Bibliograph

Sketches of the criminal world, further Kolyma stories, Varlam Shalamov ; translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield

Type

Label

Sketches of the criminal world, further Kolyma stories, Varlam Shalamov ; translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield

Language

eng

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

no index present

Literary Form

short stories

Main title

Sketches of the criminal world

Responsibility statement

Varlam Shalamov ; translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield

Series statement

New York Review Books classics

Sub title

further Kolyma stories

Summary

n 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered firsthand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky’s underground: “How does someone stop being human?” and “How are criminals made?”

resource.variantTitle

Kolyma stories. Volume 2

Classification