The strength of [Kolyma Tales] derives, first of all, from a refusal to blink at the finality of waste…. [Shalamov writes] not with, and not without, bitterness, but somehow in a voice that seems beyond bitterness. Anger and grief have long ago exhausted themselves. What remains is the determination, perhaps beyond explaining, to get things straight, for whatever record may survive. Shalamov speaks in the voice of the irrevocable: millions perished, other millions were drained of health and youth, and there can be no recompense or reconciliation. The injustice is radical, complete, without end. Nor does Shalamov cover this up with noble phrases about "the human spirit," "transcendence," etc.…

[Shalamov's stories] yield a modest triumph of voice. Each story has its own nuances of theme and style, but the stories as a whole come together in something rare in modern literature: the filling-out of an impressive yet by no means transparent personality. Shalamov writes in a tone close to resignation yet not finally resigned, and in one of his best stories, "Major Pugachov's Last Battle," he breaks out in a spirited defiance of authority and death. Nor is his tone exactly stoical, though no critic need be chastized for so describing it. Shalamov holds himself in severe check as an artist, just as he held himself, apparently, while a prisoner; he grants nothing to rhetoric or compensatory emotions; he is simply intent with a gray passion, upon exactitude….

The urge to precision takes on a moral dimension. To note the difference between taste and the evoked sensation becomes a tacit gesture of salvage. This is an art ferociously insistent upon its present, its grasped fragment of time. There is barely a horizon of the future in these stories, since that seems beyond objective credence. As for the uses of memory regarding a time before the camps, experienced prisoners apparently learn that to surrender oneself to such memories is to risk losing the disciplines of survival. In their becalmed singleness of vision, the stories hold on to the present quite as a prisoner might grip his piece of bread….

A comparison with Solzhenitsyn is inevitable, and we might as well dispose of it. Solzhenitsyn is a writer of power, Shalamov of purity. Shalamov is not as openly rebellious or intellectually assertive as Solzhenitsyn, having obviously been more deeply impaired by his ordeal. But neither is he as apocalyptic and dogmatic as Solzhenitsyn. He seems closest in spirit to the earlier Solzhenitsyn of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and "Matryona's House"; but Solzhenitsyn has become a writer who needs large, expansive forms combining invention and invective, while Shalamov, as frugal with words as Isaac Babel, packs everything into a few pages. And while Solzhenitsyn is a writer of proclamations, sometimes ideas, Shalamov possesses a rarer gift, that of a subdued philosophical temperament. Without theory, rage, or assault, he will include an occasional passage about the exertion of will required for survival and the "spiritual dullness" this usually entails. In the context of his fiction these sparse sentences acquire an overwhelming authority. Utterly self-effacing, he is everywhere visible….

Like the work of virtually every serious Russian writer in our time, Shalamov's stories testify to a willed, an insistent continuity of Russian literature. To affirm ties with prerevolutionary masters, as well as with some of the gifted figures of the Twenties, becomes a moral-political gesture understood by friend and enemy. The formal influence that strikes one as strongest is that of Babel. In temperament and probably opinion these writers differ; Shalamov has none of Babel's fascination with violence or taste for extremes. Yet it's impossible to read "Major Pugachov's Last Battle" without hearing—behind it, so to say—the tensed nervous rhythms of Babel….

Other stories seem to contain small, delicate touches of Chekhov, half-memories, half-contrasts. (p. 36)

As one lives through this book, one can't help thinking about the relationship in this century between art and testimony. The problem has been discussed mostly with regard to writings about the Holocaust, but it presses almost as strongly on the reader of Shalamov or Solzhenitsyn. A recent reviewer of Shalamov felt obliged to reassure his readers that this Russian wasn't just another survivor piling up terrible facts about the Gulag. Shalamov, he solemnly asserted, was also an artist. Behind such remarks there seems to be the view, comforting to us all, that in the hierarchy of values by which we live, culture retains its primacy and that in responding to a book about Kolyma what matters most is its artistic quality. There is another view, more hesitantly advanced by some critics, that declares culture to be helpless, or shamed, or finally just irrelevant before the horrors of our century. Who cares whether a writer can turn out a comely sentence when he is remembering a child's head being bashed in by a Nazi rifle butt? What matters is relentless testimony piled up to the very skies that do not heed it.

Is there a way of mediating between these two outlooks? Is there even any reason to want to? My own inclination is to feel that the tension here between aesthetic and moral standards is good for our souls, if not our literary theories; let it remain, that tension, so that we will not rest too easily with mere opinion. But in the case of Varlam Shalamov it is also worth saying that one reason his work achieves high literary distinction is precisely the moral quality of his testimony. The act of representation yokes the two. (pp. 36-7)