On Tick, by Varlam Shalamov

BIOGRAPHY
Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, that is 500 km north of Moscow, in 1907, and died in Moscow when he was 74, seven years before the fall of the USSR.
He was the son of a priest and of a teacher. His father went to Alaska (when it still belonged to Russia) as a missionary, but returned after the 1905 Revolution.
Although he was a religious man, he didn’t oppose the October Revolution in 1917.
Varlam took part in the revolutionary process as a Trotskyist activist; however he couldn’t go to university because he was the son of a priest, and at that time, workers and labourers were given preference.
For some time, he worked in a leather factory as a tanner, but eventually he could study and get a degree in Law in Moscow.
In 1929 was arrested for Trotskyist activities, and in 1932, he was released. He was imprisoned again in 1937, during the Great Purge, and released in 1942. But, because he praised the writer Ivan Bunin, anti-bolchevik and winner of the1933 Nobel Prize of Literature, he was arrested again and remained imprisoned until 1951.
He was a journalist and a writer, but while he was imprisoned in Kolyma, a labourer camp in one of the coldest places in Russia, he had to do different jobs, usually very hard, but also as a nurse in the camp hospital.
His most famous book is Kolyma Tales. He started to write these short stories in1954 and finished in 1973. Some people consider it the best description of the life in a labour camp. They are written in a dry style, devoid of all literary ornament (there are no metaphors, no allegories, no deep meanings, no ambiguity of any kind), and, what it’s more important, devoid of all political references.
The stories overlap one on another and the same characters appear in different scenes and different times. This way of narrating creates the feeling of a symphony of different voices.
There is a big difference between his narrative and the books by Solzhenitsyn: in Solzhenitsyn the labourers are heroes that suffer martyrdom, and the government is the villain of the story. What is important in Shalamov stories is the human dimension: guards, prisoners, criminals, members of the Party…, all of them are human beings, all of them have their own reasons.

Shalamov remained committed to his ideals throughout the time he was in the labour camp and perhaps that is what gave him the strength to go on living and the power his writings have.
As you can imagine, the Kolyma Tales were forbidden in the USSR, but they were distributed via samizdat (that is, in handwriting copies) and smuggled abroad. In 1960, they were published in an English translation. In 1978 in London, they were published in the original Russian version, and finally in the USSR three years before their dissolution.

ON TICK

This is really the first story of Kolyma Tales, as the first tale works as a prologue. It tells us about the moments of leisure of a group of prisoners in a labour camp after their long and hard workday. In the camp, the criminals have a higher status than the political prisoners, who usually are their servants, or at least, who must obey their orders.

The non-political prisoners are playing cards and betting high. But what do they bet if their belongings are close to nothing?The language is very simple, the descriptions are very precise and minimalist, but every object depicted seems to have a deep meaning. And the outcome of the story is so abrupt and unexpected, that you have to read it twice in order to understand it fully.

QUESTIONS

-Which diffeences do you think there were between German concentration camps and the Gulag?

-What do you know about Mao Cultural Revolution in China?

-According to your opinion, punishments and penitenciary systems are useful? What is it better for the justice, a jury or a judge?

-What can you tell us about Victor Hugo, Yesenin, Gogol?

VOCABULARY

berth, deftness, stencils, card-sharp, duds, orderly