Annotation
“Essays on the Underworld” by Varlam Shalamov is a terrible and impartial testimony to the morals and customs of the Soviet forced labor camps that engulfed the country in the middle of the last century. Shalamov, who spent almost twenty years in exile and camps, wrote: “... the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. The person - neither the boss nor the prisoner - does not need to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be. For my part, I decided long ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this truth.”
Varlam Shalamov. Sketches of the Underworld
About one mistake fiction
Scam blood
Woman of the criminal world
Prison soldering
"Bitch" war
Apollo among thieves
Sergei Yesenin and the world of thieves
How they “squeeze novels”
Varlam Shalamov. Sketches of the Underworld
Varlam Shalamov
ESSAYS OF THE UNDERWORLD
About one mistake of fiction
Fiction has always portrayed the world of criminals sympathetically, sometimes with obsequiousness. Fiction has surrounded the world of thieves with a romantic aura, seduced by cheap tinsel. The artists failed to see the truly disgusting face of this world. This is a pedagogical sin, a mistake for which our youth pays so dearly. A boy of 14–15 years old can be forgiven for being carried away by the “heroic” figures of this world; this is unforgivable for an artist. But even among the great writers we will not find those who, having seen the true face of the thief, would turn away from him or brand him as every great artist should brand everything morally unworthy. At the whim of history, the most expansive preachers of conscience and honor, such as, for example, Victor Hugo, devoted a lot of energy to praising the criminal world. It seemed to Hugo that the underworld was a part of society that firmly, decisively and clearly protested against the falsehood of the ruling world. But Hugo did not take the trouble to see from what position this community of thieves fights any state power. Quite a few boys sought acquaintance with living “miserables” after reading Hugo’s novels. The nickname “Jean Valjean” still exists among thieves.
Dostoevsky in his “Notes from the House of the Dead” avoids a direct and sharp answer to this question. All these Petrovs, Luchki, Sushilovs, Gazins - all this, from the point of view of the real criminal world, real thieves - “asmodei”, “fraera”, “devils”, “men”, that is, people who are despised, robbed, trampled real underworld. From the point of view of thieves, murderers and thieves Petrov and Sushilov are much closer to the author of “Notes from the House of the Dead” than to themselves. Dostoevsky’s “thieves” are the same object of attack and robbery as Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov and his equals, no matter what the gulf separates the criminal nobles from the common people. It is difficult to say why Dostoevsky did not go for a truthful portrayal of the thieves. A thief is not the person who stole. You can steal and even systematically steal, but not be a thieves, that is, not belong to this underground vile order. Apparently, in Dostoevsky’s penal servitude there was no such “category.” This “class” is not usually punishable by such long sentences, because most of it is not murderers. Or rather, in Dostoevsky’s time they didn’t compile. There were not so many thieves who walked “in the wet”, those who had a “daring” hand in the criminal world. “Burglars”, “skokari”, “farmazons”, “pickpockets” - these are the main categories of the “Urok” society or “urkagans”, as the underworld calls itself. The word "underworld" is a term, an expression of a certain meaning. Crook, urka, urkagan, man, thug, these are all synonyms. Dostoevsky did not meet them in his penal servitude, and if he had, we would have lost, perhaps, the best pages of this book - the affirmation of faith in man, the affirmation of the good beginning inherent in human nature. But Dostoevsky did not meet with thieves. The convict heroes of “Notes from the House of the Dead” are just as random in crime as Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov himself. Is, for example, stealing from each other - which Dostoevsky dwells on several times, especially emphasizing it - is this a possible thing in the criminal world? There is the robbery of the fraters, the division of the loot, a card game and the subsequent wandering of things to different masters-thieves, depending on the victory in “Stos” or “Bur”. In the “House of the Dead” Gazin sells alcohol, and other “kissers” also do this. But the thieves would have taken the alcohol away from Gazin instantly, his career would not have had time to develop.
According to the old “law”, the thug should not work in places of detention, the fraters should work for him. The Myasnikovs and Varlamovs would have received the contemptuous nickname “Volga loader” in the criminal world. All these “mosls” (soldiers), “baklushins”, “shark husbands”, all this is not at all the world of professional criminals, not the world of thieves. These are just people who encountered the negative force of the law, who encountered it by accident, who crossed some line in the dark, like Akim Akimovich - a typical “fraerug.” The criminal world is a world of a special law, waging an eternal war with the world whose representatives are Akim Akimovich and Petrov, together with the eight-eyed parade major. The parade ground is even closer to the thugs. He is a God-given boss, relations with him are simple, as with a representative of the authorities, and any thieves will talk a lot about justice, honor and other high matters to such a parade major. And he has been saying this for more than a century now. The acne-prone, naive parade major is their open enemy, and Akim Akimovichs and Petrovs are their victims.
None of Dostoevsky's novels contain images of thieves. Dostoevsky did not know them, and if he saw them and knew them, he turned away from them as an artist.
Tolstoy does not have any impressive portraits of this type of people, even in “Resurrection,” where external and illustrative strokes are superimposed in such a way that the artist does not have to answer for them.
Chekhov encountered this world. There was something about his Sakhalin trip that changed the writer’s style. In several post-Sakhalin letters, Chekhov directly indicates that after this trip, everything he had written before seems like nonsense, unworthy of a Russian writer. As in “Notes from the House of the Dead,” on the island of Sakhalin the stupefying and corrupting abomination of places of detention destroys and cannot but destroy what is pure, good, and human. The world of thieves horrifies the writer. Chekhov recognizes in it the main battery of this abomination, a kind of nuclear reactor that itself restores fuel for itself. But Chekhov could only clasp his hands, smile sadly, and point to this world with a soft but persistent gesture. He also knew him from Hugo. On Sakhalin, Chekhov was too little, and for his own works of art until his death he did not have the courage to take this material.
It would seem that the biographical side of Gorky’s work should give him a reason for a truthful, critical display of thieves. Chelkash is an undoubted thug. But this recidivist thief is depicted in the story with the same forced and deceitful loyalty as the heroes of Les Misérables. Gavrila, of course, can be interpreted not only as a symbol of the peasant soul. He is a student of Urkagan Chelkash. It may be random, but obligatory. A student who, perhaps, tomorrow will be a “damaged stamp” will rise one step on the ladder leading to the criminal world. For, as one thieves philosopher said, “no one is born a thieves, they are made into thieves.” In Chelkash, Gorky, who encountered the criminal world in his youth, only paid tribute to that illiterate admiration for the apparent freedom of judgment and courage of behavior of this social group.
Vaska Pepel (“At the Bottom”) is a very dubious thieves. Just like Chelkash, he is romanticized, exalted, and not debunked. Several external, true features of this figure, the obvious sympathy of the author, lead to the fact that Ash also serves an evil cause.
These are Gorky’s attempts to portray the criminal world. He also did not know this world, apparently did not really encounter thieves, because this, generally speaking, is difficult for a writer. The criminal world is a closed, although not very secretive, order, and outsiders are not allowed there for training and observation. No thieves will have a heart-to-heart conversation with either Gorky the vagabond or Gorky the writer, because for him Gorky is, first of all, a fraer.
In the twenties, our literature was swept by the fashion for raiders. “Benya Krik” by Babel, Leonov’s “The Thief”, “Motke Malkhamoves” by Selvinsky, “Vaska the Whistle in the Binding” by V. Inber, Kaverin’s “The End of the Khaza”, finally, farmazon Ostap Bender by Ilf and Petrov - it seems that all the writers paid a frivolous tribute to the sudden demand for criminal romance. The unbridled poeticization of criminality presented itself as a “fresh stream” in literature and seduced many experienced literary pens. Despite the extremely weak understanding of the essence of the matter, revealed by all mentioned, as well as all unmentioned authors of works on a similar topic, they were successful with the reader, and therefore, caused significant harm.
Things got even worse from there. A long period of fascination with the notorious “reforging” began, the same reforging that the thieves laughed at and never tire of laughing at to this day. The Bolshevo and Lyubertsy communes were opened, 120 writers wrote a “collective” book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the book was published in a layout extremely similar to the illustrated Gospel. The literary crown of this period was Pogodin's "Aristocrats", where the playwright repeated the old mistake for the thousandth time, without giving himself the trouble to think seriously about those living people who themselves in life performed a simple performance before the eyes of a naive writer.
Many books, films, and plays have been produced on the topic of re-education of people in the criminal world. Alas!
From Gutenberg's times to this day, the underworld remains a sealed book for writers and readers. The writers who took on this topic dealt with this most serious topic frivolously, being carried away and deceived by the phosphorescent shine of criminality, dressing it up in a romantic mask and thereby strengthening the reader’s completely false idea of this insidious, disgusting world, which has nothing human in it.
Fussing around with various “reforgings” created a respite for many thousands of professional thieves and saved thieves.
What is the underworld?
Scam blood
How does a person cease to be human?
How do they become thugs?
Outsiders also come into the criminal world: a collective farmer who has served a sentence in prison for petty theft and has henceforth cast in his lot with criminals; former dudes whose criminal acts brought them closer to what they knew about only by hearsay; a factory mechanic who doesn’t have enough money for daring parties with his comrades; people who do not have a profession, but want to live for their own pleasure, and...
Varlam Shalamov
Apollo among thieves
Blatari don't like poetry. Poems have nothing to do with this too much real world. What innermost needs, aesthetic demands of the thief's soul should poetry answer? What demands of thieves should poetry satisfy? Yesenin knew something about this and guessed a lot. However, even the most literate blatari shun poetry - reading rhymed lines seems to them shameful fun, tomfoolery, which is offensive because of its incomprehensibility. Pushkin and Lermontov are unnecessarily complex poets for any person encountering poetry for the first time in their life. Pushkin and Lermontov require a certain preparation, a certain aesthetic level. It is impossible to introduce Pushkin to poetry, just as it is impossible for Lermontov, Tyutchev, Baratynsky. However, in Russian classical poetry There are two authors whose poems have an aesthetic effect on an unprepared listener, and cultivating a love for poetry and an understanding of poetry must begin with these authors. This is, of course, Nekrasov and especially Alexei Tolstoy. "Vasily Shibanov" and " Railway” are the most “reliable” poems in this sense. I have tested this many times. But neither “The Railway” nor “Vasily Shibanov” made any impression on the thieves. It was clear that they were only following the plot of the thing; they would have preferred a prosaic retelling of it, or even “Prince Silver” by A.K. Tolstoy. In the same way, a fictional description of the landscape in any novel read aloud did not say anything to the soul of the listeners-blatants, and one could see the desire to wait for a quick description of the action, movement, or, at worst, dialogue.
Of course, the thug, no matter how little human there is in him, is not devoid of aesthetic needs. She is satisfied with the prison song - there are a lot of songs. There are epic songs - like the already dying out “Gop with a bow”, or stanzas in honor of the famous Gorbachevsky and other similar stars of the underworld, or the song “Solovki Island”. There are lyrical songs in which the feeling of a criminal finds an outlet, colored in a very specific way and immediately different from an ordinary song - both in its intonation, and in its theme, and in its attitude.
The lyrical prison song is usually very sentimental, plaintive and touching. The prison song, despite many errors in spelling, always has a sincere character. This is also facilitated by the melody, which is often quite unique. Despite all its primitiveness, the performance greatly enhances the impression - after all, the performer is not an actor, but actor life itself. The author of a lyrical monologue does not need to change into a theatrical costume.
Our composers have not yet reached criminal musical folklore - the attempts of Leonid Utesov (“From the Odessa Kichman”) do not count.
The song “Fate” is very widespread and remarkable in its melody. A plaintive melody can sometimes bring an impressionable listener to tears. The song cannot bring a blatar to tears, but the blatar will listen to “Destiny” soulfully and solemnly.
Here's the beginning:
Fate plays a big role in everything
And you can’t go far from fate.
She controls us everywhere
Wherever he says, you obediently go.
The name of the “court” poet who composed the lyrics of the song is unknown. Further in “Fate” it is told very naturally about the father’s “inheritance” of the thief, about the mother’s tears, about the consumption acquired in prison, and expresses a firm intention to continue the chosen path of life until death.
Who has the strength to fight fate,
Fight until the very end.
The thieves' need for theatre, sculpture, and painting is zero. The thug has no interest in these muses, in these types of art - he is too real; his emotions of an “aesthetic” order are too bloody, too vital. This is not a matter of naturalism - the boundaries of art and life are indefinable, and those too realistic “performances” that the thieves put on in life frighten both art and life.
At one of the Kolyma mines, thugs stole a twenty-gram syringe from an outpatient clinic. Why do thieves need a syringe? Inject yourself with morphine? Perhaps the camp paramedic stole several ampoules of morphine from his superiors and obsequiously presented the drug to the thieves?
Or is a medical instrument a great value in the camp and, by blackmailing a doctor, one can demand a ransom in the form of “rest” in a barracks for the criminal bosses?
Neither one nor the other. Blatari heard that if air is introduced into a person’s vein, air bubbles will clog the brain vessel and form an “embolus.” And the person will die. It was decided to immediately check the validity of the interesting messages from the unknown physician. The thieves’ imagination painted pictures of mysterious murders that no criminal investigation commissioner, no Vidocq, Lecoq and Vanka Cain would expose.
The Blatari captured some hungry fratern in the isolation ward at night, tied him up and, by the light of a smoky torch, injected the victim. The man soon died - the talkative paramedic turned out to be right.
The blatar does not understand anything about ballet, but the art of dance, the dance, the “gypsy girl” has long been included in the blatar’s “honest mirror of youth.”
Masters of dancing are not translated into the criminal world. There are also plenty of criminals who like and organize such dances.
This dance, this “gypsy” tap dance, is not at all as primitive as it might seem at first glance.
Among the Blatar “choreographers” there were unusually gifted masters who were able to dance Akhun Babaev’s speech or an editorial from yesterday’s newspaper.
I'm very weak, but I still have to
Continue the path of your deceased father.
A common old lyrical romance of the underworld with a “classic” chorus:
The mirror waters were illuminated by the moon, -
where the hero complains about separation and asks his beloved:
Love me baby while I'm free
While I'm free, I'm yours.
The prison will separate us, I will live in captivity,
My buddy will take possession of you.
Instead of “my buddy” the word “other” suggests itself. But the blatar - the performer of the romance - goes to the destruction of the meter, to interrupt the rhythm, just to preserve a certain, only necessary meaning of the phrase. “Other” is usual, it’s from the fraer world. And “my buddy” is in accordance with the laws of thieves’ morality. Apparently, the author of this romance was not a criminal (unlike the song “Fate”, where the authorship of a repeat offender is undoubtedly).
The romance continues in philosophical tones:
I am a swindler of Odessa, son of the underworld,
I'm a thief, I'm hard to love.
Isn’t it better for us, baby, to part with you,
Forget each other forever.
Even further:
I'll get a deadline, I'll be sent away,
Far into the Siberian regions.
You will be happy and maybe rich,
And I never, never.
There are a lot of epic Blatar songs.
These golden dots, lights
They remind us of the Solovki camp.
(“Solovki Island”)
The ancient “Gop with a bow” is a kind of anthem of the criminal world, widely known even outside of criminal circles.
VARLAM SHALAMOV
Sergei Yesenin and the world of thieves
They are all murderers or thieves,
As fate judged them.
I fell in love with their sad looks
With hollow cheeks.
There is a lot of evil and joy in murderers,
Their hearts are simple
But they grimace in their blackened faces
Blue mouths.
The stage that went north through the Ural villages was a stage from books - everything was so similar to what had been read before by Korolenko, Tolstoy, Figner, Morozov... It was the spring of twenty-nine.
Drunken guards with crazy eyes, distributing slaps and slaps on the head, and the clicking of rifle bolts every minute. A Fedorovite sectarian who curses “dragons”; fresh straw on the earthen floor of the sheds of the stage huts; mysterious tattooed people in engineer caps, endless checks, roll calls and counting, counting, counting...
The last night before the walking stage is the night of salvation. And, looking at the faces of their comrades, those who knew Yesenin’s poems, and in 1929 there were many of them, marveled at the poet’s exhaustively accurate words:
And they grimace in their blackened faces
Blue mouths.
All their mouths were blue, and their faces were black. Everyone's mouths were twisted - from pain, from numerous bleeding cracks on their lips.
Once, when for some reason it was easier to walk or the stage was shorter than others - so much so that everyone settled down for the night before dark and rested - in the corner where the thieves were lying, a quiet singing was heard, more like a recitative with a homemade melody:
You don't love me, you don't regret me...
The thief finished the romance, having gathered many listeners, and said importantly:
- Forbidden.
“This is Yesenin,” someone said.
“Let it be Yesenin,” said the singer.
Already at this time - just three years after the poet's death - his popularity in thieves' circles was very great.
This was the only poet “accepted” and “sanctified” by the thieves, who do not favor poetry at all.
Later, thieves made him a “classic” - speaking of him with respect became good manners among thieves.
Every literate thug is familiar with such poems as “Rash, harmonica...”, “They drink here again, fight and cry...”. “Letter to Mother” is very well known. “Persian motifs”, poems, early poems are completely unknown.
Why is Yesenin close to the soul of a thug?
First of all, frank sympathy for the criminal world runs through all of Yesenin’s poems. Repeatedly expressed directly and clearly. We remember well:
Every living thing is special
Celebrated from an early age.
If I weren't a poet,
He was probably a swindler and a thief.
Blatari also remember these lines well. Just like the earlier (1915) “In the land where the yellow nettles ...” and many, many other poems.
But it's not just about direct statements. The point is not only in the lines of “The Black Man”, where Yesenin gives himself a purely criminal self-esteem:
There was that man who was an adventurer,
But the highest
And the best brand.
The mood, attitude, and tone of a number of Yesenin’s poems are close to the criminal world.
What kindred notes do the blatari hear in Yesenin’s poetry?
First of all, these are notes of melancholy, everything that evokes pity, everything that is related to “prison sentimentality.”
And animals, like our smaller brothers,
Never hit me on the head.
Poems about a dog, about a fox, about cows and horses are understood by thugs as the words of a person who is cruel to people and gentle to animals.
Blatari can caress a dog and immediately tear it into pieces alive - they have no moral barriers, and their curiosity is great, especially in the question “will he survive or not?” Having started in childhood with observations of the torn wings of a caught butterfly and a bird with its eyes gouged out, the thug, having matured, gouges out a person’s eyes out of the same pure interest as in childhood.
And behind Yesenin’s poems about animals, they imagine a kindred spirit. They do not take these verses with tragic seriousness. To them it seems like a clever rhyming declaration.
Notes of challenge, protest, doom - all these elements of Yesenin’s poetry are sensitively perceived by the thugs. They don't need any Mare Ships or Pantocrator. Blatari are realists. There is much they do not understand in Yesenin’s poems and reject what is incomprehensible. The simplest poems of the “Tavern Moscow” cycle are perceived by them as a feeling synchronous with their soul, their underground life with prostitutes, with gloomy underground revelries.
Drunkenness, carousing, glorification of debauchery - all this resonates in the thieves' soul.
They pass by Yesenin’s landscape lyrics, past poems about Russia - all this does not interest the thieves one bit.
In the poems that they know and are dear to them in their own way, they make bold cuts - for example, in the poems “Rash, harmonica...” the last stanza was cut off with Blatar scissors because of the words:
Darling, I'm crying
Sorry Sorry…
The swearing that Yesenin incorporated into his poems always evokes admiration. Still would! After all, the speech of any thieves is equipped with the most complex, the most multi-layered, the most perfect swearing - this is the vocabulary, everyday life.
And here in front of them is a poet who does not forget this important aspect of the matter for them.
The poeticization of hooliganism also contributes to Yesenin’s popularity among thieves, although, it would seem, from this side he should not have had sympathy among thieves. After all, thieves strive in the eyes of the fraters to sharply separate themselves from hooligans; they are, in fact, a completely different phenomenon from hooligans - immeasurably more dangerous. However, in the eyes common man“A bully is even worse than a thief.
Yesenin’s hooliganism, glorified in poetry, is perceived by thieves as the incident of their “sham,” their underground party, reckless and gloomy revelry.
I'm just like you, lost
I can't go back now.
Each poem of “Tavern Moscow” has notes that resonate in the soul of the criminal; What do they care about the deep humanity, the bright lyricism of the essence of Yesenin’s poems.
They need to get from there other lines that are consonant with them. But Yesenin has these lines, this tone of a person offended by the world, offended by the world.
There is another side to Yesenin’s poetry, which brings him closer to the concepts that reign in the criminal world, to the code of this world.
It's about attitude towards women. The thug treats a woman with contempt, considering her a lower being. A woman deserves nothing better than bullying, crude jokes, and beatings.
The blatar does not think about children at all; in his morality there are no such obligations, there are no concepts connecting him with “descendants”.
Who will his daughter be? A prostitute? A thief? Who his son will be is completely indifferent to the thug. But isn’t a thief obliged by “law” to give up his girlfriend to a more “authoritative” comrade?
But I have children
Lost around the world
His wife
Easily given to someone else.
And here the poet’s moral principles fully correspond to those rules and tastes that are sanctified by thieves’ traditions and everyday life.
Drink, otter, drink!
The thieves know Yesenin’s poems about drunken prostitutes by heart and have long since taken them into service. In the same way, “The nightingale has one good song ...” and “You don’t love me, you don’t regret ...” with a homemade melody are included in the golden fund of criminal “folklore”, just like:
Don't snore, belated three.
Our life flashed by without a trace,
Maybe tomorrow there's a hospital bed
Will calm me down forever.
The thieves' singers replace the "hospital" bed with a "prison" bed.
The cult of the mother, along with a grossly cynical and contemptuous attitude towards a woman-wife, is a characteristic feature of the life of a thieve.
And in this regard, Yesenin’s poetry extremely subtly reproduces the concepts of the criminal world.
For the thug, the mother is an object of sentimental affection, his “holy of holies.” This is also included in the rules good behavior thief, in his “spiritual” traditions. Combined with rudeness towards women in general, a sugary-sentimental attitude towards a mother looks false and deceitful. However, the cult of the mother is the official ideology of the thieves.
The first “Letter to Mother” (“You are still alive, my old lady...”) is known to literally every thug. This verse is the thieves' "Bird of God."
And all of Yesenin’s other poems about his mother, although they cannot compare in popularity with “The Letter,” are still known and approved.
The mood of Yesenin's poetry in some of its parts coincides with the concepts of the criminal world with amazingly guessed fidelity. This is precisely what explains the great, special popularity of the poet among thieves.
In an effort to somehow emphasize their closeness to Yesenin, to somehow demonstrate to the whole world their connection with the poet’s poems, the blatari, with their characteristic theatricality, tattoo their bodies with quotes from Yesenin. The most popular lines, found among many young thugs, among various sexual pictures, maps and cemetery tombstones:
How few roads have been traveled
How many mistakes have been made.
If it burns, then it burns, burning,
You can't set fire to someone who's burned out.
I bet on queen of spades,
And he played the ace of diamonds.
It seems that not a single poet in the world has ever been promoted in this way.
Only Yesenin, “recognized” by the criminal world, was awarded this unique honor.
Recognition is a process. From the cursory interest at the first acquaintance to the inclusion of Yesenin’s poems in the obligatory “library of a young thug” with the approval of all the leaders of the underworld, two or three decades passed. These were the very years when Yesenin was not published or was published only slightly (“Moscow Tavern” and is still not published). The more trust and interest the poet aroused among the thieves.
The criminal world does not like poetry. Poetry has nothing to do in this gloomy world. Yesenin is an exception. It is noteworthy that his biography, his suicide, did not play any role at all in his success here.
Professional criminals do not know about suicide, the percentage of suicides among them equal to zero. The most literate thieves explained Yesenin’s tragic death by the fact that the poet was not entirely a thief, but was like a “corrupted fraer” - from whom, they say, one can expect anything.
But, of course, and every thug, literate and illiterate, will say this, Yesenin had “a drop of fraudulent blood.”
Shalamov V.T. Collected works in four volumes. T.2. - M.: Fiction, Vagrius, 1998. - P. 86 - 92
In 1966, the publishing house “Soviet Writer” offered me a manuscript by some Shalamov, apparently hoping that I would cut it down. These were “Sketches of the Underworld” that are still not appreciated today. After reading them, I wrote an enthusiastic review, which, alas, did not help the publication in any way. This terrible picture of the underworld of the criminal world, with which Shalamov waged a relentless war, was too “inconvenient” even for the “thaw” that continued by inertia. It was then that our good relationship began with this writer, without whom I cannot imagine Russian literature of the 20th century.
As much as I could, I tried to “legalize” Shalamov the prose writer; his poems had already been published, although they had been bitten by vigilant editors. I agreed with the critic V. Chalmaev to take “Essays on the Underworld” to “Our Contemporary”, believing that the editor-in-chief, S. Vikulov, already as Shalamov’s fellow countryman, a Vologda resident, would publish them. I wrote to Shalamov about this and received a short answer:
“Dear Oleg Nikolaevich.
Thank you for your concerns. Come with Chalmaev (or whatever is convenient for you) any day in the morning (before 12), and I will give the manuscript of “Sketches of the Underworld” to “Our Contemporary”. And poetry. Sincerely, V. Shalamov.
Despite my deafness, I think that if I can make out who is speaking, we will be able to agree on a date.”
However, this time nothing good came of it either. The manuscript I brought to the editorial office was rejected. I realized that I was running into a wall. The only thing that remained was to remind him of Shalamov on occasion, even if he had to wishful thinking. Thus, in the brochure “Do your children love poetry?” published in 1967 by the publishing house “Znanie?” I not only respectfully quoted Shalamov’s poems twice, but also wrote a deliberate lie about the fate of the ill-fated “Essays.”
The reason was a poem by the then popular poet Eduard Asadov, in which a “coward” girl easily deals with two criminals, while her companion “with an athletic figure” openly “drifts.” This turn seemed absolutely false to me, and I burst into philippics:
“This is precisely why the criminal world is especially dangerous, because the wolf laws of the merciless attitude of the strong to the weak, mutual responsibility, and bloody revenge operate in it. Recently I had the opportunity to review a book in manuscript by the writer V. Shalamov, “Essays on the Underworld,” which is due to be published by one of the publishing houses. This book should become mandatory reading for parents, because it very clearly shows what a terrible, inhuman creature a seasoned repeat offender is. V. Shalamov’s essays awaken responsibility and arm society in the fight to eradicate crime, as they show the true face of a criminal.”
Shalamov knew the criminal world too well, as he went through all nine circles of the Gulag hell.
He was tall, thin, long-armed, with a round head and irregular features of a cheekbone face, cut by deep folds and furrows. And on this face are bright blue eyes, as if flashing during a conversation, when the conversation took an interesting turn for him.
His hands were very strong - hands stuck to the wheelbarrow, although the hands themselves moved strangely all the time, rotating in the shoulder joints. These joints were knocked out during interrogations, just as the vestibular apparatus was damaged: every time he sat down, especially if the chair or armchair was low, he momentarily lost consciousness, balance, sense of space and could not immediately find himself in it.
In a conversation, he pronounced words abruptly and even turned his face away from the interlocutor - isn’t this a habit after interrogations? He spoke somewhat through his nose. I think that as a prose writer he was still much higher than a poet, although his poems were marked by an undoubted and original gift for both sound writing and the power of thought. After all, it was in prose that he expressed the most important thing: about the infiniteness human strength in the face of those trials, completely unpredictable and impossible, say, for the nineteenth century, which befell hundreds of thousands of people. The forces of evil, Shalamov argued, under certain circumstances are capable of breaking and destroying everything in any person. For man’s possibilities are finite, but evil can be infinite, omnipotent, limitless.
And there, in the epicenter of evil, a person - alive or not - dies. I remember how, in response to my admiration for Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Shalamov placed his large, trembling hand on my shoulder with the words:
Ah, Oleg Nikolaevich! Another varnisher appeared in Soviet literature...
He had the right to say so.
Of course, my brochure about poetry was elementary, did not go into the intricacies of verse, and was addressed “just to the reader.” I sent it to Shalamov along with a review by the emigrant poet and critic Georgy Adamovich of his book of poems “Road and Fate,” published in the Parisian “Russian Thought.” Shalamov’s “ Kolyma stories", and Adamovich called his review: “Poems by the author" Kolyma stories" By that time, the editorial office of Litgazeta also had my review - “According to the very essence of being.” But editor-in-chief A.B. Chakovsky kept slowing her down. On December 22, 1967, Shalamov replied:
“Dear Oleg Nikolaevich.
Thank you very much for your book. The book is intelligent, useful and serious. Somewhat universal, perhaps. Extraordinarily little has been written about poetry. Aseev and Mayakovsky did not write about poetry at all. Thank you for pages 25, 55, 74. I was especially touched by the mention of “Sketches of the Underworld.” How can I get a copy of your review of “The Road and Destiny”? Is it possible to push her into the stormy waves of gravity?
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for Adamovich’s review.
Yours V. Shalamov"
Finally, despite all the obstacles, my review appeared in Litgazeta. She was far more modest and constrained than Georgy Adamovich’s review. I had to speak in half-hints, carefully avoiding the author’s “camp experience” where the Parisian poet, on the contrary, paid attention to him, stopped and “sharpened”:
“The collection of Shalamov’s poems - spiritually unique and significant in their own way, unlike most contemporary poems, especially Soviet poems - should and should have been analyzed from a purely literary point of view, without touching on the author’s biography. The poems would fully deserve such an analysis and, probably, for Shalamov himself such an attitude towards his work would be the only acceptable one. But whether the author is annoyed or indifferent, it is difficult for us here to get rid of the “Kolyma” approach to his poetry. You involuntarily ask yourself a question: maybe, at least in the main thing, the dryness and severity of these poems is an inevitable consequence of camp loneliness, lonely, nightly thoughts about that “road and fate” that sometimes befalls a person? Perhaps it was precisely as a result of these thoughts that the illusions that so often turn out to be the essence and core of lyricism disappeared without a trace in Shalamov’s consciousness; perhaps, with a different fate, Shalamov would have been a different poet? But guesses remain guesses, and we don’t have a reliable answer to them.”
I inevitably had to transfer everything to a different, “optimistic plane:
“The reader doesn’t know the poet Varlam Shalamov well. Prose - and even worse. Meanwhile, thanks to the moral fullness, seriousness of the content, precision of words and richness of life difficult experience- thanks to all this, Shalamov’s works have in abundance that “teaching” power, which is always precious, and especially in our days, when so much is said about the spiritual formation of man,” etc.
On February 2, 1968, I received a detailed message from Shalamov, where he clearly and firmly expressed his credo - the credo of a citizen and an artist.
“Dear Oleg Nikolaevich,” he wrote. - Thank you for your review in “ Literary newspaper" Your formula differs from Adamovich’s concept: “The author is ready to give up on everything that happened in the past.” I see in my past both my strength and my destiny and I am not going to forget anything. A poet cannot give up - then poetry would not be written. All this is not a reproach, not a reproach to Adamovich, whose review is smart, significant, and heartfelt. And - relaxed.
A collection of poems is not a novel that can be leafed through overnight. There are secrets in “Road and Fate”, there are lines that are not immediately revealed. The irreparable damage is that here are collected poems that are crippled, poems that are disabled (as in “Flint” and “The Rustle of Leaves”). “Habakkuk”, “Song”, “Atomic Poem” (“The bones crunched in the bushes”), “Poems in honor of the pine tree” - these are pieces, fragments of my little poems. In “Song,” for example, a whole chapter, the most important one, “I crushed stones for many years / Not with an angry iambic, but with a keel,” was omitted; three stanzas were removed at the very end. In other poems the damage is even greater, and “Homer”, “The Seventh Poem” did not even approach the threshold of the collection.
A violation of the unified flow of the collection was the inclusion of poems written in difficult conditions in Kolyma in 1949 and 1950 and selected from the many poems of those years: “Scarecrow”, “Parable of the Inscribed Circle” and some others. But it was better to include them, with all their verbosity and roughness, as a trace of fate, as a trace of the mood of those years, as proof to oneself of how difficult it was in Kolyma to put letters into words. At one time, Pasternak was against “Scarecrow” and understood everything only during a personal meeting.
The collection contains two “prose” poems - “Direct Fire” and “Garibaldi”. These poems replaced the removed poems about Tsvetaeva. I have written over a thousand poems. How many did you print? 200? 300? - by no means the best. I've been writing all my life. My archives were destroyed twice. Several hundred poems have been lost, the texts have long been forgotten by me. Some are only now sending them to me. Several dozen stories have also been lost, and only four were published in the thirties. Only a part (most) of the Kolyma poems, which were once taken out by plane and handed to me in 1953, have survived. These Kolyma notebooks (poems from 1937-1956) number six and contain more than six hundred poems. Some of them were included in collections and publications of Yunost.
Thus, in “The Road and Fate” the best poems are those that were written twenty and fifteen years ago. I arrived in 1956 after rehabilitation with a bag of poetry and prose on my back. About a hundred poems were taken by the magazines - each one took a little. And I figured that there was a month left before fame. But the Hungarian rebellion began, and it immediately became clear that nothing of mine would be published. This continues to this day. I manage to publish several poems a year - the least interesting ones for me, participate in “Poetry Days”, and publish three collections of two or three pages in 10 years - with truncations and cuts.
I dare to hope that “Kolyma Notebooks” is a page of Russian poetry that no one else will write except me.
Now about the poetry of thought. It seems to me that the emotional side of the matter is extremely important, the feeling, the shade of feeling, which are explored by verse, and only by verse, in the border area between feeling and thought, which constitutes the essence, in my opinion, of the creative process. After all creative process more discarding than searching. It also seems to me that the sound organization of the verse and its rhythmic structure are extremely important. I never forget about both. Only this is not alliteration like “the world is a pestilence”, which spoiled Tsvetaeva too, took her away from the main thing - overcoming the obstacles that the poetess erected in front of herself, sometimes looked heroically, hysterically heroic. These “searches” strangled the Tsvetaevsky epigones. For Tsvetaeva’s epigones, this was strumming (as opposed to Tsvetaeva’s rattling), the strumming of a very primitive weapon, the simplest weapon from a huge poetic arsenal.
For me this aspect of the matter becomes a matter of constant concern. So as not to look far for examples, here is the poem “Face”, which you like and which you consider “programmatic” for me. After all, in this poem everything is rhymed and associated. Without attention to this side of the matter, I have no poems. It even seems to me that any poet in any poem always poses a small or large, but purely “technical” problem - and solves it. These tasks can be varied: new topic, rhyme, thought, meter, rhythm... You always want to insert into a line some polysyllabic word, prosaic to the point of demonstrativeness.
But I am also proud of the fact that the sound organization of the verse, the sound support of the stanza in my poems exists, as it were, behind the thought, inside the thought. When checked, the line turns out to be more perfect than it seemed at first glance, and this should give the reader additional joy, that very joy of the exact word, which is most important for a person working on a verse, on a word. Poetry is a universal language, therefore there is no matter, fact, event, idea that cannot be applied in poetry. You can say (and most importantly, find!) a lot in poetry that you cannot find in prose. A poet who knows in advance what he wants to express in his poem is not a poet, but a fabulist. There are a thousand truths in the world, but in art there is only one truth - the truth of talent. That's all. Thank you very much. It remains to be said that I do not have the indifferent Pushkin nature (Pasternak had it) and that landscape lyricism is the best kind of civil poetry. By naming my teachers, by God you are mistaken, just like Adamovich. All Russian poetry of the beginning of the century - together - Annensky and Blok, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, as well as a dozen names below these, who were sought, found and could make up the glory of the poetry of any country.
The pinnacle of Russian poetry is Tyutchev. A poet for poets - but life. And while there is no one’s own language, there is no poet. The question of novelty, the question of creative intonation, is the most important in poetry, as in art in general. Poetic intonation is not a style, but also not the explanation given in literary dictionaries, whose authors are accustomed to dealing with prose. Poetic intonation is much broader, deeper, more special, subtler, stronger, and finally - from favorite rhymes to favorite thoughts.
Warm greetings to you.
Yours, V. Shalamov.
I also decided to add a page for you about my prosaic experiments, about the fate of Russian prose.
The history of Russian prose of the 19th century seems to me to be a gradual loss of Pushkin’s beginning, a loss of those literary heights on which Pushkin stood. The Pushkin formula was gradually replaced by a descriptive moralizing novel, the death of which we are seeing today.
Two people played a big role in this destruction of Pushkin's beginning - Belinsky and Leo Tolstoy. Belinsky, who told everyone that poetry can be explained in prose. Belinsky's praises were a Trojan horse brought into Pushkin's world, into Pushkin's camp. Leo Tolstoy was the pinnacle of the practice of a descriptive, moralizing novel, alien to Pushkin’s thought about life, Pushkin’s phrase. Leo Tolstoy swore allegiance to Pushkin (“Guests came to the dacha”), but this was idle talk. Neither in his practice, nor in his vocabulary, nor in his literary ideas was there anything more alien to Pushkin than Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy did a lot to translate the debate in art into living life, and it is no coincidence that all the prominent terrorists of the beginning of the century underwent initial training with the author of moralistic stories.
But I would like to lead the conversation outside of the moral assessment of Tolstoy’s activities, which, in my opinion, led and could not help but lead to a lot of blood. His artistic method, his advice to writers, his crafty example with three diaries - for everyone, for Chertkov and for himself - condemnation of Shakespeare and praise for Semyonov, his notebooks of 200 variations of Katyusha Maslova's eye colors - all this is so surprising for a writer.
Characters, character development. These principles have long been questioned. The prose of Bely and Remizov was a rebellion against Tolstoy's canons. But it was necessary to go through wars and revolutions, Hiroshima and concentration camps - German and Soviet - for it to become clear that the very thought of imaginary destinies, of imaginary people irritates any reader. And prose writers pretend, giving real names to people from their novels, and think that they will save the situation, that they will not need to relearn. Only, really, nothing but the truth. The document becomes the cornerstone in art; without a document there is no literature. Even a modern theater does not exist without a document.
But it's not just about the document. Prose must be created, hard-won as a document. This prose - in its laconicism, warmth of tone, discarding any and all trinkets, is a return after a hundred years to Pushkin's banner. Enriched by the experience of Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Severlag, Russian prose returns to Pushkin’s precepts, the loss of which Dostoevsky so alarmingly recalled in his speech. I consider my own prose to be a search, an attempt precisely in this Pushkin direction.
Yours, V. Shalamov.”
Alas, today's fiction, today's prose with its postmodern lowbrow, with its glitches and hatches into various unknowns, unfortunately, does not confirm this strategic forecast of Shalamov.
In the early 70s, I enthusiastically worked on the essay “The Greatness and Fall of the Odessa School.” I was attracted by the phenomenon of a group of young writers who lived in Odessa and found themselves after civil war in Moscow: Yuri Olesha, Valentin Kataev, Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov, Eduard Bagritsky, Isaac Babel and some others. All of them were, without any doubt, very gifted people in literature, but, in my opinion, they had very shaky moral foundations. However, they had their own positive program: those whom we would call today “criminal elements” were glorified in romantic or even heroic tones.
“In a romantic halo,” I wrote then, “they show a living pyramid - from the talented parasite, dreamer and everyday brawler Kavalerov (“Envy” by Yu. Olesha) to the swindlers of the occasion - the chief accountant Prokhorov and the cashier Vanechka (“Embezzlers” by V. Kataev ), then to the professional “cute swindler” Ostap Bender (“The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf”), over whom the figure of the bandit Benzion Krik (“Odessa Stories” by I. Babel) looms unattainably. On the other hand, these writers were militant atheists who sought to offend and insult a believer, an Orthodox person, as painfully as possible.”
The essay was supposed to appear in the magazine “Our Contemporary”. On a business trip for this magazine, I went to Odessa, read the files of periodicals of the revolutionary years in the special depository there, and copied the “Orthodox” and “White Guard” poems of V. Kataev and E. Bagritsky. The editor-in-chief of Our Contemporary, having read the essay, said with concern: “Aren’t you afraid, do you know, that you will be beaten for this article?”.. The author was not afraid in his youth, although the danger came from those unshakable in literature (if look through the glasses of that time) authorities.
Varlam Tikhonovich had a completely different attitude towards the idea of writing about the “Odessa School”. He, an honored prisoner, was very concerned about the romanticization of the “criminal element” in Soviet literature (mainly the 20s). In his “Essays on the Underworld,” Shalamov devoted a special chapter to this topic - “On one mistake in fiction.” In response to my request for permission to quote in the Odessa School an excerpt from this chapter (which, like the rest of the work, remained in manuscript at that time), he wrote to me in May 1972:
“Dear Oleg Nikolaevich!
I am happy to allow you to use my works as you wish - within any limits and forms. This is the answer to point a. Regarding point “b”, I am attaching a page from “Sketches of the Underworld.” Is this this one?
It makes sense, it seems to me, to include this “page”.
“In the twenties,” wrote Shalamov, “our literature was swept by the fashion for raiders. Benya Krik from “Odessa Stories” and the play “Sunset” by Babel, “The Thief” by Leonov, “Vanka Cain” and “Sonka Gorodushnitsa” by Alexey Kruchenykh, “The Thief” and “Motka Malkhamuves” by Selvinsky, “Vaska the Whistle in the Binding” by V. Inber , “The End of Khaza” by Kaverin, the raider Philip from “Intervention” by Slavin, and finally the farmer Ostap Bender by Ilf and Petrov - it seems that all the writers paid a frivolous tribute to the sudden demand for criminal romance. On the stage, Leonid Utesov received an all-Union audience with the criminal song “From the Odessa Kichman”...
From Odessa kichman
Two Urkans were running...
You made a fuss
All our raspberries... and so on.
The unbridled poeticization of criminality presented itself as a “fresh stream” in literature and seduced many experienced literary pens. Despite the extremely poor understanding of the essence of the matter, revealed by all the mentioned, as well as all unmentioned, authors of works on a similar topic, these works were successful with the reader, and therefore caused significant harm.
Things got even worse from there. A long period of fascination with the notorious “reforging” began, the same reforging that the thieves laughed at and never tire of laughing at to this day. Bolshevsky and Lyubertsy communes opened. One hundred and twenty writers wrote a “collective” book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal. This book was published in a layout extremely similar to the illustrated Gospel. One of the parables, “The Story of My Life,” was written by M. Zoshchenko and was always included in collections of his works. The literary crown of this period was Pogodin's "Aristocrats", where the playwright repeated the old mistake for the thousandth time, without giving himself the trouble to think seriously about those living people who themselves in life performed a simple performance before the eyes of a naive writer. Many books, films, and plays have been produced on the topics of the criminal world. Alas!
The underworld from Gutenberg's times to this day remains a book with seven seals for writers and readers. The writers who took on this topic dealt with this most serious topic frivolously, being carried away and deceived by the phosphorescent shine of criminality, dressing it up in a romantic mask and thereby strengthening the reader’s completely false idea of this insidious, disgusting world, which has nothing human in it. Fussing around with various “reforgings” created a respite for many thousands of professional thieves and saved the thieves.”
In his letter, Shalamov adds:
“There is also a “s” - an addition that may be useful for your work. The “Odessa School” is a literary bluff that cost the Soviet reader very dearly.
The “addition” arose because my work was written extremely concisely and concisely. There was so much to say that no matter how important this topic was - and it is very important, infinitely important - there was and is no time to expand the argument, examples, etc.
But even now - fifteen years after the recording of “Sketches of the Underworld” - everything remains the same, not a drop of truth has penetrated into the criminal case either into literature or onto the stage.
It would seem that what’s terrible about debunking the criminal world? Recently, “Notes of a Gray Wolf” appeared - another “bullshit” on this important issue. Not to mention the extreme pretentiousness of the style, this question is answered by the wrong person. “Gray Wolf” is a bandit, not a thief (Volga Loader - such a nickname is reserved for him in the criminal world). The “gray wolf” is afraid of thieves and lies that there are none. He undertakes to judge on issues on which he has no right to judge, he judges together with “Moscow”, together with “Litgazeta”. This is another opus of Sheinin's kind. Our age is the age of the document. The bandit's autobiography appears. The kingdom of thieves is still very far away. But this is all incidental, and the “c” addition may look like this:
More can be said about Babel. In addition to “Odessa Stories” with Benya Krik, which had a huge success with readers, Babel has a play “Sunset”, which was shown at the Art Theater (2nd?), which also grew out of the noise of the thieves’ romance of “Odessa Stories”. "Sunset" enjoyed great success and was interpreted in print as a new "King Lear".
More recently, film director Schweitzer plunged into thieves' Shakespearean, staging "The Golden Calf" - a programmatic piece of the "Odessa school" - according to the "Hamlet" scheme with monologues about the vanity of life, with the jester Panikovsky and the jester's grave. If the binder Mendel Krik is King Lear, then Ostap Bender of Jurassic is Hamlet, no less.
Elliy-Karl Selvinsky, as he called himself in those years for the collection “The Exchange of All” - a pun conceived in support of the iambics of Ilf and Petrov in Voronya Slobodka, gave a photograph of himself wearing a frill made of swan feathers. Near the portrait was the poem “The Thief,” which was later included in all anthologies of the twenties and in all collections of poems by Elliy-Karl Selvinsky:
The blackamoor came out, the bourgeois is channeling.
And on the belly - a golden bumper...
And the end:
You were unlucky today, dear Madame Death.
Until next time Adju.
The inept management of thieves' vocabulary was not noticed by anyone. In Kolyma, I read this poem to the thieves - for the sake of experience, they waved it off with anger, and it’s true - it wasn’t written for them.
Selvinsky’s second widely known poem on the thieves theme is “Motka Malkhamuves” - each time with the explanation that “Malkhamuves” is the Angel of Death - thieves don’t have such nicknames, everything is simpler there, not so magnificent. This is an action-packed story about a store robbery, with thieves' vocabulary, more accurate than in the first, "Thief", drawn this time from some official manual on "thieves' music", where there are no such blunders as "Went to a blackamoor" :
Red leggings. Velvet breeches,
Somewhere behind the elbows is a checkerboard jacket, etc.
The plot opus “Motka Malkhamuves” was a great success. Included in all Selvinsky's collections.
Vera Mikhailovna Inber did not want to lag behind her fellow constructivists in developing this spectacular theme. But unlike the direct glorification of “The Thief” and “Motka Malkhamuves”, the criminal poem by V.M. Inber had a moralizing ending with the heroic policeman, the death of a criminal under the bullets of the authorities in a shootout. The main criminal, who organized the robbery and incited the thief to commit the robbery, was hiding. The policeman says to his boss:
His case is weak.
Although I am whole,
Guilty of women
I didn't think so.
And the end:
You seem to be like this
Cut glass with diamond
A couple of trifles.
This is what Vaska, the hero of the great poem “Vaska Whistle in the Binding,” says before his death.
M. Zoshchenko also paid tribute to the “reforging” by writing a boring documentary story “The Story of One Life” about the correction of the international pharmaceutical zone on the channel. He didn’t even want to curl his lips into a smile - he just admired and was surprised, outlining in ink the stormy life of the new Benvenuto Cellini. Prishvin in “Osudareva Road” is head over heels in reforging. All of Sheinin's things are speculation, especially surprising for the investigator. However, Sheinin was not an investigator for criminal cases. The number of examples, of course, can be multiplied a hundredfold.
I would like to publish “Essays on the Underworld” in any magazine - special, departmental, provincial, etc. It seemed, why would a publishing house be afraid of solving this most important topic? They are afraid to violate - not tradition, but peace of mind, theirs and their superiors.
I wish you all the best.
With deep respect, V. Shalamov.”
I prepared the essay “The Greatness and Fall of the Odessa School” with extensive quotes from Shalamov for the book “Loyalty” in the Sovremennik publishing house. But the director and editor-in-chief were afraid to publish it in its original form, and I had to merge two essays - “Loyalty” (I published this article in No. 1 of the magazine “Our Contemporary” for 1974) and “Odessa School” - into a kind of semi-castrated version under the title "In search of humanism." However, even in this form it was, if not a bomb, then a bomb. When I came to a bookstore on Chernyakhovsky Street and asked for the book “Loyalty,” they answered me: “You know, we don’t have it. Yesterday the author arrived and bought all the copies...”
Of the heroes of my “Odessa School,” only Valentin Petrovich Kataev was alive at that time. He, of course, must have been outraged by many things in my essay. For example, a statement by Bunin, then unknown to us: “There was V. Kataev (a young writer). The cynicism of today's young people is simply incredible. He said: “For 100 thousand I will kill anyone. I want to eat well, I want to have a good hat, great shoes.”
Therefore, it was not difficult to guess who the “author” was who bought the book. And I gratefully sent “Fidelity” as a gift to Varlam Tikhonovich and received a gift from him - the third book of poems “Moscow Clouds”.
Enough for a long time I was the author of the “Brief Literary Encyclopedia”, wrote there about Bunin, Blok, Andrei Bely, Gippius, Shmelev, and prepared extensive articles - “Russian Literature of the 20th Century”, “Russian Soviet Literature” (this article was badly damaged, and I put under it the pseudonym - D.N. Agarkov - the surname of the mother of my friend D.N. Lyalikov), “Russian emigrant literature” (removed at the verification stage at the request of Glavlit), etc. And, of course, I wanted to write about Shalamov, which I told him about. On April 20, 1972 he replied:
“Dear Oleg Nikolaevich.
I am very glad that you will write about me for the “Literary Encyclopedia”, I answer your questions. I was born on June 18, 1907 in the city of Vologda. The list of published books (collections of poetry) is small:
1. “Flint” - 1961, Moscow, Publishing house. "Soviet writer". 2. “The Rustle of Leaves” - 1964. Same publishing house. 3. “Road and Destiny.” 1967. Same publishing house. 4. “Moscow Clouds” - published in “Soviet Writer” in July of this year, 1972 - that’s what the publishing house promised me.
I don’t have collections of prose, although I was well published “before”: the stories “The Three Deaths of Doctor Austino” - in No. 1 of “October” for 1936, “Return” - in the magazine “Around the World” No. 12 for 1936, “Pahava and the Tree” - in “Literary Contemporary” No. 3, 1937, the essay “Potatoes” was published in “Collective Farmer” by M. Gorky in No. 9, 1935. “The Master Remaking Nature” (about Michurin) - in the magazine “Spotlight” No. 8 1934 Recently I was looking through my old things. There are simply no stories there in the understanding of the genre that I have now. There the moral requirements were different, the inner impulse was different, and the technical equipment was different from the present one.
“After” only “Stlannik” was published - one of the series of “Kolyma Stories” - in the magazine “Rural Youth” No. 3 for 1965. “Questions of Literature” published my article “Bunin’s work on the translation of “The Song of Hiawatha.”
I published my first poems at the age of 50, although I have been writing poetry since childhood, in the magazine “Znamya” in 1957 (No. 5) - the cycle “Poems about the North.” Since that time, I have been constantly publishing poems in the magazines “Moscow”, “Znamya”, and the almanacs “Poetry Day”. The main magazine where I constantly publish poetry is “Youth”. B.N. The field and the editors gave me the opportunity, despite the delay, to define my poetic identity.
All my poetry collections received many reviews and responses. The most dear to me is Slutsky’s review of “Flint” - “Flint strikes fire” (“Literary Gazette” No. 5. X. 1961, your analysis “On the very essence of being” in “Literary Gazette”. There were reviews by G. Krasukhin in “ Siberian Lights" (No. 1, 1969) and E. Kalmanovsky in "Zvezda" (No. 2, 1965), where there were attempts to guess something in my poems.
At sixty, there are few things left that you truly treasure. No matter how much I hurried - and I was in a great hurry to use my reserves of both moral strength and talent - I did not do even a thousandth part of what I wanted. Both in poetry and in prose.
In my poems, it seemed to me that I had reached some important milestones in the landscape lyricism of Russian poetry of the 20th century in all its technical and spiritual equipment. That I have found almost the limit of emotionality, density of a poetic line while maintaining the sound support of canonical Russian verse, whose possibilities are limitless.
In prose, I consider myself the heir to the Pushkin tradition, the Pushkin phrase with its laconicism and precision. Bringing the document closer to the artistic fabric - this is the path of Russian prose of the 20th century - the century of Hiroshima and concentration camps, the century of wars and revolutions.
Poetry and prose mutually intersect in my things, they are united, but not by external, but by internal unity.
My head is as fresh as fifty years ago, and my pen is in perfect order.
With deepest respect,
V. Shalamov.
I am ready to answer any of your questions immediately.”
Unfortunately, very soon I suffered a breakdown in my personal life and for some time I had no time for “literature.”
Another person wrote an article about Shalamov for the Literary Encyclopedia.