Putin’s Russia closed the voice of another Russia with the bloody roar of its guns: in this ocean of propaganda, crime and cowardice, decency and dignity, memory and sensitivity become subversive presences. As in the times of Generalissimo Stalin, Russia is a prison, from the walls of which only the rapturous tones of official marches can be heard. Voices that disagree with the entrenchment of terror and autocracy are suppressed and silenced. The Empire famously devours the people it claims to serve, as it has done many times.

From this other Russia, laid under the tombstone of totalitarianism, comes Varlam Shalamov: the one who spent his whole life in the hell of stone, wind and cold of the Gulag, decided to write without a prophetic accent and without vain hope for humanity. that Stalinism was doomed to be built alive, close to the end of the world. The monument born from the desperate vocation of his literature is the cycle “Stories with Koly”, a monument between the pages of which beat the hearts of those who died, to be swallowed up by the inexorable wind of the North.

Shalamov’s life did not survive the apotheosis allowed by Solzhenitsyn. His book, which was self-published and edited in exile, was only partially recognized as it really is. The writer, Chekhov, died in another salon No. 6, in the bosom of the Soviet Union, which seemed steadfast. His loneliness is the loneliness of his work. Unique and disturbing, his book about Kolyma is a testimony and dead end of history itself.

Shalamov’s descendants were formed by the inevitable comparison with Solzhenitsyn. They are united by the fate of suffering and memory, because both emerge from this depth of death and oblivion to awaken the memory of those who are no longer there. Both were enemies of utopia to the end, in which they saw a bloody thread of state crime.

But Shalamov has in his deep identity Chekhov’s seal of skeptical empathy, which distinguishes him from the prophetic Solzhenitsyn. If the latter wanted to be a prophet who shows the world a once lost path, then Shalamov, like Chekhov, had only the ambition to write, accurately and soberly, about the hell in which he lived. There are no passages of ideological criticism from the Gulag Archipelago in his texts. This is a photo album in which there is death, cold, pain, hunger, despair, but rarely hope. Like Chekhov, the author of Sakhalin Island, Shalamov has attention and detail. His stories tell about the descent into hell. Tense and unbearable in their brevity, Shalamov’s stories cannot have a happy ending. Because in this field of absolute superiority there is no more strength to hope. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro