A Child’s Drawings (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Varlam Shalamov
- First Published: 1978
- Type of Plot: Social realism
- Time of Work: The mid-1930's to the mid-1950's
- Setting: A forced-labor camp in the Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia
- Principal Characters: The narrator, Two other political prisoners
- Genres: Social realism, Short fiction
- Subjects: Suffering, Prisoners, Victims, Fear, Nostalgia, Siberia or Siberians
- Locales: Siberia
The Story
The story begins as the routine day begins. The narrator, a nameless political prisoner in a nameless Kolyma labor camp, is sent out with the other prisoners for the day's work. There is no checklist for the prisoners; they are simply lined up by fives so that the guards have an easy time of counting and multiplying. Today the narrator's brigade has an easy job—sawing wood with a circular saw, a task that usually falls to a more privileged prisoner group, the common criminals. The saw, like the prisoners, moves slowly, growling in the bitter cold of the far North....
[The entire page is 1377 words long]
