Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was a Russian prose writer and poet.

Varlam Shalamov was born on 5 June (18 June), 1907, in Vologda, into the family of a priest, Tikhon Nikolayevich Shalamov. His mother, Nadezhda Alexandrovna Shalamova, was a homemaker. In 1914 he entered gymnasium, but completed his secondary education only after the Revolution. In 1924, after graduating from the Vologda school of the second stage, he came to Moscow and worked for two years as a tanner at a leather factory in Kuntsevo. From 1926 to 1928 he studied at the Faculty of Soviet Law at Moscow State University, after which he was expelled “for concealing his social origin” (he stated that his father was an invalid, without mentioning that he was a priest).

In his autobiographical story about childhood and youth, Fourth Vologda, Shalamov described how his beliefs were formed, how his thirst for justice and determination to fight for it grew stronger. His youthful ideal became the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries—the self-sacrifice of their feat, the heroism of resistance to the full might of the autocratic state. Even in childhood the boy’s artistic gift was evident—he read passionately and mentally “played through” all the books for himself, from Dumas to Kant.

On 19 February 1929 Shalamov was arrested for participating in an underground Trotskyist group and distributing an addition to Lenin’s Testament. In an extrajudicial proceeding he was sentenced as a “socially dangerous element” to three years in labor camps. He served his sentence in the Vishersky camp (Northern Urals). In 1932 Shalamov returned to Moscow and began publishing in Moscow periodicals as a journalist. He also published several stories. One of his first major publications was the story “Three Deaths of Doctor Austino” in the magazine Oktabr (October) (1936).

In January 1937 Shalamov was arrested again for “counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity.” He was