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

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

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

Both paradox and contrast, so abundantly used by Shalamov, contribute to the most active emotional perception of the work of art. And in general "on how strong the artist's ability to combine heterogeneous, incompatible, largely depends on the imagery, freshness, novelty of his works" .

Shalamov makes the reader shudder when he recalls the lieutenant of the tank forces Svechnikov ('' Domino ”), who was caught in the mine '' of eating the meat of human corpses from the morgue. But the effect is enhanced by the author due to a purely external contrast: this cannibal is a “gentle rosy-cheeked youth”, calmly explaining his addiction to “not fat, of course,” human flesh!

Or the meeting of the narrator with the Comintern activist Schneider, the most educated man, a connoisseur of Goethe (“Typhoid quarantine”). In the camp he is in the retinue of the blatars, in the crowd of beggars. Schneider is happy that he was entrusted to scratch the heels of the thieves' leader Senechka.

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

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

The plot basis of the story "Shock Therapy" is paradoxical: a doctor, whose vocation and duty is to help those in need, directs all his strength and knowledge to expose a convict-simulator who experiences `` horror before the world from where he came to the hospital and where he is I was afraid to return. " The story is filled with a detailed description of the barbaric, sadistic procedures carried out by doctors in order not to give the exhausted, exhausted "goner" "free". Next in the book is the story "Stlanik". This lyrical story gives the reader an opportunity to take a break, to move away from the horrors of the previous story. Nature, unlike people, is humane, generous and kind.

Shalamov's comparison of the natural world and the human world is always not in favor of man. In the story “Tamara Bitch” the head of the site and the dog are contrasted. The boss put the people subordinate to him in such conditions that they were forced to denounce each other. And next to him was a dog, whose moral firmness especially touched those who saw the species and who were in all the bindings of the inhabitants of the village.

In the story “Bears” we meet a similar situation. In the conditions of the Gulag, each convict only cares about himself. The bear '', met by the prisoners, clearly assumed the danger,ort, the male, sacrificed his life to save his girlfriend, he distracted death from her, he covered her escape ”.

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

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

"Sherri-brandy", a story about the last days of Osip Man-delshtam's life, is all permeated with oppositions. The poet dies, but life enters him again, giving rise to thoughts. He was dead, and he is alive again. He thinks about creative immortality, having already stepped over, in essence, the life line.

A dialectically contradictory chain is being built: life - death - resurrection - immortality - life. The poet remembers, composes poetry, philosophizes - and immediately cries that he didn’t get a piece of bread. The one who just quoted Tyutchev, '' was biting the bread with scurvy teeth, gums were bleeding, teeth were loose, but he did not feel pain. With all his might he pressed to his mouth, stuffed bread into his mouth, sucked it, tore it, gnawed ... ”Such duality, internal dissimilarity, contradictoriness are characteristic of many of Shalamov's heroes who found themselves in the hellish conditions of the camp. A zeka often recalls himself with amazement - another, former, free.

It is scary to read the lines about the camp konogon Glebov, who became famous in the barracks for having "forgotten the name of his wife a month ago." In his' free 'life, Glebov was ... a professor of philosophy (story' 'Funeral word').

In the story "The First Tooth" we learn the story of the sectarian Pyotr Zaits - a young, black-haired, black-browed giant. A lame, gray-haired old man who coughs up blood, met after a while by the narrator, is he.

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

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

The plot of the story "Aunt Fields" is built on a similar contrasting inconsistency. The heroine is a prisoner taken as a servant by the head. She was a slave in the house and at the same time “an unspoken arbiter in quarrels between husband and wife”, “a person who knew the shadow sides of the house”. She is well in slavery, she is grateful to fate for the gift. Sick Aunt Polya is placed in a separate ward, from which previously '' ten half corpses were dragged out into the cold corridor to make way for the daytime chief. ' The military, their wives came to Aunt Pole at the hospital with a request to put in a word for them forever. And after her death, the “all-powerful” Aunt Paul deserved only a wooden tag with a number on her left shin, because she is just a “prisoner”, a slave. Instead of one day, another will come, the same nameless, with only the number of the personal file behind the soul. Human personality in a camp nightmare is worth nothing.

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

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

Extremely indicative in this regard is the description in the story "My Trial": "There are few spectacles as expressive as redheads from alcohol placed next to them, beefy, overweight, fat-heavy figures of the camp authorities in shiny, like the sun, brand new , stinking sheepskin sheepskin coats, in fur painted Yakut malakhais and mittens - ”leggings” with a bright pattern - and figures of “goners”, torn off “wicks” with “smoking” shreds of cotton wool of worn-out quilted jackets, “goners” with the same filthy bony faces and hungry gleam of sunken eyes ”.

Hyperbolization, pedaling of negatively perceived details in the guise of the "camp bosses" are especially noticeable in comparison with the dark, dirty mass of "goners".

A contrast of this kind is also in the description of the bright, colorful, sunny Vladivostok and the rainy, gray-dull landscape of the Nagayevo Bay ('' The pier of hell ”). Here, the contrasting landscape expresses the differences in the inner state of the hero - hope in Vladivostok and the expectation of death in the Nagayevo Bay.

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

Describing the different ways of using the artistic principle of contrast in Shalamov's stories, it is appropriate to consider its implementation at the word level.

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

First, examples from the first group. “Immediately, the prisoners are being taken in clean, well-proportioned parties up into the taiga, and in a dirty heap of ot-throws - from above, back from the taiga” (“The Conspiracy of Lawyers”). Double opposition ('' clean ”- '' dirty”, '' up ”- '' above”), aggravated by a diminutive suffix, on the one hand, and a reduced phrase “a lot of garbage”, on the other, creates an impression seen in reality a picture of two opposite streams of people.

“I rushed, that is, trudged off to the workshop” ('' Handwriting ”). The obviously contradictory lexical meanings here are equal to each other, telling the reader about the extreme degree of exhaustion and weakness of the hero much more vividly than any lengthy description. In general, Shalamov, while recreating the absurd world of the Gulag, often unites rather than opposes words and expressions that are antinomic in their meaning. In several works (in particular, in the stories "Brave Eyes" and "The Resurrection of the Larch") equalsmoldering, moldandspring, lifeanddeath:”...mold also looked like spring, green, seemed alive too, and dead trunks spewed out the smell of life. Green mold ... seemed like a symbol of spring. But in fact it is the color of decrepitude and decay. But Kolyma asked us questions and harder, and the similarity of life and death did not bother us”.

Another example of contrasting similarity: '' Graphite is eternity. The highest hardness, which has passed into the highest softness ”(’ ’Graphite”).

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

The color palette of Shalamov's stories is not very intense. The artist sparingly paints the world of his works. It would be excessive to say that the writer always deliberately chooses this or that paint. He uses color and unintentionally, intuitively. And, as a rule, the paint has a natural, natural function. For example: '' the mountains were reddened by lingonberries, blackened by a dark blue blue, ... a large yellow watery mountain ash was poured ... ”('' Kant '). But in a number of cases, the color in Shalamov's stories carries a meaningful and ideological load, especially when a contrasting color scheme is used. This is what happens in the story "Children's Pictures". While tearing apart the garbage heap, the prisoner-narrator found a tete-radka with children's drawings in it. The grass on them is green, the sky is blue-blue, the sun is scarlet. The colors are clean, bright, without halftones. Typical palette children's drawing But: '' People and houses ... were fenced off with yellow even fences entwined with black lines of barbed wire. '

Childhood impressions of a little Kolyma resident run up against yellow fences and black barbed wire. Shalamov, as always, does not lecture the reader, does not indulge in discussions on this matter. The collision of flowers helps the artist to enhance the emotional impact of this episode, to convey the author's idea of ​​the tragedy not only of prisoners, but also of Kolyma children who became adults early.

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

There are many examples of "mixing styles" in stories. A characteristic technique for the artist is the method in which he speaks of everyday events and facts in a pathetic and sublime manner. For example, about food intake. For a convict, this is by no means an ordinary event of the day. This is a ritual act that gives '' a passionate, selfless feeling ”(“ At night ”).

The description of the herring breakfast is striking. Artistic time here is stretched to the limit, as close as possible to real. The writer noted all the details, nuances of this exciting event: '' While the distributor was approaching, everyone had already calculated which piece would be extended by this indifferent hand. Everyone has already managed to get upset, rejoice, prepare for a miracle, reach the edge of despair, if he made a mistake in his hasty calculations ”(’ ’Bread”). And all this gamut of feelings is caused by the expectation of a village ration!

The can of condensed milk seen by the narrator in a dream, compared to the night sky, is grand and majestic. '' Milk was seeping and flowing in a wide stream of the Milky Way. And I easily reached up to the sky with my hands and ate thick, sweet, star milk ”(“ Condensed milk ”). Not only comparison, but also inversion ("and easily got me") help here to create a solemn pathos.

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

The description of the berries, touched by the first frost (“Berries”), is sublime and delightful.

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

The tendency to elevate the ordinary, even the low, is also manifested in those stories of Shalamov, where it is a question of deliberate self-management in the camp. For many prisoners, this was the only, last chance to survive. Making yourself a cripple is not easy. It took a lot of preparation. '' The stone should have collapsed and shattered my leg. And I am forever disabled! This passionate dream was subject to calculation ... The day, hour and minute were appointed and came ”('' Rain”).

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

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

In the story "The Best Praise" we find a description of the sounds in prison: "This special ringing, and even the thunder of a door lock, locked for two turns, ... and the clicking of a key on a copper belt buckle ... here are three elements of the symphony." 'concrete' prison music that will be remembered for life.

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

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

It seems that the epically calm narrative reflects the prisoners' habit of death and the cruelty of camp life. To what E. Shklovsky called "the routine of agony" literally, it would be necessary to come to the ridiculous conclusion that only writers trample the roads in the camps in Kolyma. The absurdity of such a conclusion makes us reinterpret this sentence and understand it as a kind of metatext statement, belonging not to the narrator, but to some other subject, and perceived as the voice of the author himself.
It seems to me that Shalamov's text is deliberately flawed here. The reader loses the thread of the story and contact with the narrator, not knowing where one of them is. The meaning of the mysterious final phrase can be interpreted as a kind of reproach: the prisoners make their way into virgin snow, - intentionally not walking one after another in the trail, do not trample general the path and generally enter not this way, how reader, who is used to using ready-made tools, established by someone before him (guided, for example, by what books are in fashion now, or what "techniques" are used by writers), but - they act exactly as real writers: try to put the foot separately, walking each my way, paving the way for those who follow them. And only rare of them - i.e. the very five selected pioneers - it is brought for a short time, until they are exhausted, to punch this necessary path - for those who follow, on sleds and on tractors. Writers, from the point of view of Shalamov, should - they are directly obliged, if, of course, they are real writers, to move along the virgin lands ("on their own track", as Vysotsky would later sing about this). That is, they just, unlike us, mere mortals, do not ride tractors and horses. Shalamov also invites the reader to take the place of those who are building the road. The mysterious phrase turns into a rich symbol of the entire Kolyma epic. After all, as we know, Shalamov's detail is a powerful artistic detail that has become a symbol, an image ("Notebooks", between April and May 1960).
Dmitry Nich noticed: in his opinion, the same text as an "epigraph" also echoes the first text in the cycle "Resurrection of the Larch" - a much later sketch "The Path" (1967) 9. Let us recall what is happening there and what stands, as it were, behind the scenes of what is happening: the narrator finds "his" path (here the narration is personified, unlike In the Snow, where it is impersonal10) - a path along which he walks alone, during almost three years old, and on which poetry is born to him. However, as soon as it turns out that this path, which he liked, well-trodden, taken as a property, was also opened by someone else (he notices someone else's trace on it), it loses its miraculous properties:
I had a wonderful trail in the taiga. I myself laid it in the summer, when I was saving firewood for the winter. (…) The trail was getting dark every day and in the end it became an ordinary dark gray mountain trail. Nobody but me walked on it. (…) # I have walked this own path for almost three years. Poems were written well on it. Sometimes, you come back from a trip, get ready for the trail, and you will certainly go out on this trail to some stanza. (…) And on the third summer a man walked along my path. At that time I was not at home, I do not know if it was some wandering geologist, or a mountain postman on foot, or a hunter - a man left traces of heavy boots. Since then, no poetry has been written on this path.
So, in contrast to the epigraph to the first cycle ("Through the Snow"), here, in the "Path", the emphasis shifts: firstly, the action itself is not collective, but - emphasized individually, even individually. That is, the effect of trampling the road itself by others, comrades, in the first case, only intensified, strengthened, and here, in the second, in a text written more than a dozen years later, it disappears due to the fact that someone entered the path. another. While in "On the Snow" the very motive "to step only on virgin soil, and not a trace in a trail" was overlapped by the effect of "collective benefit" - all the torments of the pioneers were needed only in order to follow them further. horse and tractor readers. (The author did not go into details, well, is this ride necessary at all?) Now, as if no reader and no altruistic benefit are already visible or envisaged. A certain psychological bias can be detected here. Or even - the author's deliberate departure from the reader.

II Recognition - in school essay

Oddly enough, the views of Shalamov himself on what the "new prose" should be, and what, in fact, should strive for modern writer, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks and not in treatises, but - in an essay, or simply a "school essay" written in 1956 - per Irina Emelyanova, daughter of Olga Ivinskaya (Shalamov had known the latter since the 1930s), when this very Irina entered the Literary Institute. As a result, the text itself, compiled by Shalamov deliberately in a somewhat school-like manner, firstly received from the examiner, N.B. Tomashevsky, the son of a famous Pushkinist, has a "super-positive response" (ibid., P. 130-1) 11, and secondly, by a happy coincidence, a lot can now be clarified for us from the views on literature of Shalamov himself, who was already fully ripe by the age of 50. m years for his prose, but at that time, it seems, had not yet “muddied” his aesthetic principles, which he obviously did later. Here is how, using the example of Hemingway's stories "Something ended" (1925), he illustrates his captivating method of reducing details and raising prose to symbols:
The heroes of his [story] have names, but no longer have surnames. They no longer have a biography.<…>An episode is snatched from the general dark background of "our time". There is almost only an image here. In the beginning, the landscape is needed not as a specific background, but as an exclusively emotional accompaniment…. In this story, Hemingway uses his favorite method - the image.<…># Let's take the story of another Hemingway period - "Where it is clear, light" 12. # Heroes don't even have names anymore.<…>Not even an episode is taken. No action at all<…>... This is a frame.<…># [This] is one of the most striking and wonderful stories of Hemingway. Everything is brought to the symbol there.<…># The path from early stories to "Clear, light" is a path of liberation from everyday, several naturalistic details.<…>These are the principles of subtext, laconicism. "<…>The greatness of the iceberg's movement is that it rises only one eighth above the surface of the water ”13. Language devices, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, landscape as a function of Hemingway's style are minimized. #… The dialogues of any Hemingway story are the eighth part of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. # Of course, this silence about the most important thing requires a special culture from the reader, careful reading, internal consonance with the feelings of Hemingway's heroes.<…># Hemingway's landscape is also relatively neutral. Usually Hemingway gives the landscape at the beginning of the story. The principle of dramatic construction - as in a play - before the beginning of the action, the author indicates the background, the scenery in the stage directions. If the landscape is repeated once more during the story, it is for the most part the same as in the beginning. #<…># Take Chekhov's landscape. For example, from "Ward No. 6". The story also begins with a landscape. But this landscape is already emotionally colored. He is more tendentious than Hemingway.<…># Hemingway has his own invented stylistic devices. For example, in the collection of short stories "In Our Time" these are a kind of reminiscences, pre-sent to the story. These are the famous key phrases in which the emotional pathos of the story is concentrated.<…># It is difficult to tell at once what the task of reminiscences is. It depends both on the story and on the content of the reminiscences themselves14.
So, laconicism, silence, reduction of space for the landscape and - showing, as it were, individual "frames" - instead of detailed descriptions, and even the obligatory getting rid of comparisons and metaphors, this "literary" phrases, reminiscences - here literally all the principles of Shalamov's prose are listed! It seems that neither later (in the treatise set forth in a letter to I.P. Sirotinskaya "On Prose", nor in letters to Yu.A. theory new prose.
This is what, perhaps, Shalamov did not succeed in any way - but what he constantly strived for was to restrain the too direct, direct expression of his thoughts and feelings, concluding the main thing from the story - in subtext and avoiding categorical direct statements and evaluations. His ideals seemed to be completely Platonic (or, perhaps, in his view, Hemingway's). Let us compare this assessment of the most "Hemingway", as it is usually believed for Platonov, "The Third Son":
The third son atoned for the sin of his brothers, who made a row next to the corpse of his mother. But Platonov does not even have a shadow of their condemnation, he generally refrains from any assessments, in his arsenal there are only facts and images. This is, in a way, the ideal of Hemingway, who stubbornly sought to erase any assessments from his works: he practically never communicated the thoughts of the heroes - only their actions, diligently crossed out all the phrases in the manuscripts that began with the word "how", his famous statement about one eighth part of the iceberg was heavily about evaluations and emotions. In Platonov's calm, unhurried prose, the iceberg of emotions does not just stick out to any part - one has to dive to a considerable depth after it15.
Here we can only add that Shalamov's own “iceberg” is still in a state of “turning over”: in each “cycle” (and many times) he still demonstrates to us his underwater part ... Political, and simply the everyday, "cheerleader" temperament of this writer always went off scale, he could not keep the narration within the framework of impassivity.

1 Apanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in the “Kolyma stories” by Varlam Shalamov // IV International Shalamov readings. Moscow, June 18-19, 1997:
Abstracts of reports and messages. - M .: Respublika, 1997, p. 40-52 (with reference to Apanowicz F. Nowa proza ​​Warlama Szalamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej. Gdansk, 1996. S. 101-103) http://www.booksite.ru/varlam /reading_IV_09.htm
2 The author worked on them (including Resurrection of the Larch and The Glove) for twenty years, from 1954 to 1973. One can consider them as five or even six books, depending on whether the “Sketches of the Underworld”, which are somewhat aloof, are referred to the CD.
3 Sign # denotes the beginning (or end) of a new paragraph in a quote; sign ## - end (or beginning) of the whole text - M.M.
4 As if by a refrain the modality is given here duties... It is addressed by the author to himself, but therefore also to the reader. Then it will be repeated in many other stories, as, for example, in the finale of the next one (“For the introduction”): Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing wood.
5 Manuscript "In the Snow" (code in RGALI 2596-2-2 - on the site http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/2/1.html). The main text, editing and title in the manuscript - in pencil. And above the name, apparently, the originally intended name of the entire cycle - Northern Drawings?
6 As you can see from the manuscript (http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/5/1.html), the original name of this short story, then crossed out, was "Linen" - here the word is in quotation marks or it is on both sides of the signs new paragraph "Z"? - That is, [Lingerie at Night] or: [zLingeriez At Night]. Here is the title of the story "Kant" (1956) - in the manuscript in quotation marks, they were left in the American edition of R. Gulya ("New Journal" No. 85 1966) and in the French edition of M. Geller (1982), but for some reason they not in the Sirotinskaya edition. - That is, it is not clear: the quotes were removed by the author himself, in some later editions - or is it an oversight (arbitrariness?) Of the publisher. According to the manuscript, quotation marks are also found in many other places where the reader is confronted with specifically camp terms (for example, in the title of the story "Into the Presentation").
7 For the first time, the tractor will be mentioned for the first time only at the end of "Single measurement" (1955), i.e. three stories from the beginning. The very first hint about horseback riding in the same cycle is in the story "The Snake Charmer", that is, after only 16 stories from this. Well, and about horses in sledge wagons - in "Shock Therapy" (1956), after 27 stories, already closer to the end of the entire cycle.
8 Franciszek Apanowicz, "Nowa proza" Warłama Szałamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej, Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1986, s. 101-193 (translated by the author himself). So in his personal correspondence, Francishek Apanovich adds: “Shalamov was convinced that he was paving a new path in literature, on which no man had yet set foot. He not only saw himself as a discoverer, but believed that there were few such writers making new paths.<…>Well, in a symbolic sense, writers (I would even say - artists in general) trample the road here, and not readers, about whom we will not learn anything, except that they ride tractors and horses. "
9 This is a kind of prose poem, Nitsch observes: “The path serves as a path to poetry only as long as another person has not walked along it. That is, a poet or writer cannot tread in the footsteps of others ”(in e-mail).
10 Like a treadmill NS road on virgin snow? (...) Roads are always paved hut on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labor. Man himself outlining no landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree ... (my emphasis - MM).
11 Irina Emelyanova. Unknown pages of Varlam Shalamov or the History of one "receipt" // Facets №241-242, January-June 2012. Tarusa pages. Volume 1, Moscow-Paris-Munich-San Francisco, p. 131-2) - also on the website http://shalamov.ru/memory/178/
12 [The story was published in 1926.]
13 [Shalamov quotes Hemingway himself, without explicitly referring to

The work of Varlam Shalamov belongs to Russian literature of the 20th century, and Shalamov himself is recognized as one of the most outstanding and talented writers of this century.

His works are imbued with realism and unbending courage, and “ Kolyma stories”, His main artistic heritage, represent the brightest example of all the motives of Shalamov's work.

Each story included in the collection of stories is reliable, since the writer himself had to endure the Stalinist gulag and all the torture of the camps that followed.

Man and the totalitarian state

As mentioned earlier, "Kolyma Tales" is dedicated to the life that an incredible number of people had to endure, having gone through the ruthless Stalinist camps.

Thus, Shalamov raises the main moral issue of that era, reveals the key problem of that time - this is the confrontation between the person's personality and the totalitarian state, which does not spare human destinies.

Shalamov does this through the image of the life of people exiled to the camps, because this is already the final moment of such a confrontation.

Shalamov does not shy away from harsh reality and shows the whole reality of that so-called "life process" that devours human personalities.

Changes in the values ​​of human life

In addition to the fact that the writer shows how harsh, inhuman and unjust punishment this is, Shalamov focuses on who the person is forced to turn into afterwards in the camps.

This theme is especially vividly highlighted in the story "Dry ration", Shalamov shows how the will and oppression of the state suppresses the personal principle in a person, how much they will dissolve his soul in this malicious state machine.

Through physical abuse: constant hunger and cold, people were turned into animals, no longer aware of anything around, wanting only food and warmth, denying all human feelings and experiences.

Elementary things become the values ​​of life that transform the human soul, turn a person into an animal. All that people begin to want is to survive, all that drives them is a dull and limited thirst for life, a thirst just to be.

Artistic techniques in the "Kolyma Tales"

These almost documentary stories are imbued with a subtle, powerful philosophy and a spirit of courage and daring. Many critics highlight the special composition of the entire book, which consists of 33 stories, but does not lose its integrity.

Moreover, the stories are not arranged in chronological order, but the composition does not lose its semantic purpose because of this. On the contrary, Shalamov's stories are arranged in a special order, which allows you to see the life of people in the camps fully, to feel it as a single organism.

The artistic techniques used by the writer are striking in their thoughtfulness. Shalamov uses laconicism to describe the nightmares that people experience in such inhuman conditions.

This creates an even more powerful and tangible effect of what is described - after all, he speaks dryly and realistically about the horror and pain that he himself managed to endure.

But the "Kolyma stories" consist of different stories. For example, the story "Tombstone" is saturated with unbearable bitterness and hopelessness, and the story "Sherri Brandy" shows how much a person is above circumstances and that for any life is filled with meaning and truth.

Package

Parcels were handed out on watch. The foremen verified the identity of the recipient. Plywood broke and cracked in its own way, in a plywood way. The local trees did not break like that, they shouted in a different voice. Behind a barrier of benches, people with clean hands in overly neat military uniforms opened, checked, shook, gave out. Boxes of parcels, barely alive from a months-long journey, skillfully thrown to the floor, shattered. Lumps of sugar, dried fruit, rotten onions, crumpled packets of tobacco scattered across the floor. Nobody picked up the scattered. The owners of the parcels did not protest - receiving the parcel was a miracle of miracles.

Near the watch were guards with rifles in their hands - some unfamiliar figures were moving in the white frosty fog.

I stood against the wall and waited in line. These blue pieces are not ice! It's sugar! Sugar! Sugar! Another hour will pass, and I will hold these pieces in my hands, and they will not melt. They will only melt in your mouth. Such a large piece will be enough for me twice, for three times.

And the makhorka! Your own makhorka! Mainland makhorka, Yaroslavl "Belka" or "Kremenchug No. 2". I will smoke, I will treat everyone, everyone, everyone, and above all those with whom I have been smoking all this year. Mainland makhorka! After all, we were given rationed tobacco, which had been removed from army warehouses due to the shelf life - an adventure of gigantic proportions: all foodstuffs were written off to the camp if the shelf life had matured. But now I am going to smoke real shag. After all, if a wife does not know that a stronger shag is needed, she will be prompted.

Surname?

The package cracked, and prunes, leather berries of prunes spilled out of the box. Where is the sugar? And prunes - two or three handfuls ...

You cloaks! Pilot's burqas! Ha ha ha! With a rubber sole! Ha ha ha! Like the head of the mine! Take it, take it!

I stood confused. Why do I need cloaks? You can wear burkas here only on holidays - there were no holidays. If there were reindeer pimas, torbasa or ordinary felt boots. Burqas are too chic ... This is not appropriate. Moreover ...

Hear you ... - Someone's hand touched my shoulder. I turned so that one could see the cloaks, and the box, at the bottom of which there were some prunes, and the bosses, and the face of the man who was holding my shoulder. It was Andrei Boyko, our mountain warden. And Boyko whispered hastily:

Sell ​​me these cloaks. I'll give you money. One hundred rubles. You won't bring them to the barracks - they will take them away, they will tear them out. - And Boyko jabbed his finger into the white fog. - Yes, and in the barracks will be stolen. The first night. "You yourself will come up," I thought.

Okay, give me the money.

See what I am! - Smartly counted out the money. “I’m not deceiving you, not like others. I said a hundred and I give a hundred. - Boyko was afraid that he overpaid too much.

I folded the dirty pieces of paper in four and eight and put it in my trouser pocket. The prunes were poured from the box into a pea jacket - his pockets had long been ripped out onto pouches.

Buy oil! A kilogram of oil! And I will eat with bread, soup, porridge. And sugar! And I'll get the bag from someone - a bag with a string cord. An indispensable accessory for every decent prisoner from the fraer. The thieves do not wear small bags.

I returned to the barrack. Everyone was lying on a bunk, only Efremov sat with his hands on the cold stove, and stretched his face towards the disappearing heat, fearing to straighten out, to tear himself away from the stove.

What do you not melt? The orderly came up.

Efremov watch! The brigadier said: let him take wherever he wants, and so that there is firewood. I won't let you sleep anyway. Go before it's too late.

Efremov slipped out the barrack door.

Where is your package?

Wrong ...

I ran to the store. Shaparenko, the store manager, was still trading. The store was empty.

Shaparenko, I have bread and butter.

You will ditch me.

Well, take as much as you need.

See how much money I have? - said Shaparenko. - What can a wick like you give? Take the bread and butter and come off fast.

I forgot to ask for sugar. Oils - kilogram. Bread - a kilogram. I'll go to Semyon Sheinin. Sheinin was Kirov's former assistant, who had not yet been shot at that time. We once worked together, in the same brigade, but fate divorced us.

Sheinin was in the barracks.

Let's eat. Butter, bread.

Sheinin's hungry eyes sparkled.

Now I'm boiling water ...

Do not need boiling water!

No, I am now. - And he disappeared.

Immediately someone hit me on the head with something heavy, and when I jumped up, came to my senses, there was no bag. Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with malicious joy. The entertainment was of the best quality. In such cases, they were doubly happy: firstly, it was bad for someone, and secondly, it’s not bad for me. This is not envy, no ...

I didn't cry. I barely survived. Thirty years have passed, and I remember a distinctly semi-dark barrack, the angry, joyful faces of my comrades, a damp log on the floor, Scheinin's pale cheeks.

I came back to the stall. I no longer asked for butter or asked for sugar. I begged for bread, returned to the barrack, melted snow and began to cook prunes.

Barack was already asleep: moaning, wheezing and coughing. The three of us cooked each our own by the stove: Sintsov boiled a crust of bread saved from dinner in order to eat it, viscous, hot, and then greedily drink hot snowy water smelling of rain and bread. And Gubarev pushed frozen cabbage leaves into the pot - a lucky and cunning man. The cabbage smelled like the best Ukrainian borsch! And I cooked parcel prunes. We all could not help but look into other people's dishes.

Someone kicked open the hut doors. Two military men emerged from a cloud of frosty steam. One, younger, is the head of the camp, Kovalenko, the other, older, is the head of the mine, Ryabov. Ryabov was in aviation cloaks - in my cloaks! I hardly realized that it was a mistake, that Ryabov's burki. Kovalenko rushed to the stove, waving the pick he brought with him.

More bowlers! Now I’ll show you the bowlers! I'll show you how to dilute the dirt!

Kovalenko knocked over the pots of soup, with a crust of bread and cabbage leaves, with prunes and punched the bottom of each pot with a pick.

Ryabov warmed his hands on the chimney.

If there are pots, then there is something to cook, the head of the mine thoughtfully said. - This, you know, is a sign of contentment.

You should have seen what they are cooking, ”said Kovalenko, trampling down the pots. The chiefs left, and we began to take apart the crumpled pots and collect each one of our own: I - berries, Sintsov - soggy, shapeless bread, and Gubarev - crumbs of cabbage leaves. We ate everything at once - that was the safest way.

I swallowed some berries and fell asleep. I have long learned to fall asleep before my legs get warm - once I could not, but experience, experience ... Sleep was like oblivion.

Life came back like a dream - the doors opened again: white clouds of steam, lying on the floor, ran to the far wall of the barrack, people in white sheepskin coats, smelly of newness, unwornness, and something that was not moving, but alive, which had collapsed on the floor, grunting.

The orderly, in a puzzled but respectful pose, bowed before the white sheepskin coats of the foremen.

Your man? - And the caretaker pointed to a wad of dirty rags on the floor.

This is Efremov, - said the orderly.

Will know how to steal other people's firewood.

Efremov lay next to me on a bunk for many weeks until he was taken away and died in an invalid town. He was beaten off "insides" - there were a lot of masters of this business at the mine. He did not complain - he lay and moaned softly.