In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches from of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.
Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was a Russian writer, journalist, poet,
and survivor of the Gulag. NYRB Classics publishesd his Kolyma
Stories, which, together with Sketches of the Criminal World,
comprise the first complete English translation of all of
Shalamov's Kolyma writings.
Donald Rayfield is an emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at
Queen Mary University of London. He translated Nikolai Gogol's Dead
Souls for NYRB Classics.
"The most powerful stories in this volume wed
Shalamov’s unblinking awareness of human frailty and historic
catastrophe to his keen appreciation for nature . . . [A]t its
best, Shalamov’s prose is poetry of the highest
order.” —Boris Dralyuk, The Times Literary Supplement
“The impotence of intellectuals and other bookish sorts when they
encounter the allied forces of Stalinists and gangsters is a
recurrent theme. . . . And yet, despite the emotional and physical
damage he sustained in Stalin’s camps, Shalamov survived and wrote
his hundreds of stories and poems. He embraces the very words he
derides. Most other writers in comparison look like dilettantes.”
—Patrick Kurp, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“As in his earlier volume [Kolyma Stories], Shalamov writes
matter-of-factly, unblinkingly, about the endless horrors of the
gulag, which are scarcely comprehensible. Essential chronicles of
the worst face of the totalitarian state.” —Kirkus
"A Virgil of this icy underworld, Shalamov is at his most
compelling when bearing witness. He spares no
detail, describing the diagnosis of dysentery, corpses exhumed
for their clothing and the hacked-off hands of fugitives used
for fingerprint identification. . . . We are fortunate that
he—who died deaf, nearly blind and institutionalised—not only
survived his sentence but had the force to withstand the exorcism
of the experience.” —Mia Levitin, The Spectator
“'Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,' Shalamov
wrote in 1971. . . . Shalamov’s stories are slaps in all our
faces—and, like a slap, they can enliven as well as hurt. . .
. Shalamov is not only a unique witness, but also a fine poet
and one of the greatest of Russian writers of short stories.
He is as important a figure as Primo Levi." —Robert
Chandler, Financial Times
"Shalamov is an unparalleled reporter on life in the Gulag and
anatomist of the camp condition, which like an ulcer bled its
malignance through the whole body of Soviet society. Not only a
reporter but a great practitioner too of a ruthlessly stripped-down
art." —J. M. Coetzee
“Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than
my own. . . . I respectfully confess that to him and not me it was
given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which
life in the camps dragged us all.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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