Varlam Shalamov (1907-82), who ought to know, opens a poem with this line: “Memory has veiled / much evil . . .” Shalamov survived almost eighteen years in the Gulag, in the Arctic region known as Kolyma. His final imprisonment, from 1937 to 1951, was imposed after he referred to Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin as “a classic Russian writer.” Don’t read his stories looking for inspirational tales of courage, perseverance and adversity overcome. He would laugh bitterly at such foolish naiveté. That he survived the Gulag, unlike at least 1.7 million others, may be impressive. That so physically and emotionally damaged a man could write so many stories, Chekhovian in their understated precision, is miraculous. Today, the seventy-second anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, is an appropriate time to read Shalamov’s poem, as translated by Robert Chandler:
“Memory has veiled
much evil;
her long lies leave
nothing
to believe.
“There may be no cities
or green gardens;
only fields of ice
and salty oceans.
“The world may be pure
snow,
a starry road;
just northern forest
in the mind of God.”
The Anglophone world is
finally catching up with Shalamov’s accomplishment. Now we have Donald
Rayfield’s versions of his Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the
Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. Their combined 1,200 pages include 145 stories. An English-language website devoted to Shalamov and his work has posted a remarkable document,
“What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps” (trans. Dmitry Subbotin and Robert
Denis). The piece is dated 1961, ten years after his release from Kolyma. Here
is the first of his forty-six hard-earned observations: “The extraordinary
fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a
beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.”
Shalamov lived his final
years in the Soviet Union in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease,
but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his
dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and
Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated
by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life
story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.” Here is a poem by Shalamov from 1955, as translated by Chandler:
“All that is human slips
away;
everything was mere husk.
All that is left,
indivisible,
is birdsong and dusk.
“A sharp scent of warm
mint,
the river’s far-off noise;
all equal, and equally
light —
all my losses and joys.”
“Slowly, with its warm
towel
the wind dries my face;
moths immolate themselves
in the campfire’s flames.”
[Chandler translates
nineteen poems by Shalamov in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited
by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]
1 comment:
Today also marks the 72nd anniversary of the death of the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), who died the same day as Stalin. One evil man out, one good man out.
Post a Comment