Varlam Shalamov

His father worked as a missionary in Alaska for 12 years from 1892, and Varlam's older brother, Sergei, grew up there (he volunteered for World War I and was killed in action in 1917); they returned as events were heating up in Russia by 1905.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (Варла́м Ти́хонович Шала́мов; 18 June 1907 – 17 January 1982), baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor.

In 1914, Varlam entered the gymnasium of St. Alexander's and graduated in 1923.

Although he was a son of a priest, he used to say that he lost faith and became an atheist at the age of 13.

His father was of very progressive views and even supported the October Revolution in a way.

Upon his graduation it became clear that the Regional Department of People's Education (RONO, Regionalnoe Otdelenie Narodnogo Obrazovania) would not support his further education because Varlam was a son of a priest.

In 1926, after having worked for two years, he was accepted into the department of Soviet Law at Moscow State University through open competition.

While studying there Varlam was intrigued by the oratory skills displayed during the debates between Anatoly Lunacharsky and Metropolitan Alexander Vvedensky.

At that time Shalamov was convinced that he would become a literature specialist.

His literary tastes included Modernist literature (later, he would say that he considered his teachers not Tolstoy, of whom he was very critical, or other classic writers, but Andrei Bely and Aleksey Remizov) and classic poetry.

His favorite poets were Alexander Pushkin and Boris Pasternak, whose works influenced him his entire life.

He also praised Dostoevsky, Savinkov, Joyce and Hemingway, about whom he later wrote a long essay depicting the myriad possibilities of artistic endeavors.

Shalamov joined a Trotskyist-leaning group and on February 19, 1929, was arrested and sent to Butyrskaya prison for solitary confinement.

He was later sentenced to three years of correctional labor in the town of Vizhaikha, convicted of distributing the "Letters to the Party Congress" known as Lenin's Testament, which were critical of Joseph Stalin, and of participating in a demonstration marking the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution with the slogan "Down with Stalin".

Courageously he refused to sign the sentence branding him a criminal.

Later, he would write in his short stories that he was proud of having continued the Russian revolutionary tradition of members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and Narodnaya Volya, who were fighting against tsarism.

He was taken by train to the former Solikamsk monastery, which was transformed into a militsiya headquarters of the Vishera department of Solovki ITL

Shalamov was released in 1931 and worked in the new town of Berezniki, Perm Oblast, at the local chemical plant construction site.

He was given the opportunity to travel to Kolyma for colonization.

Sarcastically, Shalamov said that he would go there only under enforced escort.

Coincidentally, fate would hold him to his promise several years later.

He returned to Moscow in 1932, where he worked as a journalist and managed to see some of his essays and articles published, including his first short story, "The three deaths of Doctor Austino" (1936).

He spent much of the period from 1937 to 1951 imprisoned in forced-labor camps in the Arctic region of Kolyma, due in part to his support of Leon Trotsky and praise of writer Ivan Bunin.

At the outset of the Great Purge, on January 12, 1937, Shalamov was arrested again for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sent to Kolyma, also known as "the land of white death", for five years.

He was already in jail awaiting sentencing when one of his short stories was published in the literary journal Literary Contemporary.

In 1943, Shalamov was sentenced to another term, this time for 10 years, under Article 58 (anti-Soviet agitation), in part, for having called Nobelist Ivan Bunin a "great Russian writer".

The conditions he endured were extreme, first in gold mining operations, and then in coal mining.

He was repeatedly sent to punishment zones, both for his political crimes and for his attempt to escape.

There he managed to survive while sick with typhus, of which Shalamov was not aware until he became well.

At that time, as he recollects in his writings, he did not care much about his survival.

In 1946, near death, he became a medical assistant while still a prisoner.

He remained in that role for the duration of his sentence, then for another two years after being released, until 1953.

From 1954 to 1978, he wrote a set of short stories about his experiences in the labor camps, which were collected and published in six volumes, collectively known as Kolyma Tales.

These books were initially published in the West, in English translation, starting in the 1960s; they were eventually published in the original Russian, but only became officially available in the Soviet Union in 1987, in the post-glasnost era.

The Kolyma Tales are considered Shalamov's masterpiece, and "the definitive chronicle" of life in the labor camps.

Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, Vologda Governorate, a Russian city with a rich culture famous for its wooden architecture, to the family of a hereditary Russian Orthodox priest and teacher, Father Tikhon Nikolayevich Shalamov, a graduate of the Vologda Seminary.

At first young Shalamov was named and baptized after the patron of Vologda, Saint Varlaam Khutinskiy (1157–1210); Shalamov later changed his name to the more common Varlam.

Shalamov's mother, Nadezhda (Nadia) Aleksandrovna, was a teacher as well.

She also enjoyed poetry, and Varlam speculated that she could have become a poet if not for her family.

Therefore, he found a job as a tanner at the leather factory in the settlement of Kuntsevo (a suburb of Moscow, since 1960 part of the Moscow city).