Virgil of Kolyma

Celebrating with kneeling the next date of our Virgil, the guide to the most terrible island of the Gulag Archipelago - Kolyma, do not forget that if Auschwitz was the hell of Europe, then Kolyma, no doubt, could be considered the hell of Eurasia. Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, poet, underground worker, writer, was born 105 years ago, on June 18, 1907, to lead us through the icy circles of this abyss. Too late, the naive Trotskyist student realized that Kolyma was Lenin's testament, which he tried in vain to spread. There was no chance of surviving in Kolyma, but a miracle happened: the torture chambers of the gold mines and the horror of Elgen survived to our days and to our shuddering souls thanks to three surviving eyewitnesses, victims, witnesses for the prosecution: Varlam Shalamov, author of Kolyma Tales, Evgenia Ginzburg with her "Steep route" and the author of "Bas-relief on the rock" Andrey Aldan-Semenov.
The work of Varlam Shalamov is much darker than the stories and novels of Solzhenitsyn, and he did not have any saving “sharashkas” in the camps. His thieves are a herd of animals. Saved him only paramedic courses. Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich remained a man, but in Kolyma one could remain a man only at the cost of his life. Hunger and cold deprive the prisoner of his immortal soul. Nobility, dignity, friendship, love - everything is burned out by suffering. Only malice remains. Knowing this ending, Shalamov's favorite hero, Major Pugachev, is looking for comrades to escape, runs, rises, accepts battle and death, while they are still people, until they lose their strength, until they turn into goners eaten by hunger. And only at the end of his bloody path, an honest front-line soldier, hero, organizer of the escape from the German concentration camp, Major Pugachev, understands that his war continued in Kolyma, that there is no difference between the Scharführers of the German Stalag and the guards of the Kolyma camp, and both are enemies, that offer Vlasov, made to the major by his comrade, had to be seriously considered.
Here are the hungry convicts Shalamov rummaging in the village garbage, greedily grabbing vegetable peelings, a frozen lump of cutlets, torn socks, and find a children's notebook with drawings, where instead of Christmas trees there is a thorn, instead of the Gray Wolf there is a camp shepherd, and Ivan Tsarevich has a sheepskin coat, a machine gun and red star. Here the hungry prisoner Vaska, who did not receive payment from the authorities for the firewood delivered to the house, steals an ice-cream pig from the pantry and, while they break the door in the club where he has locked himself, manages to devour half the frozen carcass. Here, an exhausted camp student fulfills the norm by 25%, for this he is supposed to be shot under the roar of tractors behind the horse base, and before his death, he regrets only that he was straining himself at work this last day in vain. Horses die before people, because horses are less hardy.
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Too late, the naive Trotskyist student realized that Kolyma was Lenin's testament, which he tried in vain to spread.

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And Shalamov did not have fame, fans, and "Youth", and "New World". Tvardovsky found his stories too nightmarish and refused to publish them without any censorship. There was no home and no bread, and the writer's life ended in the miserable conditions of a Soviet charitable institution for the disabled.
But Shalamov's poems and stories are not an example of cowardly conciliation, but of an uncompromising challenge. He managed to write about the duty of the intelligentsia defending freedom, comparing its struggle with the spawning of salmon: “And living ranks swim past the corpses into the riverbed, to spawn the fate of Russians, to the call of fate-trouble.” He also managed to write about Archpriest Avvakum: “Our dispute is not spiritual about the age of books. Our dispute is not a church one about the benefits of chains. Our dispute is about freedom, about the right to breathe, about the will of the Lord to knit and decide.
Varlam Shalamov made his escape and made his shot towards the convoy.