He began his career by writing poetry. He became famous for his journalistic cycle dedicated to the life of prisoners. Shalamov's biography is reflected in his work, primarily in the books "Several of my lives", "Fourth Vologda". The collection that brought the writer worldwide fame - "Kolyma stories".
In order to learn more about the biography of Shalamov, you should, of course, familiarize yourself with his books. Namely, read "Kolyma stories", "Fourth Vologda", a collection of poems "Kolyma notebooks". The same article contains the main facts from the biography of Shalamov.
Son of a priest
The childhood and adolescence of the future writer had both a happy time and a tragic one. Shalamov's fate did not spare. But in spite of everything, he remained a man until the last days of his life.
Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich was born in 1907 in the family of a hereditary priest. He remembered well the First World War. Childhood memories are reflected in the aforementioned book "Several of My Lives". Both Shalamov brothers were in the war. One of them died. After his death, his father went blind. Tikhon Shalamov survived the eldest son by as much as thirteen years.
early years
The family was friendly, with strong family traditions. Varlam Shalamov began to write poetry very early. The father supported the love of literature in his son. However, the parental library soon became insufficient for the boy.
The People's Will became the youthful ideal of Shalamov. He admired their sacrifice, heroism, manifested in the resistance to the power of the autocratic state. It is worth saying that already in his early years, the future writer showed amazing talent. In one of the books, Shalamov said that he did not remember himself as illiterate. He learned to read at the age of three.
In adolescence, he was most attracted by the adventure works of Dumas. Later, the range of literature that aroused irrepressible interest in future prose writers surprisingly expanded. He began to read everything: from Dumas to Kant.
Years of study
In 1914, Shalamov entered the gymnasium. He managed to complete his secondary education only after the revolution. Ten years after entering the gymnasium, the future writer moved to the capital. In Moscow, he worked for two years as a tanner at the Kuntsevo plant. And in 1926 he entered the Moscow State University, the faculty of Soviet law.
By submitting documents to the university, Shalamov hid his social origin. He did not indicate that he belongs to a family in which men have been priests from generation to generation. For which he was expelled.
First conclusion
The first arrest of Varlam Shalamov took place in February 1929. The young poet was detained while raiding an underground printing house. After this event, the label “socially dangerous element” was attached to Shalamov. He spent the next three years in the camps. During this period, Shalamov worked on the construction of a chemical plant under the leadership of a man who later became the head of the Kolyma "Dalstroy".
Second arrest
In 1931, Shalamov was released from the forced labor camp. For some time he worked in the trade union magazines "For mastery of technology" and "For shock work". In 1936 he published his first prose work, The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino.
In 1937, there was a new wave of repression. She also did not pass Varlam Shalamov. The writer was arrested for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. Shalamov was again placed in Butyrka prison, he was sentenced to five years. In early August, he was sent to Magadan with a large party of prisoners on a steamer. He worked in gold mines for a year.
Shalamov's term was increased in December 1938. He was arrested in connection with the camp "lawyers' case". From 1939 he worked at the Black River mine, as well as in coal mines. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov not only talked about the life of prisoners, but also told about the state of mind of a person who had been imprisoned for a long time.
The life of prisoners in the works of Shalamov
The main components of the existence of a prisoner are insomnia, hunger, cold. In such an environment, no friendship was formed. According to Shalamov, affection, mutual respect could only be established in freedom. In the camp, a person was deprived of everything human, only anger, mistrust and lies remained in him.
Denunciations in the camps were widespread. They also took place at large. Shalamov's second term ended in 1942. But he was not released: a decree was issued, according to which the prisoners were to be in the camp until the end of the war. In May 1943, Shalamov was arrested. The cause of his misfortune this time was the praise addressed to the writer Ivan Bunin. Shalamov was arrested on the denunciation of fellow prisoners. A month later, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Paramedic
In 1943, Shalamov fell into the category of so-called goners - prisoners in the last stage of physical exhaustion. In this state, he ended up in the camp hospital, after being discharged he worked for several years at the Spokoiny mine.
Shalamov got to the hospital several times. So, in 1946 he was hospitalized with suspicion of dysentery. Thanks to one of the doctors, Shalamov, after recovering, was sent to a paramedic course at a hospital located twenty-three kilometers from Magadan. After graduation, he worked in the surgical department. He worked as a medical assistant for several years after his release.
The term of imprisonment was completed in 1951. Around this time, Shalamov sent Boris Pasternak a collection of his poems. In 1953, returning to Moscow, Shalamov met with relatives. Pasternak helped him establish contacts in the literary world. In 1954, Varlam Shalamov began work on Kolyma Tales.
Family
In the mid-fifties, Shalamov divorced Galina Gudz, with whom he was married in 1932. The writer was married twice in total. In 1956 he married Olga Neklyudova. In his first marriage, the prose writer had a daughter, Elena. Shalamov divorced Neklyudova, a children's writer, in 1965. There were no children in this marriage. Neklyudova had a son who later became a famous folklorist.
Last years
Shalamov's biography includes twenty years in the camps. The imprisonment did not go unnoticed. In the late fifties, he suffered a serious illness, for a long time he was treated at the Botkin hospital. After recovering, he published a collection of poems "Fire". And three years later - "Rustle of Leaves".
In the late 70s, the writer began to severely lose hearing, vision, and the ability to coordinate movements. In 1979, Shalamov was sent to a boarding house for the elderly and disabled. Two years later, he suffered a stroke. In 1982, Shalamov was examined, as a result of which he was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronists. However, during the transportation, the author of "Kolyma Stories" caught a cold and fell ill with pneumonia. Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich died on January 17, 1982. Buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery. A monument to the sculptor Fedot Suchkov was later erected on the grave of the writer.
Shalamov's work
Above is the acquaintance of the hero of today's article with the author of "Doctor Zhivago". The poetry of Varlam Shalamov was highly appreciated by Pasternak. The poets were linked by long-term friendship. However, after Pasternak refused the Nobel Prize, they parted ways.
Among the poetry collections created by Varlam Shalamov, in addition to the aforementioned ones, it is worth mentioning Moscow Clouds, Boiling Point, and the Road and Fate cycle. The Kolyma Notebooks includes six poems and poems. The prose works of Varlamov Shalamov include the anti-novel "Vishera" and the story "Fyodor Raskolnikov". In 2005, a film based on the Kolyma Tales was released. Several documentary films are devoted to the work and biography of Shalamov.
The Kolyma Tales were first published in the West. The next time this collection was published four years later in London. Both the first and second editions of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales were carried out against his will. During the life of the writer, none of his works dedicated to the Gulag came out.
"Kolyma stories"
Shalamov's works are imbued with realism and unbending courage. Each of the stories included in the "Kolyma Tales" is reliable. The collection tells about the life that a large number of people had to endure. And only a few of them (Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) were able to, found the strength to tell readers about the ruthless Stalinist camps.
In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov raised the main moral issue of the Soviet era. The writer revealed the key problem of that time, namely, the opposition of the individual to a totalitarian state that does not spare human destinies. He did this by depicting the life of prisoners.
The heroes of the stories are people exiled to the camps. But Shalamov not only told about the harsh, inhuman, unjust punishments they were subjected to. He showed who a person turns into as a result of a long imprisonment. In the story "Dry ration" this topic is revealed especially vividly. The author spoke about how the oppression of the state suppresses the individual, dissolves his soul.
In an environment of constant hunger, cold, people turn into animals. They are no longer aware of anything. They only want warmth and food. Elementary things become the main values. The prisoner is driven by a dull and limited lust for life. The author himself argued that "Kolyma stories" is an attempt to solve some important moral issues that simply cannot be resolved on any other material.
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 convictions, 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 worldview gave the first impetus to the development of this extraordinary personality. Exiled prisoners lived in Vologda, with whom Varlam's father always strove to maintain relations and provided all kinds of support.
Shalamov's biography is partially reflected in his story "The Fourth Vologda". Already in his youth, 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 destiny. 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 the 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 passing 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 of being in the camps, perhaps, was given strength by the conviction that all these events are 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 him, 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, which 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 reflecting in his work. Four years later, he was arrested again. Five years in the Kolyma camps became Shalamov's verdict 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 down his poems on the key of Duskanya. After his release, he could not leave Kolyma for another two years.
And only after the death of Stalin, 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. The 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 emaciated and starved. Their further fate, as a rule, depends 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. The 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 spirit and hope in him.
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 already impossible to safely go 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 - 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 were able to 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.
Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich
And - even if it is 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 the old days of this dispute. / "Atomic Poem" /
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 18 (July 1) 1907 in Vologda.
Shalamov's father, Tikhon Nikolayevich, 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, imperceptibly and naturally replaced the tambourine with a censer, all still in the power of paganism, the shaman himself and a pagan in the depths of his Zyryan soul ... "- this is how V. Shalamov wrote about Tikhon Nikolaevich, although the archives testify to his Slavic origin.
Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Alexandrovna, 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, did not cultivate 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 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 a 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 by that time, and, in particular, points out the danger of concentrating it in Stalin, due to his unsightly human qualities. It was this letter, which was 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 were 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 social life - the first true test in harsh conditions."
Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the 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 really new and, most importantly, a feasible experience that instilled in his soul confidence in his own strengths and unlimited possibilities of internal spiritual and moral resistance. Shalamov will emphasize the fundamental difference between a prison and a camp.
According to the writer's testimony, prison life both in 1929 and in 1937, in any case, 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 have studied foreign languages. And in the afternoon, time was allotted for "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 car 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 didn’t 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 took us to the 4th department 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 more could not be asked 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 killers were released, then the White Guards, then the Chinese. These lists were reviewed by a Moscow commission. On Solovki, such a commission was headed 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 examined and prepared by the visiting commission were taken to Moscow, and the latter approved or did not approve, sending an answer a few months later. "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 on the construction of a chemical plant in the city of Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937 he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, For Industrial Personnel. In 1936 his first publication took place - the story "The Three Deaths of 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 counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years in prison camps with heavy physical labor. Shalamov was already in a pre-trial detention center when his story “The Pave and the Tree” was published in the Literaturny Sovremennik 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 embarrassed. 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 imminent 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 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 prisoner who worked as a paramedic at the Belichya hospital of the Northern Mining Administration, and Nina Savoyeva, the head physician of the same hospital, which the patients called Black Mama.
Here, in Squirrel, Shalamov turned out to be like 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 the hospital of Nina Vladimirovna.
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, in 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 having served his sentence, 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 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 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 name, or called Andreev, Golubev, Christ. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it inadmissible 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, a book of his poems "Fire" 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 in danger of 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 Y. Schrader, who met with Shalamov a few days after the letter appeared, recalls that the writer himself treated this publication as a clever trick: he seemed to have cunningly 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 a leading post - he had never had such a position; he was not afraid of losing his income - he got along 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 from whom the best years of his life were taken away. Shalamov wanted to live and create. He wanted and dreamed that his stories, paid for with his own blood, pain, anguish, would be published in his native country, which had gone through so much 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. He looked 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 the elderly on Vilis Latsis Street in Tushino. The bureaucratic pajamas made him look very much like a prisoner. Judging by the stories of people who visited him, he again felt like a prisoner. He 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. He was finally convinced of this diagnosis by the fact that Shalamov - in his presence, right before his eyes - dictated two of his new poems to Morozov. His intellect and memory were intact. He composed 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 name "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 on the situation of Shalamov. There was only one goal - to attract public attention to help, to find a way out. In a sense, the goal was 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 a 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 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 anyway. 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, he threw off the blanket. I knew very well what the temperature was in the rafiks working on transportation, 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 away from Shalamov, but to perform a funeral service for him, like the son of a priest, according to the Orthodox rite in the church.
The writer was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery, not far from the grave of Nadezhda Mandelstam, in whose house he often visited in the 60s. There were many who came to say goodbye.
In June 2000, in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, a monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown persons tore off and carried away the bronze head of the writer, leaving a 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 //
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov(June 5, 1907 - January 17, 1982) - Russian prose writer and poet of the Soviet era. Creator of one of the literary cycles about the Soviet camps.
Biography
Family, childhood, youth
Varlam Shalamov was born on June 5 (June 18) 1907 in Vologda in the family of the priest Tikhon Nikolayevich Shalamov, a preacher in the Aleutian Islands. Varlam Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Alexandrovna, was a housewife. In 1914 he entered the gymnasium, but completed his secondary education after the revolution. In 1924, after graduating from the Vologda secondary school, he came to Moscow, worked for two years as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. From 1926 to 1928 he studied at the faculty of Soviet law at Moscow State University, then was expelled "for concealing his social origin" (he indicated that his father was disabled, without indicating that he was a priest).
In his autobiographical story about childhood and adolescence, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his convictions evolved, how his thirst for justice and his determination to fight for it were strengthened. People's will become his youthful ideal - the sacrifice of their feat, the heroism of resistance to all the might of the autocratic state. Already in childhood, the boy's artistic talent manifests itself - he passionately reads and "plays" for himself all the books - from Dumas to Kant.
Repression
February 19, 1929 Shalamov was arrested for participating in an underground Trotskyist group and for distributing an addendum to Lenin's Testament. Out of court as a "socially dangerous element" he was sentenced to three years in labor camps. He served his sentence in the Vishersky camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow, worked in departmental magazines, published articles, essays, feuilletons.
January 1937 Shalamova was arrested again for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He was sentenced to five years in the camps and spent this period in Kolyma (SWITL). Shalamov went through taiga "business trips", worked at the mines "Partizan", "Black Lake", Arkagala, Dzhelgal, several times ended up in a hospital bed due to the difficult conditions of the Kolyma. As Shalamov later wrote:
From the first minute in prison it was clear to me that there were no mistakes in the arrests, that a systematic extermination of an entire "social" group was under way - everyone who remembered from Russian history of recent years something that should have been remembered in it.
On June 22, 1943, he was again sentenced to ten years for anti-Soviet agitation, which, according to the writer himself, was what he called I. A. Bunin a Russian classic: "... I was condemned to the war for the statement that Bunin is a Russian classic".
In 1951 Shalamov was released from the camp, but at first he could not return to Moscow. Since 1946, after completing an eight-month medical assistant's courses, he began to work in the Central Hospital for prisoners on the left bank of the Kolyma River in the village of Debin and on a forest "business trip" of lumberjacks until 1953. Appointment to the post of paramedic is obliged to the doctor A. M. Pantyukhov, who personally recommended Shalamov to the courses of paramedics. Then he lived in the Kalinin region, worked in Reshetnikov. The result of the repression was the disintegration of the family and the undermined health. In 1956, after rehabilitation, he returned to Moscow.
Creation
In 1932 Shalamov returned to Moscow after his first term and began publishing in Moscow publications as a journalist. Published several stories. One of the first major publications - the story "The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino" - in the magazine "October" (1936).
In 1949, on the key of Duskanya, for the first time in Kolyma, being a prisoner, he began to write down his poems.
After being released in 1951 Shalamov returned to literary activity. However, he could not leave Kolyma. It was only in November 1953 that permission to leave was received. Shalamov came to Moscow for two days, met with BL Pasternak, with his wife and daughter. However, he could not live in large cities, and he left for the Kalinin region (the village of Turkmen, now the Klinsky district of the Moscow region), where he worked as a peat mining foreman, a supply agent. All this time he wrote one of his main works - "Kolyma stories". The writer created Kolyma Stories from 1954 to 1973. They were published in a separate edition in London in 1978. In the USSR, they were mainly published in 1988-1990. The writer himself divided his stories into six cycles: "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Sketches of the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch" and "Glove, or KR-2". They are fully 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”.
In 1962 he wrote to A.I.Solzhenitsyn:
Remember the most important thing: camp is a negative school from day one 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.
He met with Pasternak, who spoke highly of Shalamov's poems. Later, after the government forced Pasternak to refuse to accept the Nobel Prize, they parted ways.
Completed the collection of poems "Kolyma Notebooks" (1937-1956).
Since 1956, Shalamov lived in Moscow, first on Gogolevsky Boulevard, from the end of the 1950s - in one of the writers' wooden cottage houses on Khoroshevskoye Highway (building 10), since 1972 - on Vasilievskaya Street (Building 2, Building 6). He was published in the magazines "Yunost", "Znamya", "Moscow", communicated with N. Ya. Mandelstam, OV Ivinskaya, AI Solzhenitsyn (relations with whom later turned into a polemic); a frequent visitor to the house of the philologist V.N.Klyueva. Both in prose and in Shalamov's poems (collection "Flame", 1961, "Rustle of Leaves", 1964, "Road and Fate", 1967, etc.), expressing the difficult experience of the Stalinist camps, the theme of Moscow is also heard (poetic collection " Moscow Clouds ", 1972). He was also engaged in poetic translations. In the 1960s he met A. A. Galich.
In 1973 he was admitted to the Writers' Union. From 1973 to 1979, when Shalamov moved to live in the Home for the Invalids and the Elderly, he kept workbooks, the analysis and publication of which continued until his death in 2011, I.P. Sirotinskaya, to whom Shalamov transferred the rights to all his manuscripts and essays.
Letter to "Literaturnaya Gazeta"
On February 23, 1972, Literaturnaya Gazeta published a letter from Shalamov, in which, in particular, it was said that "the problems of the Kolyma stories have long been removed by life." The main content of the letter is a protest against the publication of his stories by the emigrant publications Posev and Novy Zhurnal. This letter was met with controversy by the public. Many believed that it was written under pressure from the KGB, and Shalamov lost friends among the former prisoners. Pyotr Yakir, a member of the dissident movement, expressed in the 24th edition of the Chronicle of Current Events "pity in connection with the circumstances" that forced Shalamov to sign this letter. Modern researchers note, however, that the appearance of this letter is due to the painful process of divergence of Shalamov with literary circles and the feeling of powerlessness from the impossibility of making his main work accessible to a wide range of readers in his homeland.
It is possible that the subtext should be sought in Shalamov's letter. ... there is used a typically Bolshevik accusatory epithet "fetid" in relation to emigrant publications, which in itself is shocking, because "olfactory" characteristics, both metaphorical and literal, are rare in Shalamov's prose (he had chronic rhinitis). For Shalamov's readers, the word should have cut their eyes as an alien - a lexical unit protruding from the text, a "bone" thrown to the watchdog part of readers (editors, censors) in order to divert attention from the true purpose of the letter - to smuggle the first and last mention of the "Kolymskys" into the official Soviet press. stories "- along with their exact name. Thus, the true target audience of the letter is informed that such a collection exists: readers are encouraged to think about where to get it. Perfectly understanding what is hidden behind the toponym "Kolyma", those who read the letter will ask themselves the question: "'Kolyma stories?' Where is it? '
Last years
The last three years of a seriously ill patient's life Shalamov held in the House of the Disabled and the Elderly of the Literary Fund (in Tushino). The fact that the house of the disabled was like can be judged by the recollections 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 took place 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.
- E. Zakharova. From a speech at the Shalamov readings in 2002
Nevertheless, there Varlam Tikhonovich, whose ability to move correctly and clearly articulate his speech was impaired, continued to compose poetry. In the fall of 1980, A.A. Morozov somehow incredibly managed to make out and write down these last poems of 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 the Freedom Prize.
On January 15, 1982, Shalamov, after a superficial examination by the medical commission, was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronics. During transportation, Shalamov caught a cold, fell ill with pneumonia and died on January 17, 1982.
According to Sirotinskaya:
A certain role in this translation was played by the noise that a group of his well-wishers raised around him since the second half of 1981. Among them, of course, were really kind people, there were also people who were bustling out of self-interest, out of a passion for sensation. After all, it was because of them that Varlam Tikhonovich had two posthumous "wives" who besieged the official authorities with a crowd of witnesses. His poor, defenseless old age became the subject of the show.
On June 16, 2011, E. Zakharova, who was next to Varlam Tikhonovich on the day of his death, in her speech at a conference dedicated to the fate and work of Varlam Shalamov, said:
I came across some texts in which it is mentioned that before the death of Varlam Tikhonovich, some unscrupulous people came to him in some of their own selfish interests. This is how to understand, in what such selfish interests ?! This is a disabled home! You are inside a painting by Bosch - without exaggeration, I am a witness to that. It's dirt, stench, decomposing, half-dead people around, what the hell is medicine there? An immobilized, blind, almost deaf, twitching person is such a shell, and a writer, a poet lives inside it. From time to time, several people come, feed, drink, wash, hold the hand, Alexander Anatolyevich was still talking and wrote down his poems. What selfish interests can there be ?! What is this all about? ... I insist that this must be correctly interpreted. It is impossible that this should remain unmentioned and unknown.
Despite the fact that Shalamov all his life he was an unbeliever, E. Zakharova insisted on his funeral service. The funeral service for Varlam Shalamov was served by Archpriest Alexander Kulikov, who later became the rector of the church of St. Nicholas in Klenniki (Maroseyka). The memorial service for Varlam Tikhonovich was organized by the philosopher S. S. Horuzhy.
Shalamov was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow. The funeral was attended by about 150 people. A. Morozov and F. Suchkov read Shalamov's poems.
Family
Varlam Shalamov was married twice. For the first time - on Galina Ignatievna Gudz (1909-1956), who in 1935 gave birth to his daughter Elena (Shalamova Elena Varlamovna, married Yanushevskaya, died 1990). His second marriage (1956-1965) was married to Olga Sergeevna Neklyudova (1909-1989), also a writer, whose son from his first marriage (Sergei Yuryevich Neklyudov) is a famous Russian folklorist, doctor of philological sciences.
Memory
Asteroid 3408 Shalamov, discovered on August 17, 1977 by N. S. Chernykh, was named after V. T. Shalamov.
A monument to the work of his friend Fedot Suchkov, who also passed through the Stalinist camps, was erected on Shalamov's grave. In June 2000, the monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown persons tore off and carried away the bronze head, leaving a lonely granite pedestal. This crime did not cause widespread resonance and was not solved. Thanks to the help of the metallurgists of Severstal JSC (the writer's compatriots), the monument was restored in 2001.
Since 1991, there has been an exposition in Vologda in the Shalamov House - in the building where Shalamov was born and raised and where the Vologda Regional Picture Gallery is now located. Memorial evenings are held in the Shalamov house every year on the birth and death days of the writer, and 5 (1991, 1994, 1997, 2002 and 2007) International Shalamov readings (conferences) have already taken place.
In 1992, the Literary Museum of Local Lore was opened in the village of Tomtor (Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)), where Shalamov spent the last two years (1952-1953) in Kolyma.
A part of the exposition of the Museum of Political Repression in the village of Yagodnoye, Magadan Region, created in 1994 by local historian Ivan Panikarov, is dedicated to Shalamov.
In 2005, a room-museum of V. Shalamov was created in the village of Debin, where the Central Prisoners' Hospital of Dalstroy (Sevvostlag) operated and where Shalamov worked in 1946-1951.
On July 21, 2007, the Varlam Shalamov memorial was opened in Krasnovishersk, a city that grew on the site of Vishlag, where he served his first term.
On October 30, 2013, a memorial plaque to Varlam Shalamov was unveiled in Moscow at house No. 8 on Chisty Lane, where the writer lived for three years until his arrest in 1937.
On July 20, 2012, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the building of the hospital in Debin (the former USVITL central hospital) in Kolyma (Yagodninsky district of Magadan region).