STRUCTURE OF “KOLYMA STORIES” The writer divided his stories into six cycles: “ Kolyma stories", "Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Sketches of the Underworld", "Resurrection of Larch" and "The Glove, or KR-2".

FEATURES OF “KOLYMA STORIES” The stories reflect the spiritual experience of the writer, the author’s individual artistic thinking, which has features of both existential and mythological consciousness.

Central problem. Main motives. The central problem is the problem of the destruction of personality in the camp and the possibility of a person’s spiritual rebirth. Main motives: motive of the absurd world, motive of loneliness, motive of doom, motive of resurrection.

One of the most important means of creating an artistic model of the world in V. T. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” are natural-cosmic mythologies (earth, water, fire, air), thanks to which the work combines elements of ancient archaic thinking and individual author’s myth-making.

What is common in the theme of state unfreedom in L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn, S. D. Dovlatov, V. T. Shalamov 1. Particular attention is paid to the description of the work and life of prisoners, the influence of difficult conditions is explored life on a person’s personality. 2. One subject of the image (prison, camp, hard labor). 3. Specific typology of characters (prisoners, authorities, guards, etc.) 4. Description of almost the same real space (barracks, barbed wire, guard towers, lanterns, etc.).

Shalamov depicted in his works the harshest camps - the Kolyma camps, in which it was almost impossible for prisoners to survive.

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW In Solzhenitsyn, the camp world did not so much destroy as it tested a person, and the trials in it could also become the cause of it spiritual development. In Shalamov’s work, the camp appears as a “school of evil,” in which everything is aimed at destroying the individual: every day there poses a real threat to life. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov Special attention devoted to the most tragic moments of the lives of people in the camp, creating a world of “other existence”.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In “Kolyma Stories,” unlike Dovlatov’s “Zone,” life in the camp was assessed from the point of view of the prisoner, and not the guard. But Shalamov and Dovlatov agreed that the difficult living conditions in the camp contributed not only to the physical, but also to the moral degradation of a person.

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) For Solzhenitsyn and Dovlatov, the main source of “evil” is Soviet power. For Shalamov, the source of “evil” is not only Soviet power, but also the system of violence against people in general and the power that legitimized this violence. According to Shalamov, violence has been characteristic of man at all times to a greater or lesser extent, therefore “the executions of 1937 could happen again.”

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The world is historical, history is eternal, therefore: it is no coincidence that Shalamov compares life in the camp with Egyptian slavery (“Engineer Kiselyov”), with the reign of Ivan the Terrible (“Lyosha Chekanov, or Fellow Dealers in Kolyma”). One of the important theses of the writer: the camp is “world-like”, the camp is a “model of the world”.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Shalamov refuses detailed characteristics of characters, descriptions of their portraits, verbose monologues, significant descriptions of nature, etc. However, in each Shalamov's text there are always several artistic details, “hidden” in the text or, conversely, highlighted in close-up, carrying an increased semantic load, giving the story deep philosophical overtones and psychologism (“Napredstavku”, “Condensed Milk”, “The First Chekist”, etc.).

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The absurdity of the camp world is shown in both Solzhenitsyn and Dovlatov. A significant difference is observed in the attitude to the absurdity of the main characters of these works: in Shalamov and Dovlatov, the absurdity of the camp world is felt by an educated, thinking person who is able to realize the hostility of the camp system, in Solzhenitsyn in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” main character- a peasant who has “got used to” the camp world, studied its laws and even justifies some of them. It should be noted that Solzhenitsyn deliberately distances himself from his character. He, like the reader, is amazed that a person can adapt to the world of the Gulag. Dovlatovsky Boris Alikhanov appears as an “outsider” who cannot accept the world, and evaluates all the events that happen to him in the camp from the outside, as if they were happening to someone else.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In “Kolyma Stories,” two types of absurdist people are mainly presented: “rebellious” heroes (“ Last Stand Major Pugachev”, “Silence”, “Tombstone”, etc.) and characters who do not have the physical and moral strength to resist the absurd (“At Night”, “Vaska Denisov, the Pig Thief”, etc.). Main characters " Kolyma stories“Representatives of the intelligentsia are trying to overcome the absurdity and chaos of what is happening and contrast them with a “different” space, where the categories of “memory” and “creativity” are fundamental.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Shalamov constantly models life situations, in which the inner world characters: state of loneliness, doom, awareness near death. In existential literature such situations are called “borderline”. The situation of loneliness and doom modeled by Shalamov characterizes a person’s position in the world and is ontological in nature: a person is left alone with the world, cannot find support either in God or in “another” (“Bread”, “Seraphim”, etc.) , although paradoxically, loneliness can become a condition for self-knowledge and creativity (“Trail”, “Across the Snow”, etc.).

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Peculiarities of behavior of doomed people in the camp: - shock from the discrepancy between reality, as it should be, and the reality in which a person finds himself (“Single measurement”), - concentration on small everyday concerns to distract from the worst (“Rain”), -inability to commit suicide (“Two Meetings”), -fatalism (“Tombstone”, “Green Prosecutor”).

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The motif of doom is emphasized by allusions to the plot of the journey to afterworld, the analogue of which is the camp. Images of Kolyma nature play a large role in revealing the motives of doom and loneliness. Nature in “Kolyma Tales” can be hostile, “alien” to man (“Carpenters”) or “understanding,” emphasizing his spiritual communication with the world (“Kant”).

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The sign of world culture - the Word - in “Kolyma Tales” is a symbol of revival (“Sentence”, “Athens Nights”, etc.). In Shalamov’s parables (“Trail”, “Across the Snow”), allegorically, creative path artist. The main idea in them is that a creative gift is a great responsibility, because every artist must pave his own “path” in creativity.

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) The image of the taiga tree has a positive connotation, acquiring the features of the World Tree. In mythology, the image of the World Tree is simultaneously associated with life and death, while the concept of death has a positive connotation, since it includes the idea of ​​rebirth. In Shalamov, the archetypal meanings of the World Tree are reflected in the images of Larch and Elfin Tree. In Shalamov’s story “Graphite,” Larch becomes a symbol of sacrifice - “Virgin Mary of Kolyma,” “Virgin Mary of Kolyma,” whose “wounded” body “exudes” juice.

ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) Taiga trees are associated with the motif of resurrection, rebirth, and preservation of the human in man. In this regard, they are also the embodiment of the mythology of Mother Earth as a symbol of fertility and rebirth. In the story “The Resurrection of the Larch,” where a broken, “dead” tree branch, which has made a long journey from Kolyma to Moscow, suddenly comes to life not due to the fact that it was warm and was placed in water, especially since the water in Moscow is “evil” , chlorinated”, “dead”, but because in the branch “other, secret forces have been awakened”. She is resurrected, obeying human “strength and faith”: placed in a jar of water on the anniversary of the death of the hostess’s husband, she resurrects “the memory of the dead.”

THE ORIGINALITY OF SHALAMOV'S WORLDVIEW (continued) In this story, Shalamov uses a mythological plot about a dying and resurrecting god-man, which is his poet. The writer is convinced that there is only “one kind of immortality - art,” which is why the deceased poet appears in his story, the memory of whom is preserved by his wife. There is a echo here with well-known mythological stories, in which the main idea of ​​the Tree of Life is connected with vitality and immortality.

I make way for the flowers... I make way for the flowers that follow me on my heels, overtake me in any land, in hell or in heaven. Let flowers protect me From the vicissitudes of every day. Like a thin vegetation cover, Consisting of mosses and flowers, Like a thin vegetation cover, I am ready to take responsibility for the earth. And a shield decorated with flowers is more reliable to me than any protection in the bright kingdom of plants, where I am also someone’s squad and family. In the fields near the flowers of the field I left my verse.

The plot of V. Shalamov’s stories is a painful description of the prison and camp life of prisoners of the Soviet Gulag, their similar tragic destinies, in which chance, merciless or merciful, an assistant or a murderer, the tyranny of bosses and thieves rule. Hunger and its convulsive saturation, exhaustion, painful dying, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the focus of the writer’s attention.

Funeral word

The author remembers his camp comrades by name. Evoking the mournful martyrology, he tells who died and how, who suffered and how, who hoped for what, who and how behaved in this Auschwitz without ovens, as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, few managed to survive and remain morally unbroken.

Life of engineer Kipreev

Having not betrayed or sold out to anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for actively defending his existence: a person can only consider himself human and survive if at any moment he is ready to commit suicide, ready to die. However, later he realizes that he only built himself a comfortable shelter, because it is unknown what you will be like at the decisive moment, whether you simply have enough physical strength, and not just mental ones. Engineer-physicist Kipreev, arrested in 1938, not only withstood a beating during interrogation, but even rushed at the investigator, after which he was put in a punishment cell. However, they still force him to sign false testimony, threatening him with the arrest of his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continued to prove to himself and others that he was a man and not a slave, like all prisoners. Thanks to his talent (he invented a way to restore burnt out light bulbs, repaired an X-ray machine), he manages to avoid the most hard work, however, not always. He miraculously survives, but the moral shock remains in him forever.

To the show

Camp molestation, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and occurred in the most different forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is lost to the nines and asks you to play for “representation”, that is, in debt. At some point, excited by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, who happened to be among the spectators of their game, to give him a woolen sweater. He refuses, and then one of the thieves “finishes” him, but the sweater still goes to the thieves.

At night

Two prisoners sneak to the grave where the body of their deceased comrade was buried in the morning, and remove the dead man’s underwear to sell or exchange for bread or tobacco the next day. The initial disgust at taking off their clothes gives way to the pleasant thought that tomorrow they might be able to eat a little more and even smoke.

Single metering

Camp labor, which Shalamov clearly defines as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. The poor prisoner is not able to give the percentage, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand a sixteen-hour working day. He drives, picks, pours, carries again and picks again, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures what Dugaev has done with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems very high to Dugaev, his calves ache, his arms, shoulders, head hurt unbearably, he even lost the feeling of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. And a day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the whirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev realizes why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he only regrets that he suffered the last day in vain.

Rain

Sherry Brandy

A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He takes a long time to die. Sometimes some thought comes - for example, that the bread that he put under his head was stolen from him, and it is so scary that he is ready to swear, fight, search... But he no longer has the strength for this, and the thought of bread also weakens. When the daily ration is placed in his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his might, sucks it, tries to tear it and gnaw it with his scurvy, loose teeth. When he dies, he is not written off for another two days, and inventive neighbors manage to distribute bread for the dead man as if for a living one: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself in general labor and feels that he is gradually giving up. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by his guards, and they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed and the rib has healed, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for examination. He has a chance to be activated, that is, released due to illness. Remembering the mine, the pinching cold, the empty bowl of soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be caught in deception and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a former prisoner, was not a mistake. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing malingerers. This pleases his pride: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite a year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a malingerer, and anticipates the theatrical effect of the new revelation. First, the doctor gives him Rausch anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov’s body can be straightened, and a week later the so-called procedure shock therapy, the effect of which is similar to an attack of violent madness or an epileptic fit. After this, the prisoner himself asks to be released.

Typhoid quarantine

Prisoner Andreev, having fallen ill with typhus, is quarantined. Compared to general work in the mines, the position of the patient gives a chance to survive, which the hero almost no longer hoped for. And then he decides, by hook or by crook, to stay here as long as possible, in the transit train, and then, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where there is hunger, beatings and death. At the roll call before the next sending to work of those who are considered recovered, Andreev does not respond, and thus he manages to hide for quite a long time. The transit is gradually emptying, and Andreev’s turn finally reaches. But now it seems to him that he has won his battle for life, that now the taiga is saturated and if there are any dispatches, it will be only for short-term, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners, who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms, passes the line separating short-term missions from distant ones, he realizes with an internal shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.

Aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “gone” prisoners is quite equivalent to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Prisoner Ekaterina Glovatskaya is admitted to the hospital. A beauty, she immediately attracted the attention of the doctor on duty Zaitsev, and although he knows that she is on close terms with his acquaintance, prisoner Podshivalov, the head of an amateur art group (“serf theater,” as the head of the hospital jokes), nothing prevents him in turn try your luck. He begins, as usual, with a medical examination of Glowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest quickly gives way to purely medical concern. He finds that Glowacka has an aortic aneurysm, a disease in which any careless movement can cause death. The authorities, who have made it an unwritten rule to separate lovers, have already once sent Glovatskaya to a penal women's mine. And now, after the doctor’s report about the prisoner’s dangerous illness, the head of the hospital is sure that this is nothing more than the machinations of the same Podshivalov, trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but as soon as she is loaded into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

The last battle of Major Pugachev

Among the heroes of Shalamov’s prose there are those who not only strive to survive at any cost, but are also able to intervene in the course of circumstances, stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941–1945. Prisoners who had fought and gone through the war began to arrive in the northeastern camps. German captivity. These are people of a different temperament, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and intelligence officers..." But most importantly, they had an instinct for freedom, which the war awakened in them. They shed their blood, sacrificed their lives, saw death face to face. They were not corrupted by camp slavery and were not yet exhausted to the point of losing strength and will. Their “fault” was that they were surrounded or captured. And Major Pugachev, one of these not yet broken people, is clear: “they were brought to their death - to replace these living dead” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers equally determined and strong prisoners to match himself, ready to either die or become free. Their group included pilots, a reconnaissance officer, a paramedic, and a tankman. They realized that they were innocently doomed to death and that they had nothing to lose. They've been preparing their escape all winter. Pugachev realized that only those who pass through the winter can survive the winter and then escape. general work. And the participants in the conspiracy, one after another, are promoted to servants: someone becomes a cook, someone a cult leader, someone who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But then spring comes, and with it the planned day.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The duty officer lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who has come, as usual, to get the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the guard on duty finds himself strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens to the other duty officer who returned a little later. Then everything goes according to Pugachev’s plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the duty officer, take possession of the weapon. Holding the suddenly awakened soldiers at gunpoint, they change into military uniform and stock up on provisions. Having left the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, drop off the driver and continue the journey in the car until the gas runs out. After that they go into the taiga. At night - the first night of freedom after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, remembers his escape from a German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, being accused of espionage and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He also remembers the visits of General Vlasov’s emissaries to the German camp, recruiting Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet regime, all of them who were captured were traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He looks lovingly at his sleeping comrades who believed in him and stretched out their hands to freedom; he knows that they are “the best, the most worthy of all.” And a little later a battle breaks out, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in the bear’s den, that they will find him anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

Retold

St. Petersburg Institute of Management and Law

psychology faculty

TEST

by discipline:

“Psychologism is thin. literature"

“Problematics and stylistics of “Kolyma Tales”

V. Shalamova"

Completed:

3rd year student

correspondence courses

Nikulin V.I.

Saint Petersburg

1. Biographical information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Artistic features of “Kolyma Tales”. .5
3. Problems of the work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
4. Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. Bibliography. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

Biographical information.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born on June 18 (June 5, old style) in 1907 in the northern provincial city of Vologda, equidistant from the then capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which, of course, left an imprint on his life, morals, social and cultural life. Possessing a strong receptivity since childhood, he could not help but feel the various currents in the living atmosphere of the city, “with a special moral and cultural climate,” especially since the Shalamov family was actually at the very center of spiritual life.
The writer's father, Tikhon Nikolaevich, a hereditary priest, was a prominent person in the city, because he not only served in the church, but was also involved in active social activities, he maintained contacts with exiled revolutionaries, sharply opposed the Black Hundreds, and fought to introduce knowledge and culture to the people. Having served in the Aleutian Islands for almost 11 years as an Orthodox missionary, he was a European-educated man who held fairly free and independent views, which, naturally, aroused more than just sympathy for him. From the height of his difficult experience, Varlam Shalamov rather skeptically assessed his father’s Christian and educational activities, which he witnessed during his Vologda youth. He wrote in “Fourth Vologda”: “Father guessed nothing in the future... He looked at himself as a man who came not only to serve God, but also to fight for a better future for Russia... Everyone took revenge on his father - and for everything. For literacy, for intelligence. All the historical passions of the Russian people poured through the threshold of our house.” The last sentence can serve as an epigraph to Shalamov’s life. “In 1915, a German prisoner of war stabbed my second brother in the stomach on the boulevard, and my brother almost died - his life was in danger for several months - there was no penicillin then. The then famous Vologda surgeon Mokrovsky saved his life. Alas, this wound was only a warning. Three or four years later, the brother was killed. Both of my older brothers were in the war. The second brother was a Red Army soldier in the chemical company of the VI Army and died on the Northern Front in 1920. My father became blind after the death of his beloved son and lived for thirteen years blind.” In 1926, V. Shalamov entered Moscow University at the Faculty of Soviet Law. On February 19, 1929, he was arrested for distributing the “Will of V.I. Lenin" "...I consider this day and hour the beginning of my public life... After being fascinated by the history of the Russian liberation movement, after the boiling Moscow University of 1926, boiling Moscow - I had to experience my true spiritual qualities.” V.T. Shalamov was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in the camps and sent to the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, after serving his sentence, he returned to Moscow, was engaged in literary creativity, and also wrote for magazines. On January 12, 1937, Varlam Shalamov, “as a former “oppositionist,” was again arrested and sentenced for “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities” to five years of imprisonment in camps with heavy physical labor. In 1943, a new sentence - 10 years for anti-Soviet agitation: he called I. Bunin, who was in exile, “a great Russian classic.” V. Shalamov’s acquaintance with the camp doctors saved him from death. Thanks to their help, he completed paramedic courses and worked in the central hospital for prisoners until his release from the camp. He returned to Moscow in 1953, but, not receiving registration, was forced to work at one of the peat enterprises in the Kalinin region. Rehabilitated V.T. Shalamov was there in 1954. The writer’s further lonely life was spent in persistent literary work. However, during the life of V.T. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” were not published. A very small part of the poems was published, and even then often in a distorted form...
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov died on January 17, 1982, having lost his hearing and sight, completely defenseless in the Literary Fund House for the Invalids, having completely drunk the cup of non-recognition during his lifetime.
“Kolyma Tales” is the main work of the writer V.T. Shalamov.
He devoted 20 years to their creation.

Artistic features of “Kolyma Tales”

The question of the artistic affiliation of camp literature deserves a separate study, however, the commonality of the theme and personal experience authors does not imply genre homogeneity. Camp literature should be considered not as a single phenomenon, but as a combination of works that are very different in mentality, genre, and artistic features, and - oddly enough - by topic... It must be taken into account that the authors of camp literature could not help but foresee that the majority of readers would perceive their books as literature of evidence, a source of knowledge. And thus, the nature of reading becomes one of the artistic properties of the work.

Literary critics never classified Shalamov as a documentarian, but for most of them the theme, the plan of content of “Kolyma Tales”, as a rule, overshadowed the plan of expression, and they most often turned to Shalamov’s artistic style only to record its differences (mainly intonation ) from the style of other works of camp literature. "Kolyma Stories" consists of six cycles of stories; In addition, Shalamov wrote a large series of essays dedicated to the criminal world. In one of the author’s prefaces, Shalamov wrote: “The camp is a negative experience for a person from the first to the last hour; a person should not know, should not even hear about it.”1 And further, in full accordance with the above declaration, Shalamov describes the camp with literary skill, which in these circumstances is a property, as it were, not of the author, but of the text.
“It rained for three days without stopping. On the rocky soil it is impossible to tell whether it has been raining for an hour or a month. Cold, fine rain... Gray stone shore, gray mountains, gray rain, people in gray torn clothes - everything was very soft, very agreeable. with a friend. Everything was some kind of single color harmony..."2
“We saw a small light gray moon in the black sky, surrounded by a rainbow halo, which lit up in severe frosts.”3
The chronotope of "Kolyma Tales" is a chronotope other world: endless colorless plain bordered by mountains, incessant rain (or snow), cold, wind, endless day. Moreover, this chronotope is secondary, literary - just remember the Hades of the Odyssey or the Hell of the Divine Comedy: “I am in the third circle, where the rain flows...”4. Snow rarely melts in Kolyma; in winter it cakes and freezes, smoothing out all the unevenness of the relief. Winter in Kolyma lasts most of the year. It sometimes rains for months. And the working day of prisoners is sixteen hours. The hidden quote turns into the utmost authenticity. Shalamov is accurate. Therefore, the explanation for all the features and seeming incongruities of his artistic style, apparently, should be sought in the features and incongruities of the material. That is, camps.
The oddities of Shalamov’s style are not so much that they are striking, but rather appear as you read. Varlam Shalamov is a poet, journalist, author of a work on sound harmony, however, the reader of “Kolyma Tales” may get the impression that the author does not fully speak Russian:
“Christ did not go to the camp when it was open around the clock.”5
“But they didn’t let anyone go beyond the wire without an escort.”6
"... and in any case, they did not refuse a glass of alcohol, even if it was offered by a provocateur."7.
At the level of vocabulary, the author's text is the speech of an educated person. The failure occurs at the grammatical level. Stumbling, awkward, labored speech organizes an equally awkward, uneven narrative. The rapidly unfolding plot suddenly “freezes,” displaced by a long, detailed description of some small detail of camp life, and then the fate of the character is decided by a completely unexpected circumstance, hitherto not mentioned in the story. The story “To the Show” begins like this: “They played cards at the horse guard Naumov.”8 Horse guard Narumov from “The Queen of Spades” (the presence of a paraphrase was noted by many researchers) lost the letter “r”, but remained with horses and a guards rank - in the camp the horse guard is representative of the highest aristocracy. The first phrase seems to outline a circle of associations. A detailed story about the card traditions of criminals, a restrained and tense description of the game itself finally convinces the reader that he is watching a card fight that is fatal for the participants. All his attention is focused on the game. But at the moment of highest tension, when, according to all the laws of a suburban ballad, two knives should flash in the air, the rapid flow of the plot unfolds in unexpected side and instead of one of the players, a complete stranger, and until that moment not involved in the plot in any way, “fryer” Garkunov, one of the spectators, dies. And in the story “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy,” the hero’s long journey to the seemingly inevitable death, according to the camp laws, ends with the death of the careerist investigator and the termination of the “conspiracy case” that was deadly for the hero. The mainspring of the plot is obvious and hidden cause-and-effect relationships. According to Bettelheim, one of the most powerful means of transforming a person from an individual into a model prisoner deprived of individuality is the inability to influence his future. The unpredictability of the result of any step, the inability to count even a day in advance forced us to live in the present, and even better - by momentary physical need - giving rise to a feeling of disorientation and total helplessness. In German concentration camps this drug was used quite deliberately. In the Soviet camps, a similar situation was created, it seems to us, rather as a result of the combination of an atmosphere of terror with traditional imperial bureaucracy and the widespread theft and bribery of any camp authorities. Within the bounds of inevitable death, anything could happen to a person in the camp. Shalamov narrates the story in a dry, epic, maximally objectified manner. This intonation does not change, no matter what he describes. Shalamov does not give any assessments of the behavior of his heroes and the author’s attitude can only be guessed by subtle signs, and more often it cannot be guessed at all. It seems that sometimes Shalamov’s dispassion flows into black, guignol irony. The reader may have the feeling that the detachment of the author's intonation is created partly due to the stinginess and discoloration of the graphic series of "Kolyma Tales". Shalamov’s speech seems as faded and lifeless as the Kolyma landscapes he describes. The series of sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical structure carry the maximum semantic load. Shalamov’s images, as a rule, are polysemantic and multifunctional. So, for example, the first phrase of the story “To the Show” sets the intonation, lays a false trail - and at the same time gives the story volume, introduces the concept of historical time into its frame of reference, for the “minor night incident” in the horse barracks appears to the reader as a reflection, a projection of Pushkin’s tragedy. Shalamov uses the classic plot as a probe - by the degree and nature of the damage, the reader can judge the properties of the camp universe. "Kolyma Stories" is written in a free and vivid language, the pace of the narrative is very high - and imperceptible, because it is the same everywhere. The density of meaning per unit of text is such that, trying to cope with it, the reader’s consciousness is practically unable to be distracted by the peculiarities of the style itself; at some point, the author’s artistic style ceases to be a surprise and becomes a given. Reading Shalamov requires a lot of emotional and mental tension - and this tension becomes, as it were, a characteristic of the text. In a sense, the initial feeling of the stinginess and monotony of the visual plan of “Kolyma Tales” is correct - Shalamov saves on the space of the text due to the extreme concentration of meaning.

Problems of the work.

“Kolyma Stories” is a collection of stories included in the Kolyma epic by Varlam Shalamov. The author himself went through this “iciest” hell of Stalin’s camps, so each of his stories is absolutely reliable.
“Kolyma Stories” reflects the problem of confrontation between the individual and the state machine, the tragedy of man in a totalitarian state. Moreover, the last stage of this conflict is shown - a person in a camp. And not just in a camp, but in the most terrible of camps, erected by the most inhumane of systems. This is the maximum suppression of the human personality by the state. In the story “Dry Rations” Shalamov writes: “nothing bothered us anymore.” It was easy for us to live at the mercy of someone else’s will. We didn’t even care about saving our lives, and if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the routine of the camp day... We had long ago become fatalists, we did not count on our life beyond the day ahead... Any interference in fate, the will of the gods was indecent.” You can’t say it more precisely than the author, and the worst thing is that the will of the state completely suppresses and dissolves the will of man. She deprives him of all human feelings, erases the line between life and death. Gradually killing a person physically, they kill his soul. Hunger and cold do things to people that make them scary. "All human feelings- love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - came from us with the meat that we lost during our fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was distinguishable - the most durable human feeling.” In order to eat and keep warm, people are ready to do anything, and if they do not commit betrayal, then it is subconsciously, mechanically, since the very concept of betrayal, like many other things, has been erased, gone, disappeared. “We have learned humility, we have forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, selfishness, self-love, and jealousy and old age seemed to us Martian concepts and, moreover, trifles... We understood that death was no worse than life.” You just need to imagine a life that seems no worse than death. Everything human disappears in a person. The state will suppresses everything, only the thirst for life remains, great survival: “Hungry and angry, I knew that nothing in the world would make me commit suicide... and I realized the most important thing is that I became a man not because he is God’s creation , but because he was physically stronger, more resilient than all animals, and later because he forced the spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle.” That's it, contrary to all theories about the origin of man.

Conclusion

If in the story “Sherry Brandy” Shalamov writes about the poet’s life, about its meaning, then in the first story, which is called “In the Snow,” Shalamov talks about the purpose and role of writers, comparing it with how they trample a road through virgin snow. Writers are the ones who trample it. There is the first one who has the hardest time of all, but if you follow only his footsteps, you will only get a narrow path. Others follow him and trample the wide road along which readers travel. “And each of them, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s footsteps. And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.”
And Shalamov does not follow the beaten path, he steps on “virgin snow.” “The literary and human feat of Shalamov is that he not only endured 17 years of camps, kept his soul alive, but also found the strength to return in thought and feeling to the terrible years, to carve from the most durable material - Words - truly a Memorial in memory those who died, for the edification of posterity.”

Bibliography:

1. Materials from the site shalamov.ru

2. Mikhailik E. In the context of literature and history (article)

3. Shalamov collection / Donin S., [Compiled by V.V. Esipov]. - Vologda: Grifon, 1997

Subject tragic fate person in totalitarian state in “Kolyma Stories” by V. Shalamov

I've been living in a cave for twenty years,

Burning with the only dream that

breaking free and moving

shoulders like Samson, I will collapse

stone vaults For many years

this dream.

V. Shalamov

The Stalin years are one of the tragic periods in the history of Russia. Numerous repressions, denunciations, executions, a heavy, oppressive atmosphere of lack of freedom - these are just some of the signs of life in a totalitarian state. The terrible, cruel machine of authoritarianism ruined the destinies of millions of people, their relatives and friends.

V. Shalamov is a witness and participant in the terrible events that the totalitarian country experienced. He went through both exile and Stalin's camps. Dissent was brutally persecuted by the authorities, and the writer had to pay too high a price for his desire to tell the truth. Varlam Tikhonovich summarized the experience gained from the camps in the collection “Kolyma Stories.” “Kolyma Tales” is a monument to those whose lives were ruined for the sake of the cult of personality.

Showing in his stories images of those convicted under the fifty-eighth, “political” article and images of criminals also serving sentences in camps, Shalamov reveals many moral problems. Finding themselves in a critical life situation, people showed their true selves. Among the prisoners there were traitors, cowards, scoundrels, those who were “broken” by the new circumstances of life, and those who managed to retain humanity in themselves under inhuman conditions. There were fewer of the latter.

The most terrible enemies, “enemies of the people,” for the authorities were political prisoners. They were the ones who were in the camp under the most severe conditions. Criminals - thieves, murderers, robbers, whom the narrator ironically calls “friends of the people”, paradoxically, aroused much more sympathy among the camp authorities. They had various concessions and did not have to go to work. They got away with a lot.

In the story “To the Show,” Shalamov shows a card game in which the winnings are the prisoners’ personal belongings. The author draws images of the criminals Naumov and Sevochka, for whom human life is worthless and who kill engineer Garkunov for a woolen sweater. The author's calm intonation with which he completes his story suggests that such scenes for the camp are a common, everyday occurrence.

The story “At Night” shows how people blurred the lines between good and bad, how the main goal became to survive, no matter what the cost. Glebov and Bagretsov take off the dead man’s clothes at night with the intention of getting bread and tobacco for themselves instead. In another story, the condemned Denisov takes pleasure in pulling off the footcloths from his dying but still living comrade.

The life of the prisoners was unbearable; it was especially difficult for them in the severe frosts. The heroes of the story “The Carpenters” Grigoriev and Potashnikov, intelligent people, in order to save their own lives, in order to spend at least one day in the warmth, resort to deception. They go to work as carpenters, not knowing how to do it, which saves them from the severe frost, gets a piece of bread and the right to warm themselves by the stove.

The hero of the story “Single Measurement,” a recent university student, exhausted by hunger, receives a single measurement. He is unable to complete this task completely, and his punishment for this is execution. The heroes of the story “Tombstone Sermon” were also severely punished. Weakened by hunger, they were forced to do backbreaking labor. For Brigadier Dyukov’s request to improve food, the entire brigade was shot along with him.

The destructive influence of the totalitarian system on the human personality is very clearly demonstrated in the story “The Parcel”. Very rarely do political prisoners receive parcels. This is a great joy for each of them. But hunger and cold kill the humanity in a person. Prisoners are robbing each other! “From hunger our envy was dull and powerless,” says the story “Condensed Milk.”

The author also shows the brutality of the guards, who, having no sympathy for their neighbors, destroy miserable pieces of prisoners, break their bowlers, and beat the convicted Efremov to death for stealing firewood.

The story “Rain” shows that the work of the “enemies of the people” takes place in unbearable conditions: waist-deep in the ground and under incessant rain. For the slightest mistake, each of them will die. It will be a great joy if someone injures himself, and then, perhaps, he will be able to avoid hellish work.

The prisoners live in inhumane conditions: “In a barracks filled with people, it was so cramped that one could sleep standing up... The space under the bunks was filled to capacity with people, you had to wait to sit down, squat down, then lean somewhere against a bunk, against a post, against someone else’s body - and fall asleep...”

Crippled souls, crippled destinies... “Everything inside was burned out, devastated, we didn’t care,” sounds in the story “Condensed Milk.” In this story, the image of the “informer” Shestakov arises, who, hoping to attract the narrator with a bank of condensed milk, hopes to persuade him to escape, and then report this and receive a “reward.” Despite extreme physical and moral exhaustion, the narrator finds the strength to see through Shestakov’s plan and deceive him. Not everyone, unfortunately, turned out to be so quick-witted. “They fled a week later, two were killed near the Black Keys, three were tried a month later.”

In the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” the author shows people whose spirit was not broken by any fascist concentration camps, nor Stalin's. “These were people with different skills, habits acquired during the war - with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and intelligence officers,” the writer says about them. They make a daring and brave attempt to escape from the camp. The heroes understand that their salvation is impossible. But for a breath of freedom they agree to give their lives.

“The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” clearly shows how the Motherland treated people who fought for it and whose only fault was that, by the will of fate, they ended up in German captivity.

Varlam Shalamov is a chronicler of the Kolyma camps. In 1962, he wrote to A.I. Solzhenitsyn: “Remember the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from first to last day for anyone. The person - neither the boss nor the prisoner - does not need to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. For my part, I decided long ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this truth.”

Shalamov was true to his words. “Kolyma Tales” became the pinnacle of his work.

“The so-called camp theme in literature is a very large topic, which can accommodate a hundred writers like Solzhenitsyn, five writers like Leo Tolstoy. And no one will feel cramped.”

Varlam Shalamov

“The camp theme” both in historical science and in fiction- immense. It rises sharply again in the 20th century. Many writers, such as Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Aleshkovsky, Ginzbur, Dombrovsky, Vladimov, testified to the horrors of camps, prisons, and isolation wards. They all looked at what was happening through the eyes of people deprived of freedom, choice, who knew how the state itself destroys a person through repression, destruction, and violence. And only those who have gone through all this can fully understand and appreciate any work about political terror and concentration camps. We can only feel the truth with our hearts, somehow experience it in our own way.

Varlam Shalamov in his “Kolyma Stories”, when describing concentration camps and prisons, achieves the effect of life-like persuasiveness and psychological authenticity; the texts are filled with signs of uninvented reality. His stories are closely related to the writer’s exile in Kolyma. This also proves high degree detail. The author pays attention to terrible details that cannot be understood without heartache- cold and hunger, sometimes depriving a person of reason, purulent ulcers on the legs, cruel lawlessness of criminals.

In Shalamov’s camp, the heroes have already crossed the line between life and death. People seem to show some signs of life, but they are essentially already dead, because they are deprived of any moral principles, memory, and will. In that vicious circle, forever stopped time, where hunger, cold, bullying reign, a person loses his own past, forgets his wife’s name, loses contact with others. His soul no longer distinguishes between truth and lies. Even all human need for simple communication disappears. “I wouldn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies,” Shalamov points out in the story “Sentence.” A person ceases to be a person. He no longer lives, and does not even exist. It becomes substance, inanimate matter.

“The hungry were told that this was lend-lease butter, and there was less than half a barrel left when a sentry was posted and the authorities fired shots at the crowd of goons from the barrel of grease. The lucky ones swallowed this lend-lease butter - not believing that it was just solid oil - after all, healthy American bread was also tasteless, also had this strange iron taste. And everyone who managed to touch the grease spent several hours licking their fingers and swallowing the smallest pieces of this overseas happiness, which tasted like young stone. After all, a stone will also be born not as a stone, but as a soft, oil-like creature. A being, not a substance. Stone becomes a substance in old age.”

The relationships between people and the meaning of life are clearly reflected in the story “The Carpenters.” The task of the builders is to survive “today” in the fifty-degree frost, and there was no point in making plans “further” than two days. People were indifferent to each other. "Frost" has reached human soul, she was frozen, shrank and, perhaps, would remain cold forever. In the same work, Shalamov points to a dully closed space: “thick fog that no person could be seen two steps away”, “few directions”: hospital, shift, canteen...

Shalamov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, emphasizes the difference between a prison and a camp. The picture of the world is upside down: a person dreams of leaving the camp not to freedom, but to prison. In the story “Funeral Word” there is a clarification: “Prison is freedom. This is the only place where people, without fear, said everything they thought. Where they rest their souls."

In Shalamov’s stories, it’s not just Kolyma camps fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which people live free people, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where everyone living in it is doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.

“I am a goner, a disabled person in a hospital fate, saved, even snatched by doctors from the clutches of death. But I do not see any benefit in my immortality, either for myself or for the state. Our concepts have changed scale, crossed the boundaries of good and evil. Salvation may be good, or maybe not: I have not decided this question for myself even now.”

And later he decides this question for himself:

“The main result of life: life is not good. My skin was completely renewed, but my soul was not renewed...”