to sit down or try to warm up. It was a punishment, on the other hand, that he stood up for one of the inmates, who was beaten by the warders. Soon, all the prisoners were sent further, to Vishera.
There are many dark spots in the camp history of Solikamsk. According to some historians, the plaque on the wall of the Trinity Monastery was installed by mistake, because the prison in it was established only in the second half of the 1930s. In this case, the church turned into a prison, through which the future author of the Kolyma Tales passed, most likely should be the Church of St. John the Baptist in Krasnoye Selo.
Second arrest of Varlam Shalamov
In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow. He wrote prose, poetry, collaborated with the trade union magazines "For shock work", "For mastering technology", "For industrial personnel", met with his future wife Galina Gudz, whom he met in the camp. Life seemed to be getting better. It was overshadowed only by the events caused by the natural course of time: in 1933, the writer's father died, in 1934 - his mother. Six months before her death, Shalamov married, but Nadezhda Alexandrovna did not see his granddaughter, born in April 1935.
Shalamov recalled:
“I was gaining strength. Poems were written, but not read to anyone. First of all, I had to achieve an uncommon expression. A book of stories was being prepared. The plan was as follows. In 1938, the first book of prose. Then - the second book - a collection of poems.
On the night of January 12, 1937, there was a knock on my door: - We are looking for you. It was the collapse of all hopes ... My wife's brother wrote a denunciation against me.
From the first minute in prison it was clear to me that there were no mistakes in the arrests, that there was a systematic extermination of an entire “social” group - everyone - who remembered something from Russian history that was not what should have been remembered in recent years. The cell was packed with soldiers, old communists, turned into "enemies of the people." Everyone thought that everything was a nightmare, morning would come, everything would dissipate and everyone would be invited to the old position with an apology. "
A special meeting condemned Shalamov to 5 years of forced labor camps using hard labor. On August 14, 1937, the steamer brought a large party of prisoners to the Nagaev Bay (Magadan). Among them was Varlam Shalamov.
Kolyma stretched out for Shalamov for 16 years
Five years of hard work lasted fourteen. Even sixteen - if you count all the years spent by the writer in Kolyma, and not just the camp. Although this era in Shalamov's life gave him material for creativity, he did not believe - unlike, for example, A.I. Solzhenitsyn - that she had enriched him with some at least partially useful experience. “The author of the Kolyma stories,” wrote Shalamov upon his return to the “mainland,” “considers the camp a negative experience for a person - from the first to the last hour. A person should not know, should not even hear about him. No person gets better or stronger after camp. The camp is a negative experience, a negative school, corruption for everyone - for bosses and prisoners, guards and spectators, passers-by and readers of fiction. "
Death was on his heels. Arkagala, Dzhelgala, Kadykchan, Yagodnoe, Susuman - all these names, which speak a lot to the experienced Kolyma resident, names with shackle chains entangled his biography. Scurvy and dystrophy stained teeth, obscured the eyes with a nasty fog. Some relief of fate followed in 1946, when the doctor A.M. Pantyukhov, who sympathized with Shalamov, helped him to go to the paramedic courses in Magadan. Until the end of his sentence (in 1951), the prisoner Shalamov worked as a medical assistant - first in the hospital for prisoners "Left Bank", then in the village of woodcutters "Klyuch Duskanya". During this period, he began to write poetry, which then entered the cycle "Kolyma notebooks".
Return from prison and death
Shalamov's term of imprisonment ended in 1951. But for two more years he worked as a paramedic in Yakutia, earning money to move. He sent his poems to Moscow to B.L. Pasternak. A correspondence began between them.
Varlam Tikhonovich, like many, managed to return to Moscow only in 1956. During the years away from home, his family fell apart. Love could not "step over" such a long separation.
Kolyma also broke Shalamov's soul. Even after becoming a member of the Writers' Union, having settled in Moscow, he constantly expected to be "thrown out" from here, he was afraid to be left without a registration. More frequent attacks of Meniere's disease, accompanied by loss of coordination. In the Soviet Union, Shalamov's Kolyma prose was not published, only collections of poetry were published. The stories were published only in the West, but Shalamov, hoping to see them published in his homeland, protested against these publications, which became the reason for his break with many dissident writers.
And now - a lonely old age. Pension for the elderly and disabled. Awarded the Paris Pen Club Prize. Stroke. On January 14, 1982, Shalamov was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronists. And on January 17, transient pneumonia drove him to the grave.
Sasha Mitrakhovich 27.01.2017 18:09
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 18, 1907 in the family of the Vologda priest Tikhon Shalamov and Nadezhda Alexandrovna, a former housewife. At one time, before the birth of Varlam, Tikhon Nikolaevich served for ten years as a preacher in the distant Aleutian Islands. His ancestors belonged to the Russian Orthodox clergy, while he believed in his Zyryan roots, since he spent his childhood among the people of this nationality. The writer's grandfather, priest Nikolai Ioannovich, married to the daughter of a sexton, served in the Votchinsky parish of the Ust-Sysolsk district of the Vologda province, on the territory of the present Republic of Komi.
The biographical data of the childhood of this wonderful writer are scanty: in 1914 he entered the gymnasium, and completed his secondary education after the revolutions of 1917, graduating in 1923 from the unified labor school of the 2nd stage No. 6, arranged by the Soviet authorities in the same building. This was the end of the Vologda period of Varlam Shalamov's life: ahead of him were a job as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo near Moscow, the faculty of Soviet law at Moscow State University, exclusion because of his father - "for hiding social origin", and entering the time of maturity. But childhood always lived in his memory, and he often dreamed of his hometown at night.
The future author of "Kolyma Tales" had no shortage of books. Before the revolution, their family did not live in poverty, moreover, there was a tradition in Vologda from time immemorial: each of the exiles sent here to settle here by the tsar Themis, having served his term, before leaving, donated his personal library to the book fund of the City Public Book Depository ... A variety of people were exiled here, from the rebellious and philosopher Berdyaev to the Socialist-Revolutionary Savinkov and Maria Ulyanova. Shalamov called the classic cycle of the Russian liberation movement the scheme: Petersburg - prison - Vologda - abroad - Petersburg - prison - Vologda.
Therefore, Vologda residents have always been rightfully proud of their huge public library. And also in the city there were libraries in districts and public reading rooms. It is no coincidence that Shalamov, by his own admission, acquired a taste for his native language and the literary word in Vologda. “On one of the streets there is a wooden church - the value of architecture, equal to Kizhi - the Church of Varlaam Khutynsky, the patron saint of Vologda. In honor of this saint, I was also named, born in 1907. Only I voluntarily turned my name - Varlaam - into Varlam. For sound reasons, this name seemed to me more successful, without the extra letter "a". "
The Shalamovs lived in a small state-owned apartment of the cathedral house for a clergyman, three rooms for seven people. Fate saved this building on Sobornaya Gorka due to its proximity to the state-protected architectural complex of the Ivan the Terrible Cathedral, as in the time of the writer the townspeople called it.
The head of the family wore expensive fur coats with boron collars, and even his robes were silk, expensive cut. At the same time, the elder Shalamov brought from Alaska the experience of a hunter and a fisherman; in the courtyard of the house, he made boats with his own hands, since the river is nearby. According to the recollections of Varlam Tikhonovich, all the inhabitants of their house for the clergy had sheds - "woodcutters" and vegetable gardens, worked in their free time on the ground, leading a life far from idle.
Nowadays, the Shalamovs' house houses the museum of the camp painter of everyday life. In his autobiographical pages, he often recalled the night searches of Soviet times, endless sharing, seals and, finally, the expulsion of his parents in 1929 from the now former house of the church clergy.
Before that, the life and home of the Shalamovs were akin to the then patriarchal Vologda, which sought to reach out for the capitals. A home museum with Aleutian arrows - and a simple reproduction of Rubens' work with the face of Christ, at the icon, consecrated as the main icon of the family. The stone cannonballs found by Varlam in the Vologda Kremlin - and the famous local butter and milk, top-notch even during economic crises.
The writer, according to him, had three Vologda: historical, regional, exiled and his, Shalamovskaya - the fourth, as in the story of the same name.
“In this book I am trying to combine three times: past, present and future - in the name of the fourth time - art. What is more in it? Of the past? Real? Future? Who will answer this? "
Sasha Mitrakhovich 12.03.2019 08:43