The history of the creation of "Kolyma stories". Mikhail Mikheev

That is why the narrative in “Kolyma Stories” records the simplest, most primitive things. Details are selected sparingly, subjected to strict selection - they convey only the main, vital things. The feelings of many of Shalamov’s heroes are dulled.

“The workers were not shown a thermometer, but there was no need to do so - they had to go to work at any degree. In addition, the old-timers almost accurately determined the frost without a thermometer: if there is a frosty fog, it means that it is forty degrees below zero outside; if the air when breathing comes out with noise, but it’s still not difficult to breathe - that means forty-five degrees; if the breathing is noisy and shortness of breath is noticeable - over fifty-five degrees - the spittle has been freezing on the fly for two weeks.” ("The Carpenters", 1954).

It may seem that the spiritual life of Shalamov’s heroes is also primitive, that a person who has lost touch with his past cannot help but lose himself and ceases to be a complex, multifaceted personality. However, this is not true. Take a closer look at the hero of the story “Kant”. It was as if there was nothing left for him in life. And suddenly it turns out that he looks at the world through the eyes of an artist. Otherwise, he would not be able to perceive and describe the phenomena of the surrounding world so subtly.

Shalamov's prose conveys the feelings of the characters, their complex transitions; The narrator and the heroes of “Kolyma Tales” constantly reflect on their lives. It is interesting that this introspection is perceived not as an artistic technique of Shalamov, but as a natural need of developed human consciousness to comprehend what is happening. This is how the narrator of the story “Rain” explains the nature of the search for answers to, as he himself writes, “star” questions: “So, mixing “star” questions and little things in my brain, I waited, soaked to the skin, but calm. Was this reasoning some kind of brain training? No way. It was all natural, it was life. I understood that the body, and therefore the brain cells, were receiving insufficient nutrition, my brain had long been on a starvation diet and that this would inevitably result in madness, early sclerosis or something else... And it was fun for me to think that I would not live , I won’t have time to live to see sclerosis. It was raining."

Such self-analysis simultaneously turns out to be a way to preserve one’s own intelligence, and often the basis philosophical understanding laws of human existence; it allows you to discover something in a person that can only be talked about in a pathetic style. To his surprise, the reader, already accustomed to the laconicism of Shalamov’s prose, finds in it such a pathetic style.

In the most terrible, tragic moments, when a person is forced to think about crippling himself in order to save his life, the hero of the story “Rain” remembers the great, divine essence of man, his beauty and physical strength: “It was at this time I began to understand the essence of the great instinct of life - that very quality with which man is endowed to the highest degree" or "... I understood the most important thing that a person became a person not because he is God's creation, and not because he has an amazing thumb on each hand. But because he was (physically) stronger, more resilient than all animals, and later because he forced his spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle.”

Reflecting on the essence and strength of man, Shalamov puts himself on a par with other Russian writers who wrote on this topic. His words can easily be placed next to Gorky’s famous statement: “Man – that sounds proud!” It is no coincidence that, talking about his idea to break his leg, the narrator recalls the “Russian poet”: “Out of this unkind weight, I thought of creating something beautiful - in the words of the Russian poet. I thought of saving my life by breaking my leg. Truly it was a wonderful intention, a phenomenon of a completely aesthetic kind. The stone should have fallen and crushed my leg. And I am forever disabled!”

If you read the poem “Notre Dame”, you will find there the image of “evil heaviness”, however, in Mandelstam this image has a completely different meaning - this is the material from which poems are created; i.e. words. It is difficult for a poet to work with words, so Mandelstam speaks of “unkind heaviness.” Of course, the “evil” heaviness that Shalamov’s hero thinks about is of a completely different nature, but the fact that this hero remembers Mandelstam’s poems - remembers them in the hell of the Gulag - is extremely important.

The sparseness of the narrative and the richness of reflections force us to perceive Shalamov’s prose not as fiction, but as documentary or memoir. And yet we have before us exquisite artistic prose.

"Single metering"

“Single Measurement” is a short story about one day in the life of prisoner Dugaev - the last day of his life. Or rather, the story begins with a description of what happened on the eve of this last day: “In the evening, while winding up the tape measure, the caretaker said that Dugaev would receive a single measurement the next day.” This phrase contains an exposition, a kind of prologue to the story. It already contains the plot of the entire story in a condensed form and predicts the course of development of this plot.

However, we do not yet know what the “single measurement” portends for the hero, just as the hero of the story does not know. But the foreman, in whose presence the caretaker utters words about “single measurement” for Dugaev, apparently knows: “The foreman, who was standing nearby and asked the caretaker to lend “ten cubes until the day after tomorrow,” suddenly fell silent and began to look at the flickering with the crest of the hill the evening star.”

What was the foreman thinking? Are you really daydreaming while looking at the “evening star”? It’s unlikely, since he asks that the team be given the opportunity to deliver the quota (ten cubic meters of soil taken from the face) later than the due date. The foreman has no time for dreams now; the brigade is going through a difficult moment. And in general, what kind of dreams can we talk about in camp life? Here they only dream in their sleep.

The “detachment” of the foreman is the exact artistic detail necessary for Shalamov to show a person who instinctively strives to separate himself from what is happening. The foreman already knows what the reader will understand very soon: we are talking about the murder of the prisoner Dugaev, who does not work out his quota, and therefore is a useless person in the zone from the point of view of the camp authorities.

The foreman either does not want to participate in what is happening (it’s hard to be a witness or accomplice to the murder of a person), or is to blame for this turn of fate for Dugaev: the foreman in the brigade needs workers, not extra mouths to feed. Last explanation The foreman’s “thoughtfulness” is perhaps more plausible, especially since the supervisor’s warning to Dugaev immediately follows the foreman’s request to postpone the work deadline.

The image of the “evening star” that the foreman was staring at has another artistic function. The star is a symbol of the romantic world (remember at least the last lines of Lermontov’s poem “I go out alone on the road...”: “And the star speaks to the star”), which remained outside the world of Shalamov’s heroes.

And finally, the exposition of the story “Single Measurement” concludes with the following phrase: “Dugaev was twenty-three years old, and everything that he saw and heard here surprised him more than frightened him.” Here he is main character a story that has a little time left to live, just one day. And his youth, and his lack of understanding of what is happening, and some kind of “detachment” from the environment, and the inability to steal and adapt, as others do - all this leaves the reader with the same feeling as the hero, surprise and acute feeling anxiety.

The laconicism of the story, on the one hand, is due to the brevity of the hero’s strictly measured path. On the other hand, this is an artistic technique that creates the effect of reticence. As a result, the reader experiences a feeling of bewilderment; everything that happens seems as strange to him as it does to Dugaev. The reader does not immediately begin to understand the inevitability of the outcome, almost together with the hero. And this makes the story especially poignant.

The last phrase of the story - “And, having realized what the matter was, Dugaev regretted that he had worked in vain, that he had suffered in vain this last day” - this is also its climax, at which the action ends. Further development actions or an epilogue are neither necessary nor possible here.

Despite the deliberate isolation of the story, which ends with the death of the hero, its raggedness and reticence create the effect of an open ending. Realizing that he is being led to be shot, the hero of the novel regrets that he worked and suffered through this last and therefore especially dear day of his life. This means that he recognizes the incredible value of this life, understands that there is another free life, and it is possible even in the camp. By ending the story in this way, the writer makes us think about the most important questions of human existence, and in the first place is the question of a person’s ability to feel inner freedom, regardless of external circumstances.

Notice how much meaning Shalamov contains in every artistic detail. First, we simply read the story and understand its general meaning, then we highlight phrases or words that have something more behind them than their direct meaning. Next, we begin to gradually “unfold” these moments that are significant for the story. As a result, the narrative ceases to be perceived by us as stingy, describing only the momentary - by carefully selecting words, playing on halftones, the writer constantly shows us how much life remains behind the simple events of his stories.

"Sherry Brandy" (1958)

The hero of the story “Sherry Brandy” is different from most of the heroes of “Kolyma Stories”. He is a poet. A poet on the edge of life, and he thinks philosophically. As if he is observing from the outside what is happening, including what is happening to himself: “...he slowly thought about the great monotony of dying movements, about what doctors understood and described earlier than artists and poets.” Like any poet, he speaks of himself as one of many, as a person in general. Poetic lines and images emerge in his mind: Pushkin, Tyutchev, Blok... He reflects on life and poetry. The world is compared in his imagination to poetry; poems turn out to be life.

“Even now the stanzas stood up easily, one after another, and, although he had not written down and could not write down his poems for a long time, the words still stood up easily in some given and each time extraordinary rhythm. Rhyme was a seeker, a tool for magnetic search for words and concepts. Each word was part of the world, it responded to rhyme, and the whole world rushed by with the speed of some electronic machine. Everything screamed: take me. No, me. There was no need to look for anything. I just had to throw it away. There were, as it were, two people - the one who composes, who launched his turntable with all his might, and the other, who selects and from time to time stops the running machine. And, seeing that he was two people, the poet realized that he was now composing real poetry. What's wrong with the fact that they are not written down? Recording, printing - all this is vanity of vanities. Everything that is born unselfishly is not the best. The best thing is what is not written down, what was composed and disappeared, melted away without a trace, and only the creative joy that he feels and which cannot be confused with anything, proves that the poem was created, that the beautiful was created.”

Regional state budgetary professional educational institution"Zelenogorsk College of Industrial Technologies and Service"

Literature

Pedagogical technology “Method of dialectical teaching”

Judgment questions for V.T. Shalamov’s story “Condensed Milk” (2nd year, 11th grade)

prepared

teacher of Russian language and literature

Azarova Svetlana Vasilievna

Zelenogorsk

1. How can we explain that the prisoners were jealous of Shestakov?

2.How to prove that the hero is constantly hungry?

3.When did the hero of the story meet Shestakov?

4. In what case could a prisoner get a job in his specialty in the camp?

5. How does Shestakov work out his “warm” place?

6. Why did the hero refuse Shestakov’s offer to escape?

7. Why did the hero first eat condensed milk and then refuse to escape?

Answers:

1. “At the mine, Shestakov did not work in the face. He was a geological engineer, and he was hired to work in geological exploration, in the office.” The prisoners envied those who “managed to get to work in an office, in a hospital, in a stable - there were no hours of hard physical labor there.” The working day lasted sixteen hours, which few prisoners could endure.

2. The hero is constantly hungry. Standing outside the grocery store, unable to buy, he can't "take his eyes off the chocolate-colored loaves of bread." He stands, looks at the bread, and does not have the strength to go to the barracks. “Changing with happiness,” the hero “orders” Shestakov some canned milk, and at night he sees in a dream a huge can of condensed milk. “The huge jar, blue as the night sky, was pierced in a thousand places, and the milk seeped out and flowed in a wide stream of the Milky Way. And I easily reached with my hands to the sky and ate the thick, sweet, starry milk.” While waiting, the hero did not remember what he did or how he worked that day. Having received the promised condensed milk, he ate two cans at once.

3. The hero met Shestakov on the “Big Land”, in Butyrka prison, he was sitting in the same cell with him.

4. Most often, a prisoner received a job in his specialty, “in an office,” if he agreed to fulfill all the demands of his superiors: collect and report the necessary information, arrange provocations among prisoners, etc. “...And suddenly I was afraid of Shestakov, the only one of us who got a job in his specialty. Who got him there and at what cost? You have to pay for everything. Someone else's blood, someone else's life."

5. Shestakov persuaded five prisoners to escape. “...Two were killed not far from the Black Keys, three were tried a month later.” Shestakov was transferred to another mine. “He did not receive an additional sentence for escaping; his superiors played fair with him.”

The article is posted on a hard-to-reach Internet resource in the pdf extension, duplicated here.

Documentary artistry of the stories “The Parcel” by V.T. Shalamov and “Sanochki” G.S. Zhzhenova

The article is related to the topic of the Kolyma convict camps and is devoted to the analysis of the documentary and artistic world of the stories “The Parcel” by V.T. Shalamov and “Sanochki” G.S. Zhzhenova.

The exposition of Shalamov’s story “The Parcel” directly introduces the main event of the story - the receipt of a parcel by one of the prisoners: “The parcels were handed out during the shift. The foremen verified the identity of the recipient. The plywood broke and cracked in its own way, like plywood. The trees here didn’t break like that, they screamed in a different voice.” It is no coincidence that the sound of parcel plywood is compared with the sound of breaking Kolyma trees, as if symbolizing two opposite modes of human life - life in the wild and life in prison. The “multipolarity” is clearly felt in another equally important circumstance: a prisoner who comes to receive a parcel notices behind the barrier people “with clean hands in overly neat military uniforms.” From the very beginning, the contrast creates an insurmountable barrier between the powerless prisoners and those who stand above them - the arbiters of their destinies. The attitude of the “masters” to the “slaves” is also noted in the beginning of the plot, and the abuse of the prisoner will vary until the end of the story, forming a kind of event constant, emphasizing the absolute lack of rights of the ordinary inhabitant of the Stalinist forced labor camp.

The article deals with the GULAG theme. The author made an attempt to analyze the documentary and fi ction worlds of the two stories.

LITERATURE

1. Zhzhenov G.S. Sanochki // From “Capercaillie” to “Firebird”: a story and stories. - M.: Sovremennik, 1989.
2. Cress Vernon. Zecameron of the 20th century: a novel. - M.: Artist. lit., 1992.
3. Shalamov V.T. Collected works. In 4 volumes. T. 1 // comp., prepared. text and notes I. Sirotinskaya. - M.: Artist. lit., 1998.
4. Shalamov V.T. Collected works. In 4 volumes. T. 2 // comp., prepared. text and notes I. Sirotinskaya. - M.: Artist. lit., 1998.
5. Schiller F.P. Letters from a Dead House / comp., trans. with German, note, afterword V.F. Diesendorff. - M.: Society. acad. sciences grew up Germans, 2002.

NOTES

1. Let us note that dreams about food and bread do not give a hungry prisoner in the camp peace: “I slept and still saw my constant Kolyma dream - loaves of bread floating through the air, filling all the houses, all the streets, all the earth.”
2. Philologist F.P. Schiller wrote to his family in 1940 from a camp in Nakhodka Bay: “If you have not yet sent boots and an outer shirt, then do not send them, otherwise I am afraid that you will send something completely inappropriate.”
3. Shalamov recalls this incident both in “Sketches of the Underworld” and in the story “Funeral Word”: “The burkas cost seven hundred, but it was a profitable sale.<…>And I bought a whole kilogram of butter at the store.<…>I also bought bread...”
4. Due to the constant hunger of prisoners and exhausting hard work, the diagnosis of “nutritional dystrophy” in the camps was common. This became fertile ground for undertaking adventures of unprecedented proportions: “all products that exceeded their shelf life were written off to the camp.”
5. The hero-narrator of the story “Conspiracy of Lawyers” experiences something similar to this feeling: “I haven’t been pushed out of this brigade yet. There were people here who were weaker than me, and this brought some kind of calm, some kind of unexpected joy.” Kolyma resident Vernon Kress writes about human psychology in such conditions: “We were pushed by our comrades, because the sight of a survivor always irritates a healthier person, he guesses his own future in him and, moreover, is drawn to find an even more defenseless person, to take revenge on him.”<...>» .
6. Not only the Blatars loved theatricality, other representatives of the camp population also showed interest in it.

Cheslav Gorbachevsky, South Ural State University

In his “Kolyma Tales,” Shalamov deliberately builds on Solzhenitsyn’s narrative. If “In one day...” work is spiritual liberation, then for Shalamov work is hard labor, “the camp was a place where they were taught to hate physical labor, to hate work in general.”

And if for a moment Shalamov’s hero’s work may seem like a “melody,” “music,” “symphony” (“The Shovel Artist”), then the next moment it is cacophony, grinding and ragged rhythm, deception and lies. For Varlam Shalamov, catharsis, i.e. a positive lesson from being in the camps is impossible.

However, one should pay tribute to the 16 years of imprisonment of the writer, who wandered “from the hospital to the slaughter.” Varlam Shalamov is in many ways Virgil, driving his car through the circles of hell. (The documentary story “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” is a vivid example of this). The writer was convicted under Article 58. and ended up in “criminal camps” where “domestic workers” and political prisoners were kept.

“...trolleys and carriages float along a rope to a butara - to a washing device, where the soil is washed under a stream of water, and gold settles to the bottom of the deck.” “But this is none of your business.” Butariat (sprinkle the soil with spatulas) are not wheelbarrow workers. The fifty-eighth is not allowed anywhere near gold.

The following phrase of the author is very symbolic: “... the wheelbarrow driver does not see the wheel... He must feel the wheel.” Here Shalamov talks about the specific work of a wheelbarrow driver. But the image should be understood much more broadly: a wheelbarrow driver is a person who does not see the wheel, he does not see the wheel of repression, but he feels it very well. He does not see those who set this wheel in motion, all the perpetrators of the feudal camp system of our century. Shalamov would like to tear off the mask of uncertainty from everyone, by name. This “veil of the unknown” mask grows on them, fuses with their skin. And the sooner this veil is torn off, the better.

There is such a thing as “behind-the-text, off-screen characters” of a work (fate and chance in Nabokov, for example). They are never mentioned by Shalamov, but their presence is “felt.” And we can only know an approximate amount.

“The work of the foreman is very carefully (officially) monitored by... a caretaker. The superintendent is supervised by the senior superintendent, the senior superintendent is supervised by the site foreman, the foreman is supervised by the site manager, and the site manager is supervised by the chief engineer and the head of the mine. I don’t want to lead this hierarchy higher - it is extremely branched, diverse, and gives scope for the imagination of any dogmatic or poetic inspiration.”

After all, E.P. Berzin and I.V. Stalin did not work together. There were millions of people who agreed with the machination of slavery in the 20th century.

But who are they? Where to look for them? Later, answers to these questions can be found in the works of Sergei Dovlatov, who said that “Hell is ourselves.”

* * *

Charles Francois Gounod believed that freedom is nothing more than conscious and voluntary submission to unchanging truths. These truths are most likely love, friendship, honor and truth. Based on this, we can say that Shalamov’s heroes achieve this freedom in the story “ Last Stand Major Pugachev" (all 12 fugitives achieve internal freedom at the cost of their lives).

But even Shalamov doesn’t paint his stories with just black paint. The story “Injector” is a crumb of humor in the entire Kolyma epic. One day, an injector (a jet pump for supplying pressurized water to steam boilers) wore out and broke at the production site. The foreman writes a report to his superiors saying that the injector is out of working order,” it is necessary to either correct this one or send a new one (the author has preserved the writing style). The boss’s answer follows immediately: “If the prisoner Injector does not go to work from the next day, then he should be placed in a punishment cell... And kept there as long as necessary... Until he gets into a work rhythm.”

About the title Shalamov parable, or a possible epigraph to “Kolyma Tales”

I About the miniature “In the Snow”

Franciszek Apanovich, in my opinion, very accurately called the miniature sketch “In the Snow” (1956), which opens “Kolyma Tales”, “a symbolic introduction to Kolyma prose in general,” believing that it plays the role of a kind of metatext in relation to the whole whole1 . I completely agree with this interpretation. Noteworthy is the mysterious-sounding ending of this very first text in Shalamovsky five-books. “Across the Snow” should be recognized as a kind of epigraph to all the cycles of “Kolyma Tales”2. The very last phrase in this first sketch story sounds like this:
And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers. ## (“In the snow”)3
How so? In what sense? - after all, if under writer Shalamov understands himself, but readers relates to you and me, then how We involved in the text itself? Does he really think that we will also go to Kolyma, be it on tractors or on horses? Or do “readers” mean servants, guards, exiles, civilians, camp authorities, etc.? It seems that this ending phrase is sharply dissonant with the lyrical sketch as a whole and with the phrases preceding it, which explain the specific “technology” of trampling the road through the difficult-to-pass Kolyma virgin snow (but not at all the relationship between readers and writers). Here are the phrases preceding it, from the beginning:
# The first one has the hardest time, and when he is exhausted, another from the same top five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s trail4.
Those. those who ride and do not walk have an “easy” life, while those who trample and trample the road have to do the main work. Initially, at this point in the handwritten text, the first phrase of the paragraph gave the reader a more clear hint on how to understand the ending that followed it, since the paragraph began with a strikethrough:
# This is how literature goes. First one, then the other, comes forward and paves the way, and of those following the trail, even everyone, even the weakest, the smallest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s trail.
However, at the very end - without any editing, as if it had already been prepared in advance - there was a final phrase in which the meaning of the allegory and, as it were, the essence of the whole, the mysterious Shalamov symbol was concentrated:
And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.5 ##
However, actually about those who rides tractors and horses, before that in the text “In the Snow”, and in subsequent stories - neither in the second, nor in the third, nor in the fourth (“To the show” 1956; “At night”6 1954, “Carpenters” 1954) - actually not says7. A semantic gap arises, which the reader does not know how to fill, and the writer, apparently, sought this? Thus, the first Shalamov parable is revealed - not directly, but indirectly expressed, implied meaning.
I am grateful to Franciszek Apanowicz for help in interpreting it. He previously wrote about the whole story as a whole:
It seems that there is no narrator here, there is only this strange world, which grows on its own from the meager words of the story. But even this mimetic style of perception is refuted by the last sentence of the essay, which is completely incomprehensible from this point of view<…>If we take [it] literally, we would have to come to the absurd conclusion that in the camps in Kolyma only writers trample down the roads. The absurdity of such a conclusion forces us to re-interpret this sentence and understand it as a kind of metatextual statement, belonging not to the narrator, but to some other subject, and perceived as the voice of the author himself8.
It seems to me that Shalamov’s text is deliberately flawed here. The reader loses the thread of the story and contact with the narrator, not understanding where any of them are. The meaning of the mysterious final phrase can also be interpreted as a kind of reproach: the prisoners are making their way, in virgin snow, - intentionally without going follow each other, do not trample general the path and generally act not like that, How reader who is accustomed to using ready-made means, norms established by someone before him (guided, for example, by what books are now fashionable, or what “techniques” are used by writers), but act exactly like real writers: they try to place their feet separately while walking your own way, paving the way for those who follow them. And only rare of them - i.e. those same five chosen pioneers are given the opportunity for a short time, until they are exhausted, to break through this necessary road - for those who follow behind, on sleighs and on tractors. Writers, from Shalamov’s point of view, must - they are directly obliged, if, of course, they are real writers, to move along the virgin soil (“in their own way,” as Vysotsky will later sing about it). That is, they, unlike us mere mortals, do not ride tractors and horses. Shalamov also invites the reader to take the place of those who pave the way. The mysterious phrase turns into a rich symbol of the entire Kolyma epic. After all, as we know, Shalamov’s detail is the most powerful artistic detail, which became a symbol, an image (“Notebooks”, between April and May 1960).
Dmitry Nich noted: in his opinion, this same text as an “epigraph” also echoes the first text in the cycle “Resurrection of the Larch” - a much later sketch “The Path” (1967)9. Let us remember what is happening there and what is, as it were, behind the scenes of what is happening: the narrator finds “his” path (here the narration is personified, unlike “In the Snow,” where it is impersonal10) - the path along which he walks alone, for almost three years, and in which his poems are born. However, as soon as it turns out that this path that he liked, well-trodden, taken as if he owned it, was also opened by someone else (he notices someone else’s footprint on it), it loses its miraculous properties:
I had a wonderful trail in the taiga. I laid it myself in the summer when I was storing firewood for the winter. (...) The path became darker every day and eventually became an ordinary dark gray mountain path. No one walked on it except me. (…) # I walked along this own path for almost three years. Poems were written well on it. It used to be that you would return from a trip, get ready to go on a trail, and inevitably come up with some stanza on that trail. (...) And on the third summer a man walked along my path. I was not at home at that time, I don’t know whether it was some wandering geologist, or a mountain postman on foot, or a hunter - the man left traces of heavy boots. Since then, no poetry has been written on this path.
So, in contrast to the epigraph to the first cycle (“In the Snow”), here, in “The Path,” the emphasis shifts: firstly, the action itself is not collective, but is emphasized individually, even individualistically. That is, the effect of trampling the road itself by others, comrades, in the first case only intensified, became stronger, but here, in the second, in a text written more than a dozen years later, it disappears due to the fact that someone stepped onto the path another. While in “Across the Snow” the very motive of “stepping only onto virgin soil, and not one step after another” was overshadowed by the effect of “collective benefit” - all the torments of the pioneers were needed only so that further, following them, they would go on horse and tractor readers. (The author did not go into details, well, is this ride necessary at all?) Now, it seems as if no reader and altruistic benefit is no longer visible or envisaged. A certain psychological shift can be detected here. Or even the author’s deliberate departure from the reader.

II Recognition - in school essay

Oddly enough, Shalamov’s own views on what “new prose” should be and what, in fact, one should strive for modern writer, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks or treatises, but in an essay, or simply a “school essay” written in 1956 - for Irina Emelyanova, daughter of Olga Ivinskaya (Shalamov had known the latter since the 30s), when this same Irina entered the Literary Institute. As a result, the text itself, which Shalamov deliberately compiled in a somewhat school-like manner, firstly, received from the examiner, N.B. Tomashevsky, the son of the famous Pushkinist, “superpositive review” (ibid., pp. 130-1)11, and secondly, by a happy coincidence, much can now be clarified for us from the views on literature of Shalamov himself, already fully matured by the age of 50. m years for his prose, but at that time, it seems, he had not yet “clouded” his aesthetic principles too much, which he clearly did later. Here’s how, using the example of Hemingway’s stories “Something’s Over” (1925), he illustrates the method that captured him of reducing details and raising prose to symbols:
The heroes of his [story] have names, but no longer have surnames. They no longer have a biography.<…>An episode was snatched from the general dark background of “our time”. It's almost just an image. The landscape at the beginning is needed not as a specific background, but as an exclusively emotional accompaniment... In this story, Hemingway uses his favorite method - image.<…># Let's take a story from another period of Hemingway - “Where it is clean, it is light”12. # The heroes don't even have names anymore.<…>It's not even an episode anymore. There is no action at all<…>. This is a frame.<…># [This] is one of Hemingway's most striking and remarkable stories. Everything there is reduced to a symbol.<…># Path from early stories to “Clean, Light” - this is a path of liberation from everyday, somewhat naturalistic details.<…>These are the principles of subtext and laconicism. "<…>The majesty of the iceberg’s movement is that it rises only one-eighth above the surface of the water.”13 Hemingway minimizes linguistic devices, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, landscape as a function of style. # ...the dialogue of any Hemingway story is the eighth part of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. # Of course, this silence about the most important thing requires the reader to have a special culture, careful reading, and internal consonance with the feelings of Hemingway’s heroes.<…># Hemingway's landscape is also relatively neutral. Hemingway usually gives the landscape at the beginning of the story. The principle of dramatic construction - as in a play - before the start of the action, the author indicates the background and decoration in the stage directions. If the landscape is repeated again during the story, then, for the most part, it is the same as at the beginning. #<…># Let's take Chekhov's landscape. For example, from “Ward No. 6”. The story also begins with a landscape. But this landscape is already emotionally colored. It is more tendentious than Hemingway's.<…># Hemingway has his own stylistic devices, invented by himself. For example, in the collection of stories “In Our Time” these are a kind of reminiscences that precede the story. These are the famous key phrases in which the emotional pathos of the story is concentrated.<…># It is difficult to immediately say what the task of reminiscences is. This depends both on the story and on the content of the reminiscences themselves14.
So, laconicism, omissions, reduction of space for landscape and - showing, as it were, only individual “frames” - instead of detailed descriptions, and even the obligatory getting rid of comparisons and metaphors, this sore “literary stuff”, expulsion from the text of tendentiousness, the role of subtext, key phrases, reminiscences - here literally all the principles of Shalamov’s own prose are listed! It seems that neither later (in the treatise set out in a letter to I.P. Sirotinskaya “On Prose”, nor in letters to Yu.A. Schrader), nor in diaries and notebooks, did he set out his theories new prose.
This is what, perhaps, Shalamov never succeeded in any way - but what he constantly strived for was to restrain the too direct, immediate expression of his thoughts and feelings, concluding the main thing from the story in subtext and avoiding categorical direct statements and assessments. His ideals seemed to be completely Platonic (or, perhaps, in his mind, Hemingwayian). Let’s compare this assessment of the most “Hemingway”, as is usually considered for Platonov, “The Third Son”:
The third son atoned for the sin of his brothers, who staged a brawl next to the corpse of their mother. But Platonov does not have even a shadow of condemnation of them, he generally refrains from any assessments, in his arsenal there are only facts and images. This, in a way, is the ideal of Hemingway, who persistently strove to erase any assessments from his works: he almost never reported the thoughts of the characters - only their actions, carefully crossed out in his manuscripts all phrases that began with the word “how,” his famous statement about one-eighth part of the iceberg was largely about assessments and emotions. In Platonov’s calm, unhurried prose, the iceberg of emotions not only doesn’t stick out to any part - you have to dive to a considerable depth to get it15.
Here we can only add that Shalamov’s own “iceberg” is still in a state of “about to capsize”: in each “cycle” (and many times) he still shows us his underwater part... Political, and simply The worldly, “fan” temperament of this writer was always off the charts; he could not keep the narrative within the bounds of dispassion.

1 Apanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in “Kolyma Stories” by Varlam Shalamov // IV International Shalamov Readings. Moscow, June 18-19, 1997:
Abstracts of reports and messages. - M.: Republic, 1997, pp. 40-52 (with reference to Apanowicz F. Nowa proza ​​Warlama Szalamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej. Gdansk, 1996. S. 101-103) http://www.booksite.ru/varlam /reading_IV_09.htm
2 The author worked on them (including “The Resurrection of the Larch” and “The Glove”) for twenty years - from 1954 to 1973. One can consider them a five- or even six-book, depending on whether the “Essays on the Underworld”, which stands somewhat apart, are included in the CD.
3 The # sign indicates the beginning (or end) of a new paragraph in a quotation; sign ## - end (or beginning) of the entire text - M.M.
4 The modality is given here as if as a refrain obligations. It is addressed by the author to himself, but also to the reader. Then it will be repeated in many other stories, as, for example, in the finale of the next one (“To the show”): Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing wood.
5 Manuscript “On the Snow” (code in RGALI 2596-2-2 - on the website http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/2/1.html). The main text, editing and title in the manuscript are in pencil. And above the title, apparently, is the originally intended title of the entire cycle - Northern Drawings?
6 As can be seen from the manuscript (http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/5/1.html), original title of this short story, then crossed out, was “Lingerie” - is the word in quotation marks here or are there signs on both sides of the new paragraph “Z”? - That is [“Lingerie” at Night] or: [zLingeriez at Night]. Here is the title of the story “Kant” (1956) - in the manuscript in quotation marks, they are left in the American edition of R. Gul (New Journal No. 85 1966) and in the French edition of M. Geller (1982), but for some reason they not in Sirotinskaya's edition. - That is, it is not clear: the quotation marks were removed by the author himself, in some later editions - or is this an oversight (arbitrariness?) of the publisher. According to the manuscript, quotation marks are also found in many other places where the reader encounters specifically camp terms (for example, in the title of the story “To the Show”).
7 The tractor will be mentioned again for the first time only at the end of “Single Measurement” (1955), i.e. three stories from the beginning. The first hint about riding horses in the same cycle is in the story “The Snake Charmer”, i.e. already 16 stories away from this. Well, about horses in sleigh carts - in “Shock Therapy” (1956), after 27 stories, closer to the end of the entire cycle.
8 Franciszek Apanowicz, “Nowa proza” Warłama Szałamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej, Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1986, s. 101-193 (translation by the author himself). So in personal correspondence, Franciszek Apanovich adds: “Shalamov was convinced that he was paving a new road in literature, along which no man had yet set foot. He not only saw himself as a pioneer, but also believed that there were few such writers breaking new paths.<…>Well, in a symbolic sense, the path here is trodden by writers (I would even say artists in general), and not by readers, about whom we learn nothing except that they ride tractors and horses.”
9 This is a kind of prose poem, Nitsch notes: “the path only serves as a path to poetry until another person has walked along it. That is, a poet or writer cannot follow in the footsteps of others” (in email correspondence).
10 Like a tramp ut road through virgin snow? (…) Roads are always laid ut on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. The man himself plans no yourself landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree... (emphasis mine - M.M.).
11 Irina Emelyanova. Unknown pages of Varlam Shalamov or the History of one “arrival” // Grani No. 241-242, January-June 2012. Tarusa pages. Volume 1, Moscow-Paris-Munich-San Francisco, p.131-2) - also on the website http://shalamov.ru/memory/178/
12 [The story was published in 1926.]
13 [Shalamov quotes Hemingway himself, without precise reference to