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Ideological and artistic features of "Kolyma stories" V. T

St. Petersburg Institute of Management and Law

psychology faculty

TEST

by discipline:

"Psychology is thin. literature"

"Problematics and style of "Kolyma Tales"

V.Shalamov"

Completed:

3rd year student

distance learning

Nikulin V.I.

Saint Petersburg

Biographical information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Artistic features of "Kolyma stories". .5
The problem of the work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
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 - Moscow and St. Petersburg, which, of course, left an imprint on his way of life, morals, social and cultural life. Possessing a strong receptivity since childhood, he could not help but feel the various flows in the lively atmosphere of the city, "with a special moral and cultural climate", especially since the Shalamov family was actually in the very center of spiritual life.
The writer's father, Tikhon Nikolaevich, a hereditary priest, was a prominent person in the city, since he not only served in the church, but also was engaged in active social activities, he maintained ties with the exiled revolutionaries, sharply opposed the Black Hundreds, fought for introducing the people to knowledge and culture. Having served for almost 11 years in the Aleutian Islands as an Orthodox missionary, he was a European-educated man, held fairly free and independent views, which naturally aroused not only sympathy for him. From the height of his hard experience, Varlam Shalamov was rather skeptical about his father's Christian and educational activities, which he witnessed during his Vologda youth. He wrote in The Fourth Vologda: “Father did not guess anything in the future ... He looked at himself as a person who came not only to serve God, but 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 whipped 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, my brother was killed. Both of my older brothers were in the war. The second brother was a Red Army chemical company of the VI Army and died on the Northern Front in the twentieth year. My father became blind after the death of his beloved son and lived thirteen years blind. In 1926, V. Shalamov entered the 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 social life ... After being carried away by the history of the Russian liberation movement, after the boiling Moscow University of 1926, boiling Moscow - I had to test my true spiritual qualities." V.T. Shalamov was sentenced to three years in camps and sent to the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, after serving his term, he returned to Moscow, was engaged in literary work, and also wrote for magazines. On January 12, 1937, Varlam Shalamov "as a former "oppositionist" was again arrested and convicted for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" for five years in camps with heavy physical labor. In 1943, a new term - 10 years for anti-Soviet agitation: he called I. Bunin, who was in exile, "a great Russian classic." V. Shalamov was saved from death by his acquaintance with the camp doctors. Thanks to their help, he completed medical assistant courses and worked in the central hospital for prisoners until his release from the camp. He returned to Moscow in 1953, but, having not received a residence permit, he was forced to work at one of the peat enterprises in the Kalinin region. Rehabilitated V.T. Shalamov was in 1954. The further lonely life of the writer proceeded in hard literary work. However, during the life of V.T. Shalamov's Kolyma Tales were not printed. Of the poems, a very small part of them 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 House for the Invalids of the Litfond, having drunk the cup of non-recognition to the end during his lifetime.
"Kolyma stories" - the main work of the writer V.T. Shalamova.
He devoted 20 years to their creation.

Artistic features of "Kolyma stories"

The question of the artistic affiliation of camp literature deserves a separate study, however, the commonality of the theme and the personal experience of the authors does not imply genre homogeneity. Camp literature should not be viewed as a single phenomenon, but as an amalgamation of works that are very different in mentality, genre, artistic features, and, oddly enough, in subject matter. could not foresee that most readers would perceive their books as literature of evidence, a source of knowledge. And thus, the nature of the reading becomes one of the artistic properties of the work.

Literary critics never ranked Shalamov among the documentarians, but for most of them the subject matter, the plan of the content of Kolyma Tales, as a rule, overshadowed the plan of expression, and they most often turned to Shalamov's artistic style, only to fix its differences (mainly intonational ) from the style of other works of camp literature. "Kolyma Tales" consists of six cycles of stories; in addition, Shalamov wrote a large series of essays on 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 then, in full accordance with the above declaration, Shalamov describes the camp with literary skill, which in the given circumstances is a property, as it were, not of the author, but of the text.
"It rained for the third day without ceasing. On stony soil it is impossible to know whether it is raining for an hour or a month. Cold light rain ... Gray stone shore, gray mountains, gray rain, people in gray torn clothes - everything was very soft, very agreeable friend with a friend. Everything was some kind of a single color harmony ... "2
"We saw in the black sky a small light gray moon surrounded by a rainbow halo, lit up in severe frosts."3
The chronotope of the "Kolyma Tales" is the chronotope of the other world: an endless colorless plain bordered by mountains, incessant rain (or snow), cold, wind, endless day. Moreover, this chronotope is secondary, literary - suffice it to recall 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 freezes and freezes, smoothing out all the uneven terrain. Winter in Kolyma lasts most of the year. Rain, sometimes, pours for months. A prisoner's working day is sixteen hours. The hidden quote turns into the ultimate authenticity. Shalamov is accurate. And therefore, the explanation for all the features and apparent inconsistencies of his artistic manner, apparently, should be sought in the features and inconsistencies of the material. That is camps.
The oddities of Shalamov's style are not so much striking, but seem to show through 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:
"Krist did not go to the camp when he worked around the clock."5
“But without an escort, they didn’t let anyone out“ behind the wire. ”6
"... and in any case, they did not refuse a glass of alcohol, even if it was brought 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, hampered speech organizes an equally clumsy, uneven narration. The rapidly unfolding plot suddenly "freezes", superseded by a long detailed description of some trifle 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 "At the show" begins as follows: "They played cards at Naumov's horse-racer." representative of the highest aristocracy. The first phrase, as it were, outlines the circle of associations. A detailed story about the card traditions of criminals, a restrained and intense description of the game itself finally convinces the reader that he is following a fatal - for the participants - card duel. All his attention is focused on the game. But at the moment of the highest tension, when, according to all the laws of a suburban ballad, two knives should sparkle in the air, the rapid course of the plot unfolds in an unexpected direction and instead of one of the players, a completely outsider dies, and until that moment not involved in the plot in any way "fryer" Garkunov - one of spectators. And in the story "The Conspiracy of Lawyers", the hero's long journey to death, seemingly inevitable according to camp laws, ends with the death of a careerist investigator and the termination of the "conspiracy case" that is murderous for the hero. The spring of the plot is the explicit and hidden cause-and-effect relationships. According to Bettelheim, one of the most powerful means of transforming a person from a person into a model prisoner devoid of individuality is the inability to influence his future. The unpredictability of the result of any step, the inability to count even a day ahead forced to live in the present, and even better - a momentary physical need - gave rise to a feeling of disorientation and total helplessness. In German concentration camps, this remedy was used quite consciously. In the Soviet camps, such a situation was created, it seems to us, rather as a result of the combination of an atmosphere of terror with traditional imperial bureaucracy and rampant theft and bribery of any camp authorities. Within the bounds of inevitable death, everything could happen to a person in the camp. Shalamov narrates 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 characters and the author's attitude can only be guessed by subtle signs, and more often it cannot be guessed at all. One gets the impression 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 pictorial series of Kolyma Tales. Shalamov's speech seems as faded and lifeless as the Kolyma landscapes he describes. The sound series, vocabulary, grammatical structure carry a maximum of semantic load. Shalamov's images, as a rule, are polysemantic and multifunctional. So, for example, the first phrase of the story "On the idea" sets the tone, lays a false trail - and at the same time gives the story volume, introduces the concept of historical time into its reference system, because the "minor night incident" in the barracks of the Konogonov 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 Tales" is written in a free and bright language, the pace of narration 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 great spiritual and mental tension - and this tension becomes, as it were, a characteristic of the text. In a sense, the initial feeling of stinginess and monotony of the visual plan of the Kolyma Tales is true - Shalamov saves on text space due to the extreme concentration of meaning.

The problem of the work.

“Kolyma Tales” is a collection of stories included in the Kolyma epic by Varlam Shalamov. The author himself went through this “most icy” hell of the Stalinist camps, so each of his stories is absolutely reliable.
The Kolyma Tales 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 the camp. And not just in the camp, but in the most terrible of the camps, erected by the most inhuman of systems. This is the maximum suppression of the human personality by the state. In the story “Dry rations”, Shalamov writes: “nothing worried us anymore,” it was easy for us to live in the power of someone else’s will. We did not even care about saving our lives, and if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the schedule of the camp day ... We had long ago become fatalists, we did not count on our life further than the day ahead ... Any interference in fate, into the will of the gods was indecent.” You cannot say 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, blurs the line between life and death. By gradually killing a person physically, they also kill his soul. Hunger and cold do things to people that become scary. “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for fame, honesty - came from us with the meat that we lost during our starvation. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones ... only anger was different - the most enduring human feeling. In order to eat and keep warm, people are ready for anything, and if they do not commit betrayal, then this is subconscious, mechanical, 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, pride, and jealousy and old age seemed to us Martian concepts and, moreover, trifles ... We understood that death is no worse than life. One need only imagine a life that seems no worse than death. Everything human disappears in man. The state will suppresses everything, only the thirst for life, great survival remains: “Hungry and angry, I knew that nothing in the world would force me to commit suicide ... and I realized the most important thing that I became a man not because he was God's creation , but because he was physically stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced the spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle. So, contrary to all theories about the origin of man.

Conclusion

If in the story “Sherry Brandy” Shalamov writes about the life of the poet, 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 tread the road through the 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 in his footsteps, you get only a narrow path. Others follow him and tread the wide road that readers travel on. “And each of them, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else's footprint. And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.”
And Shalamov does not follow the trodden path, he steps on the “virgin snow”. “The literary and human feat of Shalamov lies in the fact that he not only endured 17 years of camps, kept his soul alive, but also found the strength in himself to return in thought and feeling to the terrible years, to carve out of the most durable material - Words - truly a Memorial in memory dead, for the edification of posterity.

Bibliography:

1.Materials of the site shalamov.ru

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

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

Among the literary figures discovered by the era of glasnost, the name of Varlam Shalamov, in my opinion, is one of the most tragic names in Russian literature. This writer left to his descendants a legacy of amazing depth of artistry - "Kolyma Tales", a work about life and human destinies in the Stalinist Gulag. Although the word "life" is inappropriate when it comes to the pictures of human existence depicted by Shalamov.

It is often said that "Kolyma Tales" is an attempt by the writer to raise and solve the most important moral issues of the time: the question of the legality of a person's struggle with the state machine, the possibility of actively influencing one's own destiny, and ways to preserve human dignity in inhuman conditions. It seems to me that the task of a writer depicting hell on earth under the name "GULAG" is different.

I think Shalamov's work is a slap in the face to the society that allowed this. "Kolyma Tales" is a spit in the face of the Stalinist regime and everything that personifies this bloody era. What ways of preserving human dignity, which Shalamov allegedly speaks of in Kolyma Tales, can be discussed on this material, if the writer himself calmly states the fact that all human concepts - love, respect, compassion, mutual assistance - seemed to the prisoners "comic concepts ". He is not looking for ways to preserve this very dignity, the prisoners simply did not think about it, did not ask such questions. It remains to be amazed at how inhuman the conditions were in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people found themselves, if every minute of “that” life was filled with thoughts about food, clothes that can be obtained by removing it from the recently deceased.

I think that the issues of managing a person's own destiny and preserving dignity are more applicable to the work of Solzhenitsyn, who also wrote about the Stalinist camps. In the works of Solzhenitsyn, the characters really reflect on moral issues. Alexander Isaevich himself said that his heroes were placed in milder conditions than Shalamov's heroes, and explained this by the different conditions of imprisonment in which they, the eyewitness authors, found themselves.

It is difficult to imagine what emotional tension these stories cost Shalamov. I would like to dwell on the compositional features of the Kolyma Tales. The plots of the stories at first glance are unrelated, however, they are compositionally integral. “Kolyma Tales” consists of 6 books, the first of which is called “Kolyma Tales”, then the books “Left Bank”, “Artist of the Shovel”, “Essays on the Underworld”, “Resurrection of the Larch”, “Glove, or KR -2".

The book "Kolyma stories" includes 33 stories, arranged in a strictly defined order, but not tied to chronology. This construction is aimed at depicting the Stalinist camps in history and development. Thus, Shalamov's work is nothing more than a novel in short stories, despite the fact that the author has repeatedly announced the death of the novel as a literary genre in the 20th century.

The story is told in the third person. The main characters of the stories are different people (Golubev, Andreev, Krist), but all of them are extremely close to the author, since they are directly involved in what is happening. Each of the stories is reminiscent of a hero's confession. If we talk about the skill of Shalamov - the artist, about his manner of presentation, then it should be noted that the language of his prose is simple, extremely accurate. The tone of the story is calm, without strain. Severely, concisely, without any attempts at psychological analysis, even somewhere documented, the writer speaks about what is happening. I think Shalamov achieves a stunning effect on the reader by contrasting the calmness of the author's slow, calm narrative with explosive, terrifying content.

The main image that unites all the stories is the image of the camp as an absolute evil. “Camp is hell” is a constant association that comes to mind while reading Kolyma Tales. This association arises not even because you are constantly faced with the inhuman torments of prisoners, but also because the camp seems to be the kingdom of the dead. So, the story "Tombstone" begins with the words: "Everyone died ..." On each page you meet with death, which here can be named among the main characters. All heroes, if we consider them in connection with the prospect of death in the camp, can be divided into three groups: the first - heroes who have already died, and the writer remembers them; the second, those who are almost certain to die; and the third group - those who may be lucky, but this is not certain. This statement becomes most obvious if we recall that the writer in most cases talks about those whom he met and whom he survived in the camp: a man who was shot for not fulfilling the plan by his plot, his classmate, whom they met 10 years later in the Butyrskaya cell prison, a French communist whom the brigadier killed with one blow of his fist...

But death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person in a camp. More often it becomes a salvation from torment for the one who has died, and an opportunity to gain some benefit if another has died. Here it is worthwhile to turn again to the episode of camp campers digging up a freshly buried corpse from the frozen ground: all that the heroes experience is the joy that the dead’s linen can be exchanged tomorrow for bread and tobacco (“Night”),

The main feeling that pushes the heroes to nightmarish acts is a feeling of constant hunger. This feeling is the strongest of all feelings. Food is what sustains life, so the writer describes in detail the process of eating: the prisoners eat very quickly, without spoons, over the side of the plate, licking its bottom clean with their tongue. In the story "Domino" Shalamov portrays a young man who ate the meat of human corpses from the morgue, cutting down "non-fat" pieces of human flesh.

Shalamov draws the life of prisoners - another circle of hell. Huge barracks with multi-story bunks serve as housing for prisoners, where 500-600 people are accommodated. Prisoners sleep on mattresses stuffed with dry branches. Everywhere there is complete unsanitary conditions and, as a result, diseases.

Shalamova considers the GULAG as an exact copy of the Stalinist totalitarian society model: “... The camp is not the opposition of hell to paradise. and the cast of our life... The camp... is world-like.

In one of his 1966 notebook-diaries, Shalamov explains the task set by him in Kolyma Tales in this way: “I am not writing so that what has been described does not happen again. It doesn’t happen like that... I write so that people know that such stories are being written, and they themselves decide on some worthy deed...”

The plot of V. Shalamov's stories is a painful description of the prison and camp life of the prisoners of the Soviet Gulag, their tragic destinies similar to one another, in which chance, merciless or merciful, helper or murderer, arbitrariness of bosses and thieves dominate. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful dying, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention.

Gravestone

The author recalls by name his comrades in the camps. Calling to mind a 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 never betrayed or sold anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for actively protecting his existence: a person can only consider himself a person and survive if he is ready to commit suicide at any moment, ready to die. However, later he realizes that he only built himself a comfortable shelter, because it is not known what you will be like at a decisive moment, whether you just have enough physical strength, and not just mental. Arrested in 1938, the engineer-physicist Kipreev not only withstood the beating during interrogation, but even rushed at the investigator, after which he was put in a punishment cell. However, they still try to get him to sign false testimony, intimidating 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, as all prisoners are. 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 difficult work, but not always. He miraculously survives, but the moral shock remains in him forever.

For the show

Camp corruption, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and took place in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is played down and asks to play for a "representation", that is, in debt. At some point, irritated by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, who happened to be among the spectators of their game, to give a woolen sweater. He refuses, and then one of the thieves "finishes" him, and 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 take off the linen from the dead man in order to sell it or exchange it for bread or tobacco the next day. The initial squeamishness about the removed clothes is replaced by a pleasant thought that tomorrow they might be able to eat a little more and even smoke.

Single metering

Camp labor, unequivocally defined by Shalamov as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. A goner-prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand the sixteen-hour working day. He drives, turns, pours, again drives and again turns, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures Dugaev's work with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev to be very large, his calves are aching, his arms, shoulders, head are unbearably sore, he even lost his sense of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he regrets only that the last day was 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 dies for a long time. Sometimes some thought comes - for example, that they stole bread from him, which he put under his head, 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 a daily ration is put into his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucks it, tries to tear and gnaw with scurvy loose teeth. When he dies, they don’t write him off for another two days, and inventive neighbors manage to get bread for the dead man as if it were alive during the distribution: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself at common work, feels that he is gradually losing. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by the escorts, 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 grew together, 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 research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness at will. Remembering the mine, aching cold, a bowl of empty soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be convicted of deceit and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, was not a blunder. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing the fakers. This amuses his vanity: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite the year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a simulator and looks forward to the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him roush anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov's body can be straightened, and a week later, the procedure of the so-called shock therapy, the effect of which is similar to an attack of violent madness or an epileptic seizure. After it, the prisoner himself asks for an extract.

Typhoid Quarantine

Prisoner Andreev, 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 transit, and there, 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 dispatch 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 the line finally reaches Andreev as well. But now it seems to him that he has won his battle for life, that now the taiga is full, and if there are shipments, then only for nearby, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms passes the line separating short trips from long ones, he realizes with an internal shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.

aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “goal” prisoners is quite tantamount to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered as such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, is admitted to the hospital. Beauty, she immediately liked the doctor on duty Zaitsev, and although he knows that she is in close relations with his acquaintance, the prisoner Podshivalov, the head of the amateur art circle, (“the 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 Głowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest is quickly replaced by a purely medical concern. He finds an aortic aneurysm in Glovatsky, a disease in which any careless movement can cause death. The authorities, who took it as an unwritten rule to separate lovers, had already once sent Glovatskaya to a penal female 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, who is trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but already when loading into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

Major Pugachev's last fight

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, to stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941-1945. prisoners who fought and passed German captivity began to arrive in the northeastern camps. These are people of a different temper, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and scouts...”. But most importantly, they possessed the instinct of 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 their strength and will. Their “guilt” was that they were surrounded or captured. And it is clear to Major Pugachev, one of these people who have not yet been broken: “they were brought to their death - to change these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers prisoners who are just as determined and strong, to match, ready to either die or become free. In their group - pilots, scout, paramedic, tanker. They realized that they were innocently doomed to death and that they had nothing to lose. All winter they are preparing an escape. Pugachev realized that only those who bypassed the general work could survive the winter and then run away. And the participants in the conspiracy, one by one, advance into the service: someone becomes a cook, someone a cultist who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But spring is coming, and with it the day ahead.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The attendant lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who, as usual, has come for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the duty officer is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with another, who returned a little later on duty. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, take possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Leaving the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, drop off the driver and continue on their way in the car until the gas runs out. After that, they go to the taiga. At night - the first night at liberty after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from the German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, accusation of espionage and sentence - twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of the emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet authorities all of them, who were captured, are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He lovingly looks over the sleeping comrades who believe in him and stretch out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "the best, worthy of all." And a little later, a fight ensues, 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 a bear's lair, that he will be found anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

retold

Readers met with Shalamov the poet at the end of the 50s. And the meeting with Shalamov the prose writer took place only at the end of the 80s. When the dam seemed to break: what Shalamov had been creating for twenty years, from 1954 to 1973, splashed out in a matter of months. Here are memories of the twenties, and the autobiographical story "The Fourth Vologda", and "Essays on the Underworld", and the play "Anna Ivanovna". But the main place in Shalamov's publications was occupied by stories about Kolyma - by the end of 1989, about a hundred stories had been published. Now everyone reads Shalamov - from a student to the prime minister. And at the same time, Shalamov's prose seems to be dissolved in a huge wave of memoirs, notes, documents about the era of Stalinism. We have not yet fully understood that this prose, and above all the Kolyma Tales, is a special phenomenon, that it is fiction.

It is impossible to overestimate the work of I.P. Sirotinskaya, who owns the preparation of the press and the publication of all this huge material. Yu.A. Shreider and L. Zaivaya also contributed to the publication of the literary heritage of V.T. Shalamov.

Of course, approaching the Kolyma Tales as art is scary. It seems blasphemous to approach them with aesthetic standards, to talk about artistic perfection, composition, style. This hundred stories, fitting into one book, is heavier than eleven volumes of the Nuremberg trials. Because the main witness for the prosecution here is the one who left seventeen years of his life in the Kolyma hell. During these seventeen years, he went through such circles that Dante never dreamed of, saw what was inaccessible to the darkest imagination of Bosch, knew such torments that Kafka could not imagine. Shalamov, like every serious poet, has his own "Monument" not in name, but in essence:

I've been crushing stones for many years
Not an angry iambic, but a pick.
I lived the shame of crime
And eternal truth triumph.
Let not the soul in the cherished lyre -
I will run away with the body of decay
In my unheated apartment
On the burning snow.
Where over my immortal body,
That winter carried on her hands.
A blizzard rushed about in a white dress.
Already crazy.
Like a village whore
Who is completely unaware
That here they bury their souls before,
Locking up the body.
My old friend
I am not honored as a dead man,
She sings and dances - a blizzard.
Sings and dances endlessly.

The well-known metaphors of Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, these pearls of artistry, are prosaically materialized by Shalamov, plunged into the rough, cruel world of Kolyma. What an unconditional tragedy in the fate of the prisoner of Kolyma opens with this "materialization". But how much in him, having tried on the standards of high classics to his hard labor shoulders, human dignity, how much in him doomed to death in this "northern hell", gloomy pride.

Shalamov's Kolyma is the indisputable and final measure of everything and everyone. Even when he doesn't write about Kolyma, he still writes about Kolyma. Everything, literally everything - social norms, philosophical doctrines, artistic traditions - he passes through the prism of Kolyma. The filter of the Kolyma “minus-experience” (as Shalamov himself called it) is morbidly eater and ruthlessly harsh. Loaded with this experience, the writer stood up against a whole Areopagus of stereotypes and ideologemes that fettered public consciousness. For him there are no unconditional authorities and undoubted axioms. In his letters and prefaces, which sound like manifestos, Shalamov can be passionate and categorical.

He rejects idyllic ideas about progress: "Fascism, and not only fascism, has shown the complete failure of forecasts, the fragility of prophecies regarding civilization, culture, religion," the autobiographical story says. He strongly doubts the fruitfulness of "life teaching, teaching good, selfless struggle against evil," what has long been considered the noble super-task of the great Russian classics. He even throws a very heavy reproach to Tolstoy and Russian literature, declaring: “All terrorists have passed this Tolstoy stage, this vegetarian, moralizing school. Russian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century (...) prepared the ground well for the blood shed in the XX century before our eyes” [Shalamov V. Letter to Yu.A. Schrader on March 24, 1968 // Questions of Literature-1989. No. 5. S. 232-233.]. Only Dostoevsky is given indulgence - primarily for understanding Shigalevism, but Shalamov does not argue with any of the Russian classics so often on the pages of Kolyma Tales as with Dostoevsky.

And Shalamov’s attitude to contemporary literature is fully recognizable from one phrase from a letter to Pasternak: “I think it will subside, this whole era of rhymed heroic servility will pass” [See: Yunost. 1988. No. 10. S. 62]. The letter is dated January 22, 1954. The thaw had not yet begun and it was generally unknown how everything would turn out. But for Shalamov there was no doubt - all the "fairy tales of fiction" should be done away with.

Shalamov has a lot of sharp statements about "fiction". He blames her for being descriptive, he is jarred by verbal "trifles, rattles", "from old literary people and schemes." He believes that common art forms are not capable of mastering a new tragic experience, like the experience of Kolyma: "ordinary stories" - "vulgarization of the topic" ...

Shalamov saw documentary as a counterweight to "fiction". He has very radical statements on this score: “The writer must give way to the document and be documentary himself ... The prose of the future is the prose of experienced people,” he will say in one of his “manifestoes” [Shalamov V. Manifesto about “new prose » // Questions of Literature. 1989. No. 5. S. 233.]. But in another “manifesto” he will clarify: “Not the prose of a document, but prose suffered as a document” [Shalamov V. About prose // Shalamov V. Left Bank. Stories. M., 1989. S. 554. We are not talking here about the evolution of Shalamov's literary views. The published materials show that over the years his statements about the "old" literary traditions became more and more intolerant, and his statements about the advantages of documentary prose became more and more categorical. This, apparently, affected the creative practice. However, it will be possible to judge this quite definitely only after studying the creative history of all his works - not only stories, but also “manifestos”]. And this formula means that for Shalamov documentary is, first of all, the author's suffering of what he writes about, it is a rejection of fictional conventions and embellishments. But the work itself is not a document: “The prose of the Kolyma stories has nothing to do with the essay,” the writer warns us.

Indeed, in his stories, Shalamov handles facts quite freely and does not at all neglect fiction. Some of the memoirists were even embarrassed by Shalamov's "free interpretation" of individual events, destinies and deeds of real people [See. memoirs of B.N. Lesnyak about Shalamov, published in the almanac "In the Far North" (1989. No. 1).]. But this once again testifies that the Kolyma Tales were written according to other laws - according to the laws of art, where the most authentic fact is valuable not for its authenticity, but for the capacity of its aesthetic meaning, where fiction, which concentrates the truth, is more expensive than a private, albeit real, fact.

And Shalamov, a passionate debater and uncompromising maximalist, has the most respectful attitude towards the laws of art. This is quite convincingly evidenced by his theoretical judgments expressed in correspondence with B.L. Pasternak, Yu.A. Schreider and I.P. Sirotinskaya. He always defended the dignity of Literature as the art of the word, as the repository of Culture.

But the relationship between Literature and Experience in Shalamov's work is far from simple. In his “Kolyma Tales” he, in essence, collides Kolyma and Culture: with Kolyma he tests Culture, but he also tests Kolyma with Culture.

The features of many small genres of prose are recognizable in Kolyma Tales: an action-packed romantic novel, a physiological essay, a prose poem, a psychological study, a skit, various rhetorical genres (maxims, "experiments"), etc. Shalamov knew and loved this tradition well: in the 30s, between the first and second arrests, he, by his own admission, “worked hard on a short story, trying to understand the secrets of prose, its future” [Shalamov V. From an unpublished autobiography. Cit. Quoted from: Trifonov G.N. To the bibliography of V.T. Shalamov // Soviet bibliography. 1988. No. 3. P. 68. Of the whole book of stories that Shalamov was preparing for publication, he managed to publish only four short stories, the rest died. Judging by the published works, Shalamov's first novelistic experiments are far from perfect, they bear the stamp of apprenticeship, but perhaps they were useful for that - the young writer mastered the culture of the genre.]. But in "Kolyma Tales" he does not so much follow tradition as enters into a dialogue with it: he confronts the experience of Kolyma with that experience that has been "petrified" in traditional genre forms.

Shalamov's stories are often awarded the definition of "Kolyma epic". But this is nothing more than an emotional assessment. The book of stories is not up to the epic task - to discover and expose the "universal connection of phenomena." Another question: what if “the connection of times was interrupted”? If the world itself is torn and broken? If it does not lend itself to epic synthesis? Then the artist looks for a form that would allow him to explore this chaos, somehow collect, mold these fragments in order to still see and drop the whole. With his bunch of small prose genres, Shalamov produces a kind of "acupuncture", looking for the affected cells of a diseased social organism. Each individual story from Shalamov's cycle is a complete image in which a certain relationship between man and the world is refracted. And at the same time, it acts as part of a large genre formation, whose name is “Kolyma Tales”: here each short story turns out to be a piece of smalt in a grandiose mosaic that recreates the image of Kolyma, huge, chaotic, creepy.

Shalamovskaya Kolyma is a set of island camps. It was Shalamov who found this camp-island metaphor. Already in the story “The Snake Charmer”, dated 1954, the prisoner Platonov, “a screenwriter in his first life”, speaks with bitter sarcasm about the sophistication of the human mind, which invented “things like our islands with all the improbability of their life.” And in the story “The Man from the Steamboat”, the camp doctor, a man of a sharp sardonic mind, expresses his secret dream to his listener: “... If our islands, would you understand me? - our islands have sunk into the ground” [Hereinafter, italics are mine. - N.L.]. (Subsequently, gratefully taking advantage of Shalamov's "hint", A. I. Solzhenitsyn introduced the image-concept of the "Gulag archipelago", which he called his research.)

The islands, the archipelago of islands, is a precise and highly expressive image. He “captured” the fragmentation, forced isolation and at the same time the connection by a single slave regime of all these prisons, camps, settlements, “business trips” that were part of the Gulag system. But Solzhenitsyn's "archipelago" is, first of all, a conditional term-metaphor denoting the object of scientific and journalistic research, an object that is torn apart by the researcher's imperious scalpel into topics and headings. For Shalamov, “our islands” is a huge integral image. He is not subject to the narrator, he has epic self-development, he absorbs and subordinates to his sinister whirlwind, his “plot” everything, absolutely everything: the sky, snow, trees, faces, destinies, thoughts, executions ...

Nothing else that would be located outside of "our islands" in the "Kolyma Tales" does not exist. That pre-camp, free life is called the "first life", it ended, disappeared, melted away, it no longer exists. And was she?

The prisoners of "our islands" themselves think of it as a fabulous, unrealizable land that lies somewhere "beyond the blue seas, behind the high mountains" ("The Snake Charmer"). The camp swallowed up every other existence. He subordinated everything and everything to the ruthless dictates of his prison rules. Having grown infinitely, it has become a whole country. (The concept of "the country of Kolyma" is directly stated in the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev": "... In this country of hopes, and therefore, the country of rumors, conjectures, assumptions, hypotheses ...")

A concentration camp that has replaced the whole country, a country turned into a huge archipelago of camps - such is the grotesque-monumental image of the world that is made up of the mosaic of Kolyma Tales. It is ordered and expedient in its own way, this world. This is what the prison camp looks like: “The small zone is the transfer. A large zone - a camp of the mountain administration - endless barracks, prison streets, a triple fence made of barbed wire, guard towers in winter, similar to birdhouses "(" Golden Taiga "). And then follows: “The architecture of the Small Zone is ideal...” It turns out that this is a whole city, built in full accordance with its purpose. And there is architecture here, and even one to which the highest aesthetic criteria are applicable. In a word, everything is as it should, everything is “like with people”.

Such is the space of the “country of Kolyma”. The laws of time also apply here. True, in contrast to the hidden sarcasm in the depiction of a seemingly normal camp space, camp time is frankly taken out of the natural flow, this is a strange, abnormal time. "Months in the Far North are considered years - so great is the experience, the human experience, acquired there." This generalization belongs to the bearer of the general camp experience, the impersonal narrator from the story "Major Pugachev's Last Battle". And here is the subjective, personal perception of time by one of the convicts, the former doctor Glebov: “The real was a minute, an hour, a day from getting up to lights out - he did not think further and did not find the strength to think. Like everyone else ”(“ At Night ”). In this space and in this time, the life of a prisoner passes for years. It has its own way of life, its own rules, its own scale of values, its own social hierarchy. Shalamov describes this way of life with the meticulousness of an ethnographer. Here are the details of household arrangements: how, for example, a camp barrack is being built (“a rare fence in two rows, the gap is filled with pieces of frosted moss and peat”), how the stove is heated in the barracks, what a home-made camp lamp is like - a gasoline “kolyma” and etc.

The social structure of the camp is also the subject of careful description. Two poles: "blatari", they are also "friends of the people", - on one, and on the other - political prisoners, they are also "enemies of the people". from “maskas”, crows”, “scratchers of heels”. And no less merciless oppression of a whole pyramid of official bosses: foremen, accountants, overseers, escorts ...

Such is the established and established order of life on “our islands”. Incredible - as a reality, as a norm. In a different regime, the GULAG would not be able to fulfill its function: to absorb millions of people, and in return "give out" gold and timber. But why do all these Shalamov "ethnographies" and "physiology" evoke a feeling of apocalyptic horror? Just recently, one of the former Kolyma prisoners reassuringly told that “winter there, in general, is a little colder than Leningrad” and that on Butugychag, for example, “mortality was actually insignificant,” and appropriate therapeutic and preventive measures were taken to combat scurvy , like forced drinking of dwarf extract, etc. [See: Gorchakov G. Difficult bread of truth // Questions of Literature. 1989. No. 9.]

And Shalamov has about this extract and much more. But he does not write ethnographic essays about Kolyma, he creates the image of Kolyma as the embodiment of an entire country turned into a Gulag. The seeming outline is only the “first layer” of the image. Shalamov goes through "ethnography" to the spiritual essence of Kolyma, he is looking for this essence in the aesthetic core of real facts and events.

It is no coincidence that the proportion of details and details is so great in the Kolyma Tales. Shalamov especially appreciates the detail, seeing in it a part that expresses in a concentrated way the aesthetic essence of the whole. And this is the conscious attitude of the writer. [We read in one of Shalamov's fragments "On Prose": "The story must be introduced<нрзб>, details are planted - unusual new details, descriptions in a new way. (...) It is always a detail-symbol, a detail-sign, translating the whole story into a different plane, giving a “subtext” that serves the will of the author, an important element of artistic decision, artistic method” (New World. 1988. No. 6. P. 107).].

Moreover, in Shalamov, almost every detail, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, a grotesque, a stunning comparison: “Unheated damp barracks, where thick ice froze up in all the cracks from the inside, as if some kind of huge stearin candle swam in the corner of the barrack” (“ Tatar mullah and fresh air. “The bodies of people on the plank beds looked like growths, humps of wood, a curved board” (“Typhoid Quarantine”). “We followed the tractor tracks like some prehistoric animal.” ("Dry ration"). “The cries of the guards cheered us up like whips” (“How It Started”).

Even more expressive are the psychological details. Often these are landscape details that set off the spiritual atmosphere of Kolyma: “Low, bluish, as if bruised, clouds walk along the edge of the white sky for many days” (“Slanik”). Moreover, Shalamov does not shy away from traditional romantic associations: “The deeper the night became, the brighter the fires burned, they burned with a flame of hope, hope for rest and food” (“How It Started”). Sometimes a writer takes an old lofty image-symbol consecrated by legend, grounds it in a physiologically rough “Kolyma context”, and there this image acquires some special poignant coloration: “Each of us is used to breathing the sour smell of a worn dress, sweat - it’s still good that tears have no smell" ("Summ rations"). And sometimes Shalamov makes the opposite move: by association, he translates a seemingly random detail of prison life into a series of high spiritual symbols. As, for example, in the story “The First Chekist”, in the scene of an attack of epilepsy: “But Alekseev suddenly escaped, jumped onto the windowsill, grabbed the prison bars with both hands, shaking it, shaking it, cursing and growling. Andreev's black body hung on the grate like a huge black cross.

The symbolism that Shalamov finds in the everyday realities of camp or prison life is so rich that sometimes a whole micro-story grows out of a detail filled with symbolic meaning. In the same “First Chekist”, for example, there is such a micro-novella - about an escape, about a failed escape of the sun's rays: “The lock rang, the door opened, and a stream of rays escaped from the cell. Through the open door, it became clear how the rays crossed the corridor, rushed through the corridor window, flew over the prison yard and broke on the window panes of another prison building. All sixty inhabitants of the cell sang all this in the short time that the door was open. The door slammed shut with a melodious chime like old chests when the lid is slammed shut. And immediately all the prisoners, eagerly following the throw of the light flux, the movement of the Beam, as if it were a living being, their brother and comrade, realized that the Sun was locked again with them ”(“ First Chekist ”). This micro-story - about an escape, about a failed escape of the sun's rays - organically fits into the psychological atmosphere of the story about people languishing in the cells of the Butyrka remand prison.

Moreover, such traditional literary images-symbols that Shalamov introduces into his stories (a tear, a sunbeam, a candle, a cross, and the like), like bundles of energy accumulated by centuries-old Culture, electrify the picture of the world-camp, permeating it with boundless tragedy.

But even stronger in Kolyma Tales is the aesthetic shock caused by the details, these trifles of everyday camp existence. Particularly creepy are the descriptions of the prayerful, ecstatic absorption of food: “He does not eat herring. He licks her, licks her, and little by little the tail disappears from her fingers” (“Bread”); “I took a bowler hat, ate and licked the bottom to a shine out of mine habit” (“Conspiracy of Lawyers”); “He woke up only when food was given, and after that, carefully and carefully licking his hands, he slept again ...” (“Typhoid Quarantine”).

And all this, together with a description of how a person bites his nails and gnaws “dirty, thick, slightly softened skin piece by piece”, how scorbutic ulcers heal, how pus flows from frostbitten toes - this is all that we have always attributed to the office of rude naturalism takes on a special artistic meaning in the Kolyma Tales. There is some strange inverse relationship here: the more specific and reliable the description, the more unreal, chimerical this world, the world of Kolyma, looks. This is no longer naturalism, but something else: the principle of articulation of the vitally authentic and the illogical, nightmarish, which is rather characteristic of the "theater of the absurd", operates here.

Indeed, the world of Kolyma appears in Shalamov's stories as a genuine "theater of the absurd." Administrative madness rules there: there, for example, because of some bureaucratic nonsense, people are being driven hundreds of kilometers across the winter Kolyma tundra to certify a fantastic conspiracy (“Conspiracy of Lawyers”). And reading at morning and evening checks lists of those sentenced to death, sentenced for "nothing" ("To say out loud that the work is hard is enough for execution. For any, the most innocent remark about Stalin - execution. Keep silent when they shout "cheers" Stalin - also enough for execution"), reading by smoky torches, framed by a musical carcass? (“How did it start.”) What is this if not a wild nightmare?

“The whole thing was like someone else’s, too scary to be real.” This Shalamov phrase is the most precise formula of the "absurd world".

And in the center of the absurd world of Kolyma, the author places an ordinary normal person. His name is Andreev, Glebov, Krist, Ruchkin, Vasily Petrovich, Dugaev, "I". Shalamov does not give us any right to look for autobiographical features in these characters: undoubtedly, they actually exist, but autobiography is not aesthetically significant here. On the contrary, even "I" is one of the characters, equated with all the same as him, prisoners, "enemies of the people." All of them are different hypostases of the same human type. This is a man who is not famous for anything, did not go to the party elite, was not a major military leader, did not participate in factions, did not belong to either the former or the current "hegemons". This is an ordinary intellectual - a doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist, screenwriter, student. It is this type of person, neither a hero nor a villain, but an ordinary citizen, that Shalamov makes the main object of his research.

So, a normal "average" person in completely abnormal, absolutely inhuman circumstances. Shalamov explores the process of interaction between a Kolyma prisoner and the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of everyday consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious, on that border strip where the Gulag wine press pushed a person back - on the shaky line between a person as a person who still guards the ability to think and suffer, and that impersonal being who no longer controls himself and begins to live by the most primitive reflexes.

Shalamov certifies: yes, in the anti-world of Kolyma, where everything is aimed at trampling, trampling on the dignity of the prisoner, the liquidation of the individual is taking place. Among the "Kolyma stories" there are those that describe the reduction of creatures that have descended almost to the complete loss of human consciousness. Here is the novella "Night". The former doctor Glebov and his partner Bagretsov are doing what, according to the scale of generally accepted moral norms, has always been considered extreme blasphemy: they are tearing up the grave, undressing the corpse of the sonar attendant in order to later exchange his miserable linen for bread.

This is beyond the limit: there is no personality, only a purely animal vital reflex remains. However, in the anti-world of Kolyma, not only mental strength is exhausted, not only reason goes out, but the final phase occurs when the very reflex of life disappears: a person does not even care about his own death. Such a state is described in the story "Single Measurement". Student Dugaev, still quite young - twenty-three years old, is so crushed by the camp that he no longer even has the strength to suffer. only in front of the fence, behind which they are being shot, a dull regret flickers, “that I worked in vain, this last day was tormented in vain.”

Without illusion, Shalamov writes harshly about the dehumanization of people by the GULAG system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Shalamov's sixty Kolyma stories and his Essays on the Underworld, noted: “Shalamov's camp experience was bitter and longer than mine, and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not me, who got to touch that bottom of brutality and despair, to which the whole camp life pulled us” [Solzhenitsyn A.I. The Gulag Archipelago // New World. 1989. No. 11. P. 71.] It seems that it was precisely this confession of Solzhenitsyn himself that “did not suit” Pyotr Palamarchuk, the author of the completely apologetic “digest” “Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a guide”, and he eagerly began to assert the following: “Shalamov’s camp epic is a kind of "tragedy without catharsis", a terrible story about the unexplored and hopeless abyss of human fall (...) in a direct and highly symbolic sense. [See: Moscow. 1989. No. 9. S. 190.]

The nature of such critical passages has long been known: if you want to sing praises to one worthy person, you must definitely oppose it to another, no less worthy one, and trample on it so that, God forbid, no one dares to stand on the same pedestal with your idol. And to argue with Petr Palamarchuk on the merits is somehow awkward. Isn't, for example, Major Pugachev's Last Battle an image of an uprising "in the literal sense"? As for the "image of an uprising in a highly symbolic sense," as P. Palamarchuk solemnly put it... Does the author of The Archipelago think in terms of images? No, he thinks in the language of facts and logical constructions. The "cordiality" of thought, the author's deeply personal experience of the facts he collected, the emotional openness of assessments - anger, sadness, irony, sarcasm give a certain reason to call this study artistic. But still, The Gulag Archipelago is, first of all, fundamental research. Is the strength of this book in some "highly symbolic sense", and not in the most detailed analysis of the structure and functioning of the huge state repressive machine created in our country to serve the political system of barracks socialism and most clearly expressed its inhuman nature? It is not the ambiguity inherent in the artistic image, especially the image-symbol, but, on the contrary, the scrupulous accuracy of the facts, which does not allow any disagreement, their strict binding to the place, time, and persons, make The Gulag Archipelago a document of colossal accusatory power.

Another thing - "Kolyma stories". Here the object of comprehension is not the System, but a person in the millstones of the System. Shalamov is not interested in how the repressive machine of the Gulag works, but in how the human soul “works”, which this machine tries to crush and grind. And it is not the logic of the linkage of judgments that dominates in the Kolyma Tales, but the logic of the linkage of images - the original artistic logic. All this is directly related not only to the dispute about the “image of the uprising”, but much wider - to the problem of adequate reading of the “Kolyma Tales” in accordance with their own nature and the creative principles that guided their author. In the meantime, diametrically opposed judgments are expressed in criticism about the general pathos of the Kolyma Tales, about Shalamov's concept of man.

So, P. Palamarchuk has allies. “The world of Shalamov goes like a stone to the bottom of our consciousness, and we are painful and scared. And we turn - and not by chance - to Solzhenitsyn, ”writes V. Frenkel. [Frenkel V. In the last circle (Varlam Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn) // Daugava. 1990. No. 4. P. 81.] M. Zolotonosov goes even further in his generalizations: “But under the hands of Shalamov, not only the novel died, but also the person (...) The person was exposed, debunked as a species. And sent straight to hell, because immanently sinful. Paradise is hopelessly lost, remained in a fairy tale. The compromise of a person reaches its climax with Shalamov” [Zolotonosov M. Consequences of Shalamov // Rush hour. SPb., 1991. No. 31. 8 Aug.] In essence, M. Zolotonosov fits "Kolyma Tales" under the postmodernist paradigm with its characteristic apology of horror before the chaos of existence. And such an approach to Shalamov is even becoming fashionable in modern criticism: the material is very beneficial for all sorts of eschatological "horror stories". But Shalamov's stories evoked a completely different reaction from other rather qualified connoisseurs. In particular, F.A. Vigdorova, a famous writer, one of the initiators of the human rights movement. In Shalamov's reply to her letter we read: “As a half-question, you want to know why the Kolyma Tales do not press, do not make a depressing impression, despite their material. I tried to look at my characters from the outside. It seems to me that the point here is in the strength of spiritual resistance to the principles of evil, in that great moral test, which unexpectedly, accidentally for the author and for his heroes turns out to be a positive test. [Shalamov V. Letter to F.A. Vigdorova dated June 16, 1964 // Shalamov V. From correspondence // Banner. 1993. No. 5. P. 133.]

However, in Shalamov's epistolary heritage one can find other, opposite statements about a person and his "limits", and in general, the writer's judgments on this subject are very contradictory. In a letter to B. Pasternak, dated January 1954, he cites the following evidence of a person’s spiritual fortitude: “But what about me, who has seen worship in the snow, without robes, among thousand-year-old larches, with a randomly calculated east for the altar, with black squirrels, timidly looking at such worship ... ". [Correspondence of Boris Pasternak. M., 1990. S. 544.] And in another letter to the same addressee, sent in January 1956, Shalamov makes such a damning conclusion about the past twenty years: "Time has successfully made a person forget that he is a person." [Ibid. P. 563.] In a note given to Anna Akhmatova in the hospital (1965), Shalamov states: “... Life needs living Buddhas, people of moral example, full of creative power at the same time.” And this is not a ritual phrase befitting the occasion, but a well-worn conviction, as evidenced by the thought about the role of a moral example, about the “religion of the living Buddhas”, expressed in a letter to an old friend Ya.D. Grodzensky. [Ibid.] But the hand of the same Shalamov deduced a gloomy formula: "Life has no rational basis - that's what our time proves" [Ibid.]

You can fence with such mutually exclusive phrases, push them head-on for a very long time. But this is unlikely to clarify anything. Letters are one thing, but stories are quite another. In his letters, Shalamov can be passionate, extremely one-sided, since the genre itself inspires the subjectivity of judgments. In the stories, the subjectivity of the author's intention is corrected by the organic nature and self-development of the artistic world, created by the power of the writer's imagination. And Shalamov's aesthetic conception of man and the world must and can be judged primarily by his works of art. In this regard, Dora Shturman's point of view is indicative: “Those who believe in Shalamov's self-esteem are mistaken, like he himself: in the totality of his poems and books, light shines in darkness. It is not clear - from where, it is not known - how, but it dawns. [Shturman D. Children of Utopia. (Memories) // New World. 1994. No. 10. S. 192.] Indeed, the main task of the researcher is to find out “what was said” in the work of art, and not “what the creator wanted to show”, and if the reader feels the radiation of light in Gulag hell of the Kolyma Tales, then the researcher needs to understand “from where, and to find out “how” he “glimpses”.

Let's start with what lies on the surface - with specific collisions. Of course, everything human is extremely dear to Shalamov. He sometimes even tenderly “husks” out of the gloomy chaos of Kolyma the most microscopic evidence that the System failed to completely “freeze in people’s souls that primary moral feeling, which is called the ability to compassion.

When the doctor Lidia Ivanovna, in her low voice, upsets the paramedic that she yelled at Andreev, he remembered her “for the rest of his life” - “for a kind word spoken on time” (“Typhoid Quarantine”). When an elderly toolmaker covers two clumsy intellectuals who call themselves carpenters, just to stay at least a day in the warmth of a carpentry workshop, and gives them hand-turned ax handles (“Carpenters”), when bakers from a bakery try first of all to feed the camp goners sent to them ( “Bread”), when convicts, hardened by fate and alienated from each other by the struggle for survival, burn a letter and a statement from the only daughter of an old carpenter with a renunciation of her father (“Apostle Paul”), then all these seemingly insignificant actions appear as acts of high humanity. And what the investigator does in the story "Handwriting": he throws the case of Krist, who is included in the next list of those sentenced to death, into the stove - this, by existing standards, is a desperate act, a real feat of compassion.

However, the main semantic load in Shalamov's short stories is not carried by these moments, even very dear to the author. A much more important place in the system of reference coordinates of the artistic world of the Kolyma Tales belongs to the antitheses of image-symbols. Among them, perhaps the most significant antithesis of seemingly incongruous images - the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree.

In the system of moral references of the Kolyma Tales, there is nothing lower than sinking to the position of a heel scratcher. And when Andreev saw that Schneider, a former sea captain, "an expert on Goethe, an educated Marxist theorist", "a merry fellow by nature", who maintained the morale of the cell in Butyrki, now, in Kolyma, was fussily and obligingly scratching the heels of some Senechka -blatar, then he, Andreev, "did not want to live." The theme of the Heel Scratcher becomes one of the sinister leitmotifs of the entire Kolyma cycle. But no matter how disgusting the figure of the heel scratcher, the author-narrator does not stigmatize him with contempt, for he knows very well that "a hungry person can be forgiven a lot, a lot" ("The Snake Charmer"). Perhaps it is precisely because a person exhausted by hunger does not always manage to retain the ability to control his consciousness to the end, Shalamov puts as an antithesis to the Heel Scratcher not another type of behavior, not a person, but the Tree, the persistent, tenacious Northern Tree.

The tree most revered by Shalamov is elfin. In the Kolyma Tales, a separate miniature is dedicated to him, a poem in prose of the purest water - paragraphs with a clear internal rhythm, like stanzas, the elegance of details and details, their metaphorical halo:

“In the Far North, at the junction of taiga and tundra, among dwarf birches, undersized rowan bushes with unexpectedly large watery berries, among six-hundred-year-old larches that reach maturity at three hundred years, lives a special tree - elfin. This is a distant relative of cedar, cedar - evergreen coniferous bushes with trunks thicker than a human hand, two to three meters long. It is unpretentious and grows, clinging to the cracks in the stones of the mountain slope with its roots. He is courageous and stubborn, like all northern trees. His sensitivity is extraordinary.

This is how this prose poem begins. And then it is described how the dwarf behaves: and how it spreads out on the ground in anticipation of cold weather and how it “gets up before anyone else in the North” - “hears the call of spring that we cannot catch”. “The elfin tree always seemed to me the most poetic Russian tree, better than the famous weeping willow, plane tree, cypress ...” - this is how Varlam Shalamov ends his poem. But then, as if ashamed of a beautiful phrase, he adds a soberly everyday: “And firewood from elfin is hotter.” However, this household decline not only does not detract, On the contrary, it enhances the poetic expression of the image, because those who have passed Kolyma are well aware of the price of heat. ..

The image of the northern tree - elfin, larch, larch branch - is found in the stories "Dry rations", "Resurrection", "Kant", Major Pugachev's last battle. And everywhere it is filled with symbolic, and sometimes frankly didactic meaning.

The images of the Heel Scratcher and the Northern Tree are a kind of emblems, signs of polar opposite moral poles. But no less important in the system of cross-cutting motives of the Kolyma Tales is another, even more paradoxical pair of antipodal images, which designate two opposite poles of a person's psychological states. This is the image of Malice and the image of the Word.

Anger, Shalamov argues, is the last feeling that smolders in a person who is being ground by the millstones of Kolyma. “In that insignificant oven layer that still remained on our bones (...), only malice was placed - the most durable human feeling” (“Dry rations”); “... Anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones” (“Sentence”); “He lived only with indifferent malice” (“Train”). In this state, the characters of the Kolyma stories most often remain, or rather, the author finds them in such a state.

Anger is not hate. Hatred is still a form of resistance. Anger is total bitterness against the whole wide world, blind hostility to life itself, to the sun, sky, grass. Such separation from being is already the end of the personality, the death of the spirit.

And on the opposite pole of Shalamov's hero's state of mind stands the feeling of the word, the worship of the Word as a bearer of spiritual meaning, as an instrument of spiritual work.

One of the best works of Shalamov is the story “(Sentence”. Here is a whole chain of mental states through which a prisoner of Kolyma passes, returning from spiritual non-existence in a human form. The initial stage is malice. Then, as physical strength was restored, “indifference appeared - fearlessness": "After indifference came fear - not a very strong fear - fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of a boiler, a high cold sky and aching pain in worn muscles. "Then, after the return of the vital reflex, envy returned as a revival of the ability to evaluate his position: “I envied my dead comrades - people who died in the year 38. "(Because they did not have to endure all subsequent bullying and torment.) Love did not return, but pity returned: "Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for the people."

And finally, the highest is the return of the Word. And how it is described!

“My language, a mine rough language, was poor - how poor were the feelings still living near the bones (...) I was happy that I did not have to look for any other words. Whether these other words exist, I did not know. Couldn't answer this question.

I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, right here - I remember it clearly - under the right parietal bone, a word was born that was not at all suitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades. I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity.

Maxim! Maxim! - And I laughed. - A maxim! I yelled straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, not yet understanding the meaning of this word born in me. And if this word is returned, found again - so much the better! All the better! Great joy overwhelmed my whole being - a maxim!

The very process of the restoration of the Word appears in Shalamov as a painful act of liberation of the soul, breaking through from a deaf dungeon to the light, to freedom. And yet breaking through - in spite of Kolyma, in spite of hard labor and hunger, in spite of the guards and informers.

Thus, having passed through all mental states, having re-mastered the whole scale of feelings - from the feeling of anger to the feeling of the word, a person comes to life spiritually, restores his connection with the world, returns to his place in the universe - to the place of homo sapiens, a thinking being.

And the preservation of the ability to think is one of the main concerns of Shalamov's hero. He is afraid: “If the bones can freeze, the brain could freeze and become dull, the soul could freeze too” (“Carpenters”). But the most ordinary verbal communication is dear to him as a process of thinking, and he says, “rejoicing that his brain is still mobile” (“Dry rations”).

Hence, he, crushed by the state machine, thrown into the Kolyma sewer, has a reverent attitude to everything that bears the stamp of spiritual work, that is connected with culture, with art: whether it is Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time”, somehow miraculously found himself in a world of timelessness (“Marcel Proust”), or the liturgy of John Chrysostom, which is served right in the snow, among the Kolyma larches (“Day off”), or a line from a poem by a half-forgotten poet (“Handwriting”), or a letter from Boris Pasternak , obtained in the Kolyma exile ("For a letter"). And Pasternak’s high assessment of Shalamov’s judgment about rhyme is put on a par with the praise that his neighbor in Butyrka, the old political prisoner Andreev bestowed on him: “Well, Varlam Tikhonovich, what can I say to you in parting - only one thing: you can go to prison” (“The Best praise"). Such is the hierarchy of values in Kolyma Tales.

They may say: well, these are already purely personal priorities of Varlam Shalamov himself, a man who lived by culture and created culture with the highest concentration. But such a judgment would be incorrect in principle. Rather, on the contrary: Shalamov adopted from his father, a Vologda priest, a highly educated person, and then consciously cultivated in himself, starting from his student years, a system of life attitudes, where spiritual values - thought, culture, creativity, come first, it was in Kolyma that them as the main, moreover - as the only belt of defense that can protect the human personality from decay, decay. To defend not only Shalamov, a professional writer, but any normal person turned into a slave of the System, and not only in the Kolyma "archipelago", but everywhere, in any inhuman circumstances.

Shalamov himself, indeed, turned to writing poetry in Kolyma in order to “save himself from the overwhelming and soul-corrupting power of this world” [Letter to V.T. Shalamova B.L. Pasternak on January 2, 1954 // Correspondence of Boris Pasternak. S. 542.]. There are similar confessions in the memoirs of N.I. Hagen-Thorn and A.I. Solzhenitsyn. But all these are facts of the biography of outstanding people - thinkers and artists. And in the Kolyma Tales, the realization of the Word as the highest human value is presented as a turning point in the spiritual confrontation between the “average” prisoner and the state machine.

A thinking person, who defends his soul with a belt of culture, is able to understand what is happening around. A person who understands - this is the highest assessment of a person in the world of "Kolyma Tales". There are very few such characters here, and in this Shalamov is also true to reality, but the narrator has the most respectful attitude towards them. Such, for example, is Alexander Grigoryevich Andreev, “the former general secretary of the society of political convicts, a right-wing socialist-revolutionary who knew both tsarist hard labor and Soviet exile.” A whole, morally impeccable personality, not sacrificing one iota of human dignity even in the investigative cell of the Butyrka prison, in the thirty-seventh year. What holds it together from the inside? The narrator feels this support: “Andreev - he knows some truth, unfamiliar to the majority. This truth cannot be told. Not because she is a secret, but because she cannot be trusted” (“First Chekist”).

In dealing with people like Andreev, people who left everything behind the prison gates, who lost not only the past, but also hope for the future, acquired what they did not even have in the wild. They also began to understand. Like that simple-minded honest “first security officer” - the head of the fire brigade Alekseev: “... It was as if he had been silent for many years, and now the arrest, the prison cell returned him the gift of speech. He found here an opportunity to understand the most important thing, to guess the course of time, to see his own destiny and understand why... To find the answer to that huge, hanging over his whole life and destiny, and not only over his life and destiny, but also over hundreds of thousands of others, a huge, gigantic "why" ... "

And for Shalamov's hero there is nothing higher than enjoying the act of mental communication in a joint search for truth. Hence the strange, at first glance, his psychological reactions, paradoxically at odds with worldly common sense. For example, he fondly recalls “high-pressure conversations during long prison nights” (“Typhoid Quarantine”). And the most deafening paradox in Kolyma Tales is the Christmas dream of one of the prisoners (moreover, the hero-narrator, the alter ego of the author) to return from Kolyma not to home, not to his family, but to the investigation chamber. Here are his arguments: “I would not like to return to my family now. They will never understand me, they will never be able to understand me. What they think is important, I know it's nothing. What is important to me - the little that I have left - is not given to them to understand or feel. I will bring them a new fear, one more fear to the thousand fears that fill their lives. What I saw is not necessary to know. Prison is another matter. Prison is freedom. (?! - N.L.) This is the only place I know where people, without fear, said whatever they thought. Where they rested their souls. They rested their bodies because they were not working. There, every hour of existence was comprehended” (“Tombstone”).

The tragic comprehension of “why”, digging here, in prison, behind bars, to the secret of what is happening in the country - this is the insight, this is the spiritual acquisition that is given to some heroes of the Kolyma Tales - those who wanted and managed to think . And with their understanding of the terrible truth of time, they rise above time. This is their moral victory over the totalitarian regime, because the regime failed to deceive a person, to disorientate with demagogy, to hide the true roots of evil from an inquisitive mind.

And when a person understands, he is able to make the most correct decisions even in absolutely hopeless circumstances. And one of the characters in the story "Dry rations", the old carpenter Ivan Ivanovich, prefers to commit suicide, and the other, student Savelyev, cut off his fingers on his hand than to return with a "free" forest business trip back behind the wire to the camp hell. And Major Pugachev, who raised his comrades to escape with rare courage, knows that they will not escape from the iron ring of a numerous and heavily armed raid. But “if you don’t run away at all, then die free,” that’s what Major Pugachev and his comrades went for (“Major Pugachev’s Last Fight”).

These are the actions of people who understand. Neither the old carpenter Ivan Ivanovich, nor the student Saveliev, nor Major Pugachev and his eleven comrades are looking for excuses before the System, which condemned them to the Kolyma. They no longer harbor any illusions, they themselves have understood the deeply anti-human essence of this political regime. Condemned by the System, they have risen to the consciousness of judges above it. They pronounced their verdict on the System by an act of suicide or a desperate escape, also tantamount to collective suicide. In those circumstances, this is one of the two forms of conscious protest and resistance of a fragile human being to the all-powerful state evil.

And the other one? The other is to survive. To spite the System. Do not let the machine, specially designed to destroy a person, crush itself - neither morally nor physically. This is also a battle, as Shalamov's heroes understand it - "a battle for life." Sometimes unsuccessful (as in "Typhoid Quarantine"), but - to the end.

In his theoretical notes, V. Shalamov speaks very sharply about literary moralizing, about the writer's claims to the role of a judge. “In the new prose,” says Shalamov, “after Hiroshima, after self-service in Auschwitz and Serpentine in Kolyma, after wars and revolutions, everything that is didactic is rejected. Art is deprived [?] of the right to preach. Nobody can teach anyone. He has no right to teach." [See: Questions of Literature. 1989. No. 5. S. 241.]

But the pathos of understanding, this core motif that permeates the entire book of Kolyma Tales, conflicts with the author's theoretical declarations. This is especially evident in the role played by the narrator. He is active and powerful. As a rule, this is a different figure than the central character, that one is the object, and this one is the subject of the story. He is the reader's guide through the Kolyma hell. He knows more than his heroes. And most importantly, he understands more. He is close to those few heroes of the "Kolyma Tales" who rose to the understanding of time.

And by type of personality, he is related to them. He, too, treats the Word with care, for he feels the beauty and power of cultural tradition contained in it. In 1954, just at the time of work on the Kolyma Tales, Shalamov wrote to Pasternak: “Perhaps the best minds of mankind and brilliant artists have developed a language for communicating a person with his best inner essence.” [Correspondence of Boris Pasternak. P. 544.] And Shalamov's narrator literally cherishes this language, extracting the aesthetic possibilities hidden in it. This explains the careful work of the author on the word.

But the narrator treats the language of Kolyma, the cynical camp jargon (“The anecdote with swearing here looked like the language of some institute girl”) with frank disgust. The thieves' word appears in Kolyma Tales only as a fragment of "someone else's speech". Moreover, the narrator neatly separates it with quotation marks and immediately translates it, as if it were foreign, into normal language. When, for example, a half-drunk radio operator informs the hero-narrator: “You need a ksiva from the administration,” he translates for us readers: “Ksiva from the administration, - a telegram, a radiogram, a telephone message - addressed to me” (“For a letter”) . And here is how the camp rumor is stated: “A gust of wind blew a rumor, a bucket, that no more money would be paid. This “slop”, like all camp “slops”, was confirmed” (“How It Started”). The content of these devices is obvious - this is how the narrator defiantly dissociates himself from the absurd language of the absurd world. [One more piece of information to reflect on the difference between everyday and artistic truth in Shalamov's work. B. Lesnyak. the author of memoirs about the writer, says: “In his everyday speech, much remained from the camp life. Perhaps it was bravado." - and recalls a lot of camp words that Shalamov did not disdain in everyday conversation (“In the Far North”, 1989, No. 1. P. 171). It turns out that what the old Kolyma resident Varlam Shalamov could allow himself in everyday speech, the writer Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales, fundamentally does not allow his narrator.]

The narrator in "Kolyma Tales" is the custodian of the Words of the instrument of thought. And he himself is a thinker, if you like, a reasoner. He loves and knows how to generalize, he has an aphoristic gift. Therefore, didactic micro-genres such as "experiments" and maxims are very often found in his speech. Probably, the word "maxim", which suddenly came to life in the frozen brain of the hero of the story of the same name, did not come into the world so unexpectedly and accidentally.

"Experiments" in Shalamov's stories are clots of bitter practical knowledge. Here is the "physiology" of Kolyma - information about how work in the gold mine in a matter of weeks "made disabled people out of healthy people" ("Tombstone"). Here are “experiments” from the field of social psychology: about the morals of the blatars (“Typhoid Quarantine”), about two “schools” of investigators (“The First Chekist”), about why decent people turn out to be weak in confrontation with dishonorable people (“Dry rations ”), and about many other things that formed the moral atmosphere in Kolyma, turning this “country of islands” into a kind of “inverted world”.

Shalamov's individual observations are striking in their insight. We read, for example, in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” about two “generations” of Kolyma prisoners - about those who ended up in camps in the thirties, and about those who ended up there immediately after World War II. People "with the habits acquired during the war - with courage, the ability to take risks" and could stand up for themselves. And the prisoners of the thirties were accidental victims of “a false and terrible theory about the class struggle flaring up as socialism strengthened (...) The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral stamina of the prisoners extremely. They were neither enemies of the authorities, nor state criminals, and, dying, they did not understand why they had to die. Their pride, their malice had nothing to rely on. And, disunited, they died in the white Kolyma desert - from hunger, cold, hours of work, beatings and diseases ... ". This is a whole micro-study of the ideology of obedience, convincingly explaining what seemed inexplicable: why in the thirties millions went to the slaughter like sheep? Why, among those of them who were lucky enough to survive, there are many who justify the Stalinist terror in principle?

Finally, the tragic experience of "our islands" is often compressed by Shalamov into the chased form of maxims and apothegms. They formulate the moral lessons of Kolyma. Some lessons confirm and bring to an imperative sound the guesses that were timidly, cautiously expressed in the past, before Auschwitz and the Gulag. Such, for example, is the argument about power: “Power is corruption. The unleashed beast, hidden in the human soul, seeks to satisfy its eternal human essence - in beatings, in murders ... ”(“ Grishka Logun’s Thermometer ”). This poem in prose - four stanzas ringed with an aphorism formula - is included as a "plug-in genre" in the short story about the humiliation of a person by a person.

Other Shalamov's maxims openly shock with their polemical divergence from the traditional general opinion, from age-old moral stereotypes. Here is one of these maxims: “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those "difficult" conditions of life, which, as the tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need rallied, gave birth to the friendship of people, then this need is not extreme and the trouble is not great. Grief is not sharp and deep enough if you can share it with friends. In real need, only one’s own mental and bodily strength is known, the limits of one’s capabilities, physical endurance and moral strength are determined” (“Dry rations”).

Some will see here an apology for loneliness. Others will appreciate the courageous "independence of a person" who does not allow himself to stoop to moral dependency. But in any case, it is impossible to dismiss Shalamov's maxims - behind them is the experience of the Kolyma hell. It is no coincidence that these maxims are devoid of a “personal” intonation, epicly “depersonalized”: the general harsh and bitter wisdom of Kolyma is heard in them.

In the process of working on his Kolyma cycle, Varlam Shalamov gradually developed a special type of story - on the synthesis of a narrative plot with maxims and "experiments", on the union of poetry and prose.

Poetry here is a clear idea, minted in an aphoristic form, an image that carries the semantic quintessence of the described collision. And prose is a stereoscopic, non-one-dimensional image of the world. Moreover, if poetry purposefully directs thought in a certain direction, then prose is always more than an idea, faceted in a maxim, prose is always an increment. For life is always richer than the thought of it. And in this proper genre “bend” of Shalamov’s stories, there is also a content of its own: the exactingness of the author’s thought is combined with the rejection of the dictates of one’s own assessments, and tolerance for other truths (“a writer must remember that there are a thousand truths in the world,” - this is from Shalamov’s manifesto “About prose”) and compassion for the weakness of another person - with maximalism of demands on oneself (“No,” I said. “I won’t give up my soul,” is the final phrase from the story “Prostheses.”)

Deliberately pushing prose and poetry, documentary and fiction, rhetoric and narration, "author's" monologue and plot action, Shalamov achieves mutual correction of the idea and reality, the subjective view of the author and the objective course of life. And at the same time, unusual genre "alloys" are born from such a collision, which give a new angle of view, a new scale of vision of the world of Kolyma.

Very indicative of Shalamov's genre poetics is the story "Tombstone". The structure of this story is formed by the conjugation of two genres, openly manifesting their belonging to different types of literature. The first genre is actually a funeral word, the traditional high genre of church oratorics, and the second is a Christmas tale, known for its maximum fiction: willfulness of fantasy, conditional collisions, sensitivity of tone. But both genres are immersed in the world of Kolyma. The traditional genre content, consecrated for centuries, clashes with the content that was born of the Gulag.

"Everyone is dead..." This is how the story begins. And the sad narration of the narrator about his twelve comrades in the camp follows. The magic number "12" has already surfaced in the story "Major Pugachev's Last Battle". But there were heroes - twelve fugitives who entered into a hopeless mortal battle with the state machine. Here, in the Tombstone, there are not heroes, not apostles, but simply people, innocent victims of the System. But each of them is honored with a farewell commemoration - a separate micronovela is dedicated to each of the twelve, even if it is only two or three paragraphs or just a few lines. And the narrator will find a place there for respectful, and even grateful words about a person, and there will certainly be a paradoxical situation (a scene, an exchange of remarks, or just a maxim), sharply exposing the utter nightmare of what was happening to these people with the blessing of the System. And in each micronovela there is a sense of the inevitability of death: the GULAG stupidly, with mechanical regularity, draws a person into its deadly millstones.

And then comes the epilogue. It sounds in a completely different register: “On Christmas Eve this year, we were sitting by the stove. Her iron sides on the occasion of the holiday were redder than usual. An idyllic picture, by Gulag standards, of course. And on Christmas Eve, it is supposed to make the most cherished wishes:

“It would be nice, brothers, to return home to us. After all, a miracle happens ... - said the horseman Glebov, a former professor of philosophy, known in our barracks for having forgotten the name of his wife a month ago. “Only, damn it, the truth.”

This is the purest travesty of the beginning of a Christmas fairy tale. And the initiator here is traditional: at least not a magician, but a "former professor of philosophy", which means that he is attached to the magical mysteries. True, the professor now serves as a horse-racer and, in general, he seems to have become worn out, since “a month ago he forgot the name of his wife,” but nevertheless he expresses himself in the language of the genre, slightly reduced by the situation: here is a dream of a miracle, and accepting applications with cherished desires , and the inevitable "chur". And five cherished desires follow, one more unexpected than the other. One dreams of returning not to his family, but to a remand prison. Another, “the former director of the Ural trust,” would like, “when he comes home, to eat his fill:“ I would cook porridge from magar - a bucket! Soup "dumplings" - also a bucket! The third, “in his first life - a peasant”, he “would not leave his wife a single step. Where she is, there I am; where she is, there I am. “First of all, I would go to the district committee of the party,” a fourth dreamed. It is natural to expect that he will achieve something in this high and strict institution. But it turns out: “There, I remember, there are a lot of cigarette butts on the floor ...”.

And finally, the fifth wish, it goes to Volodya Dobrovoltsev, a pointist, a supplier of hot steam. What can this lucky man want in particular, warmed up in a warm - in the literal sense - place? Only his monologue is preceded by a small pri. preparation: “He raised his head without waiting for a question. The light of glowing coals from the open door of the stove fell into his eyes - his eyes were alive, deep. But this retardation is enough to prepare everyone for a mature, desperate thought:

“And I,” and his voice was calm and unhurried, “would like to be a stump. Human stump, you know, no arms, no legs. Then I would find the strength in myself to spit in their faces for everything they do to us ... "

And that's it - the story is over. Two plots closed - the plot of the tombstone and the plot of the Christmas fairy tale. The plot of the tombstone here is similar to the "monumental story": the same chain of micronovelas, which, for all their "uniformity", create a feeling of novel stereoscopicity and openness. And the cherished dreams of the characters of the Christmas fairy tale also form a rather variegated spectrum of opinions and horizons. But the contamination of both genres turns the entire narrative into a new plane: the funeral sermon becomes an indictment, and the Christmas tale turns into a sentence - a sentence to the political regime that created the Gulag, a sentence to the highest measure of human contempt.

In The Tombstone, the journalistic structure and the fiction structure, infecting each other, create a special artistic whole - undeniable in its vital persuasiveness and furiously exacting in its moral pathos. And in the story "The Cross" a similar artistic effect is achieved through the polemical clash of the hagiographic story about the "temptation" with the naked "truth of the fact." In the stories “How It Started”, “The Tatar Mullah and Clean Air”, this effect arises on the basis of the relationship of two lines: the logic of the narrator’s analytical thought, expressed in “experiments” and maxims, and the chain of plastically specific fictionalized scenes and episodes.

Works like "Tombstone", "Sentence", "Cross" are on a certain axial line of Shalamov's creative quest as a short story writer. They implement the "maximum of the genre" created by him. All Kolyma Tales are located on one side or another of this axial line: some gravitate more towards the traditional short story, and others towards rhetorical genres, but never neglecting one of the poles. And this "pairing" gives them extraordinary capacity and strength.

Indeed, in the Kolyma Tales, behind the narrator's authoritative word, behind his maxims and "experiments", behind the genre contours of lives and grave words, there is a great artistic tradition rooted in the culture of the European Enlightenment and even deeper - in the ancient Russian preaching culture. This tradition, like a halo, surrounds Shalamov's world of Kolyma, showing through the naturalistic rudeness of the "texture", the writer pushes them together - high classical culture and low reality. Under the pressure of the Kolyma reality, high genres and styles are travestyed, ironically reduced - the criteria they proposed turned out to be very “out of this world” and fragile. But the irony here is tragic and the humor is black. For the memory of the forms of classical literature - their genres, styles, syllables and words - does not disappear, on the contrary, Shalamov actualizes it in every possible way. And in comparison with it, with this memory of ancient shrines and noble rituals, with the cult of reason and thought, Kolyma appears as a blasphemous mockery of universal human values that were passed from civilization to civilization, as an illegal world, cynically violating the laws of human society, which were developed by peoples for thousands of years.

The search for "new literature" meant for Shalamov the destruction of literature, a kind of "deliteration" of literature. He stated: “When they ask me what I write, I answer, I do not write memoirs. There are no memories in KR (Kolyma Tales). I do not write stories either - or rather, I try to write not a story, but something that would not be literature. ”[Shalamov V. Left Bank. S. 554.]

And Shalamov achieved his goal - "Kolyma stories" are perceived as "non-literature". But, as we could see, the impression of rough authenticity and unpretentious simplicity that arises when reading them is the result of a masterful "dressing" of the text. Shalamov contrasted “fiction” not with “bare life”, not regulated by culture, he opposed it with another culture. Yes, the culture of artistic consolation and embellishment did not stand the test of Kolyma, Kolyma rudely and mercilessly mocked the "fairy tales of fiction." But Kolyma itself did not stand the test of the culture that preserves the dignity of reason and faith in the spiritual essence of man. In the light of the culture of Reason and Spirit, the blatant anti-humanity of Kolyma as a world order and the sheer absurdity of those doctrines that decreed the construction of such a world and its functioning were clearly exposed.

Taken together, in bulk, “Kolyma Tales” form such a mosaic, where repetitions and echoes of motifs, themes, images, details, verbal formulas not only do not weaken the artistic impression, but, on the contrary, strengthen the “masonry”, give the whole a special density and monumentality. And in the huge image of the world-concentration camp emerging when reading the Kolyma Tales, one can clearly see the structure of the state system and the system of social relations that should make even the most “blinkered” reader understand. Such an understanding frees the soul from the captivity of fear and lack of will, for it awakens disgust for despotism, totalitarian oppression, especially such that is allegedly affirmed in the name of "a bright future for mankind."

Andrei Voznesensky once exclaimed: “Who can master our monstrous experience of lack of freedom and attempts at freedom for us?” Shalamov, with his "Kolyma Tales", created about thirty years ago, mastered this experience and gave us an aesthetic key to it.

However, the warning of Yu.A. Schreider, one of the publishers of the writer's legacy, is not without foundation: "The subject of Shalamov's stories in a certain sense makes it difficult to understand their true place in Russian literature." [Schrader YL. He managed not to break // Soviet bibliography. 1988. No. 3. P. 64.] Probably, Shalamov himself was afraid that the transcendent nature of life material could “crush” all other aspects of his prose when perceived. Therefore, apparently, he considered it necessary to explain himself to the future reader. In the fragment “On Prose”, which is very similar to the preface to the collection, he writes: “Kolyma Tales” is an attempt to raise and solve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved on other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one's destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, the teeth of evil. Illusory and heaviness of hope. Opportunity to rely on forces other than hope.” [Shalamov V. Left Bank. S. 551].

For Shalamov, the most urgent problem was "the struggle of man against the state machine." Elsewhere, he writes: "Isn't the destruction of man with the help of the state the main issue of our time, which has entered the psychology of every family?" [Shalamov V. Left Bank. P. 554.] And this aspect of the Kolyma Tales will undoubtedly evoke the strongest response in our society, for it will really touch each of us with pain and shame.

But still, we must not forget that the "struggle of man against the state machine" is inscribed in "Kolyma Tales" on an even grander scale - the scale of "man's meeting with the world." For those who were born in Russia in the first third of the 20th century, the meeting with the world was like a meeting with the bloodiest totalitarian system in the history of mankind. Such was the hypostasis of Being, such was the face of Eternity for all of us at that time. The perception of the time of human destiny as a moment of eternity was highly characteristic of Boris Pasternak, an artist with whom Shalamov felt a special spiritual affinity. Explaining the concept of his novel Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak wrote: “This is not the fear of death, but the consciousness of the futility of the best intentions and achievements, and the best guarantees, and the resulting desire to avoid naivety and follow the right path so that if anything perish, so that the infallible perishes, so that it perishes through no fault of your error. [Pasternak B. Letter to O.M. Freidenberg dated November 30, 1948 // Friendship of Peoples. 1980. No. 9. S. 249.]

Varlam Shalamov in the last years of his life did not accept the novel "Doctor Zhivago". But he never disagreed with Pasternak in understanding the life of a person - no matter what historical period it falls on - as a way of the cross. And the fate of Yuri Zhivago, and the fate of the heroes of "Kolyma Tales" - these are all different versions of the way of the cross of a person in history as a moment of being. And more tragic, more terrible fate than the fate of the Kolyma prisoners, humanity has not yet known. The more weighty is the authority of the experience drawn from these destinies, the more worthy is that code of worldview and worldview, which is crystallized in the mosaic of Kolyma Tales.

The study of the phenomenon of Varlam Shalamov is just beginning. We have yet to evaluate the role of Shalamov in the spiritual quest of our tragic era. We still have hours of exploratory pleasure in analyzing all the subtleties of the poetics of this great master of prose. But one truth is already clear - it is that the Kolyma Tales belong to the great classics of Russian literature of the 20th century.

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