Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
Beyond Bitterness
By Irving Howe
Kolyma Tales
by Varlam Shalamov, translated by John Glad
Norton, 222 pp., $9.95
The strength of these stories derives, first of all, from a refusal to blink at the finality of waste. Varlam Shalamov, now seventy-three, said to be living in Moscow, spent seventeen years in the forced labor camps of Kolyma, and his life was shattered by this ordeal. In stories that circulated in Samizdat but are still not published in the Soviet Union he writes about it not with, and not without, bitterness, but somehow in a voice that seems beyond bitterness. Anger and grief have long ago exhausted themselves. What remains is the determination, perhaps beyond explaining, to get things straight, for whatever record may survive. Shalamov speaks in the voice of the irrevocable: millions perished, other millions were drained of health and youth, and there can be no recompense or reconciliation. The injustice is radical, complete, without end. Nor does Shalamov cover this up with noble phrases about 'the human spirit,' 'transcendence,' etc.
Review, 1923 words
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