Shalamov - Pain

 This is a strange story, so strange that anyone who hasn’t been in a camp, who doesn’t know the dark depths of the criminal world, the realm of gangsters, cannot even understand it. The camps are the very bottom of life. The criminal world isn’t the bottom of the bottom. It’s an utterly, utterly different and inhuman world.

There is a banal saying that history repeats itself twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.

No. There is also a third reflection of the same events, the same plot, a reflection in the underworld’s distorting mirror. The plot is unimaginable but nevertheless real: it genuinely exists and is there alongside us.

The utterly real gallows “courts” and “courts of honor” that the criminals hold at the mines are reflected in the distorting mirror of feelings and actions. Here war games are played, scenes of war are reenacted, and real blood is shed.

There is a world of higher forces, a world of Homeric gods who come down to our world to reveal themselves and to improve the human race by their example. True, the gods tend to be late. Homer praised the Achaeans, but we are enthused by Hector: the moral climate has changed a little. Sometimes the gods would invite human beings to heaven to observe their “lofty spectacles.” All this is a mystery that the poet solved a long time ago. There is a world and an underground hell from which people sometimes return, where they do not disappear forever. Why do they return? These people have hearts filled with an undying anxiety, an eternal horror of the dark world, and that is not the world beyond the grave.

This world is more real than Homer’s heavens.

*

Shelgunov “got stuck” in the Vladivostok transit camp: he was a ragged, dirty, hungry, badly but not yet fatally beaten objector to work. People had an urge to live, but the ships and their prisoners, one party after the other, were constantly being transported across the sea, on ship after ship, like the train cars feeding the Auschwitz gas ovens. On the other side of a sea from which nobody ever returned, Shelgunov had been in the valley of death on which the hospital stood, and he was lucky enough to be sent back to the mainland: Shelgunov’s bones were not good enough for the gold mines.

At this moment danger was again coming close; the lack of certainty that affected all of a prisoner’s life was becoming more and more palpable to Shelgunov. And there was no escape from that uncertainty, from the fragility of hope.

The transit camp was an enormous settlement, divided in various directions into zones, which were precise squares, and entangled with barbed wire; it lay in the line of fire of a hundred or so guard towers, and it was lit, flooded with light by a thousand searchlights that blinded the prisoners’ weak eyes.

The bunks at this enormous transit camp were the gates to Kolyma: they could suddenly empty and then fill up again with exhausted dirty people, new parties of prisoners from the outside world.

The steamships came back, the transit camp belched out a new portion of men, was emptied and then filled again.

In the zone, the largest in the transit camp, where Shelgunov was staying, all the barracks had been cleaned out, except for the ninth. The ninth was where the gangsters lived. That was where the King, the godfather, held sway. Wardens didn’t show their faces there; the camp staff would go every day to the porch and collect the bodies of those who’d pushed their luck too far with the King.

The cooks carted off to this barracks the kitchen’s best dishes and best items—the clothes brought by all the parties of prisoners always ended up as stakes in the gambling games of the ninth barracks, the King’s.

Shelgunov, a direct descendant of the Shelgunovs of the People’s Will,19 had a father who was an academician and a mother who was a professor in civilian life; since childhood, he had lived on books and for books; a bibliophile and a bookworm, he sucked in Russian culture with his mother’s milk. Shelgunov was shaped by the nineteenth century, the golden age of humanity.

Share your knowledge! Trust people, love people! That was what Russian literature taught, and Shelgunov had some time ago felt enough strength to give back to society what he had inherited. Self-sacrifice was for everyone. To rise up against lies, however petty, especially if they were close by.

Prison and exile were the state’s first response to Shelgunov’s attempts to live as books had taught him to live, as the nineteenth century had taught him.

Shelgunov was struck by the vileness of the people surrounding him. There were no heroes in the camps. Shelgunov refused to believe that the nineteenth century had deceived him. A deep disillusionment in people, acquired during his interrogations, during his journey as a prisoner and in the transit camp, was suddenly replaced by his old cheerfulness, his old exaltation. Shelgunov found what he wanted, what he had been seeking and dreaming of: living examples. He met a force about which he had read a great deal, and which inspired a belief that was absorbed by his blood. This was the world of gangsters and criminals.

The bosses trampled down and despised Shelgunov’s neighbors and friends, as well as Shelgunov himself, but they feared and revered the professional criminals.

Here was a world that boldly set itself against the state, a world that could help Shelgunov in his blind, romantic thirst for good and for vengeance.

“You wouldn’t have a novelist here, would you?”

Someone had put a foot on the bunk to change his footwear. Judging by the necktie and the socks, in a world where only foot wrappings had existed for many years, Shelgunov quite rightly classified the man as someone from the ninth barracks.

“We have one. Hey, writer!”

“You’ve got a writer here!”

Shelgunov twisted himself around into the light.

“Let’s go and see the King. You can ‘print’ us something.”

“I’m not coming.”

“What do you mean, you’re not coming? You’ll be dead before nightfall, you stupid fool.”

The fiction he’d read was a good preparation for Shelgunov when he met the criminal world. Shelgunov crossed the threshold of the ninth barracks in a spirit of reverence. All his nerves, all his gravitation toward the good were tensed, as resonant as taut strings. Shelgunov had to have success, had to gain attention, trust, love from his noble listener, the barracks boss, the King. And Shelgunov did have success. All his miseries stopped the moment that the King’s dry lips parted in a smile.

God knows what Shelgunov “printed”! Shelgunov absolutely refused to begin by playing an ace, The Count of Monte Cristo. No. He resurrected before the King’s very eyes Stendhal’s chronicles, Cellini’s autobiography, the bloodthirsty legends of medieval Italy.

“Great stuff, great stuff!” rasped the King. “Those cultures really knew how to fill their bellies.”

After that evening there was no question whatsoever of Shelgunov doing any work in the camp. He was brought a dinner and tobacco, and the next day he was moved to live permanently in the ninth barracks, officially, if that could be done officially in a camp.

Shelgunov became the court novelist.

“What’s making you so miserable, novelist?”

“I’m thinking about home, about my wife . . .”

“Well . . .”

“You know, the interrogations, the train journey, the transit camp. I’m not allowed to write until I’m taken to the gold mines.”

“You really are dumb. What are we here for? Write to your little beauty, and we’ll send the letters . . . We don’t use the post, we have our own railway. Okay, novelist?”

So once a week Shelgunov sent letters to Moscow.

Shelgunov’s wife was a performer, a Muscovite performer and the daughter of a general.

Some time ago, at the time of his arrest, they had embraced.

“I don’t mind if I don’t get any letters for a year or two. I’ll wait, I’ll always be with you.”

“The letters will come before that.” Shelgunov confidently calmed his wife as husbands do. “I’ll find my own channels. And you’ll get my letters through those channels.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Shall I get the novelist? Or are you bored with him?” Karzubyi, concerned, asked his boss, the King. “Shouldn’t I bring you a nancy from the new party? You can have one of our lot, or one of the politicals, the article fifty-eighters.”

“Nancy” was the criminal’s word for a homosexual.

“No, call the novelist. Mind you, we’ve stuffed ourselves enough on that literature. It’s nothing but novels and theory. There’s another game we can play with that freier. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

•

“My dream, novelist,” said the King, when all the ceremonies of going to sleep had been observed: he’d had his heels tickled, a cross hung around his neck, and prison “hot cupping”—tweaks with the fingernail—on his back. “My dream, novelist, is for a woman like yours to write to me from the outside. She’s a looker!” The King turned in his hands a crumpled, faded photograph of Shelgunov’s wife, Marina, which he’d managed to hang on to despite thousands of searches, disinfections, and thefts. “A real looker! Just right for a séance. A general’s daughter! A performer! You freiers really are lucky, all our lot get are the poxy ones. And we don’t even notice the clap. All right, time for bed. I’m already dreaming.”

The next evening the novelist printed no novels.

“There’s something I like about you, freier. You may be a dummy, but there’s a drop of crook’s blood in you. Write a letter to the wife of my pal, a real man, to put it in a nutshell. You’re a writer. Make it really tender and clever: you know all those novels. I’ll bet no woman can resist a letter from you. What are we? Just ignorant. Write. The man will copy it and send it. You even have the same name: Aleksandr. That’s a laugh. Mind you, he’s only Aleksandr for the job he’s in here for. But he’s still Aleksandr, Shura for short, or Shurochka.”

“I’ve never written that sort of letter,” said Shelgunov. “But I can have a go.”

For each letter the King told him the overall gist, and Shelgunov-Cyrano20 turned the King’s ideas into reality.

Shelgunov wrote fifty of those letters.

One said, “I’ve confessed to everything; I’m asking Soviet power to forgive me.”

“Do convicts, I mean gangsters,” asked Shelgunov, unable to go on with the letter, “really ask for forgiveness?”

“Of course they do,” said the King. “This bit of writing is a dummy, a hoax, a spoof. Military tactics.”

Shelgunov asked no more questions; he just meekly wrote whatever the King dictated.

Shelgunov would read his letters out loud, polish the style, proud of his still-flamboyant brain. The King gave his approval, his lips barely parting in his royal smile.

Everything comes to an end. So did writing letters for the King. But there may have been an important reason: there was a rumor through the camp grapevine that the King was eventually going to be sent with a party of prisoners to Kolyma, where he had sent, by murder and deceit, so many others. He was going to be grabbed while he was asleep, it was said, his arms and legs bound, and then put on board the steamship. It was time to stop the correspondence; after all, Shelgunov had been speaking words of love to Roxane in Christian’s voice for nearly a year now. But the game had to end the criminal way, with real live bloodshed . . . 

Blood was congealing on the temple of a corpse lying before the King’s eyes.

Shelgunov tried to cover the corpse’s face, the reproachful look in its eyes.

“You see who it is? It’s the man with your name, Aleksandr, Shura, the man you wrote the letters for. The special action squad finished him off today, cut his head off with an ax. He seems to have been walking around with his face covered by a scarf. Write: ‘It’s a friend of your Shura writing! Shura was executed today, and I am writing as fast as I can to let you know his last words . . .’ Have you written that?” asked the King. “We’ll copy it, and then we’re quits. No need to write any more letters. I could have written that letter on my own.” The King smiled. “We value education, writer. We’re an ignorant lot.”

Shelgunov wrote the funereal letter.

The King must have been clairvoyant: he was seized that night and sent overseas.

Shelgunov couldn’t get in touch with home, and despaired. He struggled on, all alone, for a year, for two, for three, moving from hospital to work, outraged with his wife for having turned out to be a bitch or a coward, not using the “safe channels” to get in touch, forgetting him, Shelgunov, and trampling on every memory she had of him.

But it so happened that the hell of the camps ended and Shelgunov was released. He came back to Moscow.

His mother told him that she knew nothing about Marina. His father had died. Shelgunov found the address of a girlfriend of Marina’s who worked in the same theater and he went to her apartment.

The girlfriend cried out.

“What’s happened?” asked Shelgunov.

“Didn’t you die, Shura?”

“What do you mean, die? I’m standing here, aren’t I?”

“You’ll live forever.” A man emerged from the next room. “That’s the belief.”

“Marina is dead. After you were executed, she threw herself under a train. Not where Anna Karenina did it but in Rastorguyevo. She put her head under the wheels. The head was cut off clean and even. After all, you’d confessed to everything, but Marina refused to hear of it, she believed in you.”

“I confessed?”

“You wrote so yourself. But a friend of yours wrote about your being executed. Look, that’s her chest.”

The chest contained all fifty letters that Shelgunov had written to Marina through his Vladivostok channels. The channels had worked perfectly, but not for freiers.

Shelgunov burned his letters. But where were Marina’s letters with her photograph, that she had sent to Vladivostok? Shelgunov imagined the King reading his love letters. He imagined the King using the photograph “for a session.” And Shelgunov burst into tears. After that, he wept every day for the rest of his life.

Shelgunov rushed to see his mother, to find at least something, at least a line in Marina’s hand. It didn’t have to be to him. There were such letters, two faded letters, and Shelgunov learned them by heart.

The general’s daughter, the performer, was writing letters to a gangster. Gangster slang has a word “blagging,” meaning “bragging.” The word, khlestat’sia in Russian, came into gangster jargon from the boastful hero of a major literary work, Gogol’s Government Inspector’s Khlestakov. The King certainly had something to “blag” about: that freier of a novelist. Good for a laugh. That nice Shura. But the proper way to write letters is “You disgusting bitch, you can’t put two words together . . .” The King was reading phrases from his own affair with the prostitute Zoya Talitova.

“I haven’t had an education.”

“There’s no such thing. You sluts should learn how to live.”

Shelgunov, standing under a dark Moscow arch, could see all that easily. It was the scene with Cyrano, Christian, and Roxane, but acted in the ninth circle of hell, almost on the ice of the Far North. Shelgunov had trusted gangsters, and they had made him kill his wife with his own bare hands.

The two letters had become moldy, but the ink hadn’t faded and the paper had not turned to dust.

Shelgunov read these letters every day. How could he keep them forever? What glue would repair the crevices, the cracks in these dark sheets of writing paper that once were white. Certainly not liquid glass: that would burn and annihilate them.

All the same, letters can be restored so that they last forever. Every archivist knows how to do this, especially one who works in a literary museum. All you have to do is make the letters speak.

The lovely woman’s face was fixed to the glass next to a twelfth-century Russian icon, just above an icon of the Three-Handed Virgin. A female face, Marina’s photograph was perfectly apt here: it was superior to the icon . . . In what way was Marina less of a Virgin, a saint? In what way? Why are there so many women who are saints, apostolic martyrs, while Marina was only an actress, an actress who put her head under a train? Or does the Orthodox religion not accept suicides as angels? The photograph was tucked away among the icons and was itself an icon.

Sometimes Shelgunov would wake up in the night and, without turning on the lamp, search the table with his hands for Marina’s photograph. His fingers, frostbitten in the camp, could not distinguish an icon from a photograph, or wood from cardboard.

But perhaps Shelgunov was merely drunk. He drank every day. Of course vodka is bad for you, alcohol is hell, while disulfiram, the cure for alcoholism, is good. But what can you do if Marina’s icon is on the table?

•

“Do you remember that freier, that novelist, the writer, Genka? Eh? Or did you forget him ages ago?” asked the King, when the time came to get to sleep after all the ceremonies had been carried out.

“Why should I forget him? I remember him. He was that jerk, that ass!” And Genka waved his stretched-out fingers over his raised ear.

1967

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD

Further Kolyma Stories

VARLAM SHALAMOV

Shalamov - A Piece of Flesh

 YES, GOLUBEV had brought this blood-soaked offering. A piece of flesh had been cut out of his body and thrown at the feet of the almighty god of the camps: to appease the god. To appease him, or to deceive him? Life repeats Shakespeare’s plots more often than we think. Are Lady Macbeth, Richard III, King Claudius merely remote medieval figures? Is Shylock, who wanted to cut a pound of live human flesh out of the merchant of Venice, a fairy-tale figure? Of course, the wormlike bit of gut, an appendix, a rudimentary organ, weighs less than a pound. Of course, the blood-soaked offering was made under fully sterile conditions. Yet, all the same. . . . The rudimentary organ turned out to be not at all rudimentary. It was vital, active, and lifesaving.

The end of the year fills prisoners’ lives with anxiety. Anxiety besets everyone whose place is insecure (and what prisoner could be sure that he was secure), especially if they are convicted under article 58, once they have managed, after many years’ labor at the pit face, hungry and frozen, to win the illusory, uncertain good fortune of a few months, a few weeks working either in a job they were trained for or at some cozy idiot’s job—as a bookkeeper, a paramedic, a doctor, a laboratory assistant—everyone who’s won the fight for a job that is supposed to go to a free hired worker (except when there are no such workers available) or to a nonpolitical convict (and ordinary convicts look down on these “privileged” jobs, because they can always get one, and for that reason they spend their time getting drunk or worse).

Fifty-eighters can get permanent staff jobs, and they do them well. Very well indeed. And without hope. For a commission is bound to come, find them, and get them dismissed, and, what’s more, give their boss a reprimand. No boss wants to spoil his relations with this powerful commission, so he acts in advance by getting rid of anyone who is not entitled to work at these “privileged” jobs.

A good boss waits until the commission has arrived. Let the commission do the hard work of deciding whom they can dismiss and send away. Those who are sent away won’t be away for long, and those who aren’t dismissed will stay for some time, for a year, until the next December. At the very least, six months. If the boss himself does the dismissing, without waiting for the commission to arrive so he can report that everything is in order, he’ll do it worse and more stupidly.

The worst sort of boss, the least experienced, will conscientiously carry out his superiors’ orders and not allow anyone with article 58 to do any job that doesn’t involve pickax and wheelbarrow, saw and ax.

That sort of boss presides over the worst-run enterprises, and they are the ones who get dismissed quickly.

The flying visits by commissions always happen toward the end of the year. The top bosses have their own backlog of checks and control, and they therefore make an effort to catch up on the backlog by the end of the year. So they send out commissions. Sometimes they make personal visits. In person. That means they get travel expenses and their “hot spots” have not been left personally unsupervised. They can tick the boxes for fulfilling their duty, and they can simply relax, have a nice trip, or if they like, show what they’re made of, display their strength and their importance.

Both prisoners and their bosses, from the lowest to the highest rank with big stars on their epaulets, know all this. It’s an old game, a very familiar ritual. But it is still worrying, dangerous, and relentless.

A December flying visit can reverse the fate of many and quickly drive yesterday’s children of fortune to an early grave.

After such visits nobody in the camp ever experiences any changes for the better. Prisoners, especially if they come under article 58, expect only the worst from such visits. For them there were no good expectations.

Ever since the previous evening there had been rumors, camp “grapevine” whispers, the kind that always turn out to be true. People said some important bosses had come, with a whole truckload of armed soldiers and a prison bus, a Black Maria, to take their captives to a hard-labor camp. Faced with those masters of life and death, the local bosses went into a panic; even the senior figures began to seem juniors, unknown captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels. Lieutenant colonels were hiding deep in their offices. Captains and majors were running around the courtyard holding various lists, lists that probably contained surnames, and among those surnames Golubev’s was sure to be found. Golubev felt this, he knew it. But nothing had been announced and nobody had been summoned. Not one name in the zone had been listed yet.

About six months earlier, when a Black Maria had made its regular visit to the settlement and there had been another manhunt, Golubev, who was not on the lists then, was standing by the guardhouse next to a prisoner-surgeon. The surgeon was working in the hospital not just as a surgeon but as a general physician.

The new group of prisoners who had been caught, hunted down, or exposed were pushed into the Black Maria. The surgeon took his leave of a friend who was being sent away.

Golubev was then standing next to the surgeon. When the truck crawled off, raising a cloud of dust, and disappeared in the mountain ravine, the surgeon looked Golubev in the eyes and said, referring to his friend who had now gone to a certain death, “It’s his own fault. If he’d had an attack of acute appendicitis, he’d still be here.”

Golubev had committed those words to memory. It wasn’t the thought or the reasoning he remembered. It was a visual memory: the surgeon’s eyes, the mighty clouds of dust. . . .

“The clerk of works is looking for you,” said someone who had just run up to him. Golubev saw the clerk of works.

“Get your things!” The clerk was holding a paper list. It was a short one.

“Right away,” said Golubev.

“Then come to the guardhouse.”

But Golubev did not go to the guardhouse. He clutched the right side of his belly with both hands and groaned as he staggered in the direction of the clinic.

The surgeon came out onto the porch: it was the same surgeon. Something was reflected in his eyes, something he remembered. Perhaps it was the dust cloud that covered the truck that was taking his friend away forever. The examination was quick.

“Admit him. And call out the theater nurse. Call a doctor from the free village to assist. It’s an urgent operation.”

In the hospital, about two kilometers from the zone, Golubev was undressed, washed, and registered.

Two male nurses took him in and laid him on the operating table. They tied him to the table with canvas straps.

“The injection’s coming,” Golubev heard the surgeon say. “But I think you’re brave enough.”

Golubev said nothing.

“Answer! Nurse, talk to the patient.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“It’s always like that with local anesthesia.” Golubev heard the surgeon’s voice explaining something to the assistant. “It’s all talk, it doesn’t really work. Here it is. . . .”

“Hang in there just a bit longer. . . .”

A sharp pain made Golubev’s whole body jerk, but the pain stopped being acute almost immediately. The surgeons started talking, interrupting each other cheerfully and loudly. The operation was coming to an end.

“Well, we’ve removed your appendix. Nurse, show the patient his bit of flesh. Can you see it?” The nurse held a snakelike piece of gut, about half as long as a pencil, over Golubev’s face.

“We have instructions to show patients that there was a good reason for an incision, that the appendix really has been removed,” the surgeon explained to his assistant, who was a free worker. “Well, this gives you a little bit of practical experience.”

“I’m very grateful to you,” said the free doctor, “for the lesson.”

“For a lesson in human kindness, a lesson in philanthropy,” said the surgeon, speaking in metaphors as he took off his gloves.

“If you get anything else like this, be sure to call me in,” said the free doctor.

“If we get anything else like this, I certainly shall,” said the surgeon.

The male nurses, convalescent patients wearing patched white gowns, carried Golubev into the hospital ward. It was a small, postoperative ward, but there weren’t many operations in the hospital and none of the patients there were surgical ones. Golubev lay on his back, cautiously touching the bandage wrapped around him, like an Indian fakir’s or yogi’s loincloth. When he was a child, Golubev had seen drawings of such people in magazines; for almost the whole of his adult life he hadn’t known whether those fakirs and yogis really existed or not. But the thought of yogis slipped past and disappeared from his brain. The efforts of his will and his nervous tension weakened, and a pleasant feeling of having done his duty flooded his body. Every cell of that body was singing, purring a happy tune. This meant a break for a few days, a reprieve from being sent into the unknown realm of hard manual labor. For the time being Golubev was saved. This was a postponement. How many days did a wound take to heal? Seven or eight. So danger would return in a fortnight. Two weeks is a very long time, as good as a thousand years, long enough to prepare oneself for new ordeals. And in any case the time it takes for a wound to heal according to the textbooks, and for healing by primary intention, is seven or eight days, so the doctors said. And if the wound gets infected? If the plaster stuck over the wound should come off the skin too early? Golubev cautiously felt the plaster: it was a piece of gauze impregnated with gum arabic, and it was firm, already drying. He felt it through the bandaging. Yes. . . . This was an emergency exit, a reserve, a few extra days, possibly months if need be. Golubev recalled the big ward at the mine where he had been a patient a year ago. Almost all the patients there would undo their bandages at night and put in a bit of salutary dirt, real dirt picked off the floor, which they would rub in with their fingernails and thus reopen the wounds. Golubev was then a novice and these nighttime changes of dressing used to arouse his amazement to the point of contempt. But a year had passed and Golubev now understood why the patients had acted as they did. It was time for him to profit from what he had learned there. He fell asleep and woke only when somebody’s hand pulled the blanket off his face. Golubev always slept as camp prisoners did, with his head under the blanket, trying above all to get warm and to protect his head. Someone’s very handsome face was bending over Golubev. The face had a mustache and a haircut, which was either short on the back and sides or a crew cut. That meant the head was not a prisoner’s head. Golubev opened his eyes and thought it must be the memory of the yogis or a dream, perhaps a nightmare, but perhaps just an ordinary dream.

“Just an ordinary freier,” the man rasped in disappointment, putting the blanket back over Golubev’s face. “An ordinary freier. No proper people about.”

But Golubev’s feeble fingers pulled his blanket down so that he could look at the man. That man knew Golubev, and Golubev knew him. There was no doubt about it. But he must not, must not be in any hurry to show he recognized him. He had to remember things properly. Remember everything. Golubev did remember. The crew-cut man was. . . . Any moment now the man would be taking off his shirt by the window and Golubev would see a cluster of intertwined snakes tattooed on his chest. The man turned around and the cluster of intertwined snakes appeared before Golubev’s eyes. This was Kononenko, a gangster with whom Golubev had been in a transit camp a few months ago, a man who had served several sentences for murder, a prominent gangster who had been “taking a break” for several years in hospitals and pretrial prisons. Whenever the time came for him to be discharged, Kononenko would murder someone in a transit camp: he didn’t care who, any freier would do, and he would suffocate them with a towel. A towel, a prison-issue towel was Kononenko’s favorite murder weapon, it was his calling card. He would be arrested, a new case would be opened, he would be tried again and get an extra twenty-five years to add to the many hundreds of years he already had to serve. After the trial Kononenko would do his best to get into the hospital “for a rest,” then he would murder again, and the whole process would start anew. At the time execution of common criminals by shooting had been abolished. The only people who could be executed were “enemies of the people” under article 58.

“Kononenko’s in the hospital now,” Golubev reflected calmly, every cell of his body singing for joy, afraid of nothing, confident of success. “Kononenko is in the hospital now. He’s going through the hospital cycle of his horrible transformations. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, Kononenko’s well-known program will require yet another murder.” Would that not make Golubev’s efforts—his operation, his terrible effort of willpower—count for nothing? He, Golubev, would be the next victim whom Kononenko would strangle. Perhaps he shouldn’t have tried to get out of being sent to hard-labor camps, where prisoners had the “ace of diamonds,” a five-digit number, stitched to their backs and were issued striped uniforms. But at least you didn’t get beaten there and they didn’t strip the flesh off your bones. And there weren’t all those Kononenkos there.

Golubev’s bunk was by the window. Kononenko was lying opposite him. By the door, a third man lay, his feet close to Kononenko’s feet. Golubev could see the third man’s face clearly, he didn’t even have to turn his head to see that face. Golubev knew that patient, too. It was Podosionov, a permanent inhabitant of the hospital.

The door opened and a paramedic brought the medicines in.

“Kazakov!” he shouted.

“Here,” yelled Kononenko, getting up.

“Something for you to read,” said the paramedic, handing a piece of paper folded over several times.

“Kazakov?” the name wouldn’t stop pounding inside Golubev’s brain. But this was Kononenko, not Kazakov. Suddenly Golubev realized what was going on, and his body broke out in a cold sweat.

Everything had taken a turn for the worse. None of the three men was mistaken. This was Kononenko, a “cold fish” as the criminals called him, who had taken somebody else’s name and under that name, Kazakov’s name, along with Kazakov’s criminal record, had gotten himself admitted to the hospital as a “shift worker.” This made things even worse, even more dangerous. If Kononenko was just Kononenko, his next victim might be Golubev or it might not. In that case there would still be a choice, a chance, a possibility of salvation. But if Kononenko was Kazakov, then Golubev had no hope of survival. The moment Kononenko suspected anything, Golubev would die.

“You, have we met before? Why are you looking at me like a boa constrictor looking at a rabbit? Or a rabbit looking at a boa constrictor? Which is the right expression, in your learned opinion?”

Kononenko was sitting on a bedside table in front of Golubev’s bunk; he was crumpling up his message with his big, hard fingers, scattering crumbs of paper over Golubev’s blanket.

“No, we haven’t met,” said Golubev hoarsely. He was turning pale.

“Well, it’s a good thing we haven’t,” said Kononenko, taking a towel off a nail that was hammered into the wall over the bunk, and shaking the towel in Golubev’s face. “Only yesterday I was going to strangle that ‘doctor’ over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of Podosionov, whose face now expressed boundless horror. “After all, what is the bastard doing?” Kononenko went on cheerfully, pointing the towel at Podosionov. “He’s mixing his own blood into his urine—look at the jar under his bunk. . . . He scratches his finger and puts a drop of blood in his urine. He knows what he’s doing. He’s as good as the doctors. The laboratory analysis results: blood in his urine. Our ‘doctor’ stays in the hospital. Well, tell me, does a man like that deserve to live or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Golubev.

“You don’t? You do. And then you were brought in yesterday. You were in transit camp with me, weren’t you? Before I was tried. I went under the name of Kononenko at the time.”

“I’ve never seen your face before,” said Golubev.

“You have. So I’ve decided. Instead of the ‘doctor,’ I’ll finish you off. What has he done wrong?” Kononenko pointed to Podosionov’s pale face, which was very slowly turning red as the blood began to circulate again. “What has he done wrong? He’s trying to save his life. Like you. Or, if you like, me. . . .”

Kononenko paced the ward, tossing the crumbs of paper, all that was left of the message he’d received, from one hand to the other.

“And I would do you, I’d send you to the next world, and I wouldn’t hesitate. Except the paramedic’s just brought me a message, you see. I’ve got to get out of here as quick as I can. The bastards at the mine are trying to kill us. All the thieves in the hospital have been called on to help. You don’t know what our life is like. . . . You stupid freier!”

Golubev said nothing. He did know what their life was like. As a freier, of course, by observation only.

After dinner Kononenko was discharged and he was out of Golubev’s life forever.

While the third bunk was still empty, Podosionov managed to get himself to the edge of Golubev’s bunk, where he sat at Golubev’s feet and started whispering.

“Kazakov is going to strangle both of us, no doubt about it. We’ve got to tell the bosses—”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Golubev.

1964

KOLYMA STORIES

Volume One

Shalamov - SHOCK THERAPY

 SHOCK THERAPY

EVEN IN that distant blissful period when Merzliakov worked as a stableman and was able, by using a homemade grinder cobbled together from an old tin can with holes in the bottom to make a sieve, to make flaked grain fit for human consumption from the oats that were provided for the horses, and thus cook porridge, a bitter hot gruel that suppressed and reduced his hunger, he was pondering one simple question. The big draft horses brought in from the mainland were given a government oats ration every day which was twice what the squat, shaggy Yakut ponies got, although the draft horses pulled no more than the ponies. Thunder, the monstrous Percheron, had as much oats poured into his trough as five Yakut ponies could eat. This was justifiable, it was done everywhere, and that was not what tormented Merzliakov. He couldn’t understand why the human rations in the camp, the mysterious prescription of proteins, fats, vitamins, and calories destined to be swallowed by prisoners and called the “pot sheet,” were drawn up with absolutely no consideration of people’s live weight. If they were to be treated as beasts of burden, then questions of rations should be dealt with more logically, instead of observing some terrible mathematical average or bureaucratic whim. At best this terrible average would benefit only the lightweights, and in fact those who weighed less took longer than the others to become goners. Merzliakov had a constitution like that of Thunder, the Percheron, and that pathetic breakfast of three spoonfuls of porridge only increased the nagging pain in his stomach. Yet a workman in a brigade could get almost nothing in addition to his ration. The most precious items—butter, sugar, and meat—were never added to the pot in the quantity prescribed by the pot sheet. There were other things that Merzliakov had seen: tall people were the first to die. Being inured to heavy labor made absolutely no difference. An intellectual weakling still held out longer than a giant from Kaluga, where tilling the earth was in the blood, if they received the same food, in accordance with camp rations. There was not much advantage in increasing your ration by exceeding the production norm by a percentage either, because the basic prescription was unchanged and still did not match the needs of tall men. If you wanted to eat better, you had to work better; but if you wanted to work better, you had to eat better. Everywhere, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians were the first to die. They were the first to become goners, which always led the doctors to remark that the Baltic peoples were weaker than the Russians. True, the living standards of the Latvians and Estonians were far higher than those of the camps, or even of the Russian peasant, so they found things harder. But the main cause lay elsewhere: they weren’t less tough, they were just taller.

About eighteen months earlier, after an attack of scurvy, which quickly knocked out anyone new to the camps, Merzliakov was given a job as a temporary nurse in the tiny local hospital. He saw there that medicines were dispensed in doses according to the patient’s weight. New medicines were tested on rabbits, mice, or guinea pigs, and human doses were determined by calculating body weight. Children’s doses were less than adult doses.

But the camp rations were not calculated according to the weight of the human body. This was, then, the wrong answer to the question that astonished and worried Merzliakov. But before he became hopelessly weak, he managed by some miracle to get a stableman’s job, where he could steal the horses’ oats and stuff his own stomach with them. Merzliakov was already thinking he could get through the winter and then face whatever was coming. But things worked out differently. The stable manager was dismissed for drunkenness, and a senior stableman was promoted. He was one of the men who had shown Merzliakov how to use a tin can to make porridge oats. The senior stableman had himself been something of an oats thief and knew perfectly well how it was done. He now felt the need to ingratiate himself with his bosses, and he no longer needed any oat flakes. He therefore personally sought out and destroyed all the homemade grinders. People started roasting, boiling, and eating oats, husk and all, treating their stomachs as if they were horses. The new manager wrote a report to the authorities. Several stablemen, including Merzliakov, were put in solitary confinement for stealing oats and then sent from the stables back to where they had come from: ordinary manual labor.

•

Doing manual labor, Merzliakov soon realized that death was imminent. He staggered under the weight of the beams he had to drag around. The foreman took a dislike to the idle bruiser (“bruiser” is what they called anyone tall in the camp) and always put Merzliakov “under the butt,” that is, made him carry the heavy butt end of the beam. Once Merzliakov fell down and could not at first get up from the snow-covered ground; he suddenly decided to refuse to carry this damned beam. It was late, dark, and the guards were in a hurry to get to their indoctrination class, while the workmen wanted to reach the barracks and food as fast as they could; that evening the foreman was late for a card-game duel. Merzliakov was blamed for all the delay. So he was punished. First, he was beaten up by his workmates, then by the foreman and the guards. The beam lay abandoned in the snow and, instead of the beam, it was Merzliakov that was carried to the camp. He was let off work and lay on the bunk. The small of his back hurt. The paramedic rubbed him down with tallow—the medical center hadn’t had any proper ointments for ages. Merzliakov lay there, bent half double, all the time complaining of pain in the small of his back. The pain had gone long ago, his broken rib had quickly mended, but Merzliakov was determined, using any lie he could, to put off being declared fit for work. They didn’t declare him fit. One day they put his outdoor clothes on, laid him on a stretcher, and loaded him into the cab of a truck to take him, with other patients, to the district hospital. There was no X-ray machine there. Some serious thinking had to be done about everything, and Merzliakov thought. He stayed there for some months, still bent half double; he was then transferred to the central hospital where, of course, there was an X-ray machine, and where Merzliakov was put in the surgical section, in the ward for traumatic illnesses (the patients, unaware of the irony in the pun, called these illnesses “dramatic”).

•

“And this man, too,” said the surgeon, pointing to Merzliakov’s notes, “we’ll hand over to you, Piotr Ivanovich. He doesn’t need treatment in the surgical section.”

“But you’ve written a diagnosis of ankylosis due to spinal trauma. Why should I have him?”

“Well, of course there is ankylosis. What else can I put down? Worse than that can happen after a beating. I had a case at the Gray mine, where the foreman beat up a good worker—”

“Seriozha, I haven’t got time to listen to your cases. I’m asking why you’re transferring him.”

“But I’ve written ‘To be examined with a view to documentation.’ Poke him with needles, let’s document him and get him on a ship. Then he can be a free man.”

“But you’ve taken X-rays, haven’t you? We shouldn’t need needles to detect any abnormalities.”

“I have. Have a look, if you’d care to,” and the surgeon placed a dark film negative on the muslin screen. “This picture makes no sense at all. Until we get proper lighting, proper voltage, our X-ray photographers will go on giving us this fuzz.”

“It really is fuzzy,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “All right, so be it.” And he signed his name on the notes, agreeing to accept Merzliakov’s transfer.

The surgical section was noisy, chaotic, overcrowded with cases of frostbite, dislocated limbs, fractures, burns—the northern mines were no joke—and some of the patients lay on the ward and corridor floors; just one young, infinitely tired surgeon and four paramedics worked there, none of them sleeping for more than three or four hours a night. Nobody had the time to give Merzliakov proper attention. In the neurology section, however, where Merzliakov had been so suddenly transferred, he realized that a really close examination would begin.

All his desperate prisoner’s willpower had long been focused on one thing: to not unbend. And he didn’t. His body so very much wanted to straighten out, if only for a second. But he recalled the mine, the piercing breath of the cold air, the slippery frozen stones of the goldmine pit face, which shone from the sub-zero temperatures; the little bowl of soup, his dinner, which he devoured in one gulp, not needing any spoon; the rifle butts of the guards and the boots of the foremen—then he found the strength to stay doubled up. In any case, it was now easier than it had been in the first weeks. He didn’t sleep much, since he was afraid of unbending while he slept. He knew that the duty nurses had long ago been ordered to watch him and catch him faking. And if he was caught—Merzliakov knew this, too—he would immediately be send to the punishment mines, and what would a punishment mine be like, if the ordinary one left Merzliakov with such terrible memories?

The day after he was transferred, Merzliakov was taken to see the doctor. The chief of the section asked him briefly about the early stages of the illness and nodded in sympathy. The doctor told him, as if by the way, that even healthy muscles could get used to being in an unnatural position after many months, and that a man can turn himself into an invalid. Then Piotr Ivanovich started examining his patient. As the doctor inserted needles, tapped away with a rubber mallet, and pressed certain points, Merzliakov gave random answers to his questions.

Piotr Ivanovich devoted more than half of his working hours to exposing malingerers. Of course, he understood the reasons that induced prisoners to fake their symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich had been a prisoner not so long ago, and he wasn’t surprised by the childish stubbornness of malingerers, nor by the primitive and frivolous nature of their faked symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich, formerly a lecturer at a Siberian medical institute, had made his professional career in the same snowy world as the one where his patients tried to save their lives by trying to deceive him. One cannot deny that he felt sorry for people. But he was more a doctor than a human being and he was, above all, a specialist. He was proud of the fact that a year of manual labor in the camps had not destroyed the specialist doctor in him. He looked at the problem of exposing malingerers not from a lofty, statesmanlike point of view, and not morally. He saw this problem as a proper use of his knowledge, of his psychological skill in setting traps for hungry, half-insane, wretched people to fall into, to the greater glory of science. In this battle between doctor and malingerer, everything favored the doctor: thousands of subtle medicines, hundreds of textbooks, a wide array of equipment, the help of the guards, and the enormous experience of a specialist, while all the patient had on his side was his horror of the world that he had left for the hospital and was afraid of being returned to. It was this horror that gave the prisoner the strength to battle on. Exposing yet another malingerer gave Piotr Ivanovich deep satisfaction. Once more he had proof from real life that he was a good doctor, that instead of losing his skills, he had enhanced them, perfected them—in other words, that he still could. . . .

“What fools those surgeons are,” he thought, as he lit a cigarette after Merzliakov had left. “They don’t know topographical anatomy, or they’ve forgotten it, and they never have known what reflexes are. X-rays are their only answer. If they haven’t got an X-ray, they can’t be sure even about a simple fracture. Yet they’re so conceited.” Piotr Ivanovich, naturally, had no doubt that Merzliakov was a malingerer. “All right, he can stay in bed for a week. That week will give us time to do all the analyses, so we jump through all the hoops. We’ll stick all the right bits of paper in his notes.” Piotr Ivanovich smiled as he anticipated the theatrical effect of this, his next unmasking.

A week later the hospital would be getting a party of patients ready to be shipped home to the mainland. The papers were being drawn up in the ward and the chairman of the medical commission had come from the administration building to examine personally the patients whom the hospital had prepared for dispatch. The chairman’s job was limited to examining the documentation, checking that the proper formulas had been used—actual examination of a patient took only thirty seconds.

“I have in my lists a certain Merzliakov. The guards broke his back a year ago. I’d like to send him off. He’s recently been transferred to the neurology section. Here are his documents, all ready for dispatch.” The chairman of the commission turned to face the neurologist.

“Bring Merzliakov,” said Piotr Ivanovich. They brought in the patient, bent nearly double. The chairman gave him a cursory glance.

“What a gorilla,” he said. “Yes, of course, there’s no point keeping men like that.” Picking up his pen, he reached for the lists.

“Personally, I’m not signing for him,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a clear, loud voice. “He’s a malingerer, and tomorrow I shall have the privilege of showing him up to you and to the surgeon.”

“Right, then we’ll leave him out,” said the chairman indifferently, and put his pen down. “Anyway, it’s time we stopped, it’s getting late.”

“He’s a malingerer, Seriozha,” Piotr Ivanovich said as he took the surgeon by the arm, when they were leaving the ward.

The surgeon freed his arm.

“He may be,” he said, frowning with distaste. “Good luck with exposing him. You’ll get an enormous amount of pleasure.”

The next day, at a meeting with the head of the hospital, Piotr Ivanovich reported in detail on Merzliakov’s case.

“I think,” he concluded, “that we can expose Merzliakov in two stages. First comes Rausch anesthesia, which you, Seriozha, have forgotten about,” he said triumphantly, turning to face the surgeon. “That should have been done straightaway. Then if Rausch anesthesia doesn’t work,” Piotr Ivanovich spread his arms, “it’s shock therapy. That’s a very intriguing procedure, I assure you.”

“Not too intriguing?” asked Aleksandra Sergeyevna, the manager of the biggest section in the hospital, the tuberculosis section. She was a stout, heavily built woman who had only recently arrived from European Russia.

“Well,” said the hospital chief, “for a bastard like that. . . .” The presence of ladies didn’t inhibit him much.

“Let’s see what the Rausch anesthesia does,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a conciliatory tone.

Rausch is short-term anesthesia administered by an overwhelming dose of ether. The patient goes to sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes, enough time for a surgeon to manipulate a dislocation, amputate a finger, or lance an infected boil.

The hospital chiefs, dressed in white gowns, surrounded an operating table on which a submissive, half-bent Merzliakov had been put. Male nurses picked up the linen straps that usually tie patients down on the operating table.

“No need, no need,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich, as he ran forward. “Straps are the last thing we need.”

Merzliakov’s face was turned upward. The surgeon placed an anesthesia mask over it and picked up a bottle of ether.

“Start, Seriozha!”

The ether began dripping.

“Breathe in deeper, deeper, Merzliakov! Count aloud!”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven,” Merzliakov counted in a lazy voice; then, suddenly stopping counting, he started saying broken phrases, making no sense at first, some of them obscene curses.

Piotr Ivanovich was holding Merzliakov’s left hand. After a few minutes, that hand relaxed and Piotr Ivanovich let go of it. The hand fell gently, like a dead object, onto the edge of the table. Piotr Ivanovich slowly and solemnly unbent Merzliakov’s body. Everyone gasped with amazement.

“Now tie him down,” Piotr Ivanovich told the nurses.

Merzliakov opened his eyes and saw the hospital chief’s hairy fist.

“How about that, you reptile?” the chief was rasping at him. “You’ll be charged and tried.”

“Congratulations, Piotr Ivanovich, congratulations!” repeated the chairman of the commission, clapping the neurologist on the shoulder. “To think that only yesterday I was about to give that gorilla his freedom!”

“Untie him!” ordered Piotr Ivanovich. “Get off the table.”

Merzliakov hadn’t fully regained consciousness. His temples throbbed, and he could still taste the sickeningly sweet ether in his mouth. Even now he didn’t understand whether he was awake or dreaming, and it may be that he’d had dreams like this before.

“To hell with the lot of you!” he suddenly yelled out, and bent himself double, as he had been.

Broad-shouldered, bony, his thick long fingers almost touching the floor, his eyes clouded, and his hair disheveled, Merzliakov really did look like a gorilla. He left the bandaging room and Piotr Ivanovich was told that the patient Merzliakov was lying on his bed in his usual posture. The doctor ordered him to be brought to his office.

“You’ve been exposed, Merzliakov,” said the neurologist. “But I’ve asked the chief, and you won’t be charged, you won’t be sent to a punishment mine. You’ll simply be discharged from hospital and go back to your mine to do what you were doing. You’re a hero, man. You’ve pulled the wool over our eyes for a whole year.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said the gorilla, not lifting his eyes.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? We’ve only just straightened you out!”

“Nobody straightened me out.”

“Look, dear man,” said the neurologist. “There’s no need for all this. I wanted to do it the nice way. Otherwise, watch out, because in a week’s time you yourself will be asking to be discharged.”

“What do I care what’s going to happen in a week’s time?” Merzliakov said quietly. How could he explain that just one extra week, an extra day, an extra hour spent somewhere that was not the mine was his idea of happiness. If the doctor couldn’t understand that, how could he explain it? Merzliakov said nothing and stared at the floor.

Merzliakov was taken away; Piotr Ivanovich went to see the hospital chief.

“Well, you could do it tomorrow, instead of in a week,” said his boss after he’d listened to Piotr Ivanovich’s proposal.

“I promised him a week,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “It won’t bankrupt the hospital.”

“All right,” said the chief. “In a week, then. But bring me along. Are you going to tie him down?”

“You can’t tie him down,” said the neurologist. “He’d dislocate an arm or a leg. He’ll be held down.” Taking Merzliakov’s notes with him, Piotr Ivanovich wrote in the treatment column “shock therapy” and named a date.

Shock therapy consists of intravenously injecting the patient with a quantity of camphor oil several times higher than the dose used subcutaneously for maintaining a seriously ill patient’s cardiac activity. The camphor oil acts by causing a sudden attack, like an attack of violent madness of epilepsy. A rush of camphor causes a sharp increase in all of the patient’s muscular activity and motor forces. Muscles are tensed as never before and the patient’s strength, although he has lost consciousness, is increased tenfold. The attack lasts several minutes.

Several days passed without Merzliakov thinking of unbending of his own free will. The morning named in his notes came and he was taken to see Piotr Ivanovich. Any entertainment is highly appreciated in the north, so the doctor’s office was crowded. Eight burly male nurses were lined up against the wall. A divan was placed in the middle of the office.

“We’ll do it here,” said Piotr Ivanovich, getting up from his desk. “We shan’t bother the surgeons. Where’s Sergei Fiodorovich, by the way?”

“He’s not coming,” said Anna Ivanovna, the sister on duty. “He said he was busy.”

“Busy, busy,” repeated Piotr Ivanovich. “It would do him good to watch me doing his job for him.”

Merzliakov’s sleeve was rolled up and the paramedic rubbed some iodine on his arm. Taking a syringe in his right hand, the paramedic pierced a vein near the patient’s elbow joint. Dark blood flowed through the needle into the syringe. With a gentle movement of his thumb the paramedic pressed the plunger and a yellow solution began entering the vein.

“Get it in as fast as you can!” said Piotr Ivanovich. “And then stand aside quickly. As for you,” he told the male nurses, “hold him.”

Merzliakov’s enormous body leapt up and writhed in the nurses’ hands. Eight men were holding him down. He rasped, he struggled, he kicked, but the nurses were holding tight and he started quieting down.

“You can restrain a tiger like that, a tiger,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich in his delight. “On the other side of Lake Baikal that’s how they catch tigers by hand. Now watch closely,” he told the hospital chief, “see how Gogol exaggerated. Do you remember the end of Taras Bulba? ‘Almost thirty men were hanging on to his arms and legs.’ Well, this gorilla is rather bigger than Taras Bulba. And he only needs eight men.”

“Yes, yes,” said the chief. He didn’t remember Gogol, but he did like the shock therapy enormously.

The next morning Piotr Ivanovich did his rounds and stopped at Merzliakov’s bed.

“Well, then,” he asked, “what’s your decision?”

“You can discharge me,” said Merzliakov.

1956

From: KOLYMA STORIES

Volume One

VARLAM SHALAMOV

Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by

DONALD RAYFIELD

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