#Varlam Shalamov

[rapid-apathy]

Friendship never arises in a state of deprivation or misery. The “difficult” conditions of life, which writers of fairy tales tell us are a precondition for friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If deprivation or misery ever gave people solidarity and friendship, then the deprivation was not extreme and the misery was not very great. Grief is not acute or deep enough if you can share it with friends.

Kolyma Stories - Varlam Shalamov 

[bormgans]

KOLYMA STORIES - Varlam Shalamov (1954-1965, transl. 2018) & TELLURIA - Vladimir Sorokin (2013, transl. 2022)

Two very different books this time, both translated from Russian, both published by New York Review Books, and both collections of short stories of sorts. Telluria is a work of speculative fiction, set in a future Russia. Kolyma Stories is not so fictional, as it is Shalamov’s personal account of his 15 years in the gulag – one of the very few that survived in the system for such a long time. I’m…

[artisthomes]

Birthplace of Varlam Shalamov in Vologda, Russia

[yurucamp]

i'm still having this issue where half of the asks i get disappear mysteriously so copying the ask content from emails will have to do!

@hernharmony asked: there's smth uniquely melancholic and isolating about your works that I am strangely drawn to. It's the likes of which I've mostly seen in certain literature, perhaps Dostoevsky. But I'd really love to know if you've any book recs? If it's not a bother, I'd really like to get a glimpse of what it is that fuels you.

hi! thank you very much for your kind words, my heart swells at your description - i'm really happy that i'm able to convey something like that.

i don't read as much as i'd like to, because of university i'm usually reading for class and in my free time i like reading nonfiction (right now, i'm reading yuri slezkine's arctic mirrors).

recently i finished minor detail (by adania shibli) and i recommend everyone to read it. i like andrei platonov's writing (though most of all his short stories) and varlam shalamov's writing (though it's appropriately and exquisitely painful so only in small doses). i adore elizabeth bishop's poetry and that's the most immediate comparison to my art i can make, i would like to paint something that captures an ounce of the same feeling as the moose or at the fishhouses, i feel like my heart lives in those poems

a lot of this is repeated here: https://yurucamp.tumblr.com/post/727765369602850816/do-you-have-any-moviebook-recommendations-your

[panorama2024aaaa]

كيف يتحول الإنسان إلى وحش

‏«خذ شخصًا صالحًا وصادقًا ومحبًا وجرّده من الضروريات الأساسية وستحصل قريبًا على وحش لا يمكن التعرف عليه؛ سيفعل أي شيء للبقاء على قيد الحياة في ظل الضغوط الشديدة—يصبح الإنسان وحشًا في ثلاثة أسابيع من الضغط»

‏فارلام شالاموف Varlam Shalamov

‏(حكايات كوليما)

[queenlucythevaliant]

🪆would love one featuring Russian thoughts on God! ✝️

SO. I could have sworn that I've posted "Avvakum in Pustozyorsk" on this blog before, but I can't seem to find it so here it is.

(For context, this is written in the voice of a 17th century Russian Orthodox priest and religious dissident (an "Old Believer"). Avvakum was sent to the military outpost of Pustozyorsk where he was imprisoned four fourteen years, then eventually burned at the stake. It uses this historical voice to reflect on the religious persecution of the Soviet era. Also, it's fairly long, so I've highlighted my favorite stanzas.)

Avvakum in Pustozyorsk The walls of my church are the ribs round my heart; it seems life and I are soon bound to part. My cross now rises, traced with two fingers. In Pustozyorsk it blazes; its blaze will linger. I’m glorified everywhere, vilified, branded; I have already become the stuff of legend: I was, people say, full of anger and spite; I suffered, I died for the ancient rite. But this popular verdict is ugly nonsense; I hear and reject the implied censure. A rite is nothing – neither wrong nor right; a rite is a trifle in God’s sight. But they attacked our faith and the ways of the past, in all we’d learned as children, and taken to heart. In their holy garments, in their grand hats, with a cold crucifix in their cold hands, in thrall to a terror clutching their souls, they drag us to jails and herd us to scaffolds. We don’t debate doctrine, of books and their age; we don’t debate virtues of fetters and chains. Our dispute is of freedom, and the right to breathe – about our Lord’s will to bind as he please. The healers of souls chastised our bodies; while they schemed and plotted, we ran to the forests. Despite their decrees, we hurled our words out of the lion’s mouth and into the world. We called for vengeance against their sins along with the Lord; we sang poems and hymns. The words of the Lord were claps of thunder. The Church endures; it will never go under. And I, unyielding, reading the Psalter, was brought to the gates of the Andronikov Monastery. I was young; I endured every pain: hunger, beatings, interrogations. A winged angel shut the eyes of the guard, brought me cabbage soup and a hunk of bread. I crossed the threshold – and I walked free. Embracing my exile, I walked to the East. I held services by the Amur River, where I barely survived the winds and blizzards. They branded my cheeks with brands of frost; by a mountain stream they tore out my nostrils. But the path to the Lord goes from jail to jail; the path to the Lord never changes. And all too few, since Jesus’s days, have proved able to bear God’s all-seeing gaze. Nastasia, Nastasia, do not despair; true joy often wears a garment of tears. Whatever temptations may beat in your heart, whatever torments may rip you apart, walk on in peace through a thousand troubles and fear not the snake that bites at your ankles – though not from Eden has this snake crawled; it is an envoy of evil from Satan’s world. Here, birdsong is unknown; here one learns patience and the wisdom of stone. I have seen no colour except lingonberry in fourteen years spent as a prisoner. But this is not madness, nor a waking dream; it is my soul’s fortress, its will and freedom. And now they are leading me far away and in fetters; my yoke is easy, my burden grows lighter. My track is swept clean dusted with silver; I’m climbing to heaven on wings of fire. Through cold and hunger, through grief and fear, towards God, like a dove, I rise from the pyre. O far-away Russia – I give you my vow to return from the sky, forgiving my foes. May I be reviled, and burned at the stake; may my ashes be cast on the mountain wind. There is no fate sweeter, no better end, than to knock, as ash, at the human heart.

--Varlam Shalamov

[grandhotelabyss]

I'm rooting for ChatGPT now. I kid, I joke, I jest...and yet, when Freud replaced the "Image of the Lord" with childhood trauma as definitive of the human, the human may have suffered a diminution in status beneath even the serenely untraumatized animals, to say nothing of the serenely untraumatized machines, neither of which embarrasses us with essentially charitable appeals to our attention based on their weakness and fragility, rather than, in the case of writers, their ability to instruct and to delight.

Without sharing his Maoist politics, such politics plus his Platonic love of mathematics being why I've probably never cited him before, I still think Alain Badiou had a point when he argued against contemporary liberalism's habit of defining humanity by its weakness, a superficially humane politics concealing its own brutalist will-to-power insofar as it falls to liberal empire (to include, in the case of the professional class, the liberal empire of therapists) to oversee and administrate this inherent frailty:

...because the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple (life being, as Bichat says, nothing other than 'the set of functions that resist death'). To be sure, humanity is an animal species. It is mortal and predatory. But neither of these attributes can distinguish humanity within the world of the living. In his role as executioner, man is an animal abjection, but we must have the courage to add that in his role as victim, he is generally worth little more. The stories told by survivors of torture forcefully underline the point: if the torturers and bureaucrats of the dungeons and the camps are able to treat their victims like animals destined for the slaughterhouse, with whom they themselves, the well-nourished criminals, have nothing in common, it is because the victims have indeed become such animals. What had to be done for this to happen has indeed been done. That some nevertheless remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact. But this is always achieved precisely through enormous effort, an effort acknowledged by witnesses (in whom it excites a radiant recognition) as an almost incomprehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide with the identity of victim. This is where we are to find Man, if we are determined to think him [Ie penser]: in what ensures, as Varlam Shalamov puts in his Stories of Life in the Camps, that we are dealing with an animal whose resistance, unlike that of a horse, lies not in his fragile body but in his stubborn determination to remain what he is—that is to say, precisely something other than a victim, other than a being-for-death, and thus: something other than a mortal being.

An immortal: this is what the worst situations that can be inflicted upon Man show him to be, in so far as he distinguishes himself within the varied and rapacious flux of life. In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from this principle. So if ‘rights of man' exist, they are surely not rights of life against death, or rights of survival against misery. They are the rights of the Immortal, affirmed in their own right, or the rights of the Infinite, exercised over the contingency of suffering and death. The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man's identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances may expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal—unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary. In each case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a ‘biped without feathers', whose charms are not obvious. If we do not set out from this point (which can be summarized, very simply, as the assertion that Man thinks, that Man is a tissue of truths), if we equate Man with the simple reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle of life seems to imply. For this ‘living being' is in reality contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable legionnaires, the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?

—Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (trans. Peter Hallward)

And if you want to take the above passage as an oblique comment on the spectacle's other rigged debate of the hour, the one about what the urban bourgeoisie should do about "the unhoused" (engineered euphemism in its pragmatic frivolity compounds the offense, but never mind...), with conservatives arguing that they should be cleansed from the streets like subhuman scum and liberals arguing conversely that they ought to be mutely appreciated for the way their ornamentation of city space invites effusions of progressive sentiment, then so much the better.

[texasdreamer01]

People you'd like to get to know better tag game

I was tagged by @thejediandthemandalorian for this one. Cheers!

Last Song: Theory of a Deadman's "Strangers"

Currently watching: Just finished re-watching Stargate Atlantis <3

Currently reading: Lots of fanfiction, but eventually I'll finish Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov

Current Obsession: I'm still digesting a lot of SGA, but I'll probably bounce to another thing soon enough.

Tagging @spurious, @pandora15, and @treetart if any of you would like to do it!

[chuckredman]

"Chilling" Insight

I think George Orwell would have appreciated this excerpt from the anthology I’m reading. It’s a collection of Russian writing from the Soviet era. Most of the writers were imprisoned, exiled, or killed by the Soviets: “In 1937 Shalamov [Varlam Shalamov, short story writer] was informed on by someone who heard him express the opinion that Ivan Bunin [exiled Nobel Prize winner] was a classical…

[uncleweed]

ARUNDHATI ROY

When I was growing up in Kerala, to nourish the English part of my brain—there was a Malayalam part, too—there was a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of Kipling, a combination of the most beautiful, lyrical language and some very unlyrical politics, although I didn’t see it that way then . . . I was definitely influenced by them, as I have been later by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, John Berger, Joyce, Nabokov. What an impossible task it is to list the writers one loves and admires. I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer. My reading can switch rather oddly from Mrs. Dalloway to a report about the National Register of Citizens and the two million people in Assam who have been struck off it and have suddenly ceased to be Indian citizens. Ceased to have any rights whatsoever.

A novel that overwhelmed me recently is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Just incredible—the audacity, the range of characters and situations. It begins with a surreal description of the Volga burning—the gasoline floating on the surface of the water catching fire, giving the illusion of a burning river—as the battle for Stalingrad rages. The manuscript was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as though it were a person. Another recent read was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It’s about the time just before World War II, when many Jews in Italy were members of the Fascist Party. The Finzi-Continis are an elite Jewish family who live in a mansion with huge grounds and tennis courts. The book is centered around a love affair between the daughter of the Finzi-Continis and a person who is an outsider to that world as the Holocaust closes in. There is something about the unchanging stillness of that compound, the refusal to acknowledge what is happening, even while the darkness deepens around it. It is chilling and so eerily contemporary. All of the entitled Finzi-Continis end up dead. Considering what happened in Stalinist Russia, what happened in Europe during World War II—one is reading, searching for ways to understand the present. What fascinates me is how some of the people who were shot by Stalin’s firing squads died shouting “Long live Stalin!” People who labored in the gulag camps wept when he died. Ordinary Germans never rose up against Hitler, even as he persisted with a war that turned their cities into rubble. I look for clues to human psychology in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin basically killed, in the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

[mattdenuzzo]

What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps // Varlam Shalamov

[matthewdenuzzo]

What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps // Varlam Shalamov

[andreyshch]

Varlam Shalamov

Liszt rapsody No.2.

The town didn't have its madman. For ten years this established vacancy was occupied by the lousy bell ringer Kuzya. Once, the son of a bell ringer has drowned, and since then Kuzya considered water to be the vomit of the devil. He refused from washing and never went to the other side of the river. He whispered to the blue-eyed he encountered: "devil spat into your eyes". He crossed his glass thrice before the tea drinking. Black-eyed and brown-eyed shopkeepers were feeding him. Kuzya has died recently and the townspeople were examining the oldman in a worn out glossy cloak, thinking if he is suitable for the role of the mad.

The boys were already running after him, shouting: "chizhik, chizhik". Long ago, before the elder brothers of these boys were born, the oldman was a music teacher. The nickname "chizhik" was not given to him by the children. The oldman's wife was dying, he exchanged the piano for the butter and invited a professor from Moscow. The wife died and the oldman took a job of a pianist at the cinematograph. Between the two performances of "The fairy tale of love dear" the pianist was given an envelope with the blurry purple stamp. The regiment commander was advising that both oldman's sons, red army servicemen, had died heroes. The oldman accurately put the paper into the envelope and took a seat at the piano. But at the most pathetic moment he started to play chizhik. The film went on without music and cinematograph director was consoling the oldman as he could during the whole evening. A week later the director dismissed him. The military commissariat obtained a relief payment for the oldman.

Every morning he, a huge man with the swollen face, was walking through the town leaning on his stick, breathing heavily. The lion heads - the clasps of his cloak - were shining. Every morning the oldman was cleaning their muzzles with chalk. He was moving past the gardens chopped for firewood, past the goats eating away the mobilization posters, past the wilted vegetable plots fenced by the barbwire, past the churches not yet altered into cinematographs and fiercely raising the crumpled breasts of their doms to the sky. He was going to the market.

The market was renamed into "The Square of struggle against speculation". The struggle with speculation took place there. Once a week the whistles and the market women made a squeal. The gymnasium coats, the sacks of tabacco and striped sailor shirts were flying over the fences. The present and the future owners of these things were jumping after them. The parrot who pulled out happinness was hiding at the backstreet.

And at the abandoned market place, among the painted stools and facetted wooden spinning tops - the roulettes of the market Monte Carlo - "for five - twenty five, for twenty five - a hundred twenty five. The answer up to two millions" - the huge sad man stood motionless. His story was well-known in the town and even the police didn't take him during the raids. And when once the young investigation agent, an ardent collector of Carters and Pinkertons, conveyed the oldman to his chief, the chief asked: "but why did you bring this...Liszt?.." Again, it wasn't the chief criminal investigator who came up with this name. The oldman has sold the piano but kept the grammophone. Long ago, when the wife and children were not only alive but cheerful, he was winding up the grammophone every day. Gymnasium students, shop sellers, firemen and cooks were gathering beneath the window of their appartment - the oldman was entertaining the town. In the year of war he bought a record which became favorite in the family. It was the Liszt rapsody No. 2. It has been played only twice - during the urgent gathering of the elder son to the front the disc was swiped from the table and smashed. The oldman couldn't repeat this proud, powerful and young melody, but he remembered it exactly like this.

In the evenings the oldman was bringing the chair out to the street. He was recollecting life looking at the narrow green strip of the dawn. He felt that some happinness has slipped out of his hands and shattered. He was recalling his sons and singing two or three bars he remembered of the rapsody. There was neither rapsody, nor sons. The grey dust was lying on the oldman's boots quietly.

Gradually he began to think more of a rapsody than about the sons and the wife. The oldman thought that Liszt will bring his family back. He began to search for the record. He renewed the old and strarted the new acquaintances. He was bending over the stalls of the ragmen and market vendors, groaning. His search was painfully long - may be a thousand days. That's how the town got to know about the existence of Liszt and his rapsody.

One wet and windy autumn day he found the record. He was gasping with happinness. They were asking a kilo of sugar for the record. It was a crazy price, but the seller was notified in andvance that the buyer was crazy himself. The oldman worried. He offered pressed tea, a copy of Rubens, a pair of boots. There was no sugar in the city. The oldman was affraid to loose the rapsody. He begged the seller to come to his apartment and choose anything for exchange. The seller refused. The oldman besought him to wait - he ran home to ask his neighbors for sugar. The seller agreed. The oldman hobbled towards his house. After two hours he came back to the market, hot and sweating. He didn't get the sugar. The disk owner disappeared. The oldman sat on a stone and began to cry. A mathematics teacher of the unified labor school led him home. He never came back to the market. Two days later the mathematics teacher found him delirious - the oldman had caught a cold. He was raving about the rapsody. There was an old grammophone in the corner of the room, surrounded by the pile of broken discs. The teacher rushed for a doctor. The jolly doctor came, the one whose patients ran away. A year ago he came to the town as a doctor of psychiatry, but the drunken hospital guard had scattered all the insane and there was no one there to collect them. They disappeared. The doctor became a therapist. At that time venerologists were treating the spainsh flue, pharmacists were trepanning the skulls. The doctor put a thermometer and shook his head.

"We'll get better, pop", he said briskly. "A little aspirin..."

"Rapsody", gasped the oldman.

"What..."

The mathematician told the story of the oldman. The doctor looked at the patient with interest. The oldman's swollen belly was slightly trembling.

- Liszt...- pronounced the oldman crying, - Liszt...- and he folded his blue heavy hands prayerfully. The cramp of suffering was running along his face like a lightning. The doctor came in the morning. The mathematician looked at him timidly with his reddened desperate eyes. The doctor kept himself like a wizard. He took a thermometer out of his sleeve. He felt the pulse. The oldman was in full consciousness and kept silent.

- Pop, said the doctor leaping back from the bed and exulting, - Liszt rapsody No.2, - and he took the black disc from behind. The oldman's heavy breath interrupted. He opened his eyes widely. His body was trembling in small convulsions. The doctor turned the grammophone handle and wiped the dust from the cloth turntable. He placed the disc and pushed the lever. The needle started to hiss and the first bars of the waltz "On the hills of Manchuria" threw the teacher of mathematics up from his chair. He rushed to the grammophone but the doctor stood in his way. The teacher clutched at the doctor's shoulders.

What - are you, - there was a gurgling noise in the throat of a teacher and the big drops of sweat appeared on his forehead.

- Now, said the doctor, carefully taking the teacher's hands off his shoulders. - Take it easy. You are only a mathematician.

The oldman's face was brightenning. Severe wrinkle folds were smoothing out slowly. He was smiling. The light blissful froth was bubbling on the oldman's lips.

Liszt! - he whispered, - Liszt...

[nicklloydnow]

“The mountain had been laid bare and transformed into a gigantic stage for a camp mystery play.

A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses of 1938 was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma.

In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years. There were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost.

In 1938 entire work gangs dug such graves, constantly drilling, exploding, deepening the enormous gray, hard, cold stone pits. Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no "assignment," no "norm" calculated to kill a man with a fourteen-hour working day. It was easier to dig graves than to stand in rubber galoshes over bare feet in the icy waters where they mined gold - the "basic unit of production," the "first of all metals."

These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.

The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.

These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to arise. From a distance, from the other side of the creek, I had previously seen these moving objects that caught up against branches and stones; I had seen them through the few trees still left standing and I thought that they were logs that had not yet been hauled away.

Now the mountain was laid bare, and its secret was revealed. The grave "opened," and the dead men slid down the stony slope. Near the tractor road an enormous new common grave was dug. Who had dug it? No one was taken from the barracks for this work. It was enormous, and I and my companions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in this new grave, this housewarming for dead men.

The bulldozer scraped up the frozen bodies, thousands of bodies of thousands of skeleton-like corpses. Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and eyes burning with a hungry gleam.

With my exhausted, tormented mind I tried to understand: How did there come to be such an enormous grave in this area? I am an old resident of Kolyma, and there hadn't been any gold mine here as far as I knew. But then I realized that I knew only a fragment of that world surrounded by a barbed-wire zone and guard towers that reminded one of the pages of tent-like Moscow architecture. Moscow's taller buildings are guard towers keeping watch over the city's prisoners. That's what those buildings look like. And what served as models for Moscow architecture - the watchful towers of the Moscow Kremlin or the guard towers of the camps? The guard towers of the camp "zone" represent the main concept advanced by their time and brilliantly expressed in the symbolism of architecture.

I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking for uranium or a gold mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in the folds of the mountain.

And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossoming of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any deed of man - good or bad. And if I forget, the grass will forget. But the permafrost and stone will not forget.” (p. 178 - 180)

[queenlucythevaliant]

🪆

Have some Varlam Shalamov!

Memory had 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.

[megairea]

All that is human slips away; everything was mere husk. All that is left, indivisible, is birdsong and dusk.

Varlam Shalamov, from “All that is human”; The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (ed. by Robert Chandler, Irina Mashinski, Boris Dralyuk)