Varlam Shalamov Kolyma stories maxim. Read the book "Sentence" online in full - Varlam Shalamov - MyBook

The first reading of "Kolyma Tales" by V. Shalamov

To talk about the prose of Varlam Shalamov means to talk about the artistic and philosophical meaning of non-existence. About death as a compositional basis of the work. About the aesthetics of decay, disintegration, disintegration... It would seem that there was nothing new: before, before Shalamov, death, its threat, expectation and approach were often the main driving force of the plot, and the very fact of death served as a denouement... But in Kolyma stories, otherwise. No threats, no waiting! Here, death, non-existence is the artistic world in which the plot usually unfolds. The fact of death preceded the beginning of the story. The line between life and death was crossed forever by the characters even before the moment when we opened the book and, having opened it, started the clock counting artistic time. The most artistic time here is the time of non-existence, and this feature is perhaps the main one in Shalamov's writing style...

But here we immediately doubt: do we have the right to understand precisely the artistic manner of the writer, whose works are now read primarily as a historical document? Isn't there a blasphemous indifference to the real destinies of real people in this? And about the reality of destinies and situations, about the documentary background of the Kolyma Tales, Shalamov spoke more than once. Yes, and I would not say - the documentary basis is already obvious.

So, shouldn’t we first of all recall the sufferings of the prisoners of Stalin’s camps, the crimes of the executioners, some of them are still alive, and the victims are crying out for revenge ... We are going to talk about Shalamov’s texts - with analysis, about the creative manner, about artistic discoveries. And, let's say right away, not only about discoveries, but also about some aesthetic and moral problems of literature ... It is on this, Shalamov's, camp, still bleeding material - do we have the right? Is it possible to analyze a mass grave?

But after all, Shalamov himself was not inclined to regard his stories as a document indifferent to artistic form. A brilliant artist, he apparently was not satisfied with the way his contemporaries understood him, and wrote a number of texts explaining precisely the artistic principles of the Kolyma Tales. "New prose" he called them.

“In order for prose or poetry to exist, it doesn’t matter, art requires constant novelty”

He wrote, and to comprehend the essence of this novelty is precisely the task of literary criticism.

Let's say more. If "Kolyma Tales" is a great document of the era, then we will never understand what it tells about if we do not comprehend what its artistic novelty is.

“The artist’s business is precisely the form, because otherwise the reader, and the artist himself, can turn to an economist, a historian, a philosopher, and not to another artist, in order to surpass, defeat, surpass the master, the teacher,” Shalamov wrote. .

In a word, we need to understand not only and not so much Shalamov the convict, but above all Shalamov the artist. It is necessary to understand the soul of the artist. After all, it was he who said: “I am the chronicler of my own soul. No more". And without understanding the artist's soul, how can a person understand the essence and meaning of history, the essence and meaning of what happens to him? Where else do these meanings and meanings lurk, if not in great works of literature!

But it is difficult to analyze Shalamov's prose because it is really new and fundamentally different from everything that has been in world literature so far. Therefore, some of the former methods of literary analysis are not suitable here. For example, retelling - a common method of literary criticism in the analysis of prose - is far from always sufficient here. We have a lot to quote, as happens when it comes to poetry ...

So, first let's talk about death as the basis of artistic composition.

The story "Sentence" is one of the most mysterious works of Varlam Shalamov. By the will of the author himself, he was placed last in the corpus of the book "Left Bank", which, in turn, as a whole completes the trilogy of "Kolyma Tales". This story, in fact, is the finale, and, as it happens in a symphony or a novel, where only the finale finally harmonizes the entire previous text, so here only the last story gives the final harmonic meaning to the entire thousand-page narrative...

For the reader already familiar with the world of the Kolyma Tales, the first lines of the Maxim do not promise anything unusual. As in many other cases, the author already at the very beginning puts the reader on the edge of the bottomless depths of the other world, and from these depths the characters, the plot, and the very laws of plot development appear to us. The story begins energetically and paradoxically:

“People arose from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunks, leaned against my bony shoulder at night ... "

The main thing is that from non-existence. Non-existence, death are synonyms. Did people emerge from death? But we have become accustomed to these Shalamov paradoxes.

Having taken the Kolyma Tales in our hands, we quickly cease to be surprised at the fuzziness or even the complete absence of boundaries between life and non-existence. We get used to the fact that characters arise from death and go back to where they came from. There are no living people here. Here are the prisoners. The line between life and death disappeared for them at the moment of arrest ... No, and the very word arrest- inaccurate, inappropriate here. The arrest is from a living legal lexicon, but what is happening has nothing to do with law, with the harmony and logic of law. The logic has fallen apart. The man was not arrested have taken. They took it quite arbitrarily: almost by accident - they could have taken not him - a neighbor ... There are no sound logical justifications for what happened. Wild randomness destroys the logical harmony of being. They took it, removed it from life, from the list of tenants, from the family, separated the family, and left the emptiness left after the withdrawal left an ugly gaping... That's it, there is no person. Was or was not - no. Alive - disappeared, perished ... And the plot of the story already includes a dead man who has come from nowhere. He forgot everything. After they dragged him through the unconsciousness and delirium of all these senseless actions performed on him in the first weeks and called interrogation, investigation, sentence - after all this he finally woke up in another, unknown to him, surreal world - and realized that forever . He might have thought that everything was over and that there was no return from here, if he remembered exactly what ended and where there was no return. But no, he doesn't remember. He does not remember his wife's name, nor God's word, nor himself. What was is gone forever. His further circling around the barracks, transfers, "hospital hospitals", camp "business trips" - all this is already otherworldly ...

Really, in the understanding that people enter into the plot of the story (and, in particular, into the plot of the "Sentence") from death, there is nothing that would contradict the general meaning of Shalamov's texts. People arise from non-existence, and it seems that they show some signs of life, but nevertheless it turns out that their condition will be clearer to the reader if we talk about them as about the dead:

“An unfamiliar person lay next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth, and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through scraps of a pea jacket, padded jackets, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, gets up at a cry, dresses and obediently obeys the command.

So, leaving neither warmth nor a human image in memory, they disappear from the narrator's field of vision, from the plot of the story:

"A man who emerged from nothingness disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever."

The narrator himself is also a dead man. At least the story begins with the fact that we get to know the dead man. How else to understand the state in which the body does not contain heat, and the soul not only does not distinguish where the truth is, where the lie is, but this distinction itself is not of interest to a person:

“I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: "Do not ask, and you will not be lied to." It didn’t matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie.

At first glance, both the plot and the theme of the story are simple and rather traditional. (The story has long been noticed by critics: see, for example: M. Geller. Concentration World and Modern Literature. OPI, London. 1974, pp. 281-299.) It seems that this is a story about how a person changes, how a person comes to life when several the conditions of his camp life are improving. It seems to be about resurrection: from moral non-existence, from the disintegration of the personality to high moral self-consciousness, to the ability to think - step by step, event after event, act after act, thought after thought - from death to life ... But what are the extreme points of this movement? What is death in the author's understanding and what is life?

The hero-narrator no longer speaks about his existence in the language of ethics or psychology - such a language cannot explain anything here - but using the vocabulary of the simplest descriptions of physiological processes:

“I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings ...

And, keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life.

Everything is displaced in the artistic world of Kolyma Tales. The usual meanings of words are not suitable here: they do not compose the logical concepts so well known to us. formulas life. It's easy for readers of Shakespeare, they know what it means be So what - not to be, know between what and what the hero chooses, and empathize with him, and choose together with him. But Shalamov - what is life? what is malice? what is death? What happens when today a person is tortured less than yesterday - well, at least they stop beating them every day, and that's why - that's the only reason! - death is postponed and he passes into another existence, to which no formulas?

Resurrection? But is it so resurrect? The acquisition by the hero of the ability to perceive the surrounding life, as it were, repeats the development of the organic world: from the perception of a flatworm to simple human emotions ... There is a fear that the delay of death will suddenly turn out to be short; envy of the dead, who already died in 1938, and to living neighbors - chewing, smoking. Pity for animals, but not yet pity for people...

And finally, after the feelings, the mind awakens. An ability is awakened that distinguishes a person from the natural world around him: the ability to call words from memory stores and, with the help of words, to give names to beings, objects, events, phenomena is the first step towards finally finding logical formulas life:

“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 completely unsuitable 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:

- A maxim! Maxim!

And laughed...

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

For a week I did not understand what the word "maxim" means. I whispered this word, shouted it out, frightened and made the neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from the sky, clues, explanations, translations... And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy. Fear - because I was afraid of returning to that world where there was no return for me. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.

Many days passed until I learned to call more and more new words from the depths of the brain, one after another ... "

Resurrected? Returned from oblivion? Got freedom? But is it possible to go back, go back all this way - with arrest, interrogations, beatings, experienced death more than once - and resurrect? Leave the underworld? Free yourself?

And what is liberation? Regaining the ability to use words to make logical formulas? Using logical formulas to describe the world? The very return to this world, subject to the laws of logic?

Against the gray background of the Kolyma landscape, what fiery word will be saved for future generations? Will it be an all-powerful word denoting the order of this world - LOGIC!

But no, "maxim" is not a concept from the dictionary of the Kolyma reality. The life here does not know logic. It is impossible to explain what is happening with logical formulas. An absurd case is the name of the local fate.

What is the use of the logic of life and death, if, sliding down the list, it is on your last name that the finger of a stranger, unfamiliar (or, conversely, familiar and hating you) contractor accidentally stops - and that's it, you're not there, got on a disastrous business trip and a few days later your body, twisted by frost, will hastily throw stones at the camp cemetery; or by chance it turns out that the local Kolyma "authorities" themselves invented and themselves uncovered a certain "conspiracy of lawyers" (or agronomists, or historians), and suddenly it is remembered that you have a legal (agricultural or historical) education - and now your name is already in the execution list; or without any lists, the gaze of a criminal who lost at cards accidentally fell on you - and your life becomes the stake of someone else's game - and that's it, you're gone.

What a resurrection, what a liberation: if this absurdity is not only behind you, but also ahead - always, forever! However, one must immediately understand: it is not a fatal accident that interests the writer. And not even an exploration of a fantasy world, consisting entirely of intertwining wild accidents, which could captivate an artist with the temperament of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambroise Bierce. No, Shalamov is a writer of the Russian psychological school, brought up on the great prose of the 19th century, and in the wild clash of chances he is interested in precisely certain patterns. But these patterns are outside the logical, cause-and-effect series. These are not formal-logical, but artistic patterns.

Death and eternity cannot be described by logical formulas. They just don't fit that description. And if the reader perceives the final Shalamov's text as a major psychological study and, in accordance with the logic familiar to modern Soviet people, expects that the hero is about to fully return to normal life, and just look, he will find suitable formulas, and he will rise to denounce the “crimes of Stalinism”, if the reader perceives the story in this way (and with it all the “Kolyma stories” as a whole), then he will be disappointed, since none of this happens (and cannot happen with Shalamov!). And the whole thing ends very mysteriously ... with music.

The tragedy of the Kolyma Tales ends not at all with a accusatory maxim, not with a call for revenge, not with a formulation of the historical meaning of the horror experienced, but with hoarse music, an occasional gramophone on a huge larch stump, a gramophone that

“... played, overcoming the hiss of the needle, played some kind of symphonic music.

And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraer, foremen and hard workers. The boss was standing next to me. And the expression on his face was as if he himself had written this music for us, for our deaf taiga business trip. The shellac plate whirled and hissed, the stump itself whirled, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years ... "

And that's it! Here is the final for you. Law and logic are not synonymous at all. Here the very absence of logic is natural. And one of the main, most important patterns is manifested in the fact that there is no return from the otherworldly, irrational world. In principle... Shalamov has repeatedly stated that it is impossible to resurrect:

“... Who would have figured out then, a minute or a day, or a year, or a century, we needed to return to our former body - we did not expect to return back to our former soul. And they didn't come back, of course. Nobody returned."

No one returned to the world that could be explained with the help of logical formulas... But what then is the story "Sentence" about, which occupies such an important place in the general corpus of Shalamov's texts? What's with the music? How and why does her divine harmony arise in the ugly world of death and decay? What mystery is revealed to us by this story? What key is given to understand the entire multi-page volume of Kolyma Tales?

And further. How close are the concepts? logics life and harmony peace? Apparently, it is precisely these questions that we have to look for answers in order to understand Shalamov's texts, and with them, perhaps, many events and phenomena both in history and in our life.

“The world of barracks was squeezed by a narrow mountain gorge. Limited by sky and stone…” — this is how one of Shalamov’s stories begins, but we could start our notes about artistic space in Kolyma Tales this way. The low sky here is like a punishment cell ceiling - it also restricts freedom, it presses just the same ... Everyone should get out of here on their own. Or die.

Where are all those enclosed spaces and enclosed territories located that the reader finds in Shalamov's prose? Where does that hopeless world exist or existed, in which the deaf lack of freedom of each is due to the complete lack of freedom of all?

Of course, those bloody events took place in Kolyma that forced the writer Shalamov, who survived them and miraculously survived, to create the world of his stories. The events took place in the famous geographic area and deployed in a certain historical time... But the artist, contrary to the widespread prejudice - from which, however, he himself is not always free - does not recreate any real events, much less "real" space and time. If we want to understand Shalamov's stories as an artistic fact (and without such an understanding we cannot comprehend them at all - we cannot comprehend them either as a document, or as a psychological phenomenon or a philosophical acquisition of the world - in general, then if we want to understand at least something in Shalamov's texts, then first of all it is necessary to see what is the significance of these "as if physical" categories - time and space - in the poetics of the Kolyma Tales.

Let's be careful, nothing can be missed here ... Let's say, why at the very beginning of the story "On the show" when designating the "scene" the author needed an obvious allusion to everyone: "We played cards at Naumov's konogon"? What is behind this appeal to Pushkin? Is it just irony, shading the gloomy coloring of one of the last circles of the camp hell? A parodic attempt to "lower" the tragic pathos of The Queen of Spades by jealously opposing it... no, not even another tragedy, but something beyond the bounds of any tragedy, beyond the limits of human reason, and perhaps something beyond the limits of art in general?...

The opening phrase of Pushkin's story is a sign of the easy freedom of the characters, freedom in space and time:

“Once we were playing cards with Narumov, a horse guard. The long winter night passed unnoticed; sat down to supper at five o'clock in the morning ... ".

They sat down to supper at the fifth, or they could at the third or at the sixth. The winter night passed unnoticed, but the summer night could have passed just as unnoticed... And in general, Narumov, the Horse Guardsman, could not have been the owner - in draft sketches, the prose is not at all so strict:

“About 4 years ago we gathered in P<етер>B<урге>several young people connected by circumstances. We led a rather hectic life. We dined at Andrie's without appetite, drank without gaiety, went to S.<офье>A<стафьевне>irritate the poor old woman with feigned legibility. During the day they killed somehow, and in the evening they took turns gathering at each other's.

It is known that Shalamov had an absolute memory for literary texts. The intonational relationship of his prose to Pushkin's prose cannot be accidental. Here's a calculated take. If in Pushkin's text there is an open space, the free flow of time and the free movement of life, then in Shalamov's it is a closed space, time seems to stop and it is no longer the laws of life, but death determines the behavior of the characters. Death is not an event, but like a name the world we find ourselves in when we open the book...

“We played cards at Naumov's konogon. The guards on duty never looked into the horse barracks, rightly considering their main service in monitoring the convicts under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by the counter-revolutionaries. True, the practical supervisors grumbled in silence: they were losing the best, most caring workers, but the instruction on this matter was definite and strict. In a word, the konogons were the safest of all, and every night the thieves gathered there for their card fights.

In the right corner of the hut on the lower bunks were spread multi-colored wadded blankets. A burning "kolyma" was fastened to the corner post - a home-made light bulb on gasoline steam. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of the can - that's all the device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was heated, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on both sides of it, with their legs tucked up in the Buryat style, “partners” were sitting - a classic pose of a prison card battle. There was a brand new deck of cards on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards: it was a prison homemade deck, which is made by the masters of these crafts at an unusual speed ...

Today's maps have just been cut out of a volume of Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone yesterday in the office ...

I and Garkunov, a former textile engineer, sawed firewood for the Naumov barracks ... "

There is a clear designation of space in each of Shalamov's short stories, and always - always without exception! - this space is deafly closed. It can even be said that the grave isolation of space is a constant and persistent motif of the writer's work.

Here are the opening lines, introducing the reader to the text of only a few stories:

“All around the clock there was a white fog of such density that a man could not be seen two steps away. However, it was not necessary to go far alone. Few directions - a canteen, a hospital, a shift - were guessed, unknown as an acquired instinct, akin to that sense of direction that animals fully possess and which, under suitable conditions, wakes up in a person.

“The heat in the prison cell was such that not a single fly could be seen. Huge windows with iron bars were wide open, but this did not give relief - the hot asphalt of the yard sent hot air waves upwards, and it was even cooler in the cell than outside. All clothes were thrown off, and hundreds of naked bodies, full of heavy, damp heat, tossed and turned, dripping with sweat, on the floor - it was too hot on the bunk.

“A huge double door opened, and a distributor entered the transit hut. He stood in the broad band of morning light reflected by the blue snow. Two thousand pairs of eyes looked at him from everywhere: from below - from under the bunks, directly, from the side, from above - from the height of the four-story bunks, where those who still retained strength climbed up the ladder.

“The “Small Zone” is a transfer, the “Large Zone” is the camp of the Mining Administration - endless squat barracks, prison streets, a triple barbed wire fence, guard towers that look like birdhouses in winter. In the “Small Zone” there are even more towers, castles and hecks ... ".

It would seem that there is nothing special there: if a person writes about the camp and about the prison, then where can he get at least something open! Everything is so ... But before us is not a camp in itself. Before us is only a text about the camp. And here it depends not on the protection, but only on the author, how exactly the "artistic space" will be organized. What will be the philosophy of space, how will the author make the reader perceive its height and length, how often will he make him think about towers, locks and hecks, and so on and so forth.

The history of literature knows enough examples when, at the will of the author, a life that seems to be completely closed, closed (even in the same camp zone) easily communicates with life that flows within other limits. After all, there are some ways from the special camp, where Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Shukhov was imprisoned, to Shukhov's native Temgenevo. It's nothing that these paths - even for Shukhov himself - are traversable only mentally. One way or another, having gone through all these paths (say, remembering the letters received together with the hero), we will learn about the life of Ivan's family, and about affairs on the collective farm, and in general about the country outside the zone.

And Ivan Denisovich himself, although he tries not to think about the future life - in today's one he would survive - but nevertheless with her future one, albeit with rare letters, he is connected and cannot resist the temptation to think briefly about the tempting business, which it would be worthwhile to do after release - to paint carpets according to a stencil. With Solzhenitsyn, a person is not alone in the camp either, he lives in cohabitation with his contemporaries, in the same country, in the neighborhood of humanity, according to the laws of humanity - in a word, although in deep captivity, but in the world of people, a person lives.

Otherwise, Shalamov. The abyss separates a person from everything that is customarily called the word "modernity". If a letter comes here, it is only to be destroyed under the overseer's drunken laughter before it is read - they do not receive letters after death. Deaf! In the other world, everything takes on otherworldly meanings. And the letter does not unite, but - not received - further divides people. Yes, what to talk about letters, if even the sky (as we already recalled) does not broaden one's horizons, but limits his. Even doors or gates, although they will be open, will not open space, but will only emphasize its hopeless limitation. Here you seem to be forever fenced off from the rest of the world and hopelessly alone. There is no mainland, no family, no free taiga in the world. Even on the bunks you are not side by side with a person - with a dead man. Even the beast will not stay with you for a long time, and the dog, to which he managed to become attached, will be shot by the guard in passing ... Reach out even for a berry growing outside this closed space - and then you fall dead, the guard will not miss:

“... ahead were hummocks with wild rose berries, and blueberries, and lingonberries ... We saw these hummocks a long time ago ...

Rybakov pointed to the jar, which was not yet full, and to the sun descending towards the horizon, and slowly began to approach the enchanted berries.

A shot crackled dryly, and Rybakov fell face down between the bumps. Seroshapka, brandishing his rifle, shouted:

"Leave it where you are, don't come near!"

Seroshapka pulled the bolt and fired again. We knew what that second shot meant. Seroshapka also knew this. There should be two shots - the first is a warning.

Rybakov lay between the bumps unexpectedly small. The sky, the mountains, the river were huge, and God knows how many people can be laid in these mountains on the paths between the bumps.

Rybakov's jar rolled away, I managed to pick it up and hide it in my pocket. Maybe they will give me bread for these berries...”.

It is only then that the sky, and the mountains, and the river open. And only for the one who fell, buried his face between the taiga bumps. Freed! For another, a survivor, the sky is still no different from the other realities of camp life: barbed wire, barrack walls or cells, at best, hard beds of a camp hospital, but more often - bunks, bunks, bunks - such is the real cosmos of Shalamov's short stories.

And here, what is the cosmos, such is the luminary:

"A dim electric sun, filthy with flies and shackled with a round lattice, was attached high above the ceiling."

(However, the sun, as it appears in the text of Kolyma Tales, could be the topic of a separate, very voluminous study, and we will have the opportunity to touch on this topic later.)

Everything is deaf and closed, and no one is allowed to leave, and there is nowhere to run. Even those desperate who dare to escape - and run! - with incredible efforts, it is possible to only slightly stretch the boundaries of the grave world, but no one has ever managed to break or open them at all.

In Kolyma Tales there is a whole cycle of short stories about escapes from the camp, united by one title: “The Green Prosecutor”. And all these are stories about unsuccessful escapes. Successful - not that there are none: in principle, they cannot be. And those who fled - even those who fled far away, somewhere to Yakutsk, Irkutsk or even Mariupol - all the same, as if it were some kind of demonic obsession, like running in a dream, always remain within the grave world, and the run goes on and on , lasts and sooner or later there comes a moment when the borders, which were far stretched, are again instantly pulled together, drawn into a loop, and a person who believed himself to be free wakes up in the cramped walls of a camp punishment cell ...

No, this is not just a dead space fenced off with barbed wire or barrack walls or landmarks in the taiga, a space into which some doomed people have fallen, but outside of which more fortunate people live according to other laws. That is the monstrous truth, that everything that Seems existing outside this space, in fact, is involved, drawn into the same abyss.

It seems that everyone is doomed - everyone in general in the country, and maybe even in the world. Here is some kind of monstrous funnel, equally sucking in, sucking in the righteous and thieves, healers and lepers, Russians, Germans, Jews, men and women, victims and executioners - everyone, everyone without exception! German pastors, Dutch communists, Hungarian peasants... None of Shalamov's characters are even mentioned - not a single one! - about whom one could say that he is definitely outside these limits - and safe ...

Man no longer belongs to the epoch, to the present, but only to death. Age loses all meaning, and the author sometimes admits that he himself does not know how old the character is - and what's the difference! Any time perspective is lost, and this is another, the most important, constantly repeating motif of Shalamov's stories:

“The time when he was a doctor seemed very distant. And was there such a time? Too often that world beyond the mountains, beyond the seas, seemed to him some kind of dream, an invention. The real was a minute, an hour, a day from getting up to lights out - he did not think further, did not find the strength to think. As everybody".

Like everyone else ... There is no hope even for the passage of time - it will not save! In general, time here is special: it exists, but it cannot be defined in the usual words - past, present, future: tomorrow, they say, we will be better, we will not be there and not the same as yesterday ... No, here today is not at all not an intermediate point between "yesterday" and "tomorrow". “Today” is a very indefinite part of what is called the word Always. Or is it more correct to say - never...

The cruel writer Shalamov. Where does it take the reader? Does he know how to get out of here? However, he himself, apparently, knows: his own creative imagination has known, and, therefore, overcame the conditioned closure of space. After all, this is precisely what he claims in his notes “On Prose”:

“The Kolyma stories are an attempt to pose 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.”

Perhaps... an opportunity... Yes, indeed, does it exist where, say, the possibility of looting - pulling a corpse out of a shallow grave, barely stoned, pulling off his underpants and undershirt - is considered a great success: linen can be sold , exchange for bread, maybe even get some tobacco? ("At night ").

The one in the grave is dead. But aren't those who are above his grave in the night, or those in the zone, in the barracks, on the bunk beds, aren't they dead? Isn't a person without moral principles, without memory, without will a dead man?

“I gave a word a long time ago that if they hit me, then this will be the end of my life. I will hit the boss and they will shoot me. Alas, I was a naive boy. When I weakened, my will, my mind also weakened. I easily persuaded myself to endure and did not find the strength of my soul to retaliate, to commit suicide, to protest. I was the most ordinary goner and lived according to the laws of the psyche of goners.

What “moral questions” can be solved by describing this closed grave space, this forever stopped time: talking about beatings that change a person’s gait, his plasticity; about hunger, about dystrophy, about the cold that deprives the mind; about people who have forgotten not only the name of their wife, but who have completely lost their own past; and again about beatings, bullying, executions, which are spoken of as liberation - the sooner the better.

Why do we need to know all this? Do we not remember the words of Shalamov himself:

“Andreev was the representative of the dead. And his knowledge, the knowledge of a dead person, could not be useful to them, still alive.

Cruel artist Varlam Shalamov. Instead of immediately showing the reader direct answers, direct, happy exits from the abyss of evil, Shalamov places us deeper and deeper into this closed otherworldly world, into this death, and not only does not promise an early release, but, it seems, does not seek to give anything at all - at least in the text.

But we no longer live without a clue. We are seriously drawn into this hopeless space. Here you can't get away with talking about the documentary, and hence the temporary, passing problems of stories. Let there be no Stalin and Beria, and the order has changed in Kolyma ... but the stories, here they are, live on. And we live in them together with the characters. Who will say that the problems of "War and Peace" have now been removed - due to the remoteness of the events of 1812? Who will put aside Dante's tencins because, they say, their documentary background has long lost its relevance?

Mankind cannot exist otherwise than by solving the great mysteries of great artists. And we cannot understand our own life, which seems to be far from the Kolyma reality — we cannot understand without unraveling the riddle of Shalamov's texts.

Let's not stop halfway.

It seems that we have only one chance left to escape from the abyss of Shalamov's world - the one and only, but true and well-acquired by literary criticism method: to go beyond literary fact and turn to the facts of history, sociology, politics. The same opportunity that Vissarion Belinsky suggested to Russian literary criticism a hundred and fifty years ago and which has since fed more than one generation of literary scholars and critics: the opportunity to call a literary work an “encyclopedia” of some kind of life and thus secure the right to interpret it one way or another, depending on how we understand "life" itself and that historical "phase" of its development, in which the critic places us together with the author.

This possibility is all the more tempting because Shalamov himself, in one of his self-commentaries, speaks of the state machine, in another, in connection with the Kolyma Tales, he commemorates the historical events of that time - wars, revolutions, the fires of Hiroshima ... Perhaps, if we will weave the Kolyma reality into the historical context, will it be easier for us to find the key to Shalamov's world? Like, there was a time like this: revolutions, wars, fires - they cut down the forest, the chips fly. After all, be that as it may, we analyze the text written after behind real events, not fiction of the author, not fantasy. Not even an artistic exaggeration. It is worth remembering once again: there is nothing in the book that would not find documentary evidence. Where did Varlam Shalamov find such a closed world? After all, other authors who wrote about Kolyma reliably inform us about the normal, natural, or, as psychologists say, “adequate” reactions of prisoners to historical events that took place simultaneously with the terrible events of Kolyma life. No one has ceased to be a man of his time. Kolyma was not cut off from the world and from history:

"- Germans! Fascists! Crossed the border...

Our retreat...

- Can't be! How many years they kept repeating: “We won’t give up our land even five!”

Elgen barracks do not sleep until morning...

No, we are not sawyers now, we are not drivers from the convoy base, we are not nannies from the children's plant. With extraordinary brightness, they suddenly remembered “who is who” ... We argue until we are hoarse. We're trying to get perspective. Not their own, but general. People, desecrated, tormented by four years of suffering, we suddenly recognize ourselves as citizens of our country. For her, for our Motherland, we are trembling now, her rejected children. Someone has already got hold of paper and writes with a pencil stub: “Please direct me to the most dangerous sector of the front. I have been a member of the Communist Party since the age of sixteen”...”

(E. Ginzburg. Steep route. N.-Y. 1985, book 2, p. 17)

Alas, let's say right away, Shalamov does not leave us even this last chance. Well, yes, he recalls historical events ... but how!

“It seems to me that a person of the second half of the twentieth century, a person who survived wars, revolutions, the fires of Hiroshima, the atomic bomb, betrayal, and the most important crowning all(emphasis mine.— L.T.), - the shame of Kolyma and the ovens of Auschwitz, man ... - and after all, every relative died either in the war or in the camp - a person who survived the scientific revolution simply cannot help but approach issues of art differently than before.

Of course, both the author of the Kolyma Tales and his characters have not ceased to be people of their time, of course, in Shalamov’s texts there is both a revolution, and a war, and a story about the “victorious” May 1945 ... But in all cases, all historical events - both great and small - turn out to be only an insignificant everyday episode in a series of other events, the most important- camp.

“Listen,” said Stupnitsky, “the Germans bombed Sevastopol, Kyiv, Odessa.

Andreev listened politely. The message sounded like news of a war in Paraguay or Bolivia. What's the deal with Andreev? Stupnitsky is full, he is a foreman - that's why he is interested in such things as war.

Grisha Grek, the thief, came up.

- What are automata?

- Don't know. Like machine guns, I guess.

“A knife is worse than any bullet,” Grisha said instructively.

- That's right, - said Boris Ivanovich, a prisoner surgeon, - a knife in the stomach is a sure infection, there is always a danger of peritonitis. A gunshot wound is better, cleaner...

“A nail is best,” said Grisha Grek.

- Stand up!

Lined up in rows, went from the mine to the camp ... ".

So we talked about the war. What is in it for a prisoner?.. And the point here is not some biographical insults of the author, who, due to a judicial error, was suspended from participation in the main event of our time, - no, the point is that the author is convinced that it was his tragic fate that made him a witness to the main events. Wars, revolutions, even the atomic bomb are only private atrocities of History - hitherto unseen in centuries and millennia, a grandiose spill of evil.

No matter how strong it is - to the point of prejudice! - the habit of the Russian public consciousness to operate with the categories of dialectics, here they are powerless. Kolyma stories do not want to be woven into the general fabric of "historical development". No political mistakes and abuses, no deviations from the historical path can explain the all-embracing victory of death over life. On the scale of this phenomenon, all sorts of Stalins, Berias and others are only figurants, nothing more. Bigger than Lenin's idea here ...

No, the reality of Shalamov's world is not the "reality of the historical process" - they say, yesterday it was like this, tomorrow it will be different ... Here nothing changes "with the passage of time", nothing disappears from here, nothing goes into non-existence, because the world of "Kolyma Tales" is itself nothingness. And that is why it is simply wider than any conceivable historical reality and cannot be created by the “historical process”. From this nothingness there is nowhere to return, nothing to resurrect. An idyllic ending, sort of like in "war and peace", is unthinkable here. There is no hope that there is another life somewhere. Everything is here, everything is drawn into the dark depths. And the “historical process” itself, with all its “phases,” slowly circles in the funnel of the camp, prison world.

In order to make any kind of digression into recent history, the author and his characters need not strive beyond the camp fence or prison bars. All history is nearby. And the fate of each camp inmate or cellmate is her crown, her main event.

“Prisoners hold themselves differently during arrest. Breaking the distrust of some is a very difficult task. Gradually, day by day they get used to their fate, they begin to understand something.

Alekseev was of a different stock. It was as if he had been silent for many years - and now the arrest, the prison cell returned to him the gift of speech. He found here an opportunity to understand the most important thing, to guess the course of time, to guess his own fate and understand why. To find an 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”.

The very possibility of finding an answer appears because the "course of time" has stopped, fate ends as it should - with death. On the Last Judgment, revolutions, wars, executions float into the prison cell, and only a comparison with non-existence, with eternity, clarifies their true meaning. From this point on, the story has a reverse perspective. In general, isn’t non-existence itself the final answer—the only terrible answer that we can only extract from the entire course of the “historical process,” an answer that drives the ingenuous, deceived by crafty agitators to despair, and makes those who has not yet lost this ability:

“... Alekseev suddenly broke free, jumped onto the windowsill, grabbed the prison bars with both hands and shook it, shaking it, swearing and growling. The black body of Alekseev hung on the grate like a huge black cross. The prisoners tore Alekseev's fingers from the bars, unbent his palms, hurried, because the sentry on the tower had already noticed the fuss at the open window.

And then Alexander Grigoryevich Andreev, General Secretary of the Society of Political Prisoners, said, pointing to a black body sliding from the bars:

Shalamov's reality is an artistic fact of a special kind. The writer himself has repeatedly stated that he is striving for a new prose, for the prose of the future, which will speak not on behalf of the reader, but on behalf of the material itself - “stone, fish and cloud”, in the language of the material. (The artist is not an observer studying events, but their participant, their witness- in the Christian meaning of this word, which is synonymous with the word martyr). The artist - "Pluto, who has risen from hell, and not Orpheus, descending into hell" ("On Prose") And the point is not that before Shalamov there was no master capable of coping with such a creative task, but that there was no still on earth "the most important, crowning all" evil. And only now, when evil had swallowed up all the previous sly hopes for the final victory of the human mind in its historical development, the artist could rightfully declare:

"There is no rational basis for life - that's what our time proves."

But the absence of a reasonable (in other words, logically explainable) foundation in life does not mean the absence of what we, in fact, are looking for - the truth in the artist's texts. This truth, apparently, is not where we are used to looking for it: not in rational theories that “explain” life, and not even in moral maxims, which so habitually interpret what is good and what is evil. How close are the concepts to each other? logics life and harmony peace? Perhaps not the earthly word "logic" will shine against the background of the Kolyma night, but the divine one - LOGOS?

According to Mikhail Geller, who carried out the most complete edition of Kolyma Tales, along with Shalamov's texts, a letter from Frida Vigdorova to Shalamov was circulated in samizdat:

“I have read your stories. They are the most brutal I have ever read. The most bitter and merciless. There are people without a past, without a biography, without memories. It says that adversity does not bring people together. That there a person thinks only about himself, about how to survive. But why do you close the manuscript with faith in honor, goodness, human dignity? It's mysterious, I can't explain it, I don't know how it works, but it is so.

Remember the mysterious whirling of the shellac record and the music at the end of the story "Sentence"? Where does it come from? The sacrament to which Shalamov introduces us is art. And Vigdorova was right: comprehend this sacrament is completely given to no one. But the reader is given something else: by joining the sacrament, strive to understand himself. And this is possible, because not only the events of history, but all of us - the living, the dead, and not yet born - all the characters in Shalamov's stories, the inhabitants of his mysterious world. Let's take a look at ourselves there. Where are we there? Where is our place? The finding of a simple person of his Self in the radiance of art is similar to the materialization of sunlight ...

“A beam of red sunbeams was divided by the binding of the prison bars into several smaller beams; somewhere in the middle of the chamber, beams of light again merged into a continuous stream, red and gold. Dust particles were densely golden in this jet of light. The flies that fell into the strip of light themselves became golden, like the sun. The rays of the sunset beat right on the door, bound with gray glossy iron.

The lock tinkled, a sound that every prisoner, awake and sleeping, hears in a prison cell at any hour. There is no conversation in the chamber that could drown out this sound, there is no sleep in the chamber that would distract from this sound. There is no such thought in the chamber that could... No one can focus on anything in order to miss this sound, not to hear it. Everyone's heart stops when he hears the sound of the castle, the knock of fate on the cell door, on souls, on hearts, on minds. This sound fills everyone with anxiety. And it cannot be confused with any other sound.

The lock rattled, the door opened, and a stream of rays escaped from the chamber. 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 managed to see 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 stream, the movement of the beam, as if it were a living being, their brother and comrade, realized that the sun was again locked up with them.

And only then did everyone see that a man was standing at the door, taking on his wide black chest a stream of golden sunset rays, squinting from the harsh light.

We intended to talk about the sun in Shalamov's stories. Now it's time for that.

The sun of the Kolyma Tales, no matter how bright and hot it may be at times, is always the sun of the dead. And next to him are always other luminaries, much more important:

“There are few spectacles as expressive as the red faces from alcohol, beefy, overweight, fat-heavy figures of the camp authorities in brilliant, like a sun(hereinafter italics are mine. — L.T.), brand new, smelly sheepskin coats ...

Fedorov walked along the face, asked something, and our foreman, bowing respectfully, reported something. Fyodorov yawned, and his golden, well-repaired teeth reflected Sun rays. The sun was already high ... ".

When this helpful sun of the warders sets, or the rainy autumn haze overshadows it, or an impenetrable frosty fog rises, the prisoner will only be left with the already familiar “dim electric sun, polluted by flies and chained with a round lattice ...”

One could say that the lack of sunlight is a purely geographical feature of the Kolyma region. But we have already found out that geography cannot explain anything to us in Shalamov's stories. It's not about seasonal changes in sunrise and sunset times. The point is not that there is not enough heat and light in this world, the point is that there is no movements from darkness to light or vice versa. There is no light of truth, and nowhere to find it. There are no rational causes, and there are no logical consequences. There is no justice. Unlike, say, Dante's hell, the souls imprisoned here do not bear reasonable punishments, they do not know their own guilt, and therefore they do not know either repentance or the hope of ever, having atoned for their guilt, to change their position ...

“The late Alighieri would have created the tenth circle of hell out of this,” Anna Akhmatova once said. And she was not the only one who was inclined to correlate the Russian reality of the 20th century with the pictures of Dante's horrors. But with such a ratio, it became obvious every time that the last horrors, the camp ones, were stronger than those that seemed extremely possible to the greatest artist of the XIV century - and you can’t cover it with nine circles. And, apparently, understanding this, Akhmatova does not look for anything similar in the literary texts already created, but evokes the genius of Dante, brings him closer, makes him a recently departed contemporary, calling him "the late Alighieri" - and, it seems, only such a contemporary can comprehend everything recently experienced by humanity.

The point, of course, is not to follow a rational, even numerical order, in which the nine circles of hell appear to us, then seven - purgatory, then nine heavenly heavens ... It is the rational ideas about the world, revealed by the text of the Divine Comedy, structure of this text, are questioned, if not completely refuted by the experience of the 20th century. And in this sense, the worldview of Varlam Shalamov is a direct denial of the philosophical ideas of Dante Alighieri.

Recall that in the orderly world of The Divine Comedy, the sun is an important metaphor. And the “carnal” sun, in the depths of which there are shining, radiating light, pouring flame souls of philosophers and theologians (King Solomon, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi), and the “Sun of Angels”, as the Lord appears to us. One way or another, Sun, Light, Reason are poetic synonyms.

But if in Dante's poetic consciousness the sun never fades away (even in hell, when there is dense darkness all around), if the path from hell is the path to the luminaries and, having gone to them, the hero, on occasion, does not forget to notice how and in what direction his shadow lies , then in the artistic world of Shalamov there is neither light nor shadow at all, there is no familiar and generally understandable boundary between them. Here, for the most part, thick dead twilight - a twilight without hope and without truth. In general, without any source of light, it is lost forever (and was it?). And there is no shadow here, because there is no sunlight - in the usual sense of these words. The prison sun, the camp sun of the Kolyma Tales are not at all the same thing, Sun. It is not present here as a natural source of light and life. for all, but as a kind of secondary inventory, if not belonging to death, then it has nothing to do with life.

No, after all, there comes a moment - rarely, but still happens - when the bright, and sometimes hot sun breaks into the world of the Kolyma prisoner. However, it never shines for everyone. From the dull twilight of the camp world, like a strong beam directed from somewhere outside, it always snatches someone's one figure (say, the "first Chekist" Alekseev, already familiar to us) or someone's one face, is reflected in the eyes of one person. And always - always! - this is the figure or face, or eyes of the finally doomed.

“...I was completely calm. And I was in no hurry. The sun was too hot - it burned her cheeks, weaned from bright light, from fresh air. I sat down by a tree. It was nice to sit outside, breathe in the elastic wonderful air, the smell of blooming rose hips. My head is spinning...

I was sure of the severity of the sentence - killing was a tradition of those years.

Although we have quoted the same story twice here, the sun that illuminates the face of the doomed prisoner is by no means the same as that which, a few pages earlier, was reflected in the coats of the guards and in the golden teeth of the guards. This distant, as if unearthly light, falling on the face of a person who is ready to die, is well known to us from other stories. There is a certain peace in it, perhaps a sign of reconciliation with Eternity:

“The fugitive lived in the bathhouse of the village for three whole days, and finally, shorn, shaved, washed, well-fed, he was taken away by the “operative” to the investigation, the outcome of which could only be execution. The fugitive himself, of course, knew about this, but he was an experienced, indifferent prisoner, who had long ago crossed that line of life in prison, when every person becomes a fatalist and lives “with the flow”. Near him all the time there were escorts, “guards”, they didn’t let him talk to anyone. Every evening he sat on the porch of the bathhouse and looked at the cherry sunset. The fire of the evening sun rolled into his eyes, and the eyes of the fugitive seemed to be burning - a very beautiful sight.

Of course, we could turn to the Christian poetic tradition and say that this directed light of love meets the soul leaving this world... But no, we remember Shalamov's statement very well: "God is dead..." And one more thing:

“I lost faith in God a long time ago, at the age of six ... And I am proud that from the age of six to sixty I did not resort to his help either in Vologda, or in Moscow, or in Kolyma.”

And yet, despite these claims, the absence of God in the artistic picture otherworldly Kolyma world is not at all a simple and self-evident fact. This theme with its contradictions, as it were, constantly disturbs the author, again and again attracts attention. There is no God... but there are believers in God, and it turns out that these are the most worthy people of those who had to meet in Kolyma:

“The non-religiousness in which I lived my conscious life did not make me a Christian. But I have never seen more worthy people than religious people in the camps. Corruption seized the souls of all, and only the religious held on. So it was fifteen and five years ago.”

But at the same time, having spoken about the spiritual stamina of the "religious", Shalamov, as it were, passes by, not showing much attention to the nature of this stamina, as if everything is clear to him (and, presumably, to the reader) and this way of "holding on" is of little interest to him. . (“Is there only a religious way out of human tragedies?” asks the hero-narrator in the story “The Unconverted”).

Moreover, Shalamov, as if by a specially calculated method, removes traditional ideas about God and religion from his artistic system. It is precisely this goal that the story “The Cross” serves - a story about an old blind priest, although he does not live in Kolyma and not even in a camp, but still in the same Soviet conditions of constant deprivation, humiliation, direct bullying. Left with the same old and sick wife like himself, completely without funds, the priest breaks, cuts a golden cross for sale. But not because he lost his faith, but because "God is not in this." The story does not seem to belong to the “Kolyma Tales” either by the setting or the plot, but according to a subtle artistic calculation, the author included it in the general corpus and turns out to be extremely important in the composition of the volume. At the entrance to the other world, it is like a sign of prohibition for any traditional humanistic values, including the Christian one. When it is said that there is no rational basis in this life, it means the Divine Mind too - or even such a mind in the first place!

But at the same time, here is a completely different turn of the theme: one of the lyrical heroes of Shalamov, an undoubted alter ego, is named Krist. If the author is looking for a "non-religious way out", then what exactly attracts him to the Son of Man? Is there any thought here about a redemptive sacrifice? And if there is, then whose victim is the author, the hero, all those who died in Kolyma? And what sins are atoned for? Isn’t it the same temptation, since Dante’s times (or even more ancient — from the times of St. Augustine, or even from Plato’s, pre-Christian times?) to build a just world order — fair according to human understanding — a temptation that turned into “the shame of Kolyma and the ovens of Auschwitz” ?

And if we are talking about redemption, then “in whose name”? Whose, if God is not in the artistic system of Varlam Shalamov?

We are not talking about an ordinary person, not about the religious views of one of the thousands of Kolyma residents, finding out who was easier to survive in the camps - a "religious" or an atheist. No, we are interested in the creative method of the artist, the author of Kolyma Tales.

Shalamov wrote, as if objecting to the doubters or those who could not see this triumph. But if good triumphs, then what is it, this very good? It’s not a science to fasten your fly in the Kolyma frost! ..

Shalamov deliberately rejects the literary tradition with all its fundamental values. If in the center of the artistic world of Dante Alighieri is the Light of the Divine Mind, and this world is arranged rationally, logically, in fairness, and Reason triumphs, then in the center of Shalamov’s artistic system ... yes, however, is there anything at all here that could be called center, system-forming beginning? Shalamov, as it were, rejects everything that he offers him as such began literary tradition: the concept of God, the idea of ​​a reasonable order of the world, dreams of social justice, the logic of legal law ... What remains for a person when nothing remains for him? What remains artist when the tragic experience of the past century forever buried the ideological foundations of traditional art? What new prose he will offer the reader - is he obliged to offer?!

“Why can’t I, a professional who has been writing since childhood, published since the beginning of the thirties, and thought about prose for ten years, add nothing new to the story of Chekhov, Platonov, Babel and Zoshchenko? Shalamov wrote, asking the same questions that are now tormenting us. - Russian prose did not stop at Tolstoy and Bunin. The last great Russian novel is Bely's Petersburg. But Petersburg, no matter how colossal its influence on the Russian prose of the twenties, on the prose of Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Vesely, is also only a stage, only a chapter in the history of literature. And in our time, the reader is disappointed in Russian classical literature. The collapse of her humanistic ideas, the historical crime that led to the Stalinist camps, to the ovens of Auschwitz, proved that art and literature are zero. When confronted with real life, this is the main motive, the main question of time. The scientific and technological revolution does not answer this question. She cannot answer. The probabilistic aspect and motivation give many-sided, many-valued answers, while the human reader needs a yes or no answer, using the same two-valued system that cybernetics wants to apply to the study of all mankind in its past, present and future.

There is no rational basis for life - that is what our time proves. The fact that Chernyshevsky's "Favorites" are being sold for five kopecks, saving waste paper from Auschwitz, is highly symbolic. Chernyshevsky ended when the hundred-year era completely discredited itself. We do not know what is behind God - behind faith, but behind unbelief we clearly see - everyone in the world - what is worth. Therefore, such a craving for religion, surprising for me, the heir to completely different beginnings.

There is a deep meaning in the reproach that Shalamov throws at the literature of humanistic ideas. And this reproach was deserved not only by Russian literature of the 19th century, but also by all European literature - sometimes Christian in outward signs (well, after all, it is said: love your neighbor as yourself), but seductive in its essence, the tradition of dreams, which always boiled down to one thing. : to take away from God and transfer into the hands of the human creations of History. Everything for man, everything for the good of man! It was these dreams - through the utopian ideas of Dante, Campanella, Fourier and Owen, through the "Communist Manifesto", through the dreams of Vera Pavlovna, "plowed" Lenin's soul - that led to Kolyma and Auschwitz ... This sinful tradition - with all possible consequences sin - Dostoevsky discerned. Not without reason, at the very beginning of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, the name of Dante is mentioned as if by chance ...

But art is not a school of philosophy and politics. Or at least not only or even not so much the school. And the "late Alighieri" would still rather create the tenth circle of hell than the program of a political party.

“Dante's poetry is characterized by all types of energy known to modern science,” wrote Osip Mandelstam, a sensitive researcher of the Divine Comedy, “The unity of light, sound and matter constitutes its inner nature. Reading Dante is, first of all, an endless labor, which, as far as we are successful, moves us away from the goal. If the first reading causes only shortness of breath and healthy fatigue, then stock up for the subsequent pair of indestructible Swiss shoes with nails. The question really comes to my mind, how many soles, how many cowhide soles, how many sandals Alighieri wore out during his poetic work, traveling along the goat paths of Italy.

Logical formulas and political, religious, etc. doctrine is the result of only the "first reading" of literary works, only the first acquaintance with art. Then art itself begins - not formulas, but music ... Shocked by the dependence of the Kolyma reality on texts that seem to be in no way connected with it, realizing that the “shame of Kolyma” is a derivative of these texts, Shalamov creates a “new prose”, which from the very The beginning does not contain any doctrines and formulas - nothing that could be easily grasped at the "first reading". It seems to remove the very possibility of "first reading" - there is neither healthy shortness of breath, nor satisfaction. On the contrary, the first reading leaves only bewilderment: what is it about? What's with the music? Is it possible that the shellac plate in the story "Sentence" is the system-forming metaphor of "Kolyma Tales"? Doesn't he put the Sun, not Reason, not Justice at the center of his artistic world, but just a hoarse shellac record with some kind of symphonic music?

Masters of the "first readings", we are not immediately able to discern the relationship between the "late Alighieri" and the late Shalamov. Hear the kinship and unity of their music.

“If we had learned to hear Dante,” wrote Mandelstam, “we would have heard the maturation of the clarinet and trombone, we would have heard the transformation of the viola into a violin and the lengthening of the horn valve. And we would be listeners of how a foggy core of the future homophonic three-part orchestra is formed around the lute and theorbo.

“There are thousands of truths in the world (and truth-truths, and truth-justices) and there is only one truth of talent. Just like there is one kind of immortality - art.

Having finished the analysis, we ourselves must now seriously question our work or even completely cross it out ... The fact is that the very text of the Kolyma Tales, the text of those publications that we referred to in our work, already raises doubts. It's not that anyone is not sure whether Varlam Shalamov wrote this or that story - it is, thank God, undoubtedly. But what genre is the entire collection of his "Kolyma" works, how large is its text, where does it begin and where does it end, what is the composition - this not only does not become clear with the passage of time, but, as it were, even becomes more and more incomprehensible.

We have already referred to the nine-hundred-page volume of the Paris edition of Kolyma Tales. The volume opens with the actual cycle "Kolyma Tales", here called "The First Death". This cycle is a harsh introduction to the artistic world of Shalamov. It is here that we first find both a deafly closed space and a stopped time - nothingness- Kolyma camp "reality". (It is here that the deathbed indifference, the mental stupefaction that comes after torture by hunger, cold, and beatings is first spoken of.) This cycle is a guide to that Kolyma non-existence, where the events of the following books will unfold.

A guide to the souls of the inhabitants of this hell - the prisoners. It is here that you understand that to survive (to stay alive, to save life - and to teach the reader how to survive) is not at all the task of the author, which he solves together with his "lyrical hero" ... If only because none of the characters already did not survive - everyone (and the reader along with everyone) is immersed in Kolyma non-existence.

This cycle is, as it were, an "exposition" of the author's artistic principles, well, like "Hell" in the "Divine Comedy". And if we are talking about the six cycles of stories known today as a single work - and this is precisely what everyone who interpreted Shalamov's compositional principles tends to - then it is impossible to imagine a different beginning of the whole grandiose epic, as soon as the cycle entitled in the Paris volume (and which, by the way, is subject to additional discussion) "The First Death".

But now, in Moscow, a volume of Shalamov's stories "The Left Bank" (Sovremennik, 1989) is finally coming out... and without the first cycle! You can't imagine worse. Why, what guided the publishers? No explanation...

In the same year, but in a different publishing house, another book of Shalamov's stories was published - "The Resurrection of the Larch". Thank God, it begins with the first cycle, with the Kolyma Tales proper, but then (again, worse than ever!) are heavily and completely arbitrarily truncated, by half or more, The Spade Artist and The Left Bank. And here they have changed places both in comparison with the Paris edition, and in comparison with the just published collection "Left Bank". Why, on what basis?

But no, only at first glance it seems incomprehensible why all these manipulations are performed. It's easy to figure it out: a different sequence of stories - a different artistic impression. Shalamov is strenuously forced to conform to the traditional (and repeatedly refuted with such force and certainty) principle of the Russian humanistic school: “from darkness to light” ... But it is enough to look back a few dozen lines back to see that this principle, in the opinion of Shalamov himself , there is something decidedly incompatible with his "new prose".

I. Sirotinskaya herself, the publisher of both books, seems to express the right thoughts: “The stories of V.T. Shalamov are connected by an inseparable unity: this is the fate, the soul, the thoughts of the author himself. These are the branches of a single tree, streams of a single creative stream - epics about Kolyma. The plot of one story grows into another story, some characters appear and act under the same or different names. Andreev, Golubev, Krist are the incarnations of the author himself. There is no fiction in this tragic epic. The author believed that the story about this otherworldly world is incompatible with fiction and should be written in a different language. But not in the language of psychological prose of the 19th century, already inadequate to the world of the 20th century, the century of Hiroshima and concentration camps.

It's like that! But after all, artistic language is not only, and often not so much words, but rhythm, harmony, composition of an artistic text. How, understanding that "the plot of one story develops into another story," one cannot understand that the plot of one cycle develops into another! They cannot be arbitrarily reduced and rearranged. Moreover, there is a sketched by the writer himself order arrangement of stories and cycles - it was used by Parisian publishers.

With respect and love thinking about Shalamov, we transfer our respect to those who, by the will of the artist, bequeathed to be his executors. Their rights are inviolable... But managing the text of a brilliant artist is an impossible task for one person. The task of qualified specialists should be the preparation of the publication of the scientific edition of Kolyma Tales - in full accordance with the creative principles of V. Shalamov, so clearly set out in the recently published letters and notes (for which I.P. Sirotinskaya kudos) ...

Now that there seems to be no censorship interference, God forbid that we, contemporaries, offend the memory of the artist by considerations of political or commercial conjuncture. Life and work of V.T. Shalamova is an expiatory sacrifice for our common sins. His books are the spiritual treasure of Russia. This is how they should be treated.

M. "October". 1991, No. 3, pp. 182-195

Notes

• 1. "New World, 1989, No. 12, p. 60
• 2. Ibid., p. 61
• 3. Ibid., p. 64
• 4. Shalamov V. Resurrection of larch. "Thermometer Grishka Logun"
• 5. Shalamov V. Resurrection of larch. "Brave Eyes"
• 6. A.S. Pushkin. PSS, vol. VIII (I), p. 227.
• 7. Ibid., vol. VIII (II), p. 334.
• 8. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Carpenters"
• 9. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Tatar mullah and clean air"
• 10. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Bread"
• 11. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Golden Taiga"
• 12. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Berries"
• 13. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Sherry brandy"
• 14. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "At night"
• 15. Shalamov V."About prose"
• 16. Shalamov V. Resurrection of larch "Two meetings"
• 17. Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. "Typhoid Quarantine"
• 18. "New World", 1989, No. 12, p. 60
• 19. Shalamov V. Spade artist. "June"
• 20. Shalamov V.
• 21. Shalamov V. Spade artist. "First Chekist"
• 22. "New World", 1989. No. 12, p. 61
• 23. By the time the article was published, approx. shalamov.ru
• 24. In book. V. Shalamov "Kolyma stories" Foreword by M. Geller, 3rd ed., p.13. YMCA - PRESS, Paris, 1985
• 25. Shalamov V. Spade artist. "First Chekist"
• 26. Shalamov V. Left Coast. "My process"
• 27. See L. Chukovskaya. Workshop of human resurrections... "Referendum". Journal of Independent Opinions. M. April 1990. No. 35. page 19.
• 28. Shalamov V. Left Coast. "My process"
• 29. Shalamov V. Spade artist. "Green prosecutor"
• 30. "The Fourth Vologda" - Our heritage, 1988, No. 4, p. 102
• 31. Shalamov V. Spade artist. "Courses"
• 32. The plot of the story is based on the life events of the writer's father T.N. Shalamova.
• 33. "New World", 1989, No. 2, p. 61
• 34. In book. O. Mandelstam. Word and culture. - M. Soviet writer 1987, p. 112
• 35. Ibid., p. 114
• 36. "New World", 1989, No. 12, p. 80
• 37. I. Sirotinskaya. About the author. In book. V. Shalamova "Left Bank". - M., Sovremennik, 1989, p. 557.
• 38. We are talking about the publication: Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. Foreword by M. Geller. - Paris: YMKA-press, 1985.

Varlam Shalamov

Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of the human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from non-existence disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the questioner: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.

What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boilermaker - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could be kicked out - but where? The taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could hardly drag my legs, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed to me endless, and I sat down to rest more than once. I still remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried now on my shoulder, now by drag, holding by one handle, seemed to me a load of incredible weight.

I have never been able to boil water in time, to get titanium to boil for dinner.

But none of the workers from the freemen, all of them were yesterday's prisoners, did not pay attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - trimmings, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a "free" cauldron. No, our freemen didn't have yesterday's soup.

In our tent there were two guns, two shotguns. Partridges were not afraid of people, and at first they beat the bird right from the threshold of the tent. Prey was baked whole in the ashes of a fire or boiled when carefully plucked. Down-feather - on the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra money from the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted, plucked partridges were boiled in tin cans - three liters, hung from the fires. From these mysterious birds, I have never found any remnants. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, sucked out all the bird bones without a trace. It was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

End of introductory segment.

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Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of the human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from non-existence disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the questioner: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.

What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boilermaker - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could be kicked out - but where? The taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could hardly drag my legs, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed to me endless, and I sat down to rest more than once. I still remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried now on my shoulder, now by drag, holding by one handle, seemed to me a load of incredible weight.

I have never been able to boil water in time, to get titanium to boil for dinner.

But none of the workers from the freemen, all of them were yesterday's prisoners, did not pay attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We

...

Here is an excerpt from the book.
Only part of the text is open for free reading (restriction of the copyright holder). If you liked the book, the full text can be obtained from our partner's website.

A maxim in Latin is a thought. This is the first word that resurrected in the reviving consciousness of Varlam Shalamov, when he returned to life from half-death, from dystrophy. The first word from the natural for him, the Russian intellectual, the world of images and concepts. He writes about this in a story that is called "Sentence".

This story is dedicated to his great friend, N.Ya. Mandelstam, the widow of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in transit on the eve of Kolyma from the same dystrophy, Mandelstam, to whom Shalamov dedicated "Sherri-Brandy" - about the dying of the poet. Shalamov knew how poetry was killed in 20th-century Russia.

In world history, no one except Shalamov has ever made such a limiting, last state of a person, from which circumstances have completely removed all false values ​​and appearances, and with which a completely false society covers and disguises, as a fact and the subject of great literature, as a fact and the subject of great literature universal masquerade ball, then the first and last thing that is actually in the person himself is his true, unfamiliar to us today, human face.

Shalamov is the only one in all world literature who completely and on the basis of the most complex personal experience saw and showed in a person that innermost that, by the will of time and epoch, was revealed to him and was given precisely as a lofty task of revealing the truth - the last, completely naked roots and rods of a person’s being inside himself - in a transcendental situation on the verge of a matter of life and death. In the last hopeless and inhuman conditions, beyond which there is no longer any physical and mental limit - no protection with masks. Everything is completely transparent and everything is completely real. No illusions.

Everything that remains in a person absolutely beyond all limits of the shaky and too fragile framework of that false splendor of the social masquerade that usually surrounds him, as self-deception and a cheap fake of a diligent American smile, and which, as something external and artificial in relation to the deep core and to the center of personality, changes absolutely nothing in the person himself and protects absolutely nothing at the last frontier of the great test of personal humanity - the test of one's own Face, Personality.

And here it is immediately and inevitably revealed that the king is naked.

About the love for which still from the beginning of history, a person accepts anything, any feelings and passions, without ever knowing under the guise of false moral values ​​and false social stereotypes, than in reality at that last frontier of testingis herself , Shalamov wrote:

"Love has not returned to me. Oh, how far love is from envy, from fear, from anger. How little people need love. Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, returns last, and whether it returns "But not only indifference, envy and fear witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned before pity for people."

About the word that arose in the consciousness resurrecting from half-death, Shalamov wrote as follows:
« There was something Roman, solid, Latin in this word. Ancient Rome for my childhood was the history of political struggle, the struggle of people, and Ancient Greece was the realm of art. Although in ancient Greece there were politicians and murderers, in ancient Rome there were many people of art. But my childhood sharpened, simplified, narrowed and divided these two very different worlds. A maxim is a Roman word. For a week I did not understand what the word "maxim" meant. I whispered this word, shouted it out, frightened and made the neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from heaven, clues, explanations, translations... And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy. Fear - because I was afraid of returning to that world where there was no return for me. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.

Shalamov created only literary evidence of such a complex phenomenon as the absolutely naked core of a person, uncovered by absolutely no appearances and conditional frames, devoid of all his own masks. He only showed the man himself on the verge of bare biology, when everything fake, superficial is torn from him. But he did not offer any solutions, and, in fact, did not know what the solution was.

That is why we are even physically so uncomfortable, painful and painful in his stories and after them.

After those years, Shalamov remained until the end of his life and was a thoroughly ill person, and spent the end of his life in a boarding school for the disabled. His last and greatest love remained with him until the very end, Shalamov's close friend - Irina Pavlovna Sirotinskaya, who had a family and children, but who, although she refused his marriage proposal, nevertheless did not leave him out of gratitude and recognition for all that he did - for all his great human honesty and honor. Writing in the camp came at the cost of great danger and great sacrifice, but it was necessary to save and carry out scraps of drafts in order to convey this story to us.

On January 11, 2011, an outstanding professional archivist, close friend of Varlam ShalamovIrina Pavlovna Sirotinskaya, successor, custodian and publisher of his legacy, who became the first member of the Board of Trustees of our National Style Magazine SOBAKI DANDY.

And she entered the Board of Trustees of the magazine precisely for the reasonfundamental importance of the discovery, clearly indicated inthis very story "Sentence", and through which Shalamov in hisultimate exposure of rods involuntarily passed in practice. discoveries thatpity for animals returns before pity for people and even love. That the obligatory feeling of any living beings, and not just people, precedes all other feelings. And that it is not only impossible to bypass it or jump over it on the way to eliminating the worldwide deficit of love, but you will also have to go to it. inevitably return and inevitably include in the upbringing and building of any social relationships as a basic feeling of all life in the universe. And that without it, even love itself is impossible.

I am sincerely sorry that Irina Pavlovna will never read this preface about Shalamov. She was always very worried about the legacy of Shalamov (legally remaining the sole legal heir), held and organized many conferences dedicated to his work in different countries, published many of his books. Her intonation never had the slightest hint of reverence or pathos, but deep warmth and devotion were hidden in it, with which her words about Varlam Shalamov were always permeated.

In her, in this modest "Russian Madonna Laura", as she was nicknamed in Italy by the name of her beloved Petrarch for Shalamov's last to the end and deep love for her, there was something genuinely bright, lively, sincere and real, which sharply distinguished her from most of her contemporaries.

Shalamov's experience is infinitely painful, but still too underestimated. And its true meaning has not yet been comprehended to the end by the general experience of mankind, boundlessly suppressed already today by that false, fanatical splendor and masquerade of artificial society, which today almost completely severed the inseparable ties between man and the organics of being. And which you need to start linking again today. Realizing that today we are already on this - the most formidable - verge of exposing the roots and cores of being in ourselves, still cleverly disguised by a false society, but which, not in a childish way, absolutely not in favor of a person, are exposed from the slightest breath of any life problem. And that already today, right now and here, we are daily tested by our own humanity. A test by its very roots and rods - namely, extremely naked ones - which we have long been invited to begin to rebuild and change consciously, building this great inner temple higher and higher until the moment when the great power of immortality is sure to manifest in him, as promised by the inevitably true prophecies. But the temple is precisely internal, and not at all external and collapsing, perverted by the same golden Phanaberian false splendor and human fabrications, so that the king, at the hour of his last Rubicon and Revelation, would again be naked in the most important thing - in the roots and rods.

As the Apocrypha says: "Jesus said: When you get naked And Not be ashamed and take your clothes, put their at your feet, like little children, trample their, Then [you will see] the son of the one who is alive, and you will not be afraid" (Apocrypha of the ancient Christians, Gospel of Thomas).

Today this unique experience is underestimated. Yes, it did not bring an answer in itself, until it became general, but it brought a problem and a direction. But we must try to understand that tomorrow the comprehension of this invaluable experience may no longer help - it will be too late to look for a way out.

FOREWORD: DOGS DANDY NEWS

V. Shalamov

Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunks, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from nothingness disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.

What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boilermaker - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could be kicked out - but where? The taiga is far away, our village, "business trip" in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could hardly drag my legs, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed to me endless, and I sat down to rest more than once. I still remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried now on my shoulder, now by drag, holding by one handle, seemed to me a load of incredible weight.

I have never been able to boil water in time, to get titanium to boil for dinner.

But none of the workers from the freemen, they were all yesterday's prisoners, did not pay attention to whether the water was boiling or not.

Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - trimmings, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a "free" cauldron. No, our freemen didn't have yesterday's soup.

In our tent there were two guns, two shotguns. Partridges were not afraid of people, and at first they beat the bird right from the threshold of the tent. Prey was baked whole in the ashes of a fire or boiled when carefully plucked. Down-feather - on the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra money from the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted, plucked partridges were boiled in tin cans - three liters, hung from the fires. From these mysterious birds, I have never found any remnants. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, sucked out all the bones without a trace. It was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

I have never tasted a morsel of these partridges. Mine were berries, grass roots, rations. And I didn't die. I began to look more and more indifferently, without malice, at the cold red sun, at the mountains, the loaches, where everything: rocks, bends of the stream, larches, poplars - was angular and unfriendly. In the evenings, a cold fog rose from the river, and there was not an hour in the taiga days when I would be warm.

Frostbitten fingers and toes ached, buzzed with pain. The bright pink skin of the fingers remained pink, easily vulnerable. The fingers were forever wrapped in some kind of dirty rags, protecting the hand from a new wound, from pain, but not from infection. Pus oozed from the big toes on both feet, and there was no end to the pus.

I was awakened by a blow to the rail. They were removed from work by a blow to the rail. After eating, I immediately lay down on the bunk, without undressing, of course, and fell asleep. I could see the tent in which I slept and lived as if through a fog - people were moving somewhere, loud swearing arose, fights broke out, there was an instant silence before a dangerous blow. The fights quickly faded away - on their own, no one held back, did not separate, the fight motors simply stalled - and there was a cold night silence with a pale high sky through the holes in the canvas ceiling, with snoring, wheezing, groans, coughing and unconscious curses of the sleeping people.

One night I felt that I heard these groans and wheezing. The sensation was sudden, like a revelation, and did not please me. Later, recalling this moment of surprise, I realized that the need for sleep, oblivion, unconsciousness became less - I slept well, as Moisei Moiseevich Kuznetsov, our blacksmith, a smart one of the smart girls, said.

There was persistent pain in the muscles. What kind of muscles I had then - I don’t know, but the pain in them was, it angered me, did not allow me to distract myself from the body. Then I had something other than anger or anger that exists with anger. There was indifference - fearlessness. I realized that it didn't matter to me whether they would beat me or not, whether they would give me dinner and rations or not. And although in reconnaissance, on an unescorted business trip, they didn’t beat me - they beat me only at the mines - I, remembering the mine, measured my courage by the measure of the mine. With this indifference, this fearlessness, some kind of bridge was thrown over from death. The consciousness that there would be no beating, no beating and no beating, gave birth to new strengths, new feelings.

Indifference was followed by fear - not a very strong fear - the fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of a boiled fryer, a high cold sky and aching pain in worn muscles. I realized that I was afraid to leave here for the mine. I'm afraid that's all. I have never looked for the best of good in my entire life. The meat on my bones grew day by day. Envy was the name of the next feeling that came back to me. I envied my dead comrades - people who died in the thirty-eighth year. I envied the living neighbors who are chewing something, the neighbors who are smoking something. I did not envy the boss, the foreman, the foreman - it was a different world.

Love didn't come back to me. Ah, how far love is from envy, from fear, from anger. How little love people need. Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, comes back last, and does it come back? But not only indifference, envy and fear witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned before pity for people.

As the weakest in this world of pits and exploratory ditches, I worked with a topographer - I dragged a rail and a theodolite behind the topographer. It happened that for the speed of movement the topographer would fit the theodolite straps behind his back, and I got only the lightest rail, painted with numbers. The topographer was one of the prisoners. With him for courage - that summer there were many fugitives in the taiga - the topographer carried a small-caliber rifle, asking for weapons from his superiors. But the rifle only got in the way. And not only because it was an extra thing in our difficult journey. We sat down to rest in a clearing, and the topographer, playing with a small-caliber rifle, took aim at a red-breasted bullfinch, which flew up to take a closer look at the danger, to take it aside. If necessary, sacrifice your life. The female bullfinch was sitting somewhere on her eggs - only this explained the insane courage of the bird. The topographer raised his rifle, and I moved the muzzle aside.

Put away your gun!
- Yes, what are you? Crazy?
"Leave the bird, and that's it."
- I'll report to the boss.
“To hell with you and your boss.

But the topographer did not want to quarrel and did not say anything to the chief. I realized that something important had returned to me.

For many years I have not seen newspapers and books, and long ago I taught myself not to regret this loss. All fifty of my neighbors in the tent, in the ragged canvas tent, felt the same way - not a single newspaper, not a single book appeared in our barracks. The higher authorities - the foreman, the head of intelligence, the foreman - descended into our world without books.

My tongue, a rough mine tongue, was poor, as poor were the feelings that still lived near the bones. Rise, work divorce, lunch, end of work, lights out, citizen boss, let me turn, shovel, pit, I obey, drill, pick, it's cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, rations, leave a smoke - two I managed dozens of words for more than a year. Half of those words were swear words. There was an anecdote in my youth, in childhood, how a Russian managed in a story about a trip abroad with just one word in different intonation combinations. The richness of Russian swearing, its inexhaustible offensiveness, was revealed to me not in childhood and not in youth. A joke with a curse here looked like the language of some institute girl. But I didn't look for other words. I was happy that I didn't have to search for any other words. Whether these other words exist, I did not know. I did not know how to 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 completely unsuitable 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 laughed.

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

Maxim!
- That's psycho!
-- Psycho and there is! You are a foreigner, right? asked the mining engineer Vronsky, the same Vronsky, caustically. "Three tobaccos".

Vronsky, let me smoke.
-- No, I do not have.
- Well, at least three tobaccos.
- Three tobaccos? Please.

From a pouch full of shag, three tobaccos were extracted with a dirty fingernail.
-- Foreigner? - The question translated our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, consequences and extensions of the term.

But I didn't care about Vronsky's provocative question. The find was too huge.
-- A maxim!
- Psycho and there is.

The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person went into oblivion, into a dead world. Is it dead? Even the stone did not seem dead to me, not to mention the grass, trees, river. The river was not only the embodiment of life, not only a symbol of life, but life itself. Her eternal movement, incessant roar, some kind of conversation, her own business, which makes the water run downstream through the headwind, breaking through the rocks, crossing the steppes, meadows. The river, which changed the sun-dried, bare bed and, as a barely visible thread of water, made its way somewhere in the stones, obeying its eternal duty, like a stream that had lost hope for the help of heaven - for saving rain. The first thunderstorm, the first downpour - and the water changed its banks, broke rocks, threw trees up and rushed furiously down the same eternal road.

Maxim! I myself did not believe myself, I was afraid, falling asleep, that during the night this word that had returned to me would disappear. But the word did not disappear.

Maxim. Let them rename the river on which our village stood, our business trip "Rio-rita". Why is it better than "Sentence"? The bad taste of the owner of the earth - the cartographer introduced Rio-ritu on the world maps. And it can't be fixed.

There was something Roman, solid, Latin in this word. Ancient Rome for my childhood was the history of political struggle, the struggle of people, and Ancient Greece was the realm of art. Although in ancient Greece there were politicians and murderers, in ancient Rome there were many people of art. But my childhood sharpened, simplified, narrowed and divided these two very different worlds. A maxim is a Roman word. For a week I did not understand what the word "maxim" meant. I whispered this word, shouted it out, frightened and made the neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from heaven, clues, explanations, translations. And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy of Fear - because I was afraid of returning to this world, where there was no return for me. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.

It took many days until I learned to call from the depths of the brain more and more new words, one after another. Each came with difficulty, each arose suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words did not come back in a stream. Each returned singly, without a convoy of other familiar words, and arose first in the language, and then in the brain.

And then the day came when everyone, all fifty workers quit their jobs and ran to the village, to the river, getting out of their pits, ditches, leaving unsawn trees, undercooked soup in the boiler. Everyone ran faster than me, but I hobbled in time, helping myself in this run down the mountain with my hands.

The chief came from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On a huge larch stump that stood at the entrance to the tent, there was a gramophone. The gramophone played, overcoming the hiss of the needle, playing some kind of symphonic music.

And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraers, foremen and hard workers And the boss stood nearby And his expression was as if he had written this music for us, for our remote taiga business trip The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years.

IT WOULD BE WRONG TO REDUCE THE ALL SIGNIFICANCE OF SHALAMOV'S EXPERIENCE ONLY TO PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, SINCE PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ARE A DIRECT CONTINUATION OF SPIRITUAL, AND THERE IS NO SPIRIT ON EARTH TODAY.

FOR THE SPIRIT IS THE ONLY CONDITION FROM THE BEGINNING OF CREATION WHICH WILL ALLOW MAN TO LIVE AN INDEPENDENT LIFE IN NATURE, A LIFE WITHOUT NEEDS. THIS IS CONFIRMED BY ALL THE ANCIENT DOCTRINES AND PRACTICES. BUT HUMANITY HAS NEVER TRYED TO FOLLOW THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE WHOLE HISTORY, WITHOUT TASTING WHAT IT IS.

However, it is impossible here, in connection with the main features of Shalamov’s work, to ignore the facts confirming that society only continues to cover the truth that he himself, by and large, is only a fake masquerade mask, behind which is completely different - its unreliability and THE FULL INSECURE OF HUMAN IN THIS WORLD, WHICH THEY HAVE NOT COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDED THEM. LET'S REMEMBER THE LAST, UNEXPECTED FOR MOST, JUST RINGED REMINDER ALARM CLOCK, WHICH MAN RECEIVED FROM NATURE, AGAIN EXPOSING THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY - JAPAN.

IS IT TIME FOR MAN TO WAKE UP?

REFERENCE:

“Despite the impression you give, less than 8% of the world's undernourished people are left starving as a result of emerging emergencies due to the media. Few people realize that over one billion hungry people on our planet do not make headlines. , which is equal to the population of the United States, Japan, and the European Union combined.They are people of all ages, from infancy, whose mothers cannot produce enough breast milk, to the elderly, who have no relatives who could They are unemployed urban slum dwellers, landless farmers cultivating foreign land, orphaned children of AIDS patients and patients who need special intensive nutrition in order to survive.

4 - Where do the hungry live?

The percentage of people who go hungry is highest in east, central and southern Africa. About three quarters of undernourished people live in rural areas of developing countries with the lowest per capita incomes. However, the number of hungry people in cities has also increased recently.

Of the one billion hungry people on our planet, more than half live in Asia and the Pacific, and about a quarter of the hungry live in sub-Saharan Africa.

5 - Is the number of hungry people in the world decreasing?

While significant progress was made in reducing the number of undernourished people in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the number of undernourished people has slowly but steadily increased in the last decade, according to FAO. In 1995-97 and 2004-2006, their number increased in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. But even in these regions, gains made in the fight against hunger have been reversed by high oil prices and the onset of the global economic crisis."

In the barracks, the Konogons are playing cards. The guards never look in there, they watch the convicts under the fifty-eighth article, so it’s safe to play at the horse-drawn horses. Every night, the thieves gather there and, by the light of a home-made light bulb - "kolyma" on a dirty pillow, arrange fights. The cards are self-made, from sheets cut out from Hugo's volume. This time the card-sharp Sevochka, an expert on card games, and Naumov, the foreman of the konogonov, a railway thief from the Kuban, played.

The narrator and the former textile engineer Garkunov do night work, sawing firewood for the horse barracks. After work, they are given food and watch the game. Naumov lost trousers and a jacket with a shirt, then a pillow and a blanket, a Ukrainian towel with roosters, a cigarette case with an embossed profile of Gogol. According to the rules, the fight cannot be over while there is something to lose. When there is nothing left, Naumov ingratiatingly offers to play for a performance - on credit. This is optional, but Sevochka gives him a chance to win back and gives him an hour of introduction. Naumov won back the blanket, pillow, trousers and again lost it all. Sevochka put the winnings into a plywood suitcase. Naumov examines the narrator and Garkunov, demands to take off their quilted jackets. Garkunov has a red woolen sweater under his quilted jacket - the last transfer from his wife. Naumov demands to remove it. Sevochka approvingly examines the valuable thing: wash it and you can wear it. Garkunov replies that he will take off the sweater only with the skin. They knock him down, he bites, Sashka, Naumov's orderly, stabs him with a knife. A sweater is pulled off the dead man, the blood on the red is invisible. Sevochka puts the sweater in the suitcase. The game is over, the narrator states that he needs to look for a new partner for sawing firewood.

Maxim

One by one, new people come to the camp, they all look like the dead. The last feeling for the narrator is not indifference, but anger. Neighbors appear and disappear forever, the hero does not ask them anything. Keeping malice in his heart, he waits for death, but instead life is replaced by a semi-conscious existence. The narrator works as a stoker - this is an easy job, but it is also hard: he does not have time to chop firewood, he cannot boil water in time, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seems to him endless, and the two-handed saw is incredibly heavy.

None of the settlers even paid attention to whether the water was boiling - the main thing is that it is hot. The hero feeds on what he gets. Despite the meager nutrition, frostbitten purulent limbs, he does not die, living in a fog. But one day the narrator realizes that he hears the groans and wheezes of his comrades, and from that moment on, the need to forget decreases. Muscles began to hurt, he began to feel his body. Anger was replaced by indifference-fearlessness, it did not matter to him whether they would beat him or not, whether he would be fed or not. But they beat only at the mines, and this calmed and gave strength.

Indifference is replaced by fear - a person is afraid of losing the life-saving work of a boiled man, afraid to leave for a mine. Then comes the envy of dead and living comrades. The narrator regrets that the feeling of love has not returned, but after he prevents the topographer from shooting the bullfinch protecting the nest, he realizes that something else important has returned. The impoverished language and feelings of the hero are poor: two dozen words, half of them are curses. The narrator did not look for other words and was amazed when suddenly the word “maxim” “unsuitable for the taiga” was born in his head. The word stuns a person, and he shouts it to the whole taiga, not yet understanding its meaning, but rejoicing in finding it. And even a provocative question, whether he is a foreigner, does not make him forget the word. There is something solid, Roman in it. Only a week later does the narrator understand what it means and realize that he is being reborn. New words come back with difficulty, but there are more and more of them. Then the day came when the workers left work and food and ran to the village: the chief from Magadan arrived. A gramophone is playing on a stump at the entrance to the tent, and murderers, horse thieves, thieves, fraera, foremen and hard workers stand nearby. The boss looks as if he wrote this music himself: “The shellac record whirled and hissed, the stump itself whirled, wound up for all its three hundred laps, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years ...”

Life authenticity of "Kolyma stories" by V. Shalamov

“Kolyma stories” Shalamov created from 1954 to 1973. The writer divided them into six books: “Kolyma stories”, “Left Bank”, “Artist of a shovel”, “Essays on the underworld”, “Resurrection of a larch” and “Glove, or KR -2". The terrible long-term camp experience of the writer, which consisted of superhuman trials - death, hunger and cold, humiliation, formed the basis of Shalamov's prose. It contains the truth about the years of terror. Each story describes the prison and camp life of the Gulag prisoners, the tragic fate of people who depend on the will of chance, bosses and thieves. A cross-cutting theme of the stories is a man in inhuman conditions.

The truth about the camps is merciless, Shalamov shows the reader terrible details, speaking as their witness. In the camp, a person lost everything that connected him with his former, pre-camp life, which Shalamov calls the “first”, a second life began, and all life experience had to be acquired again. The fate of the prisoner is determined by chance. The intellectuals, political prisoners, the so-called enemies of the people, were handed over to be torn to pieces by criminals. Humiliation, bullying, beatings, violence - a natural thing in the camp.

Humiliation was worse than hunger and disease, they lowered a person to the level of an animal, he stopped thinking and feeling, confining himself to a semi-conscious existence (malice becomes the only feeling of the hero of the story "Sentence"). The famous Stalinist slogan "Work is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, valor and heroism", hanging over the gates of each camp, is in fact about forced labor, slave labor. This is how human life is devalued, the concepts of good and evil are changing.

When the moral and physical forces dry up, a person becomes a goner with an atrophied will. Hunger turns into a disease, into torture of a tortured and humiliated person, whose main goal is to survive. Another facet of human humiliation is to submit to thieves. The author appreciates those who are able to resist circumstances even at the cost of their own lives. This is an artistic document of the era, a work of great psychological impact. "Kolyma Tales" became an accusation against the Soviet totalitarian regime, which gave birth to the camps.

The camp personifies absolute evil, while people dream of escaping from it not to freedom, but to prison: “Prison is freedom. This is the only place I know where people, without fear, said whatever they thought. Where they rested their souls” (“Tombstone”).

Despite the details, what is happening seems unreal, it is so cruel. But it really happened, this is our history.