Varlam Shalamov Kolyma stories maxim. Maxim. Varlam Shalamov. Story. Preface and afterword. Life of engineer Kipreev

A maxim in Latin is a thought. This is the first word that was resurrected in the reviving consciousness of Varlam Shalamov when he returned to life from half-death, from dystrophy. The first word from the natural world of images and concepts for him, a Russian intellectual. He writes about this in a story called “Sentence”.

This story is dedicated to his great friend, N.Ya. Mandelstam, the widow of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in transit on the eve of Kolyma from the same dystrophy, Mandelstam, to whom Shalamov dedicated “Sherry Brandy” - about the dying of the poet. Shalamov knew how poetry was killed in Russia in the 20th century.

In world history, no one except Shalamov has ever made such an extreme, final state of a person a fact and the subject of great literature, from which circumstances have completely removed all false values and appearances, and with which a completely false society covers and disguises, as in the great universal masquerade ball, then the first and last thing that actually exists in a person himself is his true, unfamiliar to us today, human face.

Shalamov is the only one in all of world literature who fully and on the basis of the most complex personal experience saw and showed in man that hidden thing that, by the will of time and era, was revealed to him and was given precisely as the high task of revealing the truth - the last, completely exposed roots and cores of man’s existence within himself - in an extreme situation on the verge of life and death. In the last hopeless and inhumane conditions, beyond which there is no longer any physical or mental limit - no protection with masks. Everything is completely transparent and everything is completely real. No illusions.

Everything that remains in a person absolutely beyond the shaky and too fragile framework of that false splendor of the social masquerade that usually surrounds him, as self-deception and a cheap counterfeit of a diligent American smile, and which, as something external and artificial in relation to the deep core and the center of the personality, changes absolutely nothing in the person himself and does not protect him from absolutely anything at the last frontier of the great test of personal humanity - the test of his own Face, Personality.

And here it is immediately and inevitably revealed that the king is naked.

About the love for which still From the beginning of history, a person accepts anything, any feelings and passions, without ever knowing, under the guise of false moral values and false social stereotypes, what in reality is at that last stage of testingis she herself , Shalamov wrote this:

“Love has not returned to me. Oh, how far love is from envy, from fear, from anger. How little people need love. Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, returns last, and does it return? “But not only indifference, envy and fear witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned before pity for people.”

About the word that arose in the consciousness resurrected from half-death, Shalamov wrote this:
« Sentence - there was something Roman, solid, Latin in this word. Ancient Rome for my childhood was the history of political struggle, the struggle of people, and Ancient Greece was the kingdom of art. Although in Ancient Greece there were politicians and murderers, and in Ancient Rome there were many people of art. But my childhood sharpened, simplified, narrowed and separated these two very different worlds. Sentence is a Roman word. For a week I didn’t understand what the word “maximum” meant. I whispered this word, shouted it, scared and made my neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from the sky, a solution, an explanation, a translation... And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy. Fear - because I was afraid of returning to that world where I had no return. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.”

Shalamov created only literary evidence of such a complex phenomenon as the absolutely naked core of a person, undisguised by absolutely no appearances and conventional frameworks, deprived of all his own masks. He only showed man himself on the verge of bare biology, when everything fake and superficial was torn from him. But he didn’t offer any solutions, and he didn’t really know what the solution was.

That is why we are even physically so uncomfortable, painful and painful in his stories and after them.

After those years, Shalamov remained a completely sick person until the end of his life, and spent the end of his life in a boarding school for the disabled. His last and greatest love remained with him until the very end, Shalamov’s close friend Irina Pavlovna Sirotinskaya, who had a family and children, but who, although she refused his marriage proposal, nevertheless did not leave him out of gratitude and recognition for everything he did - for all his great human honesty and honor. Writing in the camp was achieved at the cost of enormous dangers and great sacrifices, but it was necessary to save and carry out scraps of drafts in order to convey this story to us.

On January 11, 2011, an outstanding professional archivist passed away, close friend of Varlam ShalamovIrina Pavlovna Sirotinskaya, successor, custodian and publisher of his legacy, who became the first member of the Board of Trustees of our National stylish magazine DOGS DANDY.

And she joined the magazine’s Board of Trustees precisely for the reasonfundamental importance of the discovery, clearly indicated inthis very story "Sentence", and through which Shalamov in hisextreme exposure of the rods involuntarily passed in practice. discoveries thatpity for animals returns earlier than pity for people and even love. That the necessity of feeling any living beings, and not just people, precedes all other feelings. And that it is not only impossible to avoid it or jump over it on the way to eliminating the worldwide shortage of love, but you will also have to inevitably return and inevitably include in the education and construction of any social relationships as the basic feeling of all living things in the universe. And that without it, even love itself is impossible.

I am sincerely sorry that Irina Pavlovna will never read this preface about Shalamov. She was always very concerned about Shalamov’s legacy (legally remaining the only legal heir), held and organized many conferences dedicated to his work in different countries, and published many of his books. Her intonation never had the slightest shade of piety or pathos, but the deep warmth and devotion that always permeated her words about Varlam Shalamov were hidden in it.

In her, in this modest “Russian Madonna Laura,” as she was nicknamed in Italy after Petrarch’s beloved for Shalamov’s last to the end and deep love for her, there was something genuinely bright, living, sincere and real, which sharply distinguished her from most of her contemporaries.

Shalamov's experience is infinitely painful, but still too underestimated. And its true meaning has not yet been fully comprehended by the general experience of humanity, which is already infinitely suppressed today by that false, fanatical splendor and masquerade of an artificial society, which today has almost completely severed the inseparable ties of man with the organics of being. And which we need to start connecting again today. Having realized that today we are already on this - the most formidable - brink of exposing the roots and cores of being in ourselves, still cleverly disguised by a false society, but which, in a childish way, are absolutely not in favor of a person, are exposed at the slightest whiff of any life problem. And that today, right now and here, we are tested every day - by our own humanity. Testing by those very roots and cores - namely, extremely naked - which we have long been invited to begin to rebuild and change consciously, creating this great inner temple higher and higher until the moment when the great power of immortality is sure to manifest itself in him, as promised by inevitably true prophecies. But the temple is precisely internal, and not at all external and collapsing, perverted by the same golden fanaberist false splendor and human fabrications, so that the king, at the hour of his last Rubicon and Revelation, does not again find himself naked in the most important thing - in the roots and cores.

As it is said in the Apocrypha: “Jesus said: When you get naked And Not be ashamed and take your clothes and put them their at your feet, like little children, you will trample their, Then [you will see] the son of the one who lives, and you will not be afraid" (Apocrypha of the ancient Christians, Gospel of Thomas).

Today this unique experience is underestimated. Yes, it did not bring an answer in itself until it became general, but it brought a problem and a direction. But we must try to understand that tomorrow understanding this invaluable experience may no longer help - it will be too late to look for a way out.

PREFACE: DOGS DANDY NEWS

V. Shalamov

Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was enough only for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many areas in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the free workers, all of them yesterday’s prisoners, paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not.

Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - scraps, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a “free” cauldron. No, our freewomen didn’t have any soup left from yesterday.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feathers - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted, plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter cans, hung from the fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bones of the sheep without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

I have never tasted a single piece of these partridges. Mine were berries, grass roots, rations. And I didn’t die. I began to look more and more indifferently, without malice, at the cold red sun, at the mountains, the loaches, where everything: rocks, turns of the stream, larch, poplars - was angular and unfriendly. In the evenings, a cold fog rose from the river - and there was not an hour in the taiga day when I felt warm.

Frostbitten fingers and toes ached and buzzed with pain. The bright pink skin of the fingers remained pink, easily vulnerable. The fingers were always wrapped in some kind of dirty rags, protecting the hand from a new wound, from pain, but not from infection. Pus oozed from the big toes on both feet, and there was no end to the pus.

They woke me up with a blow to the rail. They were fired from work by hitting the rail. After eating, I immediately lay down on the bunk, without undressing, of course, and fell asleep. The tent in which I slept and lived seemed to me as if through a fog - people were moving somewhere, loud swearing arose, fights broke out, there was instant silence before a dangerous blow. The fights quickly died out - on their own, no one restrained, did not separate, the engines of the fight simply stalled - and a cold night silence set in with a pale high sky through the holes in the tarpaulin ceiling, with snoring, wheezing, groans, coughing and the unconscious swearing of the sleeping people.

One night I felt that I heard these moans and wheezes. The feeling was sudden, like an epiphany, and did not make me happy. Later, remembering this moment of surprise, I realized that the need for sleep, oblivion, unconsciousness became less - I got enough sleep, as Moisey Moiseevich Kuznetsov, our blacksmith, said, the smartest of smartest people.

There was persistent pain in the muscles. I don’t know what kind of muscles I had then, but there was pain in them, it made me angry, and didn’t let me distract myself from my body. Then something appeared in me other than anger or malice, which exists along with anger. Indifference appeared - fearlessness. I realized that I didn’t care whether they would beat me or not, whether they would give me lunch and rations or not. And although in reconnaissance, on an unescorted business trip, they didn’t beat me - they only beat me in the mines - when I remembered the mine, I measured my courage by the measure of the mine. This indifference, this fearlessness, built some kind of bridge from death. The consciousness that they would not beat here, did not beat and would not beat, gave birth to new strength, new feelings.

Behind indifference came fear - not very strong fear - fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of the boiler, the high cold sky and the aching pain in worn-out muscles. I realized that I was afraid to leave here for the mine. I'm afraid, that's all. I have never sought the best from the good throughout my life. The meat on my bones grew day by day. Envy was the name of the next feeling that returned to me. I envied my dead comrades - the people who died in '38. I also envied the living neighbors who chew something, the neighbors who light something. I didn’t envy the boss, the foreman, the foreman - it was a different world.

Love didn't come back to me. Oh, how far love is from envy, from fear, from anger. How little love people need. Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, returns last, and does it return? But it was not only indifference, envy and fear that witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.

As the weakest in this world of pits and exploratory ditches, I worked with a topographer - I carried a staff and a theodolite behind the topographer. It happened that in order to speed up the movement, the topographer would fit the theodolite straps behind his back, and I would only get the lightest rod, painted with numbers. The topographer was one of the prisoners. For courage - that summer there were many fugitives in the taiga - the topographer carried a small-caliber rifle, having begged the weapon from his superiors. But the rifle only got in our way. And not only because she was an extra thing on our difficult journey. We sat down to rest in a clearing, and the topographer, playing with a small-caliber rifle, took aim at a red-breasted bullfinch, which flew up to take a closer look at the danger and lead it to the side. If necessary, sacrifice your life. The female bullfinch was sitting somewhere on her eggs - this was the only explanation for the bird’s insane courage. The topographer raised his rifle, and I moved the barrel to the side.

Put the gun away!
- What are you talking about? Crazy?
- Leave the bird, that's all.
- I'll report to the boss.
- To hell with you and your boss.

But the topographer did not want to quarrel and did not say anything to the boss. I realized that something important had returned to me.

I have not seen newspapers or books for many years and have long taught myself not to regret this loss. All fifty of my neighbors in the tent, in the torn tarpaulin tent, felt the same way - not a single newspaper, not a single book appeared in our barracks. The highest authorities - foreman, intelligence chief, foreman - descended into our world without books.

My language, the rough language of a mine, was poor, just as poor were the feelings still living near the bones. Getting up, divorce for work, lunch, end of work, lights out, citizen boss, allow me to address you, shovel, pit, I obey, drill, pick, it’s cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, rations, leave me to smoke - two It’s not the first year I’ve made do with dozens of words. Half of these words were curse words. In my youth, in childhood, there was an anecdote about how a Russian used just one word in different intonation combinations in a story about traveling abroad. The richness of Russian swearing, its inexhaustible offensiveness, was revealed to me not in childhood or youth. An anecdote with a curse word here looked like the language of some college girl. But I didn't look for other words. I was happy that I didn't have to look for any other words. I didn’t know whether these other words existed. I didn’t know how to answer this question.

I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, right here - I remember it clearly - under the right parietal bone - a word was born that was completely unsuitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades. I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity:

Maxim! Maxim!
And he started laughing.

Maxim! - I screamed straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, I screamed, not yet understanding the meaning of this word that was born in me. And if this word has returned, been found again, so much the better, so much the better! Great joy filled my entire being.

Maxim!
- What a psycho!
- There is a psycho! Are you a foreigner or what? - the mining engineer Vronsky, the same Vronsky, asked sarcastically. "Three tobaccos."

Vronsky, let me light a cigarette.
-- No, I do not have.
- Well, at least three pieces of tobacco.
- Three pieces of tobacco? Please.

From a pouch full of shag, three pieces of tobacco were extracted with a dirty fingernail.
-- Foreigner? - The question transferred our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, consequences and extensions of time.

But I didn’t care about Vronsky’s provocative question. The find was too huge.
- Sentence!
- He is a psycho.

The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person goes into oblivion, into a dead world. Is he dead? Even the stone did not seem dead to me, not to mention the grass, trees, and river. The river was not only the embodiment of life, not only a symbol of life, but life itself. Its eternal movement, incessant rumble, its own conversation, its own business, which makes the water run downstream through the headwind, breaking through rocks, crossing steppes and meadows. The river, which changed the sun-dried, naked bed and made its way as a barely visible thread of water somewhere in the stones, obeying its eternal duty, was a stream that had lost hope for the help of the sky - for the saving rain. The first thunderstorm, the first downpour - and the water changed banks, broke rocks, threw trees up and madly rushed down the same eternal path.

Maxim! I didn’t believe myself, I was afraid, falling asleep, that this word that had returned to me would disappear overnight. But the word did not disappear.

Maxim. Let them rename the river on which our village stood, our business trip “Rio-Rita”. How is this better than "Sententia"? The bad taste of the owner of the earth, the cartographer, introduced Rio Rita onto world maps. And it can't be fixed.

Sentence - there was something Roman, solid, Latin in this word. Ancient Rome for my childhood was the history of political struggle, the struggle of people, and Ancient Greece was the kingdom of art. Although in Ancient Greece there were politicians and murderers, and in Ancient Rome there were many people of art. But my childhood sharpened, simplified, narrowed and separated these two very different worlds. Sentence is a Roman word. For a week I didn’t understand what the word “maximum” meant. I whispered this word, shouted it, scared and made my neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from the sky, a solution, an explanation, a translation. And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy of Fear - because I was afraid of returning to a world where I had no return. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.

Many days passed until I learned to summon more and more new words from the depths of my brain, one after another. Each came with difficulty, each arose suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words did not return in a stream. Each returned alone, without the escort of other familiar words, and appeared first in the tongue, and then in the brain.

And then the day came when everyone, all fifty workers, quit their jobs and ran to the village, to the river, getting out of their pits, ditches, throwing half-cut trees, half-cooked soup in the cauldron. Everyone ran faster than me, but I also hobbled on time, helping myself in this run down the mountain with my hands.

The chief arrived from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On a huge larch stump at the entrance to the tent, there was a gramophone. The gramophone played, overcoming the hiss of the needle, playing some kind of symphonic music.

And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraers, foremen and hard workers. And the boss stood nearby and the expression on his face was as if he himself had written this music for us, for our remote taiga business trip. The shellac record spun and hissed, The stump itself was spinning, wound up in all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years.

IT WOULD BE INCORRECT TO REDUCE THE ENTIRE SIGNIFICANCE OF SHALAMOV'S EXPERIENCE ONLY TO PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, SINCE PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ARE A DIRECT CONTINUATION OF SPIRITUAL PROBLEMS, AND THE SPIRIT IS NOT ON THE EARTH TODAY.

FOR SPIRIT IS THE ONLY CONDITION FROM THE BEGINNING OF CREATION THAT WILL ALLOW MAN TO LIVE AN INDEPENDENT LIFE IN NATURE, A LIFE WITHOUT NEEDS. THIS IS CONFIRMED BY ALL ANCIENT TEACHINGS AND PRACTICES. BUT HUMANITY HAS NEVER TRIED TO FOLLOW THE PATH OF THE SPIRIT IN ALL HISTORY WITHOUT TASTING WHAT IT IS.

HOWEVER, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE HERE, IN CONNECTION WITH THE MAIN FEATURES OF SHALAMOV’S CREATIVITY, TO LEAVE WITHOUT ATTENTION THE FACTS CONFIRMING THAT SOCIETY ONLY CONTINUES TO COVER THE TRUTH THAT HE HIMSELF IS, BY FAR, FAKE A MASQUERADE MASK BEHIND WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING - ITS UNRELIABILITY AND THERE IS STILL THE COMPLETE INPRESSITY OF HUMAN IN THIS WORLD, WHICH THEY HAVE NOT COMPLETELY COMPREHENSED WITH. LET'S REMEMBER THE LAST, UNEXPECTED FOR MOST, JUST RINGING A REMINDING ALARM CLOCK THAT MAN RECEIVED FROM NATURE, AGAIN EXPOSING THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY - JAPAN.

IS IT TIME FOR MAN TO WAKE UP?

REFERENCE:

“Despite the impression you may get from the media, less than 8% of the world's hungry population goes hungry as a result of emerging emergencies. Few people realize that the more than one billion hungry people on our planet do not make the headlines. This number is equal to the population of the United States, Japan and the European Union combined. These are people of all ages, from infancy whose mothers cannot produce enough breast milk to the elderly who have no relatives who could. to take care of them: these are unemployed residents of urban slums, farmers who do not have their own land and cultivate someone else's land, orphaned children of AIDS patients and patients who need special intensive nutrition in order to survive.

4 - Where do the starving people live?

The percentage of hungry people is highest in eastern, central and southern Africa. About three-quarters of undernourished people live in rural areas of developing countries, where per capita incomes are lowest. However, the number of hungry people in cities has also been increasing recently.

Of the one billion hungry people on our planet, more than half live in Asia and the Pacific, and another quarter live in sub-Saharan Africa.

5 - Is the number of hungry people in the world decreasing?

According to FAO, while significant progress was made in reducing the number of hungry people in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the number of hungry people has been slowly but steadily increasing in the last decade. In 1995-97 and 2004-2006, their numbers increased in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. But even in these regions, gains made in the fight against hunger have been reversed by high oil prices and the ensuing global economic crisis."

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

* * *

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away.

e.u. mikhailik

Mikhailik Elena Yurievna

PhD, lecturer,

University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia)

The University of New South Wales (UNSW),

Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052

Tel.: 612-93852389

E-mail: [email protected]

the time of the “Kolyma stories”. 1939 - the year that doesn't exist

Annotation. The article attempts to analyze the nature of the treatment of time in “Kolyma Stories” by Varlam Shalamov, in particular, the “incident of 1939” is investigated. The year 1939, the time of action of many key stories, is extremely important within the Kyrgyz Republic in terms of events, directly as a date and is practically absent from the text. This problem, in our opinion, is part of the more complex problem of the Kyrgyz Republic. Shalamov depicts time in general and historical time in particular as a biosocial category. the ability to perceive time and relate to it in the CR directly depends on the character’s social status and his physical condition. In order for this social incoherence with time and history to come into the reader’s field of vision, time and history themselves must inevitably be present in the same field of vision - as objects of rejection. One of these objects, simultaneously present and absent, was the year 1939 - as we believe, the “standard” camp year according to Shalamov.

Keywords: poetics, time, camp literature, Varlam Shalamov, “Kolyma Tales”, 1939

Varlam Shalamov’s story “Sentence” begins with the words: “People arose from oblivion - one after another” [Shalamov 2004-2013 (1): 399]1. The reader does not suddenly realize that the phrase describes not so much these emerging ones as the state of the narrator: consciousness has returned to

so much so that he gained the ability to notice the presence of others - and talk about it. After all, “Sentence” is a story about how a mining goner, a boiler operator, and then an assistant topographer of a geological party, falling into pieces, slowly - a few extra calories here, a few hours of sleep there - begins to notice the world around him, recognize those around him, and experience some feelings - indifference, anger, envy, pity for animals, pity for people - until the non-camp “Roman word” “maximum” awakens under his parietal bone, finally restoring the connection with his former personality, his former life. The connection is fragile, unfaithful, imperfect, but infinitely valuable. At the end of “Sentence”, the narrator is already able to enjoy symphonic music and put his feelings into an alliterated multi-layered metaphor: “The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring twisted for three hundred years.”

However, by this time the reader already knows that in exactly the same way - a frost will strike, soldering will be reduced, work will change - everything achieved can collapse inward and go in a reverse spiral to the state before the first phrase of the story, to the point where the organism is still conditionally alive, but there is no one to tell the story - or beyond this line.

The density of the narrative, the amount of information per unit of text, is amazing, and therefore it is quite easy to overlook one small information package that is clearly absent from the story: the date. The duration of the “Sentence” is not restored from the story itself. Perhaps the fact is that the character, along with everything else, lost track of time? No - he can say: “I envied my dead comrades - the people who died in the thirty-eighth year,” but how far the thirty-eighth year is from him remains unknown.

Within the “Left Bank” cycle, which includes the story, the year is also not calculated - due to the lack of markers.

Meanwhile, this important date, the date of temporary resurrection, is determined precisely.

The great and terrible year 1939 was a happy one for Varlam Shalamov. In December 1938, Shalamov was pulled from the Partizan mine for investigation into the so-called lawyers’ case. The case did not promise anything other than execution, but then the usual camp accident intervened: the initiator of the process was arrested, and all those under investigation were released for transfer to Magadan. In Magadan - another accident - there was a typhus epidemic, and therefore the “s/k s/k”2 was not immediately sent to departments, but was detained in quarantine. Great luck - the quarantined prisoners, of course, were driven to

2 Standard bureaucratic way of referring to prisoners in the plural.

work, but this work was not in itself murderous. They were also fed and washed periodically, and this respite, which lasted until April 1939, most likely saved Shalamov’s life. And in the spring - the third, decisive and most magical accident - by belated assignment he ended up not in the terrible, deadly gold or even in coal, but in geological exploration on the Black Lake, where, due to complete physical exhaustion and the softness of geological morals, he first worked as a boiler operator, and then as an assistant topographer, that is, he found himself in the very situation described in the “Sentence”.

It should be noted that the year also turned out to be generous for what was called material in the 1930s. The stories “Typhoid Quarantine”3, “Bread”, “Children’s Pictures”, “Esperantist” (from which the reader learns under what circumstances the narrator lost a precious place in geological exploration and ended up in a coal mining camp, where he was immediately assigned to the “Egyptian” cavalry collar instead of a horse), “Apostle Paul”, “Bogdanov”, “Triangulation of the III class”, “Bitch Tamara”, “Ivan Bogdanov” and the already mentioned “Sentence” - all this is the harvest of 1939, collected, of course, much later, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Actually, the plots and circumstances of 1939 appear constantly in Kolyma Stories. But 1939 itself as a date is noticeable, if at all, by its absence. As in "Sentence".

And if - again, as in “Sentence” - 1937, the disastrous, or no less disastrous 1938, is constantly mentioned, including by the characters (“Please note - no one beats you, like in the year thirty-eight. No pressure"), then 1939 is named - directly and indirectly - a total of ten times in the entire corpus of "Kolyma Stories" (hereinafter - KR) in the space of five collections of stories.

Moreover, when analyzing the corpus, one gets the impression that for some reason this particular date cannot be perceived directly, but can only be restored after the fact, according to landmarks and signs - from the outside, from a different situation. In 1939 itself, it’s as if it’s impossible, it’s impossible to know that now it’s the thirty-ninth.

It is later, having become an orderly in a chemical laboratory, a student of privileged medical assistant courses, a paramedic or even a writer, that the narrator will be able to remember with whom and how he washed the floor in 1939 at the Magadan transit station or worked on the Black Lake. The very inhabitant of the quarantine and the geological exploration worker, whoever he is, seems to exist not in the 1939 calendar year, but in some other place - or time.

3 Naturally, partly related to 1938.

If we broaden the field of study somewhat, we will discover that for Soviet camp literature, the story of the camp - and, in fact, the camp itself - seems to begin not with space, but with properly organized time.

In the year nineteen forty-nine, my friends and I came across a remarkable article in the journal “Nature” of the Academy of Sciences. It was written there in small letters that on the Kolyma River, during excavations, an underground lens of ice was somehow discovered - a frozen ancient stream, and in it - frozen representatives of fossil (several tens of thousands of years ago) fauna. Whether these fish or newts were preserved so fresh, the learned correspondent testified that those present, having cracked the ice, immediately eagerly ate them [Solzhenitsyn 2006 (1): 7].

The thirty-seventh year began, in fact, from the end of 1934. More precisely, from December 1, 1934 [Ginsburg 1991: 8].

This list - Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg, Zhigulin - can be continued simply alphabetically. G, “Gorbatov”: “One spring day in 1937, unfolding the newspaper, I read that the state security agencies “uncovered a military-fascist conspiracy”” [Gorbatov 1989: 116]. Z, “Zabolotsky”: “It happened in Leningrad on March 19, 1938. The secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union Miroshnichenko summoned me to the union on an urgent matter” [Zabolotsky 1995: 389]. Ch, “Chetverikov”: “I am writing these lines on April 12, 1979...” [Chetverikov 1991: 20].

Prose writers, poets, memoirists and random passers-by, speaking about the camp as a phenomenon, first of all built a temporal sequence, placed the camp in history and biography, corrected the official - and unofficial - chronology as necessary. And they claimed that it was so. Exactly then, on these calendar dates.

In a paradoxical (and natural) way, the inclusion of camp - monstrous, incorrect and improper - experience in the general flow of biography and history was perceived as a restoration of the connection and coherence of times.

But this restoration had three - mostly unintended - grammatical consequences:

1. The camp turns out to be entirely related to the past tense. Solzhenitsyn even included the life span of his “hero”, “The Gulag Archipelago” - “1918-1956” - in the title of the book. The camp in these texts has a date of birth and a date of death. For the audience, he is the past.

2. The camp as a historical event and even as a historical person endowed with a name and surname does not imply the questions “what are we dealing with?”

What’s the matter?”, “how did this object end up in the middle of our geography?”, “how did we end up here, and who are we - that we ended up here?” - because in various ideological paradigms, all kinds of answers have already been given to all these questions, and the reader chooses from them in accordance with his idea of the general history of the country.

3. Addressing the past at the biographical level, the genre itself - short story, novella, “artistic study”, memoir or pseudo-memoir - by definition implies that the story being told is complete and has not only a plot, but also a plot, i.e. it offers audience the meaning mastered by the author. “I spent enough time there, I nurtured my soul there and I say adamantly: “Blessings to you, prison, that you were in my life!” [Solzhenitsyn 2006 (2): 501]. The reader assumes that a survivor, by definition, knows what and why he is writing. He's waiting for history.

Thus, placing the camp in the context of historical time, the authors quite rigidly set both the boundaries of a possible conversation and the format of this conversation, implying finitude, plot and mediation. The camp here can only be a concrete historical phenomenon.

Well, if a date suddenly falls out of the chronology of this phenomenon, it means that either this period was not in the author’s experience, or the memory failed, or the author is somehow biased and he is not satisfied with this year and what is happening in it one way or another.

Can this logic be applied to “Kolyma Tales”? How and from what is Shalamov’s camp time made?

The story “To the Show,” which actually opens the CD, begins with the words “They played cards at the horse guard Naumov” - the paraphrase of the beginning of “The Queen of Spades” that has been repeatedly mentioned and studied by everyone: “They played cards at the horse guard Narumov”4.

4 This paraphrase is invariably perceived in terms of opposition. Compare, for example: “So, for example, one of the wonderful “Kolyma stories” by Varlam Shalamov begins with the words: “We played cards at the horse-driver Naumov.” This phrase immediately draws the reader to the parallel - “The Queen of Spades” with its beginning: “...played cards with the horse guard Narumov.” But besides the literary parallel, the terrible contrast of everyday life gives the true meaning to this phrase. The reader must assess the extent of the gap between the horse guard - an officer of one of the most privileged guards regiments - and the horse guard - belonging to the privileged camp aristocracy, where access is denied to “enemies of the people” and which is recruited from criminals. The difference, which may escape the ignorant reader, between the typically noble surname Narumov and the common people's surname Naumov is also significant. But the most important thing is the terrible difference in the very nature of the card game. Play is one of the main forms of life and it is precisely one of those forms in which the era and its spirit are reflected with particular sharpness” [Lotman 1994: 13-14]; “If in Pushkin’s text there is open space, the free flow of time and the free movement of life, then in Shalamov there is closed space, time seems to stop and no longer

For us, however, it is important that, among other tasks being solved, this mocking quote establishes the relationship of the Kyrgyz Republic with history and culture. Only this relationship is not of connection and coherence, but of conflict and rupture. The fact that in classical literature, in the cultural tradition (and on average, camp literature appealed specifically to it) filled the niche of the terrible, with a situation where a person is killed, because a sweater needed for calculation in a card game is easier to remove from a dead person than from a living one, doesn't correlate at all. What, really, gothic, what, really, ghosts.

What is equally important, within the text of “To the Show” this gap, this conflict could not be realized by anyone, including the narrator. The latter is quite capable of detailing and thoughtfully describing the details of Kolyma life and etiquette of thieves, but he is too hungry and too reluctant to return to the frozen barracks to draw conclusions from his own observations, even if we are talking about life and death (including his own life and of death).

As a result, all conclusions about how much the reality of the story “To the Show” is separated from the circumstances of “The Queen of Spades” (and how much a new reference is needed in this situation) must be made by the reader - and independently. Thus, the model of interaction with the text, characteristic of camp literature, where all meanings in theory are produced by the author, is turned 180 degrees.

However, in order for the reader to draw this conclusion, someone - no longer the characters, not the narrator, but the author of the CD - must first pose a question to him. In order for the reader to understand the distance to the “Queen of Spades”, the “Queen of Spades” must be brought into the barracks of horsemen. For the connection of times to be visibly broken, it must be present in some form.

One could consider this an overly extensive interpretation of a single case, a single paraphrase, but if we look at how Shalamov generally deals with time, we will see structurally the same situation.

Mentioning any phenomenon hostile to humans (from the countless number of Kolyma phenomena of this type), Shalamov, as a rule, gives it the characteristic of a long or constant action.

“It rained for three days without stopping.”

“There was a white fog all day long...”.

“The spittle has been freezing on the fly for two weeks.”

“Nature in the North is not indifferent, not indifferent - it is in cahoots with those who sent us here.”

The camp structure in all its forms is here equated with natural phenomena. In the story “How It Began,” describing the process of crystallization

laws of life, but death determines the behavior of the characters. Death is not an event, but as a name for the world in which we find ourselves when we open the book...” [Timofeev 1991: 186].

lization of the camp Kolyma from the geographical Kolyma, the narrator combines, brings into one image cold, hunger, snow drifts and the then head of USVITL5 Colonel Garanin, without making any distinction between them, conceptualizing them as completely homogeneous in the nature of the impact of the combat elements of the emerging system:

For many months, day and night, during morning and evening roll calls, countless execution orders were read. In the fifty-degree frost, the imprisoned musicians from the households played carcasses... The musicians froze their lips pressed to the necks of flutes, silver helicons, cornets-a-pistons... Each list ended the same way: “The sentence has been carried out. Head of USVITL Colonel Garanin."

The author gives the reading of “countless execution orders” the same temporal characteristic as “cold, fine rain.” Imperfect verbs: “frosted”, “covered”, “ended”, load the action with the additional meaning of duration and incompleteness.

In addition, within the chronotopic system of the Kyrgyz Republic, the time in which the camp exists, the viscous duration of any of its manifestations, is constantly compared with the length of human life: with long-term prison terms, “the gold slaughter made disabled people out of healthy people in three weeks...”. Accordingly, the internal countdown of time in the s/k operates in small currency - hours, days: “Two weeks is a very distant period, a thousand years,” “It was difficult to live a day, let alone a year.”

However, quite quickly hunger, cold, fatigue, fear of an uncertain future, the irrationality of the camp world, the inability to navigate in it, the inevitable decay of memory and brain functions (“It was painful to think”) deprive the heroes of the Kyrgyz Republic of the very ability to perceive the passage of time, turning “now” into the unshakable “always”: “...and then you stop noticing time - and the Great Indifference takes possession of you” [1: 426].

Here we will have to invade the sphere of disciplines that are still very indirectly associated with literary studies - neurology and psychology. At the time of the creation of the main body of Soviet camp literature, this information did not yet exist; It was only in the 1990s that experiments by D. Kahneman and D. Redelmeier were carried out. Patients forced, for example, to undergo painful operations without anesthesia, were asked to record the level of pain at each point in time, and at the end of the procedure, re-evaluate their experience as a whole. It turned out that people who were well aware of their

5 Department of Northeast Forced Labor Camps.

experienced during the process, they invariably retained no memory of either the actual amount of pain experienced or, more importantly, the duration of the procedure itself. The person’s “remembering self,” turning experiences into a plot, simply discarded these data.

In fact, the phenomenon turned out to be so stable that it gave rise to the term duration neglect; Moreover, patients subsequently used their experience as a criterion when choosing between procedures, systematically preferring the one where they experienced some relief in the end over the most painless and quick option.

We have to conclude that that part of the survivor’s personality that is responsible for mastering, comprehending and transmitting experience, by definition, does not remember and, apparently, is physically unable to remember what it went through. And the part that experienced this experience step by step is devoid of speech and memory, and time does not exist for it at all.

In fact, Shalamov, reproducing for the reader the gradual disconnection and disappearance of time, duplicates a real physiological process, which at that moment had not yet been described by specialists, but was probably directly known to the author of the CD. The hero of “Sentence” emerges from that same non-existence and is just as unable to remember what happened to him there.

But, as has already been said, in order for subjective disturbances or the very cessation of the passage of time to become noticeable to the reader, even Kolyma time must flow and still be measured.

So that the inconsistency of the average story with the “big story” comes into view (and how will the hero of the story “At Night” Glebov, who does not remember “whether he himself was ever a doctor”, and the other Glebov, relate to it, for example, or perhaps the same one who forgot the name of his own wife?), the “big story” itself must inevitably be present in the same field of view. After all, neither movement nor the absence of movement can be shown without having a coordinate system, a reference point. In order to create timelessness for the reader, Shalamov is forced to introduce time into the Kyrgyz Republic.

It looks something like this. Opening the “Shovel Artist” series, the reader discovers that the stories “June” and “May” (united by a common character, Andreev) seem to be in the wrong order - summer is ahead of spring. In the process of reading, from the short remarks of the characters about the situation on the fronts, it turns out that Shalamov did not violate the chronological sequence at all, because “June” is June 1941 (in fact, the action of the story begins on the day of the German attack on the USSR), and “May” - May 1945 Is this the end of the work over time? No.

From the same brief remarks, it is quite noticeable that the correlation with historical time exists in the stories as a biosocial luxury, inaccessible to most s/cs and frankly alien to them6:

Listen, said Stupnitsky. - The Germans bombed Sevastopol, Kyiv, Odessa.

Andreev listened politely. The message sounded like news of a war in Paraguay or Bolivia. What does Andreev have to do with this? Stupnitsky is well-fed, he is a foreman - so he is interested in such things as war.

“Listen, you gentlemen convicts,” he said, “the war is over. It ended a week ago. The second courier from the department arrived. And the first courier, they say, was killed by the fugitives.” But Andreev did not listen to the doctor.

But in fact, at this level of exhaustion, not only interest and attention to the events of the outside world, but also, as we have already said, keeping track of time itself becomes unaffordable. This, in fact, is what the reader encounters at the plot level, because:

a) in “June” the action from the end of June for an expected maximum of two months defiantly jumps into winter:

Koryagin removed Andreev from underground work. In winter, the cold in the mine reaches only twenty degrees on the lower horizons, and on the street

Sixty. Andreev stood on the night shift on a high waste heap where rocks were piled up -

Moreover, this winter comes suddenly after July, having missed the warmest Kolyma month, August;

b) the event with which the story “May” begins (the capture of a camp robber) clearly takes place in April.

And the stories end with almost the same phrase: “He had a fever”; “His temperature was rising.” (In both cases, high temperature is, naturally, a purely positive circumstance, contributing to the survival of the character.)

6 Leona Toker's work exhaustively examines the essence and importance of this semantic gap for the Soviet audience, which was accustomed to perceiving the Second World War (or, more precisely, the Great Patriotic War) as one of the pivotal events of Soviet history and (more importantly) as a universal shared experience and which most likely they were disoriented by the fact that for some of their contemporaries the war could turn out to be an unimportant, insignificant and unworthy of attention [Toker 2015].

The literal coincidence of endings can confidently be considered non-random - both stories were written in 1959 and brought into sequence by the author's will. Shalamov actually closes both stories to a single ending, creating in the reader the illusion of that same motionless, untraceable camp time that does not allow orientation within itself.

In fact, the degree of correlation of a character with historical and biological time is an indicator of physical decay, a measure of absorption in the camp system. Moreover, in Shalamov’s world, camp time and ordinary time cannot coexist within the same organism. It is not without reason that in the story “The Seizure” the memory of the camp, by its appearance, seems to push the narrator out of the real, post-camp, completely historical reality surrounding him and back into his previous experience. Where there is a camp, nothing else exists.

This rule applies not only to people. Within the framework of the CR (we have already talked about this in other works [Mikhailik 2002; 2009; 2013]) any things, creatures, texts and ideas from the outside world perish in the camp: a deck of cards will be made from a book; the cat will be killed and eaten by criminals; a scarf, suit, photograph of a loved one will be taken away during an inspection or stolen; sending a package from home will almost cause death; precious letters from his wife will be burned by a drunken camp commander; The plot of the play "Cyrano" will be used to drive his wife to suicide through the hands of an unsuspecting character. In the story “The Tie,” the character does not even manage to hold in his hands this piece of civilian clothing intended for him as a gift: the embroidered tie will be taken away by another camp commander directly from the craftswoman who made it. Neither a tie nor such a complex social concept as a gift can exist on their own in the camp7.

All of the above allows us to assume that Shalamov considered the camp a battery of parameters of the quality of life, or rather the unbearable, murderous absence of this quality, a measure of entropy, a measure of socially organized general decay - not limited by the geographical borders of Kolyma and the time frame of the history of the Gulag (or Soviet power) and easily reproducible on any substrate.

7 See, for example, the story “Hercules”, where the doctor, who gave the head of the hospital his favorite rooster, immediately witnesses how the guest of honor, the head of the medical department, tears off the head of a defenseless tame bird - demonstrating his heroic strength. As a rule, within the corps of the Kyrgyz Republic, people whose “social status” is much higher than the position of the recipient can give gifts successfully (and without catastrophic consequences). The gifts themselves often have a specifically camp character: “And Krist was still alive and sometimes - at least once every few years - he remembered the burning folder, the decisive fingers of the investigator tearing up Krist’s “case” - a gift to the doomed from the doomed.”

Here, for example, is the story “Squirrel” (the cycle “Resurrection of the Larch”), which tells how, in the midst of revolution, famine and the execution of hostages, completely ordinary residents of a non-camp Vologda, not yet spoiled by the housing problem of the 1918 model, selflessly hunt in a crowd for someone who has run into the city a squirrel and kill it - just as later in the camp there will be crazy half-fed people who will catch crazy people dying of hunger with a bread ration forgotten on the table and beat them to death for “theft.”

In the story “The Resurrection of the Larch,” which gives the cycle its name, the narrator writes:

The maturity of Dahurian larch is three hundred years. Three hundred years! The larch, whose branch, a twig breathed on the Moscow table, is the same age as Natalia Sheremeteva-Dolgorukova and can remind of her sad fate... .

These three hundred years, the maturity period of the Daurian larch, the time distance from Shalamov to Natalya Sheremeteva, have already been encountered on the pages of “Kolyma Stories”. These are the same three hundred annual rings of the stump that served as a stand for the gramophone in the finale of “Sentence” - “wound for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years.” And over these three hundred years, Shalamov concludes, “nothing has changed in Russia - neither fate, nor human malice, nor indifference.”

Within the framework of the figurative and philosophical system of the Kyrgyz Republic, the camp was not built by the Soviet government, did not appear out of nowhere and did not suddenly open up - it has always been here, and not at all as a political phenomenon. It inevitably appears at the intersection of physical circumstances and human nature wherever these circumstances and this nature are left to each other long enough - as happened by the will of Sevvost-lag in Kolyma or by the will of Anna Ioannovna in Berezovo. Long enough - for example, two weeks.

What then is the reason for the lack of mention of 1939 - what kind of condition, what kind of category of non-life does this date represent?

Was 1939 different for Shalamov himself from other Kolyma years? Did it exist separately? We can say with confidence - yes, it was different, it existed. Here, for example, is what Shalamov wrote to Solzhenitsyn in November 1964 about the newly published memoirs of A. Gorbatov (New World, 1964, No. 3-5):

Gorbatov is a decent person. He does not want to forget and hide his horror at what he met at the Maldyak mine.<.. .>

Having counted all the terms, you will see that Gorbatov stayed on the “Mal-dyak” for only two or three weeks, at most a month and a half, and was thrown out of the slaughter forever like human slag. But this was 1939, when the wave of terror was already subsiding.

It is characteristic that historians of Kolyma and Dalstroi share this assessment: by the beginning of 1939, the wave of political terror and the wave of executions really subsided. But industrial terror has not disappeared anywhere. Actually, it was then that it was put on the order of the day and introduced into the system [Batsaev 2002: 92]. It was in 1939 that the colonies, free-living settlements for prisoners, created by the first director of the Dalstroy state trust, E.P. Berzin, were liquidated, and their inhabitants were returned behind the wire [Ibid: 94]. It was in 1939 that the parole system was abolished, and the main incentive “to increase labor productivity” was recognized as “supply and food”8. It was in 1939 that the towers and barriers were massively restored and all prisoners who did not fulfill 100% of their daily output were transferred to a reinforced camp regime. It was in the summer of 1939 that “all prisoners who refused to work and maliciously failed to comply with work standards were ordered to be transferred to penal food” [Zelyak 2004: 65], and at all mines punishment cells were created for refuseniks and violators of discipline, where the daily ration consisted of 400 grams bread and boiling water (naturally, these 400 grams existed mainly on paper). It was in 1939 that the camp authorities systematically received reprimands for “incomplete allocation of labor to the main production” [Ibid: 66], and eight such leaders were administratively arrested: it is quite easy to imagine how these measures affected the state prisoners. The payroll of the workforce of those very terrible mining departments increased from 55,362 to 86,799 people (against the planned figure of 61,617 people) [Batsaev 2002: 59]. Exceeded.

But at the same time, fresh reinforcements arrived from the mainland, and in connection with this, the need for constant 14-16-hour overtime work disappeared, weekends were restored, and prisoners began to be periodically fed in order to fulfill the plan. Some kind of infrastructure appeared that was absent a year earlier. And the Kolyma mortality rate, which reached almost 12% in 1938, drops to 7.5% - a figure also devastating, but already indicating not an intensive mass death, but a gradual slow extinction, which in this way does not contradict the needs of the mining industry [Kokurin, Morukov: 536-537].

It seems to us that this administrative and everyday picture, in combination with the already described poetics of time in the Kyrgyz Republic and Shalamov’s idea of the nature of the camp, makes it possible to explain why 1939 in the Kyrgyz Republic has become partly a figure of silence.

Within Shalamov’s poetics, 1939 took the place of an exemplary camp year, a standard, “point zero.” A time when the Kolyma camp system had already taken shape in all its industrial splendor, undisturbed by the triumphant mismanagement and political rage of 1937 and 1938. This is the place of the environment, that water that the camp fish is unable to notice or name, that state whose parameters can only be identified by comparison.

An environment in which you might even be lucky enough to live longer, if you don’t end up in the mining department, if the work turns out to be feasible. Environments where hunger is not strong enough to kill quickly...

But at the same time, the “prosperous” narrator, happily stuck in typhoid quarantine, will dream of bread, bread and bread, and the child living next to the camp will not remember anything and will not be able to draw about his life, “except yellow houses, barbed wire , towers, shepherd dogs, guards with machine guns and blue, blue sky.”

An environment in which, with incredible luck and the same perseverance, you can regain the word “maximum” - before the first cold snap or denunciation.

The year 1938 in the Kyrgyz Republic is easily dated and distinguished by executions and disappearances, sudden famine, typhus, winter life in tents, a 16-hour working day, the hands of workers instantly bent and petrified along the handle of a shovel. Due to the fact that by the end of any story posted this year, the narrator, the focus of the indirect narrative, his neighbor or his neighbor's neighbor - in fact, anyone - will likely be dead. With no less probability, they will all be dead.

The war years are recognizable by American Lend-Lease bread, the epidemic of camp trials, mass beatings - there are many signs of time in the Kyrgyz Republic, linked with dates, they are distinguished by “s/c s/c”, and the reader will begin to distinguish them.

But in order to say “it was in 1939”, you need to change your state, leave your environment, stand outside and above - a paramedic, a writer, an inhabitant of historical time. Look at the thin crust of ice that separates some semblance of life from timelessness, the same for the films of Andreev and Natalya Sheremeteva, for all representatives of our biological species, and say: “This is the thirty-ninth. Ideal camp. It turns out that this is what he was like.”

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Time in the "Kolyma Tales". 1939 - the year that wasn't there

Mikhailik, Elena Iu.

PhD, Lecturer, The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052 Tel.: 612-93852389 E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: This paper attempts to analyze the treatment of time in the "Kolyma Tales" of Varlam Shalamov: in particular, we investigate "the case of the year 1939". As a date, as a number the year 1939, the time in which many of the key KT stories are set, a period that is very important within the general structure of the events, is for all practical purposes absent from the narration. This problem, in our view, is part of a more complex issue: Shalamov is portraying time in general and historical time in particular as a biosocial category. The very ability to perceive time and relate to it in KT depends directly on the social status of the character, and (therefore) on their physical state. However, if this social lack of cohesion with time and history is to be noticed by the audience, the very same time and history have to be a noticeable part of the general landscape - as objects of rejection. One of such objects that are present and absent at the same time happens to be the year 1939 - a period that represents, as we believe, the model, "perfect" prison camp year in Shalamov.

Keywords: poetics, time, labor camp literature, Varlam Shalamov, "Kolyma Tales", 1939

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Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

* * *

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, it’s like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the workers - from the freewomen, all of them were yesterday's prisoners - paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feather - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted and plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter tins suspended from fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bird bones without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

End of introductory fragment.

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Varlam Shalamov

Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the free workers, all of them yesterday’s prisoners, paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feather - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted and plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter cans, hung from fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bird bones without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

End of introductory fragment.

Text provided by LitRes LLC.