Varlam Shalamov Biography

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (SHAH-lahm-uhf) was a prose writer, poet, and essayist whose seventeen-year imprisonment in Soviet labor camps provided him with the material for a remarkable set of short stories, known collectively as Kolyma Tales. He was born on July 1, 1907 (June 18, according to the Julian calendar used in prerevolutionary Russia), the fifth child of a Russian Orthodox priest. Vologda, Shalamov’s hometown, is a provincial city some 250 miles northeast of Moscow. Shalamov continued to live in Vologda through World War I and the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power; soon afterward, though, his family began to come apart. The first blow was material: Under the new, officially atheist government, Shalamov’s father lost his pension. Then in 1920 one of Shalamov’s brothers was killed in the civil war between the regime and its opponents, and his father went blind from glaucoma.

In 1924 Shalamov left Vologda for Moscow, where he first worked as a tanner at a leather factory. In 1926 he enrolled in the law department of Moscow State University. Throughout the late 1920’s he was very much caught up in Moscow’s cultural life, with its rapidly evolving literary groups and the fierce polemics that raged in the press. While a student, he came into contact with circles that opposed the emerging Stalinist direction in the Soviet Union’s political life. In February of 1929, he was arrested during a raid on an underground printing press and was sentenced to three years of hard labor in the northern Ural Mountains.

He was freed a year early, in 1931, and by 1932 he had returned to Moscow, where he worked for the next five years as a journalist, critic, and writer, publishing several articles and stories in some of the more prestigious literary journals. He was rearrested in 1937, at the beginning of the purges, and that year he was sent to hard labor in the Kolyma region, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. In 1942, when his original five-year sentence should have ended, his term was extended until the end of the war, and in 1943, after having been denounced for remarking upon the quality of German armaments, he was sentenced to ten more years. (According to one story, he was also condemned for referring to Ivan Bunin, the 1933 Nobel laureate who had emigrated from the Soviet Union, as a classic Russian writer.) On several occasions Shalamov narrowly escaped execution, and he was often close to death from cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Somehow he survived, and during the 1950’s he...

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born and reared in Vologda, a town in north-central European Russia. Shalamov’s adult life was largely spent in prisons and camps, but ironically even his childhood was spent in a region affected by the Russian penal system. He has written of Vologda that “over the centuries as a result of the banishment to the area of so many protesters, rebels, and different critics of the tsars, a sort of sediment built up and a particular moral climate was formed which was at a higher level than any city in Russia.” In 1919, Kedrov, the Soviet commander of the northern front, had two hundred hostages shot in Vologda. Little is known of Shalamov’s life, but he says in a story that one of the hostages killed was the local chemistry teacher—as a result, Shalamov never learned chemistry or even the formula for water.

Shalamov was married, and in 1937, he was arrested for declaring that Ivan Bunin, the winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Literature, was “a Russian classic.” Shalamov spent the next seventeen years in labor camps, mostly in Kolyma, in northeastern Siberia, where the prisoners worked in gold mines. The Soviet Union was the second largest producer of gold in the world, largely because of these mines, which utilized prison and slave labor; it is estimated that more than three million people died there from cold, hunger, and overwork. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn calls Kolyma “the pole of cold and...