Shalamov varlam tikhonovich biography is briefly the most. Biography of Shalamov

Memory is the last to return to a person. But, having returned, she makes life unbearable, because memory pulls a person out of the hell in which he lives, reminding that there is another world.
The resurrection of a person comes, but at the same time the break ends and it is necessary to return to the mine again - to death. Only death awaits Shalamov's heroes. “The special instruction says: to destroy, not to let them stay alive” (“Lida”).
To the question “why do people continue to live in inhuman conditions?” Why only a few commit suicide, Shalamov gives two answers. Some, very few, are supported by faith in God. With deep sympathy, but also with some bewilderment before an incomprehensible, inexplicable phenomenon to him, he tells about a prisoner-priest who prays in the forest ("Day of Rest"), about another priest, who - as a rare exception - was called to confess a dying woman (" Aunt Paul "), about a German pastor (" Apostle Paul "). True faith that relieves suffering and enables camp life is not common.
Most of the prisoners continue to live because they hope. It is precisely hope that sustains the faint flame of life among the Kolyma prisoners. Shalamov sees evil in hope, for very often death better than life in hell.

“Hope for a prisoner is always shackles. - writes Shalamov. - Hope is always unfreedom. A person hoping for something changes his behavior, often bends his soul than a person who has no hope ”(“ The Life of the Engineer Kipreev ”). Supporting the will to live, hope disarms a person, deprives him of the opportunity to die with dignity. In the face of imminent death, hope becomes the ally of the executioners.

Rejecting hope, Shalamov opposes it with the will to freedom. Indomitable love not for abstract freedom, but for individual human freedom. One of Shalamov's best stories, "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev", is dedicated to this topic. In the story, Major Pugachev escapes from German captivity, but, having got to his own, he is arrested and sent to the Kolyma. Shalamov gives the hero of the story a symbolic name - Pugachev, the leader of the peasant war that shook Russia in the 18th century. In "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev" the writer tells the story of people who decided to be free or die in arms.

An important place in "Kolyma stories" is occupied by criminals, "thieves". Shalamov even wrote a study on this topic - "Sketches of the Underworld", in which he tried to penetrate into the psychology of "thieves".

Faced with living professional criminals in the camp, Shalamov realized how wrong Gorky and other Russian writers were, who saw criminals as rebels, romantics who rejected the gray, bourgeois life.

In a whole series of stories - "On presentation", "Snake charmer", "Pain", in "Sketches of the underworld" Varlam Tikhonovich shows thieves - people who have lost everything human - robbing, killing, raping as calmly and naturally as other people sleep and eat. The writer insists that all feelings are alien to criminals. “The camp is the bottom of life. - writes Shalamov. - "Underworld" is not the bottom of the bottom. This is completely, completely different, inhuman. "

At the same time, Shalamov notes, one should distinguish between a person who stole something, a hooligan and a thief, a member of the "underworld". A person can kill and steal and not be a blatar. “Any killer, any bully,” Shalamov asserts, “is nothing compared to a thief. A thief is also a murderer and a bully, plus something else for which there is almost no name in human language. "

Hating criminals, not finding a single word of condescension for them, Varlam Shalamov shows the peculiarity of the thieves' world. This is the only organized force in the camps. Their organization, their cohesion look especially impressive against the background of the complete disunity of all other prisoners. Bound by a strict thieves' "law", thieves feel like they are in prison and camp at home, they feel like masters. Not only their ruthlessness, but also their solidarity gives them strength. The authorities are also afraid of this force.

The criminals and the bosses are the two forces of the camp world. They are at home here. The bosses are just as cruel, merciless and just as corrupt as the criminals. Shalamov shows a line of criminals - who kill for a sweater, who kill in order not to go to the camp, but to stay in prison. And next to it is the same gallery of chiefs of various levels - from Colonel Garanin, who signs the lists of the executed, to the sadist engineer Kiselev, who breaks prisoners' bones with his own hand.

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“There is an all-or-nothing law in art, which is now so popular in cybernetics. In other words, there are no poems less qualified or more qualified. There are poems and not poems. This division is more correct than the division into poets and non-poets. " Collected for the first time in a separate edition theoretical work Shalamov dedicated to literature. Including the famous theory of "new prose", which diagnoses the death of the novel, which is being replaced, according to Shalamov, by a short prose of a document, or rather "prose, suffered as a document." In this collection, Shalamov acts as a literary researcher, theorizing not only someone else's, but also his own literary experience.

I can't tell you what the hell
I'm out of my place - out of line
Where I am so little, little worth,
That just can't live.

Here - not human, here - the Lord,
Otherwise, how else, who else
Will write letters to Gioconda,
He will stick the knife under his coat.

And in front of Tsar Ivan's eyes
Will sparkle with a sharpened knife
And those artificial wounds
The arts will be the frontier.

And in front of my Madonna
I cry, not at all ashamed
I hide my head in my hands
What I didn’t do when I was born.

I apologize to myself
For the fact that I understood only here,
That these tears are cleansing
They are also called "catharsis".

Varlam Shalamov's literary essays, first published as a separate volume, are capable of completely changing his image in the reader's mind. A thin, exhausted man in a hat with earflaps (half the life of the camps, a small volume of piercing camp prose and a neuropsychiatric boarding school in the finale) suddenly straightens his tie, turning out to be an intellectual, an erudite, a brilliant literary critic, an ironic critic. After spending many years In complete isolation from the cultural space, Shalamov surprisingly steps into the vanguard of literary disputes of his time: he talks about Huxley's dystopia, refers to the French surrealists, continues Jacobson's ideas and understands structuralism.

Returning from the camp, Shalamov was extremely dissatisfied with the state of modern literary criticism, especially the science of poetry: he did not understand why such an important concept as poetic intonation, which makes it possible to distinguish poetry from non-poetry, had not been introduced and developed in poetry. Shalamov, for example, considered Akhmatova's Requiem, declared by Chukovsky to be her main contribution to Russian poetry, but written in the intonations of early Kuzmin, as a classic example of “intonational plagiarism”. A large block of works on the theory of versification, on which Shalamov worked for several years, has remained unclaimed until now.

However, the most unexpected thing in the book is the lost somewhere in the section of the theory of prose autoreview "My prose". Having transformed his human camp experience into a literary experience, Shalamov takes the next step - he subjects his own works and his own creative method to a detached literary analysis. Shalamov, the writer, who is looking at Shalamov, the prisoner, is peering into Shalamov the literary critic. In rhetoric German philosopher Theodor Adorno could call this "literary criticism after Auschwitz."

Shalamov on structuralism

Russian writer. Born into the family of a priest. Memories of parents, impressions of childhood and adolescence were subsequently embodied in the autobiographical prose of the Fourth Vologda (1971).

In 1914 he entered the gymnasium, in 1923 he graduated from the Vologda secondary school. In 1924 he left Vologda and got a job as a tanner at a tannery in the city of Kuntsevo, Moscow Region. In 1926 he entered the Faculty of Soviet Law at Moscow State University.

At this time, Shalamov wrote poetry, participated in the work of literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes. He strove to actively participate in the public life of the country. He established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in the opposition demonstration for the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution under the slogan "Down with Stalin!" On February 19, 1929 he was arrested. In his autobiographical prose, Vishersky's anti-novel (1970-1971, incomplete) wrote: "I consider this day and hour the beginning of my social life - the first true test in harsh conditions."

Shalamov was sentenced to three years, which he spent in the northern Urals in the Vishersky camp. In 1931 he was released and reinstated. Until 1932 he worked on the construction of a chemical plant in the city of Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937 he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, For Industrial Personnel. In 1936 his first publication took place - the story Three Deaths of Doctor Austino was published in the magazine "October".

On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was arrested "for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years in prison camps using physical labor. He was already in the remand prison when his story Pava and the Tree was published in the Literaturny Sovremennik magazine. Shalamov's next publication (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place in 1957.

Shalamov worked in the face of a gold mine in Magadan, then, being sentenced to a new term, he got to excavation work, in 1940–1942 he worked in a coal face, in 1942–1943 at a penalty mine in Dzhelgal. In 1943 he received a new 10-year term "for anti-Soviet agitation", worked in a mine and as a lumberjack, tried to escape, after which he ended up in the penalty area.

The life of Shalamov was saved by the doctor A.M. Pantyukhov, who sent him to medical assistant courses at the hospital for prisoners. After completing the courses, Shalamov worked in the surgical department of this hospital and as a paramedic in the village of woodcutters. In 1949, Shalamov began writing poetry, which compiled the collection Kolyma Notebooks (1937-1956). The collection consists of 6 sections entitled Shalamov Blue Notebook, Postman's Bag, Personally and Confidentially, Golden Mountains, Cyprus, High Latitudes.

In his poems, Shalamov considered himself the "plenipotentiary" of the prisoners, whose hymn was the poem Toast to the Ayan-uryakh River. Subsequently, researchers of Shalamov's work noted his desire to show in poetry the spiritual strength of a person who, even in a camp, is capable of thinking about love and fidelity, about good and evil, about history and art. An important poetic image of Shalamov is the elfin, a Kolyma plant that survives in harsh conditions. The cross-cutting theme of his poems is the relationship between man and nature (Glorification to dogs, Ballad about a calf, etc.). Shalamov's poetry is permeated with biblical motives. One of the main works of Shalamov considered the poem Avvakum in Pustozersk, in which, according to the author's commentary, “ historical image connected both with the landscape and with the peculiarities of the author's biography. "

In 1951 Shalamov was released from the camp, but for two more years he was forbidden to leave Kolyma, he worked as a medical assistant at the camp and left only in 1953. His family broke up, his adult daughter did not know her father. His health was undermined, he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent for peat extraction in the village. Turkmen of the Kalinin region In 1954 he began work on the stories that compiled the collection Kolyma Stories (1954-1973). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of stories and essays - Kolyma Tales, Left Bank, Shovel Artist, Essays on the Underworld, Resurrection of a Larch, Glove, or KR-2. All stories have a documentary basis, the author is present in them - either under his own name, or called Andreev, Golubev, Christ. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it unacceptable to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but inner world heroes were created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means. The writer's style is emphatically antipathetic: the terrible material of life demanded that the prose writer embody it evenly, without declamation. Shalamov's prose is tragic in nature, despite the presence of a few satirical images in it. The author has repeatedly spoken about the confessional character of the Kolyma stories. He called his narrative style "new prose", emphasizing that it is important for him to resurrect feeling, extraordinary new details, descriptions in a new way are needed to make one believe in the story, everything else is not as information, but as an open heart wound " ... The camp world appears in the Kolyma stories as an irrational world.

Shalamov denied the need for suffering. He became convinced that in the abyss of suffering there is not purification, but corruption of human souls. In a letter to AI Solzhenitsyn, he wrote: "The camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone."

In 1956 Shalamov was rehabilitated and moved to Moscow. In 1957 he became a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, at the same time his poems were published. In 1961, a book of his poems Ognivo was published. In 1979, in serious condition, he was placed in a boarding house for the disabled and the elderly. Lost sight and hearing, could hardly move.

Books of poems by Shalamov were published in the USSR in 1972 and 1977. Kolyma stories were published in London (1978, in Russian), in Paris (1980–1982, in French), in New York (1981–1982, in English language). After their publication, Shalamov became world famous. In 1980, the French branch of the Pen Club awarded him the Freedom Prize.

Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich

And - even if it is not a tenant in the world -
I am a petitioner and a plaintiff
Inevitable grief.
I am where the pain is, I am where the groan is,
In the eternal litigation of two parties,
In the old days of this dispute. / "Atomic Poem" /

Varlam Shalamov was born on June 18 (July 1) 1907 in Vologda.
Shalamov's father, Tikhon Nikolayevich, a cathedral priest, was a prominent figure in the city, since he not only served in the church, but was also engaged in active social activities. According to the writer's testimony, his father spent eleven years in the Aleutian Islands as an Orthodox missionary, was a European educated man, adhering to free and independent views.
The relationship of the future writer with his father was not easy. The youngest son in a large family with many children often did not find a common language with the categorical father. “My father was from the darkest forest of the Ust-Sysolsk wilderness, from a hereditary priestly family, whose ancestors had recently been Zyryan shamans for several generations, from a shamanic family, imperceptibly and naturally changed the tambourine to a censer, still in the power of paganism, the shaman himself and a pagan in the depths of his Zyryan soul ... "- this is how V. Shalamov wrote about Tikhon Nikolaevich, although the archives testify to his Slavic origin.

Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda Alexandrovna, was busy with the household and kitchen, but she loved poetry, and was closer to Shalamov. A poem is dedicated to her, beginning like this: "My mother was a savage, dreamer and cook."
In his autobiographical story about childhood and adolescence, The Fourth Vologda, Shalamov told how his beliefs were formed, how his thirst for justice and his determination to fight for it were strengthened. People's will became his ideal. He read a lot, especially highlighting the works of Dumas before Kant.

In 1914, Shalamov entered the gymnasium of Alexander the Blessed. In 1923, he graduated from the Vologda Second Stage School, which, as he wrote, “did not instill in me a love of poetry or fiction, I didn’t bring up taste, and I made discoveries myself, moving in zigzags - from Khlebnikov to Lermontov, from Baratynsky to Pushkin, from Igor Severyanin to Pasternak and Blok ”.
In 1924, Shalamov left Vologda and got a job as a tanner at a tannery in Kuntsevo. In 1926, Shalamov entered the Faculty of Soviet Law at Moscow State University.
At this time, Shalamov wrote poetry, which were positively assessed by N. Aseev, participated in the work of literary circles, attended the literary seminar of O. Brik, various poetry evenings and disputes.
Shalamov strove to actively participate in the public life of the country. He established contact with the Trotskyist organization of Moscow State University, participated in a demonstration of opposition to the 10th anniversary of October under the slogans "Down with Stalin!", "Let's fulfill Lenin's will!"

On February 19, 1929, he was arrested. Unlike many for whom the arrest was really a surprise, he knew why: he was among those who circulated Lenin's so-called testament, his famous "Letter to the Congress." In this letter, Lenin, who was seriously ill and actually removed from affairs, gives brief characteristics to his closest associates in the party, in whose hands by this time the main power was concentrated, and, in particular, indicates the danger of concentrating it with Stalin - due to his unsightly human qualities. It was this letter, which was then hushed up in every possible way, declared a fake after Lenin's death, which refuted the intensely implanted myth of Stalin as the only, indisputable and most consistent successor to the leader of the world proletariat.

In Vishera, Shalamov wrote: "I was, after all, a representative of those people who opposed Stalin - no one ever thought that Stalin and Soviet power were one and the same." And then he continues: “Lenin's will, hidden from the people, seemed to me a worthy application of my strength. Of course, I was still a blind puppy then. But I was not afraid of life and boldly entered the struggle with it in the form in which the heroes of my childhood and youthful years- all Russian revolutionaries. " Later, in his autobiographical prose "Visher's Anti-Novel" (1970-1971, not completed) Shalamov wrote: "I consider this day and hour the beginning of my social life - the first true test in harsh conditions."

Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Butyrka prison, which he later described in detail in the essay of the same name. And his first imprisonment, and then a three-year term in the Vishera camps, he perceived as an inevitable and necessary test given to him to test his moral and physical strength, to test himself as a person: “Do I have enough moral strength to go my way as a certain unit - that's what I was thinking about in the 95th cell of the male solitary block of the Butyrka prison. There were excellent conditions for thinking about life, and I thank Butyrka prison for the fact that, in search of the right formula for my life, I found myself alone in a prison cell. " The image of a prison in Shalamov's biography may even seem attractive. For him, it was really new and, most importantly, a feasible experience that instilled in his soul confidence in his own strengths and unlimited possibilities of internal spiritual and moral resistance. Shalamov will emphasize the fundamental difference between a prison and a camp.
According to the writer's testimony, prison life both in 1929 and in 1937, in any case, in Butyrki remained much less cruel than in the camp. There even functioned a library, "the only library in Moscow, and maybe even a country that has not experienced all kinds of seizures, destruction and confiscations that in Stalin's time forever destroyed the book collections of hundreds of thousands of libraries" and prisoners could use it. Some have studied foreign languages... And in the afternoon, time was allotted for "lectures", each had the opportunity to tell something interesting to others.
Shalamov was sentenced to three years, which he spent in the Northern Urals. He later said: “Our car was either uncoupled or attached to trains going north or northeast. We stood in Vologda - my father and my mother lived there, twenty minutes away. I didn’t dare to drop a note. The train went south again, then to Kotlas, to Perm. Experienced it was clear - we are going to the 4th department of the USLON on Vishera. The end of the railway line is Solikamsk. It was March, Ural March. In 1929, there was only one camp in the Soviet Union - the SLON - the Solovetsky special purpose camps. They took us to the 4th department of the ELEPHANT to Vishera. In the camp of 1929 there were many "products", many "suckers", many positions that were not at all necessary for a good owner. But the camp at that time was not a good host. Work was not asked at all, only a way out was asked, and it was for this way out that the prisoners received their rations. It was believed that more could not be asked from a prisoner. There were no offsets for working days, but every year, following the example of the Solovetsky "unloading", lists were submitted for release by the camp authorities themselves, depending on the political wind that blew that year - either the killers were released, then the White Guards, then the Chinese. These lists were reviewed by a Moscow commission. On Solovki, such a commission was headed from year to year by Ivan Gavrilovich Filippov, a member of the NKVD board, a former Putilov turner. There is such a documentary film "Solovki". In it, Ivan Gavrilovich is shot in his most famous role: chairman of the unloading commission. Subsequently, Filippov was the head of the camp on Vishera, then in Kolyma and died in the Magadan prison ... The lists reviewed and prepared by the visiting commission were taken to Moscow, and the latter either approved or did not approve, sending an answer after a few months. "Unloading" was the only way of early release at the time. "
In 1931 he was released and reinstated.
Shalamov Varlam Shalamov 5
Until 1932 he worked on the construction of a chemical plant in the city of Berezniki, then returned to Moscow. Until 1937 he worked as a journalist in the magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technique, For Industrial Personnel. In 1936 his first publication took place - the story "The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino" was published in the magazine "October".
On June 29, 1934, Shalamov married G.I. Gudz. On April 13, 1935, their daughter Elena is born.
On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was arrested again "for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sentenced to 5 years in prison camps with heavy physical labor. Shalamov was already in a pre-trial detention center when his story “The Pave and the Tree” was published in the Literaturny Sovremennik magazine. Shalamov's next publication (poems in the Znamya magazine) took place twenty years later - in 1957.
Shalamov said: “In 1937, in Moscow, during the second arrest and investigation, at the very first interrogation of the trainee investigator Romanov, my profile was embarrassed. I had to call some colonel, who explained to the young investigator that “then, in the twenties, they gave it this way, don't be embarrassed,” and turning to me:
- What exactly are you arrested for?
- For printing Lenin's will.
- Exactly. So write in the minutes and put in the memorandum: "He printed and distributed a fake known as" Lenin's Testament. "
The conditions in which the prisoners were in Kolyma were calculated for imminent physical destruction. Shalamov worked in the face of a gold mine in Magadan, fell ill with typhus, ended up in excavation work, in 1940-1942 he worked in a coal mine, in 1942-1943 - at a penalty mine in Dzhelgal. In 1943, Shalamov received a new 10-year term "for anti-Soviet agitation," calling Bunin a Russian classic. He ended up in a punishment cell, after which he miraculously survived, worked in a mine as a lumberjack, tried to escape, and then ended up in the penalty area. His life often hung in the balance, but people who treated him well helped him. Such were for him Boris Lesnyak, also a prisoner who worked as a paramedic at the Belichya hospital of the Northern Mining Administration, and Nina Savoyeva, the head physician of the same hospital, which the patients called Black Mama.

Here, in Squirrel, Shalamov turned out to be like a goner in 1943. His condition, according to Savoyeva, was deplorable. As a man of large build, he always had a particularly difficult time on the more than meager camp rations. And who knows, the Kolyma Tales would have been written if their future author had not been in the hospital of Nina Vladimirovna.
In the mid-40s, Savoyeva and Lesnyak helped Shalamov to remain at the hospital as a cultural worker. Shalamov remained at the hospital while his friends were there. After they left her and Shalamov was again threatened with hard labor, in which he would hardly have survived, in 1946 the doctor Andrei Pantyukhov saved Shalamov from the stage and helped to get a medical assistant course at the Central Hospital for prisoners. After completing the courses, Shalamov worked in the surgical department of this hospital and as a paramedic in the village of woodcutters.
In 1949, Shalamov began to write down poems that compiled the collection "Kolyma Notebooks" (1937-1956). The collection consisted of 6 sections, entitled by Shalamov "Blue Notebook", "Postman's Bag", "Personally and Confidentially", "Golden Mountains", "Fireweed", "High Latitudes".

I swear until I die
take revenge on these vile bitches.
Whose vile science I have fully comprehended.
I will wash my hands with the blood of the enemy,
When this blessed moment comes.
Publicly, in Slavic
I'll drink from the skull,
From an enemy skull
as Svyatoslav did.
Arrange this funeral
in the former Slavic taste
More expensive than all the afterlife,
any posthumous glories.

In 1951, Shalamov was released from the camp as having served his sentence, but for another two years he was forbidden to leave the Kolyma, and he worked as a medical assistant at the camp and only left in 1953. By that time, his family had disintegrated, the adult daughter did not know her father, his health was undermined by the camps, and he was deprived of the right to live in Moscow. Shalamov managed to get a job as a supply agent for peat extraction in the village of Turkmen, Kalinin region.

In 1952, Shalamov sent his poems to Boris Pasternak, who praised them highly. In 1954, Shalamov began work on the stories that compiled the collection "Kolyma Stories" (1954-1973). This main work of Shalamov's life includes six collections of stories and essays - "Kolyma Tales", "Left Bank", "Shovel Artist", "Essays on the Underworld", "Resurrection of the Larch", "Glove, or KR-2".
All stories have a documentary basis, the author is present in them - either under his own name, or called Andreev, Golubev, Christ. However, these works are not limited to camp memoirs. Shalamov considered it inadmissible to deviate from the facts in describing the living environment in which the action takes place, but the inner world of the heroes was created by him not by documentary, but by artistic means. The author has repeatedly spoken about the confessional nature of the Kolyma Tales. He called his narrative manner "new prose", emphasizing that it is important for him to resurrect feeling, extraordinary new details, descriptions in a new way are needed to make one believe in the story, everything else is not as information, but as an open heart wound " ... The camp world appears in the "Kolyma Tales" as an irrational world.

In 1956, Shalamov was rehabilitated for lack of corpus delicti, moved to Moscow and married Olga Neklyudova. In 1957 he became a freelance correspondent for the Moscow magazine, at the same time his poems were published. At the same time, he fell seriously ill and received a disability. In 1961, a book of his poems "Fire" was published. The last decade of life, especially the most last years were not easy and cloudless for the writer. Shalamov had an organic lesion of the central nervous system, which predetermined the irregular activity of the limbs. He needed treatment - neurological, and he was in danger of psychiatric.

On February 23, 1972, Literaturnaya Gazeta, where international information would be obstructed, published a letter from Varlam Shalamov, in which he protested against the appearance abroad of his Kolyma Tales. The philosopher Y. Schrader, who met with Shalamov a few days after the letter appeared, recalls that the writer himself treated this publication as a clever trick: he seemed to have cunningly cheated everyone, deceived his superiors and thereby was able to protect himself. "Do you think it's that easy to appear in the newspaper?" - he asked, either really sincerely, or checking the impression of the interlocutor.

This letter was perceived in intellectual circles as a renunciation. The image of the unyielding author of the “Kolyma stories” that appeared on the lists was crumbling. Shalamov was not afraid of losing a leading post - he had never had such a position; he was not afraid of losing his income - he got along with a small pension and infrequent fees. But to say that he had nothing to lose - does not turn his tongue.

Any person always has something to lose, and Shalamov in 1972 turned sixty-five. He was a sick, rapidly aging man from whom the best years of his life were taken away. Shalamov wanted to live and create. He wanted and dreamed that his stories, paid for with his own blood, pain, anguish, would be published in his native country, which had gone through so much and suffered so much.
In 1966, the writer divorced Neklyudova. Many believed he was already dead.
And Shalamov in the 70s walked around Moscow - he was met on Tverskaya, where he sometimes went out for food from his closet. He looked terrible, he staggered like a drunk, he fell. The police were on the alert, Shalamov was raised, and he, who did not take a single gram of alcohol in his mouth, took out a certificate of his illness - Meniere's disease, aggravated after the camps and associated with impaired coordination of movements. Shalamov began to lose his hearing and sight
In May 1979, Shalamov was placed in a home for the disabled and the elderly on Vilis Latsis Street in Tushino. The bureaucratic pajamas made him look very much like a prisoner. Judging by the stories of people who visited him, he again felt like a prisoner. He perceived the home for the disabled as a prison. Like violent isolation. He didn't want to talk to the staff. He ripped the linen out of bed, slept on a bare mattress, tied a towel around his neck, as if it could be stolen from him, rolled the blanket and leaned on it with his hand. But Shalamov was not insane, although he could probably have made such an impression. Doctor D.F. Lavrov, a psychiatrist, recalls that he went to the nursing home to Shalamov, to whom he was invited by the literary critic A. Morozov who visited the writer.
It was not Shalamov's condition that struck Lavrov, but his position - the conditions in which the writer was. As for the condition, there were speech, movement disorders, a serious neurological disease, but he did not find dementia, which alone could give a reason for the transfer of a person to a boarding school for psychochronists, in Shalamov. He was finally convinced of this diagnosis by the fact that Shalamov - in his presence, right before his eyes - dictated two of his new poems to Morozov. His intellect and memory were intact. He composed poems, memorized - and then A. Morozov and I. Sirotinskaya wrote down after him, in the full sense removed from his lips. It was not an easy job. Shalamov repeated a word several times in order to be understood correctly, but in the end the text came together. He asked Morozov to make a selection of the recorded poems, gave it the name "Unknown Soldier" and expressed a wish to be taken to magazines. Morozov went and offered. To no avail.
The poems were published abroad in the "Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement" with a note by Morozov on the situation of Shalamov. There was only one goal - to attract public attention to help, to find a way out. In a sense, the goal was achieved, but the effect was the opposite. After this publication, foreign radio stations started talking about Shalamov. Such attention to the author of the Kolyma Tales, a large volume of which was published in Russian in 1978 in London, began to worry the authorities, and the relevant department began to take an interest in Shalamov's visitors.
Meanwhile, the writer suffered a stroke. In early September 1981, a commission met to decide whether the writer could continue to be kept in a nursing home. After a short meeting in the director's office, the commission went up to Shalamov's room. Elena Khinkis, who was present there, says that he did not answer questions - most likely he simply ignored, as he knew how. But he was diagnosed with exactly the one that Shalamov's friends feared: senile dementia. In other words, dementia. Friends who visited Shalamov tried to play it safe: phone numbers were left to the medical staff. New, 1982 A. Morozov met in a nursing home together with Shalamov. At the same time, the last picture of the writer was taken. On January 14, eyewitnesses said that when Shalamov was transported, there was a cry. He still tried to resist. He was rolled out in a chair, half-dressed, loaded into a chilled-out car, and across the entire snow-covered, frosty, January Moscow - a long way from Tushino to Medvedkovo - he was sent to boarding school for psychochronists No. 32.
Elena Zakharova left memories of the last days of Varlam Tikhonovich: “... We approached Shalamov. He was dying. It was obvious, but I took out the phonendoscope anyway. V.T. died of pneumonia, heart failure developed. I think it was all simple - stress and hypothermia. He lived in prison, they came for him. And they drove through the whole city, in winter, he did not have outerwear, he could not go out into the street. So, most likely, they threw a blanket over the pajamas. He probably tried to fight, he threw off the blanket. I knew very well what the temperature was in the rafiks working on transportation, I myself went for several years, working in an ambulance.
On January 17, 1982, Varlam Shalamov died of croupous pneumonia. It was decided not to arrange a civil funeral service in the Writers' Union, which turned away from Shalamov, but to perform a funeral service for him, like the son of a priest, according to the Orthodox rite in the church.
The writer was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery, not far from the grave of Nadezhda Mandelstam, in whose house he often visited in the 60s. There were many who came to say goodbye.
In June 2000, in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, a monument to Varlam Shalamov was destroyed. Unknown persons tore off and carried away the bronze head of the writer, leaving a lonely granite pedestal. Thanks to the help of compatriots-metallurgists of JSC "Severstal" in 2001, the monument was restored.
A documentary was made about Varlam Shalamov.
Andrey Goncharov //

He started his creative way with writing poetry. He became famous for his journalistic cycle dedicated to the life of prisoners. Shalamov's biography is reflected in his work, primarily in the books "Several of my lives", "Fourth Vologda". The collection that brought the writer worldwide fame - "Kolyma stories".

In order to learn more about the biography of Shalamov, you should, of course, familiarize yourself with his books. Namely, read "Kolyma stories", "Fourth Vologda", a collection of poems "Kolyma notebooks". The same article contains the main facts from the biography of Shalamov.

Son of a priest

The childhood and adolescence of the future writer had both a happy time and a tragic one. Shalamov's fate did not spare. But in spite of everything, he remained a man until the last days of his life.

Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich was born in 1907 in the family of a hereditary priest. He remembered well the First World War. Childhood memories are reflected in the aforementioned book "Several of My Lives". Both Shalamov brothers were in the war. One of them died. After his death, his father went blind. Tikhon Shalamov survived the eldest son by as much as thirteen years.

early years

The family was friendly, with strong family traditions. Varlam Shalamov began to write poetry very early. The father supported the love of literature in his son. However, the parental library soon became insufficient for the boy.

The People's Will became the youthful ideal of Shalamov. He admired their sacrifice, heroism, manifested in the resistance to the power of the autocratic state. It is worth saying that already in early years the future writer showed amazing talent. In one of the books, Shalamov said that he did not remember himself as illiterate. He learned to read at the age of three.

In adolescence, he was most attracted by the adventure works of Dumas. Later, the range of literature that aroused irrepressible interest in future prose writers surprisingly expanded. He began to read everything: from Dumas to Kant.

Years of study

In 1914, Shalamov entered the gymnasium. He managed to complete his secondary education only after the revolution. Ten years after entering the gymnasium, the future writer moved to the capital. In Moscow, he worked for two years as a tanner at the Kuntsevo plant. And in 1926 he entered the Moscow State University, the faculty of Soviet law.

By submitting documents to the university, Shalamov hid his social origin. He did not indicate that he belongs to a family in which men have been priests from generation to generation. For which he was expelled.

First conclusion

The first arrest of Varlam Shalamov took place in February 1929. The young poet was detained while raiding an underground printing house. After this event, the label “socially dangerous element” was attached to Shalamov. He spent the next three years in the camps. During this period, Shalamov worked on the construction of a chemical plant under the leadership of a man who later became the head of the Kolyma "Dalstroy".

Second arrest

In 1931, Shalamov was released from the forced labor camp. For some time he worked in the trade union magazines "For mastery of technology" and "For shock work". In 1936 he published his first prose work, The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino.

In 1937, there was a new wave of repression. She also did not pass Varlam Shalamov. The writer was arrested for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. Shalamov was again placed in Butyrka prison, he was sentenced to five years. In early August, he was sent to Magadan with a large party of prisoners on a steamer. He worked in gold mines for a year.

Shalamov's term was increased in December 1938. He was arrested in connection with the camp "lawyers' case". From 1939 he worked at the Black River mine, as well as in coal mines. In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov not only talked about the life of prisoners, but also told about the state of mind of a person who had been imprisoned for a long time.

The life of prisoners in the works of Shalamov

The main components of the existence of a prisoner are insomnia, hunger, cold. In such an environment, no friendship was formed. According to Shalamov, affection, mutual respect could only be established in freedom. In the camp, a person was deprived of everything human, only anger, mistrust and lies remained in him.

Denunciations in the camps were widespread. They also took place at large. Shalamov's second term ended in 1942. But he was not released: a decree was issued, according to which the prisoners were to be in the camp until the end of the war. In May 1943, Shalamov was arrested. The cause of his misfortune this time was the praise addressed to the writer Ivan Bunin. Shalamov was arrested on the denunciation of fellow prisoners. A month later, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Paramedic

In 1943, Shalamov fell into the category of so-called goners - prisoners in the last stage of physical exhaustion. In this state, he ended up in the camp hospital, after being discharged he worked for several years at the Spokoiny mine.

Shalamov got to the hospital several times. So, in 1946 he was hospitalized with suspicion of dysentery. Thanks to one of the doctors, Shalamov, after recovering, was sent to a paramedic course at a hospital located twenty-three kilometers from Magadan. After graduation, he worked in the surgical department. He worked as a medical assistant for several years after his release.

The term of imprisonment was completed in 1951. Around this time, Shalamov sent Boris Pasternak a collection of his poems. In 1953, returning to Moscow, Shalamov met with relatives. Pasternak helped him establish contacts in the literary world. In 1954, Varlam Shalamov began work on Kolyma Tales.

Family

In the mid-fifties, Shalamov divorced Galina Gudz, with whom he was married in 1932. The writer was married twice in total. In 1956 he married Olga Neklyudova. In his first marriage, the prose writer had a daughter, Elena. Shalamov divorced Neklyudova, a children's writer, in 1965. There were no children in this marriage. Neklyudova had a son who later became a famous folklorist.

Last years

Shalamov's biography includes twenty years in the camps. The imprisonment did not go unnoticed. In the late fifties, he suffered a serious illness, for a long time he was treated at the Botkin hospital. After recovering, he published a collection of poems "Fire". And three years later - "Rustle of Leaves".

In the late 70s, the writer began to severely lose hearing, vision, and the ability to coordinate movements. In 1979, Shalamov was sent to a boarding house for the elderly and disabled. Two years later, he suffered a stroke. In 1982, Shalamov was examined, as a result of which he was transferred to a boarding school for psychochronists. However, during the transportation, the author of "Kolyma Stories" caught a cold and fell ill with pneumonia. Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich died on January 17, 1982. Buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery. A monument to the sculptor Fedot Suchkov was later erected on the grave of the writer.

Shalamov's work

Above is the acquaintance of the hero of today's article with the author of "Doctor Zhivago". The poetry of Varlam Shalamov was highly appreciated by Pasternak. The poets were linked by long-term friendship. However, after Pasternak refused the Nobel Prize, they parted ways.

Among the poetry collections created by Varlam Shalamov, in addition to the aforementioned ones, it is worth mentioning Moscow Clouds, Boiling Point, and the Road and Fate cycle. The Kolyma Notebooks includes six poems and poems. The prose works of Varlamov Shalamov include the anti-novel "Vishera" and the story "Fyodor Raskolnikov". In 2005, a film based on the Kolyma Tales was released. Several documentary films are devoted to the work and biography of Shalamov.

The Kolyma Tales were first published in the West. The next time this collection was published four years later in London. Both the first and second editions of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales were carried out against his will. During the life of the writer, none of his works dedicated to the Gulag came out.

"Kolyma stories"

Shalamov's works are imbued with realism and unbending courage. Each of the stories included in the "Kolyma Tales" is reliable. The collection tells about the life that a large number of people had to endure. And only a few of them (Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) were able to, found the strength to tell readers about the ruthless Stalinist camps.

In Kolyma Tales, Shalamov raised the main moral issue of the Soviet era. The writer revealed the key problem of that time, namely, the opposition of the individual to a totalitarian state that does not spare human destinies. He did this by depicting the life of prisoners.

The heroes of the stories are people exiled to the camps. But Shalamov not only told about the harsh, inhuman, unjust punishments they were subjected to. He showed who a person turns into as a result of a long imprisonment. In the story "Dry ration" this topic is revealed especially vividly. The author spoke about how the oppression of the state suppresses the individual, dissolves his soul.

In an environment of constant hunger, cold, people turn into animals. They are no longer aware of anything. They only want warmth and food. Elementary things become the main values. The prisoner is driven by a dull and limited lust for life. The author himself argued that "Kolyma stories" is an attempt to solve some important moral questions that simply cannot be resolved on any other material.