Varlaam Shalamov is a writer who spent three terms in camps, survived hell, lost his family and friends, but was not broken by ordeals: “A camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. A person - neither the chief nor the prisoner needs 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 a long time ago that I would devote the rest of my life to this very truth.

Collection " Kolyma stories"- the main work of the writer, which he composed for almost 20 years. These stories leave an extremely heavy impression of horror from the fact that people really survived in this way. The main themes of the works: camp life, breaking the character of prisoners. All of them doomedly waited for imminent death, without cherishing hopes, without entering into a struggle. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful dying, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention. All heroes are unhappy, their destinies are ruthlessly broken. The language of the work is simple, unpretentious, not embellished with expressive means, which creates the feeling of a true story of an ordinary person, one of the many who experienced all this.

Analysis of the stories "At Night" and "Condensed Milk": Problems in "Kolyma Tales"

The story "Night" tells us about a case that does not immediately fit in our heads: two prisoners, Bagretsov and Glebov, dig up a grave in order to remove linen from the corpse and sell it. Moral and ethical principles have been erased, given way to the principles of survival: the heroes will sell linen, buy some bread or even tobacco. The themes of life on the verge of death, doom run like a red thread through the work. Prisoners do not value life, but for some reason they survive, indifferent to everything. The problem of brokenness opens before the reader, it is immediately clear that after such shocks a person will never be the same.

The story "Condensed Milk" is devoted to the problem of betrayal and meanness. Geological engineer Shestakov was “lucky”: in the camp he avoided compulsory work, ended up in an “office”, where he receives good food and clothes. The prisoners did not envy the free, but such as Shestakov, because the camp narrowed the interests to everyday ones: “Only something external could bring us out of indifference, take us away from the slowly approaching death. External, not internal strength. Inside, everything was burned out, devastated, we didn’t care, and we didn’t make any plans beyond tomorrow.” Shestakov decided to assemble a group to escape and hand over to the authorities, having received some privileges. This plan was unraveled by the nameless main character familiar to the engineer. The hero demands two cans of canned milk for his participation, this is the ultimate dream for him. And Shestakov brings a treat with a “monstrous blue sticker”, this is the hero’s revenge: he ate both cans under the eyes of other prisoners who did not expect a treat, just watched a more successful person, and then refused to follow Shestakov. The latter nevertheless persuaded the others and coolly surrendered them. What for? Where does this desire to curry favor and expose those who are even worse off? V. Shalamov answers this question unambiguously: the camp corrupts and kills everything human in the soul.

Analysis of the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev"

If most of the heroes of "Kolyma Tales" live indifferently for no reason, then in the story "The Last Battle of Major Pugachev" the situation is different. After the end of the Great Patriotic War former soldiers poured into the camps, whose only fault was that they were captured. People who fought against the Nazis cannot simply live indifferently, they are ready to fight for their honor and dignity. Twelve newly arrived prisoners, led by Major Pugachev, organized a conspiracy to escape, which is being prepared all winter. And so, when spring came, the conspirators burst into the premises of the guard detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, took possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniform and stock up on provisions. Leaving the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, drop off the driver and continue on their way in the car until the gas runs out. After that, they go to the taiga. Despite the willpower and determination of the heroes, the camp car overtakes them and shoots them. Only Pugachev was able to leave. But he understands that soon they will find him. Does he dutifully wait for punishment? No, even in this situation he shows fortitude, he himself interrupts his difficult life path: “Major Pugachev remembered them all - one after another - and smiled at everyone. Then he put the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth and fired for the last time in his life. The theme of a strong man in the suffocating circumstances of the camp is revealed tragically: he is either crushed by the system, or he fights and dies.

"Kolyma Tales" does not try to pity the reader, but how much suffering, pain and longing are in them! Everyone should read this collection in order to appreciate their life. After all, despite all the usual problems, modern man there is relative freedom and choice, he can show other feelings and emotions besides hunger, apathy and the desire to die. "Kolyma stories" not only scare, but also make you look at life differently. For example, stop complaining about fate and feeling sorry for yourself, because we are unspeakably more fortunate than our ancestors, brave, but ground in the millstones of the system.

Interesting? Save it on your wall! Mikhail Yurievich Mikheev allowed me to blog a chapter from his forthcoming book "Andrey Platonov ... and others. Languages ​​of Russian literature of the XX century.". I am very grateful to him.

On the title parable of Shalamov, or a possible epigraph to the "Kolyma Tales"

I About the miniature "In the Snow"

In my opinion, Franciszek Apanovich very aptly called the miniature-sketch “In the Snow” (1956), which opens the Kolyma Tales, “a symbolic introduction to Kolyma prose in general”, believing that it plays the role of a kind of metatext in relation to the whole whole. . I completely agree with this interpretation. Attention is drawn to the mysterious-sounding ending of this very first text in Shalamovsky five-books. "On the Snow" should be recognized as a kind of epigraph to all cycles of "Kolyma Tales"2. The very last sentence in this first sketch story is:
And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses. ## (“In the snow”)3
How so? In what sense? - after all, if under writer Shalamov understands himself, but to readers relates us to you, then how we involved in the text itself? Does he really think that we will also go to Kolyma, whether on tractors or on horses? Or by "readers" do you mean servants, guards, exiles, civilian employees, camp authorities, etc.? It seems that this phrase of the ending is sharply discordant with the lyrical etude as a whole and with the phrases preceding it, explaining the specific “technology” of trampling the road along the difficult-to-pass Kolyma virgin snow (but not at all - the relationship between readers and writers). Here are the phrases preceding it, from the beginning:
# The first one is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another one from the same head five comes forward. Of those following the trail, everyone, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint4.
Those. the share of those who ride, but do not go, gets an “easy” life, and those who trample, pave the road, have the main work. At the beginning, in this place of the handwritten text, the first phrase of the paragraph gave the reader a more intelligible hint - how to understand the ending following it, since the paragraph began with a strikethrough:
# This is how literature goes. First one, then the other, comes forward, paves the way, and of those following the trail, even everyone, even the weakest, the smallest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not on someone else's footprint.
However, at the very end - without any editing, as if already prepared in advance - there was the final phrase, in which the meaning of the allegory and, as it were, the essence of the whole, the mysterious Shalamovsky symbol is concentrated:
And not writers, but readers ride tractors and horses.5 ##
However, about those who rides tractors and horses, before that, in the text "In the Snow", and in subsequent stories - neither in the second, nor in the third, nor in the fourth ("On the show" 1956; "Night" 6 1954, "Carpenters" 1954) - actually not says 7. Is there a semantic gap that the reader does not know how to fill, and the writer, apparently, achieved this? Thus, as it were, the first Shalamov parable is revealed - not directly, but indirectly expressed, implied meaning.
I am grateful for the help in its interpretation - to Franciszek Apanovich. He had previously written about the story as a whole:
There is an impression that there is no narrator here, there is only this strange world, which grows on its own from the mean words of the story. But even such a mimetic style of perception is refuted by the last sentence of the essay, which is completely incomprehensible from this point of view.<…>if we understand [it] literally, one would have to come to the absurd conclusion that in the camps in Kolyma only writers trample down the roads. The absurdity of such a conclusion forces us to reinterpret this sentence and understand it as a kind of metatextual statement, belonging not to the narrator, but to some other subject, and perceived as the voice of the author himself8.
It seems to me that Shalamov's text gives a deliberate failure here. The reader loses the thread of the story and contact with the narrator, not understanding where one of them is. The meaning of the mysterious final phrase can also be interpreted as a kind of reproach: the prisoners are making their way through virgin snow, - intentionally without going one after another in the wake, do not trample general trail and generally act not this way, how reader who is accustomed to using ready-made tools established by someone before him (guided, for example, by what books are fashionable now, or what “techniques” are used by writers), but - they act exactly like real writers: try to put a leg separately, walking each your way paving the way for those who follow them. And only rare of them - ie. the same five chosen pioneers - are brought for some short time, until they are exhausted, to break through this necessary road - for those who follow, on sledges and on tractors. Writers, from the point of view of Shalamov, must - directly obliged, if, of course, they are real writers, to move along the virgin lands ("their own track", as Vysotsky later sings about this). That is, here they are, unlike us mere mortals, they do not ride tractors and horses. Shalamov also invites the reader to take the place of those who pave the way. The mysterious phrase turns into a rich symbol of the entire Kolyma epic. After all, as we know, Shalamov's detail is a powerful artistic detail that has become a symbol, an image (“Notebooks”, between April and May 1960).
Dmitry Nich noticed: in his opinion, the same text as an “epigraph” also echoes the first text in the cycle “The Resurrection of the Larch” - a much later sketch of “The Path” (1967)9. Let us recall what is happening there and what is, as it were, behind the scenes of what is happening: the narrator finds “his” path (here the narration is personified, in contrast to “In the Snow”, where it is impersonal10) - a path along which he walks alone, during almost three years, and on which his poems are born. However, as soon as it turns out that this path, which he liked, well-worn, taken as if in ownership, was also opened by someone else (he notices someone else's trace on it), it loses its miraculous property:
In the taiga I had a wonderful trail. I myself laid it in the summer, when I stored firewood for the winter. (...) The trail got darker every day and eventually became an ordinary dark gray mountain path. No one but me walked on it. (…) # I walked this own path for almost three years. She wrote poetry well. It used to happen that you would return from a trip, get ready for the path and, without fail, go out on this path for some stanza. (...) And on the third summer a man walked along my path. I was not at home at that time, I do not know if it was some wandering geologist, or a mountain postman on foot, or a hunter - a man left traces of heavy boots. Since then, no poetry has been written on this path.
So, unlike the epigraph to the first cycle (“On the Snow”), here, in “The Path”, the emphasis shifts: firstly, the action itself is not collective, but is emphasized individually, even individualistically. That is, the effect of trampling the road itself by others, comrades, in the first case, only intensified, strengthened, and here, in the second, in a text written more than a dozen years later, it disappears due to the fact that someone entered the path another. While in "On the Snow" the very motive "to step only on virgin soil, and not trail to trail" was overlapped by the effect of "collective benefit" - all the torments of the pioneers were needed only so that further, after them, they went to horse and tractor readers. (The author did not go into details, but, is this ride really necessary?) Now, it seems that no reader and altruistic benefit is no longer visible or provided. Here you can catch a certain psychological shift. Or even - the intentional departure of the author from the reader.

II Recognition - in a school essay

Oddly enough, Shalamov's own views on what "new prose" should be like and what, in fact, should be aimed at contemporary writer, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks and not in treatises, but - in an essay, or simply a "school essay" written in 1956 - per Irina Emelyanova, daughter of Olga Ivinskaya (Shalamov had known the latter since the 1930s), when this same Irina entered the Literary Institute. As a result, the text itself, compiled by Shalamov intentionally somewhat school-like, firstly, received from the examiner, N.B. Tomashevsky, the son of a well-known Pushkinist, "superpositive review" (ibid., p. 130-1)11, and secondly, by a happy coincidence - a lot can now be clarified to us from the views on literature of Shalamov himself, who had already fully matured by the age of 50. m years for his prose, but at that time, as it seems, he did not yet "cloud" his aesthetic principles too much, which he obviously did later. Here is how, using the example of Hemingway's stories "Something is over" (1925), he illustrates the method of reducing details and raising prose to symbols that captured him:
The heroes of his [story] have names, but no longer have surnames. They no longer have a biography.<…>An episode is snatched from the general dark background of "our time". It's almost just an image. The landscape at the beginning is needed not as a specific background, but as an exclusively emotional accompaniment .... In this story, Hemingway uses his favorite method - the image.<…># Let's take the story of another period of Hemingway - "Where it's clean, it's light"12. # The heroes don't even have names anymore.<…>Not even an episode is taken. No action at all<…>. This is a frame.<…># [This] is one of Hemingway's most striking and wonderful stories. Everything is brought to the symbol.<…># Path from early stories to "Clean, light" - this is the way of liberation from everyday, somewhat naturalistic details.<…>These are the principles of subtext, laconism. "<…>The majesty of the movement of the iceberg is that it rises only one-eighth above the surface of the water. Language devices, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, landscape as a function of Hemingway's style reduces to a minimum. # ... the dialogues of any Hemingway story are the eighth part of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. # Of course, this silence about the most important thing requires the reader to have a special culture, careful reading, inner consonance with the feelings of Hemingway's heroes.<…># Hemingway's landscape is also comparatively neutral. Usually landscape Hemingway gives at the beginning of the story. The principle of dramatic construction - as in a play - before the beginning of the action, the author indicates in the remarks the background, the scenery. If the scenery repeats itself over the course of the story, it is, for the most part, the same as at the beginning. #<…># Take Chekhov's landscape. For example, from "Chamber No. 6". The story also begins with a landscape. But this landscape is already emotionally colored. He is more tendentious than Hemingway.<…># Hemingway has his own stylistic devices invented by him. For example, in the collection of short stories "In Our Time" these are a kind of reminiscences prefixed to the story. These are the famous key phrases in which the emotional pathos of the story is concentrated.<…># It is difficult to say at once what the task of reminiscences is. It depends both on the story and on the content of the reminiscences themselves.
So, laconism, omissions, reduction of space for the landscape and - showing, as it were, only individual "frames" - instead of detailed descriptions, and even the obligatory disposal of comparisons and metaphors, this "literary" that has set the teeth on edge, the expulsion of tendentiousness from the text, the role of phrases, reminiscences - here literally all the principles of Shalamov's prose are listed! It seems that neither later (in the treatise set out in a letter to I.P. Sirotinskaya “On Prose”, nor in letters to Yu.A. Schrader), nor in diaries and notebooks, did he anywhere with such consistency set out his theories new prose.
That, perhaps, still did not succeed Shalamov - but what he constantly strived for - was to restrain too direct, direct expression of his thoughts and feelings, concluding the main thing from the story - in the subtext and avoiding categorical direct statements and assessments. His ideals were, as it were, quite Platonic (or, perhaps, in his mind, Hemingway). Let's compare this assessment of the most "Hemingway", as is usually considered for Platonov, "Third Son":
The third son atoned for the sin of his brothers, who staged a brawl next to the corpse of his mother. But Platonov does not even have a shadow of their condemnation, he generally refrains from any assessments whatsoever, in his arsenal there are only facts and images. This is, in a way, the ideal of Hemingway, who stubbornly strove to erase any assessments from his works: he almost never reported the thoughts of the characters - only their actions, diligently crossed out in the manuscripts all turns that began with the word “how”, his famous saying about one-eighth of the iceberg was largely about ratings and emotions. In the calm, unhurried prose of Platonov, the iceberg of emotions not only does not protrude into any part - one has to dive to a solid depth for it15.
Here we can only add that Shalamov’s own “iceberg” is still in a state of “about to turn over”: in each “cycle” (and many times) he still shows us his underwater part ... Political, and simply worldly, "cheerleader" temperament of this writer has always gone off scale, he could not keep the story within the framework of dispassion.

1 Apanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales // IV International Shalamov Readings. Moscow, June 18-19, 1997:
Abstracts of reports and communications. - M.: Respublika, 1997, pp. 40-52 (with reference to Apanowicz F. Nowa proza ​​Warlama Szalamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej. Gdansk, 1996. S. 101-103) http://www.booksite.ru/varlam /reading_IV_09.htm
2 The author worked on them (including The Resurrection of the Larch and The Glove) for twenty years - from 1954 to 1973. One can consider them five or even six books, depending on whether the “Essays on the Underworld”, which are somewhat aloof, are included in the CR.
3 The sign # denotes the beginning (or end) of a new paragraph in a quotation; sign ## - the end (or the beginning) of the whole text - М.М.
4 As if a refrain is given here modality duty. It is addressed by the author to himself, but, therefore, to the reader. Then it will be repeated in many other stories, as, for example, in the final of the next one ("To the show"): Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing firewood.
5 Manuscript "In the Snow" (code in RGALI 2596-2-2 - available at http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/2/1.html). The main text, editing and title in the manuscript - in pencil. And above the name, apparently, the originally intended name of the entire cycle - Northern drawings?
6 As can be seen from the manuscript (http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/5/1.html), the original title of this short story, then crossed out, was "Linen" - here the word is in quotation marks or is it signs on both sides new paragraph "Z" ? - That is, [“Underwear” at Night] or: [zUnderwear at Night]. Here is the name of the story “Kant” (1956) - in quotes in the manuscript, they are left in the American edition of R. Gul (“New Journal” No. 85 1966) and in the French edition of M. Geller (1982), but for some reason they not in the Sirotinskaya edition. - That is, it is not clear: the quotes were removed by the author himself, in some later editions - or is this an oversight (arbitrariness?) Of the publisher. According to the manuscript, quotation marks are also found in many other places where the reader comes across camp-specific terms (for example, in the title of the story "On the Show").
7 For the first time, the tractor will be mentioned again only at the end of “Single Measurement” (1955), i.e. three stories from the beginning. The very first hint about riding horses in the same cycle is in the story "The Snake Charmer", i.e. Already through 16 stories from this. Well, about horses in sledges - in "Shock Therapy" (1956), after 27 stories, already towards the end of the entire cycle.
8 Franciszek Apanowicz, "Nowa proza" Warłama Szałamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej, Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1986, s. 101-193 (author's own translation). Here, in personal correspondence, Franciszek Apanovich adds: “Shalamov was convinced that he was paving a new path in literature, on which no human foot had yet set foot. He not only saw himself as a pioneer, but believed that there were few such writers who break new roads.<…>Well, symbolically, the road is trampled by writers (I would even say - artists in general), and not by readers, about whom we learn nothing, except that they ride tractors and horses.
9 This is a kind of prose poem, Nitsch notes: “A path only serves as a path to poetry until another person has walked along it. That is, a poet or writer cannot follow in the footsteps of others” (in email correspondence).
10 Like topch ut snowy road? (…) Roads are always paving ut in quiet days so that the winds do not sweep away human labors. The man himself planned no yourself landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree ... (my underlining - M.M.).
11 Irina Emelyanova. Unknown pages of Varlam Shalamov or the History of one "acquisition" // Facets No. 241-242, January-June 2012. Tarusa pages. Volume 1, Moscow-Paris-Munich-San Francisco, p.131-2) - also on the site http://shalamov.ru/memory/178/
12 [The story was published in 1926.]
13 [Shalamov quotes Hemingway himself, without explicit reference to

The main theme, the main plot of Shalamov's biography, of all the books of his Kolyma Tales, is the search for an answer to the question: can a person survive in extreme conditions and remain a person? What is the price and what is the meaning of life if you have already been “on the other side”? By revealing his understanding of this problem, Varlam Shalamov helps the reader to more accurately understand the author's concept, actively applying the principle of contrast.

The ability to 'be combined in a single material by contradiction, mutual reflection different sizes, destinies, characters, and at the same time represent a certain whole” - one of the stable properties of artistic thought. Lomonosov called it 'the conjugation of distant ideas', P. Palievsky - 'thinking with the help of living contradiction'.

Contradictions are rooted within the material and are extracted from it. But from all their complexity, from the threads cunningly intertwined by life itself, the writer singles out a certain dominant that drives the emotional nerve, and it is this that he makes the content of a work of art based on this material.

Both paradox and contrast, so abundantly used by Shalamov, contribute to the most active emotional perception of a work of art. And in general, “the imagery, freshness, and novelty of his works largely depend on how strong the artist’s ability to combine the heterogeneous, incompatible is.” .

Shalamov makes the reader shudder when he remembers Lieutenant of the Tank Troops Svechnikov ('Domino'), who at the mine 'was convicted of eating the meat of human corpses from the morgue'. But the effect is enhanced by the author due to a purely external contrast: this cannibal is a “delicate rosy-cheeked young man”, calmly explaining his addiction to “not fat, of course”, human flesh!

Or the meeting of the narrator with the Comintern leader Schneider, the most educated person, an expert on Goethe ('Typhoid Quarantine'). In the camp he is in a retinue of blatars, in a crowd of beggars. Schneider is happy that he is entrusted with scratching the heels of the leader of the thieves, Senechka.

Understanding moral degradation, the immorality of Svechnikov and Schneider, the victims of the Gulag, is achieved not by wordy reasoning, but by using the artistic technique of contrast. Thus, in the structure of a work of art, contrast performs both communicative, content, and artistic functions. It makes you see and feel the world around you sharply, in a new way.

Shalamov attached great value compositions of his books, carefully arranged the stories in a certain sequence. Therefore, the appearance of two works side by side, contrasting in their artistic and emotional essence, is not an accident.

The plot basis of the story “Shock Therapy” is paradoxical: a doctor, whose vocation and duty is to help those in need, directs all his strength and knowledge to expose the convict-simulant, experiencing “horror of the world from where he came to the hospital and where he I was afraid to return." The story is filled detailed description barbaric, sadistic procedures carried out by doctors in order not to give the exhausted, emaciated “goal” “free”. Next in the book is the story ''Stlanik''. This lyrical short story gives the reader the opportunity to take a break, move away from the horrors of the previous story. Nature, unlike people, is humane, generous and kind.

Shalamov's comparison of the world of nature and the world of people is always not in favor of man. In the story ''Tamara the Bitch'', the chief, the head of the district, and the dog are contrasted. The chief put people subordinate to him in such conditions that they were forced to report on each other. And next to it was a dog, whose 'moral firmness especially touched the inhabitants of the village, who had seen the sights and been in all bindings'.

In the story ''Bears'' we encounter a similar situation. In the conditions of the Gulag, each convict only cares about himself. The bear met by the prisoners 'obviously took the danger upon himself,ort, a male, sacrificed his life to save his mate, he diverted death from her, he covered her escape.

The camp world is essentially antagonistic. Hence Shalamov's use of contrast at the level of a system of images.

The hero of the story ''Aortic Aneurysm'', doctor Zaitsev, a professional and humanist, is opposed to the immoral head of the hospital; in the story ''The Descendant of the Decembrist'', the characters are constantly contrasting in essence: the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, ''a knight, a clever man, a man of immense knowledge, whose word did not disagree with the deed', and his direct descendant, immoral and selfish Sergey Mi -Hailovich Lunin, doctor of the camp hospital. The difference between the heroes of the story 'Ryabokon' is not only internal, essential, but also external: 'The huge body of the Latvian looked like a drowned man - blue-white, swollen neck, swollen from hunger ... Ryabokon was not like a drowned man. Huge, bony, with withered veins.” People of different life orientations collided at the end of their lives in a common hospital space.

"Sherry Brandy", a story about the last days of Osip Mandelstam's life, is full of contrasts. The poet dies, but life enters him again, giving birth to thoughts. He was dead, and he became alive again. He thinks about creative immortality, having already stepped over, in essence, the line of life.

A dialectically contradictory chain is built: life - death - resurrection - immortality - life. The poet remembers, composes poetry, philosophizes - and immediately cries that he did not get the bread crust. The one who just quoted Tyutchev “bite bread with scurvy teeth, his gums bled, his teeth were loose, but he did not feel pain. With all his strength, he pressed it to his mouth, stuffed bread into his mouth, sucked it, tore it, gnawed it ... ”Such bifurcation, internal dissimilarity, inconsistency are characteristic of many of Shalamov’s heroes who found themselves in the hellish conditions of the camp. Zeka often recalls himself with surprise - another, former, free.

It is terrifying to read the lines about Glebov, the camp horse-racer, who became famous in the barracks for "forgetting his wife's name a month ago." In his “free” life, Glebov was ... a professor of philosophy (the story “The Gravestone”).

In the story “The First Tooth” we learn the story of the sectarian Pyotr Zayets, a young, black-haired, black-browed giant. Met after some time by the narrator, "a lame, gray-haired old man, coughing up blood" - this is he.

Such contrasts within the image, at the level of the hero, are not only an artistic device. This is also an expression of Shalamov's conviction that a normal person is not able to resist the hell of GU-LAG. The camp can only trample and destroy. In this, as is well known, V. Shalamov disagreed with Solzhenitsyn, who was convinced that it was possible to remain human even in the camp.

In Shalamov's prose, the absurdity of the Gulag world often manifests itself in the discrepancy between the real situation of a person and his official status. For example, in the story ''Typhoid Quarantine'' there is an episode when one of the characters achieves an honorable and very profitable job... as a barracks sewer.

The plot of the story ''Aunt Fields'' is based on a similar contrasting inconsistency. The heroine is a prisoner, taken as a servant by the authorities. She was a slave in the house and at the same time ''an unspoken arbitrator in the quarrels of husband and wife'', ''a person who knows the shadow sides of the house''. She feels good in slavery, she is grateful to fate for the gift. Aunt Polya, who fell ill, is placed in a separate ward, from which 'ten semi-dead bodies were previously dragged out into a cold corridor in order to make room for the orderly chief'. The military, their wives came to Aunt Field at the hospital with a request to put in a good word for them. forever. And after her death, the 'all-powerful' Aunt Polya deserved only a wooden tag with a number on her left shin, because she is just a 'convict', a slave. Instead of one orderly, another will come, the same nameless, having behind her soul only the number of a personal file. The human personality in the conditions of the camp nightmare is worth nothing.

It has already been noted that the use of contrast activates the reader's perception.

Shalamov, as a rule, is stingy with detailed, detailed descriptions. When they are used, they are for the most part an extended opposition.

The description in the story “My Trial” is extremely revealing in this regard: “There are few spectacles as expressive as the red-faced from alcohol, beefy, overweight, fat-heavy figures of the camp authorities in shiny, like the sun, brand new , smelly sheepskin coats, in fur-painted Yakut malakhais and mittens-“leggings” with a bright pattern - and figures of “goal”, dangling “wicks” with “smoking” tufts of cotton wool worn padded jackets, “goal” with the same dirty, bony faces and the hungry gleam of sunken eyes.”

Hyperbolization, pedaling of negatively perceived details in the guise of the "camp authorities" are especially noticeable in comparison with the dark, dirty mass of "goal".

A contrast of this kind is also found in the description of the bright, colorful, sunny Vladivostok and the rainy, gray-dull landscape of Nagaevo Bay (“Hell's Pier”). Here, the contrasting landscape expresses the differences in the inner state of the hero - hope in Vladivostok and the expectation of death in Nagaevo Bay.

An interesting example of a contrasting description is in the story ''Marcel Proust''. A small episode: the imprisoned Dutch communist Fritz David was sent velvet trousers and a silk scarf in a parcel from home. The emaciated Fritz David died of starvation in this chic, but useless in the camp, clothes, which “could not even be exchanged for bread at the mine.” In terms of the strength of its emotional impact, this contrasting detail can be compared with the horrors in the stories of F. Kafka or E. Poe. The difference is that Shalamov did not invent anything, did not construct an absurd world, but only remembered what he had witnessed.

Characterizing different ways the use of the artistic principle of contrast in Shalamov's stories, it is appropriate to consider its implementation at the word level.

Verbal contrasts can be divided into two groups. The first includes words whose very meaning is contrasted, opposed and out of context, and the second includes words whose combinations create a contrast, a paradox already in a specific context.

First, examples from the first group. ''They immediately take the prisoners in clean, orderly batches up to the taiga, and in a dirty heap of garbage - from above, back from the taiga'' (''Conspiracy of Lawyers'). The double opposition (''clean' - ''dirty', ''up'' - ''from above'), aggravated by the diminutive suffix, on the one hand, and the reduced phrase ''garbage heap'', on the other hand, creates the impression a picture of two oncoming human streams seen in reality.

"I rushed, that is, trudged into the workshop" ('Handwriting'). The apparently contradictory lexical meanings here equal each other, telling the reader about the extreme degree of exhaustion and weakness of the hero much more vividly than any lengthy description. In general, Shalamov, while recreating the absurd world of the Gulag, often combines rather than contrasts words and expressions that are antinomic in their meaning. In several works (in particular, in the stories ''Brave Eyes' and 'Resurrection of the Larch')decay, moldandspring, lifeanddeath:”...mold also seemed like spring, green, seemed to be alive, and dead trunks exuded the smell of life. green mold ... seemed to be a symbol of spring. But in fact it is the color of decrepitude and decay. But Kolyma asked us questions and more difficult, and the similarity of life and death did not bother us”.

Another example of contrasting similarity: ''Graphite is eternity. The highest hardness, turned into the highest softness” (’’Graphite’).

The second group of verbal contrasts are oxymorons, the use of which gives rise to a new semantic quality. The 'upside down' world of the camp makes possible such expressions as 'a fairy tale, the joy of solitude', 'a dark cozy punishment cell', etc.

The color palette of Shalamov's stories is not very intense. The artist sparingly paints the world of his works. It would be excessive to say that the writer always consciously chooses this or that paint. He uses color and unintentionally, intuitively. And, as a rule, the paint has a natural, natural function. For example: “the mountains turned red from lingonberries, blackened from dark blue blueberries, ... large yellow watery mountain ash poured ...” (Kant). But in a number of cases, the color in Shalamov's stories carries a meaningful and ideological load, especially when a contrasting color scheme is used. This is what happens in the story 'Children's Pictures'. Raking a garbage heap, the narrator-prisoner found in it a notebook with children's drawings. The grass on them is green, the sky is blue-blue, the sun is scarlet. The colors are clean, bright, without halftones. Typical palette children's drawing But: 'People and houses ... were surrounded by yellow even fences entwined with black lines of barbed wire.'

Childhood impressions of a little Kolyma dweller rest on yellow fences and black barbed wire. Shalamov, as always, does not teach the reader, does not indulge in arguments about this. The clash of colors helps the artist to enhance the emotional impact of this episode, to convey the author's idea of ​​the tragedy not only of prisoners, but also of Kolyma children who grew up early.

The artistic form of Shalamov's works is also interesting in other manifestations of the paradoxical. I noticed a contradiction, which is based on a discrepancy between the manner, pathos, “tonality” of the narration and the essence of what is being described. This artistic technique is adequate to that Shalamov's camp world, in which all values ​​are literally turned upside down.

There are many examples of 'mixing styles' in the stories. Characteristic for the artist is a technique in which pathetically sublimely speaks of ordinary events and facts. For example, about eating. For a convict, this is by no means an ordinary event of the day. This is a ritual action that gives a 'passionate, self-forgetful feeling' (''At night').

The description of the breakfast at which the herring is distributed is striking. artistic time here it is stretched to the limit, as close as possible to the real. The writer noted all the details, the nuances of this exciting event: “While the distributor was approaching, everyone had already calculated which piece would be extended by this indifferent hand. Everyone has already managed to get upset, rejoice, prepare for a miracle, reach the edge of despair, if he made a mistake in his hasty calculations ”(“ Bread ”). And all this gamut of feelings is caused by the expectation of a herring ration!

Grandiose and majestic is the jar of condensed milk seen by the narrator in a dream, compared by him with the night sky. ''Milk seeped through and flowed in a wide stream Milky Way. And I easily reached the sky with my hands and ate thick, sweet, stellar milk ”(“ Condensed milk ”). Not only comparison, but also inversion (“and I easily got it”) help here to create solemn pathos.

A similar example is in the story 'How It Began', where the guess that 'shoe lubricant is fat, oil, nourishment' is compared to Archimedean 'eureka'.

The description of berries touched by the first frost (''Berries'') is sublime and intoxicating.

Awe and admiration in the camp is caused not only by food, but also by fire and warmth. In the description in the story ''The Carpenters'' there are truly Homeric notes, the pathos of the sacred rite: ''Those who came knelt before the open door of the stove, before the god of fire, one of the first gods of mankind... They stretched out their hands to the warmth...”

The tendency to exalt the ordinary, even the low, is also manifested in those stories of Shalamov, where we are talking about deliberate self-mutilation in the camp. For many prisoners, this was the only, last chance to survive. It's not easy to make yourself crippled. It took a long time to prepare. ''The stone should have collapsed and crushed my leg. And I am forever disabled! This passionate dream was subject to calculation ... The day, hour and minute were appointed and came ”(“ Rain ”).

The beginning of the story 'A Piece of Meat' is saturated with sublime vocabulary; Richard III, Macbeth, Claudius are mentioned here. The titanic passions of Shakespeare's heroes are equated with the feelings of the convict Golubev. He sacrificed his appendix to escape the hard labor camp in order to survive. “Yes, Golubev made this bloody sacrifice. A piece of meat is cut from his body and thrown at the feet of the almighty god of the camps. To appease God... Life repeats Shakespearean stories more often than we think.”

In the stories of the writer, the elevated perception of a person is often contrasted with his true essence, low, as a rule, status. A fleeting meeting with “some former or real prostitute” allows the narrator to talk about “her wisdom, her great heart”, to compare her words with Goethe’s lines about mountain peaks (“Rain”). The distributor of herring heads and tails is perceived by the prisoners as an almighty giant (''Bread'); the doctor on duty at the camp hospital is likened to an 'angel in a white coat' ('Glove'). In the same way, Shalamov shows the reader the camp world of Kolyma surrounding the heroes. The description of this world is often elevated, pathetic, which contradicts the essential picture of reality. “In this white silence, I didn’t hear the sound of the wind, I heard a musical phrase from the sky and a clear, melodious, sonorous human voice ...” (’’Chasing steam locomotive smoke’).

In the story ''The Best Praise'' we find a description of the sounds in the prison: ''This special ringing, and even the roar of the door lock, locked with two turns, ... and the clicking of a key on a copper belt buckle ... these are the three elements of the symphony' 'concrete' prison music, which is remembered for a lifetime”.

Unpleasant metal sounds of the prison are compared to juicy sound symphony orchestra. I note that the above examples of the “lofty” tone of the narrative are taken from those works whose hero either has not yet been in a terrible camp (prison and loneliness are positive for Shalamov), or is no longer in it (the narrator became a paramedic). There is practically no place for pathos in works about camp life. The exception is, perhaps, the story ''Bogdanov''. The action in it takes place in 1938, the most terrible for both Shalamov and millions of other prisoners. It so happened that the authorized NKVD Bogdanov tore to shreds the letters of his wife, from whom the narrator had no information for two terrible Kolyma years. In order to convey his strongest shock, Shalamov, recalling this episode, resorts to pathos that is, in general, unusual for him. An ordinary case grows into a true human tragedy. "Here are your letters, you fascist bastard!" “Bogdanov tore to shreds and threw into the burning oven letters from my wife, letters that I had been waiting for more than two years, waiting in blood, in executions, in beatings in the gold mines of Kolyma.”

In his Kolyma epic, Shalamov also uses the opposite technique. It consists in an everyday, even reduced tone of narration about facts and phenomena that are exceptional, tragic in their consequences. These descriptions are marked by an epic calmness. “This calmness, slowness, lethargy is not only a technique that allows us to take a closer look at this transcendent world ... The writer does not allow us to turn away, not to see” .

It seems that the epicly calm narrative also reflects the habit of prisoners to death, to the cruelty of camp life. In addition to what E. Shklovsky called the “routine agony” }