Shalamov

Shalamov initially had high hopes of a literary career. Boris Pasternak greatly praised his poetic talents, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had shown in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that it was possible to write about the camps. But Pasternak, hounded by the Soviet authorities for publishing Doctor Zhivago abroad, died in 1960, and it became clear that Solzhenitsyn could publish—and then just for a few years—only because he had won the favor of Nikita Khrushchev, now the party’s leader, and of Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of the influential journal New World.

Shalamov’s initial idolization of Solzhenitsyn was met with a friendly response, even an invitation to collaborate on the compilation of The Gulag Archipelago. But, like nearly all of Shalamov’s contacts, relations rapidly soured: Shalamov clearly disapproved of Solzhenitsyn’s adherence to some of the Christian values of the nineteenth century and to some of the ethics of Soviet society, particularly the faith in the redemptive power of manual work. Whereas Solzhenitsyn moved from writing short stories to colossal novels, Shalamov disapproved of novels as elaborate structures that falsified their material. (His memoir of corrective labor in the Urals is entitled Vishera: An Antinovel.) Shalamov distanced himself from other survivors of the Gulag, such as Yevgeniya Ginzburg, accusing them of being too soft on the villains who had caused their suffering. Shalamov was initially close to Nadezhda, the widow of Osip Mandelstam—he dedicated two of his best stories to both her and the poet—but was alienated by her role as queen bee, surrounded by admirers and dissidents.

Despite this isolation, and the hostile attentions of the KGB, Shalamov managed to publish four books of poetry. While his poetry, strongly reminiscent in its techniques and subjects of the symbolist school of prerevolutionary Russia, aroused no official antagonism, publishing his stories in the USSR proved impossible, except for one in 1965, the least controversial, “The Dwarf Pine,” and even that caused the editorial board of Country Youth to be dismissed. In 1968—whether with Shalamov’s complicity or against his will is not certain—individual stories, and then the whole of the first book, Kolyma Stories, were leaked in the West and were published, first in émigré Russian journals, and then in German and French translation under the name Shalanov. Shalamov protested privately (though asking for copies and payment), and then, evidently acting under compulsion, publicly in the official Literary Newspaper.

For his condemnation of “anti-Soviet” émigré and Western publishers, he was rewarded with belated admission to the Union of Writers, without whose membership no Soviet writer could hope to make a living.

At the end of the 1960s Shalamov was befriended by Irina Sirotinskaya, who deposited his manuscripts with the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Sirotinskaya has given a detailed account of a relationship based on mutual affection and respect. Certainly, Shalamov’s work might have met the same fate of destruction as that of other dissident writers had it not been for Sirotinskaya’s intervention. More skeptical friends of Shalamov, particularly those who were dissidents or ex-prisoners, or both, had their doubts about this friendship: all state archivists in the USSR were subordinate to the KGB, and the transfer of a writer’s work to the archives during his lifetime could be seen as sequestration as well as preservation. But in my own work in the Soviet archives, I found that there were archivists who despite their “security clearance” were genuinely devoted to the literature to which they controlled access. There is no doubt that Sirotinskaya played a major part in helping Shalamov at least to publish his poetry.

In the late 1970s, Shalamov, homeless and increasingly ill, disappeared from view into a home for the elderly. Conditions there were truly appalling—ironically, as bad as the worst institutions in the Gulag. When friends, including the granddaughter of one of the imprisoned professors who had trained Shalamov as a paramedic in Kolyma, discovered him, they were allowed to alleviate his conditions slightly but were hindered by the attentions of the KGB and the indifference of the “medical” staff. By now Sirotinskaya, a married woman who felt her relationship with Shalamov had to be subordinated to her family’s interests, seems to have distanced herself from the writer. In January 1982, a psychiatric commission diagnosed Shalamov’s condition—extreme deafness, loss of muscular control, and acute suspicion of strangers—as dementia, and he was moved, almost naked in the freezing cold, to a “psychiatric hospital” to which visitors had almost no access. In a few days he died of pneumonia. In her memoir, Sirotinskaya states that she visited him just before his death and that he dictated to her the text of a collection of poems.

Shalamov also wrote a will naming her as his heir, and dedicated two of his unpublished collections of stories to her. The authenticity of these last dispositions has been disputed by Shalamov’s dissident associates, notably Sergei Grigoriants. Again, because Shalamov disliked speaking in the presence of a third party (an old camp habit), none of his reported conversations can be corroborated.

 Danald Rayfield