Kolyma Tales
by Varlam Shalamov
Buy on AmazonIt is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
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"Of all the books of the Gulag, the one that struck me the most is this because it is just so brutally matter of fact. It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in Russia’s polar northeast, and Shalamov himself spent 17 years there. This is not an overtly literary description of his experiences: it is written with such clarity and coldness that the brutality and the dehumanisation of the Gulag is palpable."
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