'All That Is Human Slips Away'

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.]