A Remarkable Dissident

July 1 would have been the 95th birthday of writer and poet Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982). Shalamov’s talented and revealing prose only saw the light of day six years after his death, when glasnost led to the publication of previously suppressed writers. Prior to this, he was known mainly as a poet, through such collections of poetry as “Ognivo” (1961), “Road and Fate” (1967), “Moscow’s Clouds” (1972), and “Boiling Point” (1977). 

It is hard to find a Russian writer with a more tragic fate than Shalamov. In 1929, while still a student in the law faculty at Moscow State University, Shalamov was arrested for distribution of the “fake” letter from Lenin to the 12th Congress of the Communist Party. The letter was actually authentic—in it, the moribund Lenin warned his comrades against electing Stalin General Secretary. Shalamov was sentenced to a three year term in the camps. He returned to Moscow in 1934 and published his first short story, “Three Deaths of Doctor Austino,” in the literary journal Oktyabr (1936). Yet, just one year later, in early 1937, the infamous year of purges, Shalamov was arrested again and sent to Kolyma. 

Released in 1953 without a right to reside in central cities, he was “rehabilitated” in 1956 at the beginning of Khruschev’s Thaw. Between 1953 and 1973 he wrote six books of breathtaking power about the fate of Russians under Stalinism, including Artist of the Spade, Resurrected Larch Tree and Kolyma Tales. The latter, published during perestroika in Novy Mir, was nothing short of a literary and social bombshell.