VARLAM SALAMOV
Stories from Kolyma
translated by Eleni Bakopoulou
ed.. Agra, 2022, page 1602.

Salamov accused Solzhenitsyn of not being faithful to the description of the real life of the prisoners: “There could not be a cat in the camp hospital. They would eat it.”

“Stories from the Kolyma” by Varlam Salamov, translated from Russian by Eleni Bakopoulu, released last December by the Agra publishing house, “a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature,” “an epic series of stories in which a total of seventeen years spent in the Soviet Gulag.”

The description “masterpiece” is not an exaggeration, nor is the adjective “epic”, by the way: the book consists of almost 1600 pages and includes an informative foreword by the translator and 145 stories that Salamov wrote from 1954 (he died Stalin a year earlier) until 1973, divided into six sections, i.e. in the complete and final form of the work, edited by Irina Sirotinskaya, archivist, friend and collaborator of the author. In the USSR, “Stories from Kolyma” came out only in 1989, seven years after the death of their creator.

Salamov was born in 1907 in Vologda. His father was a priest, and his mother was a teacher who loved poetry – she could recite a bunch of lines by heart – and burst into tears when she heard symphonic music. Salamov was first arrested in February 1929 (then he was a third-year student at the Moscow Faculty of Law) in a printing house where he printed leaflets with the famous “Lenin’s Testament”, a letter criticizing Stalin. This was preceded by his participation in a demonstration of the left inner-party opposition during the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, on which he held a banner with the slogan “Down with Stalin.” He was sentenced to hard labor as a “dangerous social element”. He was released from prison in 1931 and returned to Moscow the following year, where he began working as a journalist and publishing articles and stories in magazines. Arrested again in early 1937 (the first year of Stalin’s “Great Terror”) for “subversive Trotskyist activities” and sentenced to five years hard labor. In 1942, already in Kolyma (in northeastern Siberia, on the edge of the Arctic Circle), he was sentenced to another ten years for anti-Soviet propaganda – the main reason was that he called the emigrant Ivan Bunin “the great Russian writer.” He succeeded to survive in terribly difficult conditions and was saved by the intervention of a fellow doctor in 1946, who got him a position as a nurse in a camp hospital.She left prison in 1952 and continued to work as a nurse in Magadan, in the Kolyma.Returned to Moscow in 1953, after Stalin’s death, during which time he met Boris Pasternak, with whom he corresponded since 1951, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

On February 25, 1956, with a dramatic speech at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mr. CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev began a course towards the “de-Stalinization” of the party and the country. Salamov, like many others, was politically “rehabilitated” and thus was able to start publishing poetry and magazine articles again. The possibility of publishing some of the stories that would make up Tales from Kolyma worried him, but it was not his priority, he assured Pasternak in a 1956 letter, because “there are certain moral boundaries that I cannot cross.” “. Apparently, this implied adaptation to the requirements of Soviet censorship. In 1962, while Salamov’s Kolyma Tales lay in a drawer, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published by another ex-prisoner of the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn. These were the first Gulag testimonies legally published in the USSR; Solzhenitsyn sent them to the director of Novy Mir magazine, who was impressed enough to push them up the party hierarchy until they fell into the hands of Khrushchev himself. by whose order it was released, partially censored.

In the 1970s, Salamov ran into Solzhenitsyn, whose literary merit he acknowledged to a certain extent, but at the same time seemed to envy his publishing and commercial success. In a letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Salamov accused Solzhenitsyn of not believing in the description of the real life of prisoners: “There could not be a cat in the camp hospital. They would eat it.” Solzhenitsyn again admitted that “he [ο Σαλάμοφ], and not me, managed to demonstrate the depth of ferocity and despair into which camp everyday life threw us, ”he, however, reproached him for not giving the book a political press:“ He does not find a single word to say against Soviet power. At the same time, Salamov increasingly distanced himself from the dissidents of the USSR. He did not seem to enjoy the political instrumentalization of writers and ex-prisoners in the Cold War context of the time, but he also wanted to maintain his autonomy as a literary artist.

Literature of exile and prison

In any case, Salamov’s Kolyma, Ivan Denisovich, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago belong to the purely Russian (and Soviet) genre of “exiled and prison literature.” The text that opens this tradition is the autobiography of the priest Abvakum (Mitsos Alexandropoulos characterizes him as a “Makrygian physiognomy” in Volume I of Russian Literature, Kedros, 1977), written in the middle of the 17th century. and describing the persecution that the author suffered as an “Old Believer”, i.e. opponent of the reforms imposed on the Russian church by the Moscow Patriarch Nikon. Habakkuk begins with the lives of the saints, the Christian tradition, but goes beyond the ecclesiastical form and focuses on the simple details of the everyday life of the condemned. The next stop in “emigre literature” is Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead, who spent four years (1849-1853) in exile in Omsk, Siberia, because of his participation in a group of liberal intellectuals. Beginning in the 1960s, Memories… (which, by a strange coincidence, came out exactly 100 years before Ivan Denisovich) became something of a “Gulag palimpsest.”

Salamov’s point of departure is Dostoyevsky, not Habakkuk, although we find repeated references to both in his work, as he follows the same method of blending the autobiographical with the fictional element. Many “Kolyma stories” are based on other people’s stories, and since the survival of the prisoner usually depended on small random details of everyday life, they are more variations on the theme of the biography of the “prisoner of the Gulag” than independent elements of fiction. . In this sense, we can say that they constitute a historical novel. As Svetlana Ostroverkova writes, in Salamov’s Kolyma, Solzhenitsyn’s passion for Dostoevsky is absent, instead, behind the colorless and cynical narration about the heartbreakingly tragic everyday life of prisoners, this non-life (and the translator takes care of that, in the Greek text) Chekhov’s distancing, which allows to the reader – or rather subtly directs him – to form his own moral attitude towards history and history.

Mr. Giorgos Tsaknias is a historian.