Varlam Shalamov

Russian · 1907 to 1982

Born Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov on 18 June 1907 in Vologda, in the Russian north, he was baptised Varlaam after the local saint and was the son of Tikhon Shalamov, a Russian Orthodox priest who had spent twelve years as a missionary in Alaska, and Nadezhda Shalamova, a teacher who loved poetry. He said he lost his faith at thirteen, graduated from the gymnasium in 1923, and as the son of a priest was barred from higher education; he worked two years in a Moscow tannery before winning a place at the Moscow State University law faculty in 1926. He was first arrested on 19 February 1929 for distributing Lenin's Testament and marching against Stalin, and served three years in the Vishera camp. Re-arrested in 1937 at the start of the Great Purge, he was sent to Kolyma, the Arctic gold and coal region known as the land of white death, where a second ten-year term was added in 1943 for the offence of calling Ivan Bunin a great Russian writer. Near death in 1946, he was saved by an inmate doctor who got him appointed a camp medical assistant. Released in 1951, rehabilitated in 1956, he wrote for the next quarter-century the six cycles of Kolyma Tales, terse stories in which the camp world is reduced to frostbite, theft, hunger, and the small mercies of strangers. They circulated in samizdat and Western translation from 1966; the full Russian text appeared in his country only in 1987, during glasnost. Late in life he fell out with Solzhenitsyn and grew increasingly isolated. He died of pneumonia on 17 January 1982 after being transferred to a psychiatric facility outside Moscow, aged seventy-four; forty people attended his Orthodox funeral, not counting plainclothes policemen.