Mikhail Mikheev. How the story "In the Snow" was made

The plot of V. Shalamov's stories is a painful description of the prison and camp life of the prisoners of the Soviet GULAG, their tragic fate similar to one another, in which the case, merciless or merciful, an assistant or a murderer, arbitrariness of chiefs and thieves reigns supreme. 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 focus of the writer.

Funeral oration

The author recalls by the names of his comrades in the camps. Recalling the mournful martyrology, he tells who and how he died, who suffered and how, who hoped for what, who and how behaved in this Auschwitz without stoves, as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, few managed to survive and remain morally unbroken.

Life of engineer Kipreev

Having not betrayed or sold anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for active protection of his existence: a person only then can consider himself a person and withstand, if at any moment he is ready to commit suicide, ready for death. However, later he realizes that he only built a comfortable shelter for himself, because it is not known what you will be like at the decisive moment, whether you simply have enough physical strength, and not just mental strength. Arrested in 1938, the engineer-physicist Kipreev not only withstood the beating during interrogation, but even rushed at the investigator, after which he was put in a punishment cell. However, they still get a signature from him under false testimony, frightened by the arrest of his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continued to prove to himself and to others that he was a man, and not a slave, as all prisoners are. Thanks to his talent (he invented a way to restore burnt out light bulbs, repaired an X-ray machine), he manages to avoid the most difficult jobs, but not always. He miraculously remains alive, but the moral shock remains in him forever.

On presentation

Camp corruption, Shalamov testifies, to a greater or lesser extent, affected everyone and took place in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is played in fluff and asks to play for "presentation", that is, in debt. At some point, infuriated by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary prisoner from among the intelligentsia, who happened to be among the spectators of their game, to hand over a woolen sweater. He refuses, and then one of the thieves "finishes" him, but the sweater still goes to the blatar.

At night

Two prisoners sneak to the grave, where the body of their deceased comrade was buried in the morning, and take off the underwear from the dead man to sell or exchange for bread or tobacco the next day. The initial disgust for the removed clothes is replaced by the pleasant thought that tomorrow they may be able to eat a little more and even smoke.

Single measurement

Camp labor, unambiguously defined by Shalamov as slave labor, for the writer is a form of the same corruption. The gross prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow mortification. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand a sixteen-hour working day. He carries, kailit, pours, again carries and again kailit, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures what Dugaev has done with a tape measure. The named figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev very large, his calves ache, his arms, shoulders, head ache unbearably, he even lost the feeling of hunger. A little later, he is summoned to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirping of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he only regrets that the last day was tormented in vain.

Rain

Sherry Brandy

A poet-prisoner dies, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century. It lies in the dark depths of the lower row of solid two-story bunks. It takes a long time to die. Sometimes a thought comes up - for example, that bread was stolen from him, which he put under his head, and this is so scary that he is ready to swear, fight, search ... But he no longer has the strength for this, and the thought of bread also weakens. When a daily ration is put into his hand, he with all his might presses the bread to his mouth, sucks it, tries to tear and gnaw with scurvy loose teeth. When he dies, he is not written off for two more days, and inventive neighbors manage to receive bread for the dead as a living person when distributing them: they make him, like a puppet doll, raise his hand.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large physique, finding himself in general work, feels that he is gradually giving up. One day he falls, cannot get up right away and refuses to drag the log. First they beat him, then the guards, they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pains in his lower back. And although the pains quickly passed, and the rib healed, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying at any cost to delay the discharge to work. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous one for research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness. Remembering the mine, pinching the cold, a bowl of empty soup, which he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be caught in deception and sent to the penalty mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, did not fail. The professional displaces the human in him. Most of his time he spends precisely on exposing simulators. This flatters his pride: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he retained his qualifications, despite a year of common work. He immediately realizes that Merzlyakov is a simulator, and anticipates the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him a raush-anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov's body can be straightened, and after another week, the procedure of the so-called shock therapy, the effect of which is similar to an attack of violent madness or an epileptic seizure. After it, the prisoner himself asks for discharge.

Typhoid quarantine

Prisoner Andreev, falling ill with typhus, goes into quarantine. Compared to general work in the mines, the position of the patient gives a chance to survive, which the hero almost did not hope for. And then he decides, by hook or by crook, to stay here as long as possible, in transit, and there, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the golden slaughter, where hunger, beatings and death. At the roll call before the next dispatch of those who are considered recovered to work, Andreev does not respond, and thus he manages to hide for quite a long time. The transit line is gradually emptying, and the turn finally reaches Andreev as well. But now it seems to him that he won his battle for life, that now the taiga is full and if there are dispatches, then only for close, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners, who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms, passes the line separating short-range missions from distant ones, he realizes with an inner shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.

Aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the exhausted state of the "goner" prisoners is quite tantamount to a serious illness, although officially it was not considered such) and the hospital - in Shalamov's stories an indispensable attribute of the plot. Inmate Ekaterina Glovatskaya is admitted to the hospital. Beauty, she immediately liked the doctor on duty Zaitsev, and although he knows that she is in close relations with his acquaintance, prisoner Podshivalov, the head of an amateur art circle ("serf theater", as the head of the hospital jokes), nothing prevents him in turn try your luck. He begins, as usual, with a medical examination of Glovatskaya, with listening to the heart, but his male interest is quickly replaced by a purely medical concern. He finds Glovatska's aortic aneurysm, a disease in which any careless movement can cause death. The authorities, who took it as an unwritten rule to separate lovers, had already once sent Glovatskaya to a female mine in the penalty area. And now, after the doctor's report about the prisoner's dangerous illness, the head of the hospital is sure that this is nothing more than the intrigues of the same Podshivalov, who is trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but already when she is loaded into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

Major Pugachev's last battle

Among the heroes of Shalamov's prose, there are those who not only strive to survive at any cost, but are also able to intervene in the course of circumstances, stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941-1945. in the northeastern camps began to arrive prisoners who fought and passed German captivity. These are people of a different temper, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and scouts ... ". But most importantly, they possessed the instinct of freedom, which was awakened in them by the war. They shed their blood, sacrificed their lives, saw death face to face. They were not corrupted by camp slavery and were not yet exhausted to the point of losing their strength and will. Their "fault" consisted in the fact that they were surrounded or in captivity. And it is clear to Major Pugachev, one of such people who have not yet been broken: “they were brought to their death - to replace these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers prisoners who are just as decisive and strong, as they match, who are ready to either die or become free. In their group - pilots, scout, paramedic, tanker. They realized that they were innocently doomed to death and that they had nothing to lose. An escape is being prepared all winter. Pugachev realized that only those who pass common work can survive the winter and after that run. And the participants in the conspiracy, one after the other, are promoted to the subservient: someone becomes a cook, someone a kultorg, who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But now spring comes, and with it the planned day.

At five o'clock in the morning they knocked on the watch. The attendant lets in the camp prisoner cook, who has come, as usual, for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the attendant is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with the other duty officer who returned a little later. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators burst into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the person on duty, seize the weapon. Keeping at gunpoint the suddenly awakened soldiers, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. After leaving the camp, they stop a truck on the highway, disembark the driver and continue their journey by car until the gasoline runs out. After that, they leave for the taiga. At night - the first night at large after long months of bondage - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from a German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, charges of espionage and a sentence of twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet regime all of them who were captured are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could be convinced himself. He lovingly looks at the sleeping comrades who believed in him and stretched out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "better than everyone, more worthy than everyone." And a little later, a battle ensues, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers who surrounded them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is healed in order to then be shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to leave, but he knows, hiding in a bear den, that he will be found anyway. He does not regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

Retold

Substitution, transformation was achieved not only by embedding documents. "Injector" is not only a landscape pad like "Stlanik". In fact, it is not landscape at all, because there is no landscape lyrics, but there is only a conversation between the author and his readers.

"Elderly" is needed not as a landscape information, but as a state of mind necessary for a battle in "Shock Therapy", "Conspiracy of Lawyers", "Typhoid Quarantine".

It -<род>landscape laying.

All the repetitions, all the slips of the tongue, in which the readers reproached me, were not made by me by accident, not out of negligence, not out of haste ...

They say the ad is better remembered if it contains a spelling mistake. But this is not the only reward for negligence.

Authenticity itself, primacy, requires this kind of error.

Stern's "Sentimental Journey" breaks off at a half-phrase and does not cause disapproval from anyone.

Why is it that in the story “How It Began” all the readers add, correct by hand the phrase “We are still working…”, which I have not completed yet?

The use of synonyms, synonyms and synonyms-nouns serves the same double purpose - to emphasize the main thing and create musicality, sound support, intonation.

When a speaker speaks a speech, a new phrase is composed in the brain, while synonyms come out into the language.

The extraordinary importance of keeping the first option. Editing is invalid. It is better to wait for another rise in feeling and write the story again with all the rights of the first option.

Everyone who writes poetry knows that the first option is the most sincere, the most direct, subject to haste to express the most important thing. Subsequent finishing - editing (in different meanings) - is control, violence of thought over feeling, interference of thought. I can guess from any Russian great poet in 12-16 lines of the poem - which stanza was written first. I guessed without mistake what was the main thing for Pushkin and Lermontov.

So for this prose, conventionally called "new", it is extremely important luck the first option.<…>

They will say - all this is not needed for inspiration, for illumination.

God is always on the side of the big battalions. According to Napoleon. These large battalions of poetry are forming and marching, learning to shoot in cover, in the depths.

The artist always works, and the processing of the material is always carried out, constantly. Illumination is the result of this constant work.

Of course, there are secrets in art. These are the secrets of talent. No more and no less.

Editing, "finishing" any of my stories is extremely difficult, because it has special tasks, style.

If you correct it a little, the power of authenticity and primacy is violated. This was the case with the story "The Conspiracy of Lawyers" - the deterioration in quality after editing was immediately noticeable (N.Ya.).

Is it true that the new prose is based on new material and is strong with this material?

Of course, there are no trifles in Kolyma Tales. The author thinks, perhaps delusionally, that the matter is not only in the material, and not even so much in the material ...

Why is the camp theme. The camp theme in its broad interpretation, in its fundamental understanding, is the main, main issue of our days. Isn't the destruction of a person with the help of the state the main issue of our time, our morality, which has entered the psychology of every family? This question is much more important than the theme of war. War, in a sense, here plays the role of psychological camouflage (history says that during a war a tyrant gets closer to the people). They want to hide the "camp theme" behind the statistics of the war, statistics of all kinds.

When they ask me what I am writing, I answer: I am not writing memoirs. There are no recollections in the "Kolyma Tales". I do not write stories either - or rather, I try to write not a story, but something that would not be literature.

Not the prose of the document, but the prose, endured as a document.

How do they trample the road on virgin snow? A man walks ahead, sweating and swearing, barely moving his legs, every minute getting stuck in the loose deep snow. The man goes far, marking his path with uneven black pits. He gets tired, lies down on the snow, lights a cigarette, and the tobacco smoke spreads in a blue cloud over the white shiny snow. The man has already gone further, and the cloud still hangs where he rested - the air is almost motionless. Roads are always laid on quiet days so that the winds do not sweep away human labor. A man himself sets out landmarks for himself in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree - a man leads his body through the snow like a helmsman leads a boat along a river from a cape to a cape.

On the laid narrow and wrong track, five or six people move in a row shoulder to shoulder. They step near the track, but not on the track. Having reached the pre-designated place, they turn back and walk again so as to trample the virgin snow, the place where no man's foot has yet stepped. The road has been broken. People, sledge carts, tractors can go along it. If you follow the path of the first trail to trail, there will be a noticeable, but barely passable narrow path, a stitch, and not a road - holes, along which it is more difficult to wade than on virgin soil. The first is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another 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 into someone else's trail. And tractors and horses are not ridden by writers, but by readers.

<1956>

We played cards at the horse-man Naumov. The guards on duty never looked into the horsemen's barracks, rightly considering their main service in monitoring those convicted under the fifty-eighth article. Horses, as a rule, were not trusted by counter-revolutionaries. True, the chiefs of the practice grumbled on the sly: they were losing the best, most caring workers, but the instructions on this matter were definite and strict. In a word, the horsemen were the safest, and every night thieves gathered there for their card fights.

In the right corner of the hut, multicolored quilts were spread on the lower bunks. A burning "kolyma" - a homemade light bulb on gasoline steam, was screwed to the corner post with a wire. Three or four open copper tubes were soldered into the lid of a tin can - that was the whole device. In order to light this lamp, hot coal was placed on the lid, gasoline was warmed up, steam rose through the pipes, and gasoline gas burned, lit by a match.

There was a dirty down pillow on the blankets, and on either side of it, legs tucked in Buryat style, sat partners - the classic pose of a prison card battle. A brand new deck of cards lay on the pillow. These were not ordinary cards, it was a self-made prison deck, which is made by the craftsmen of these crafts at an extraordinary speed. To make it, you need paper (any book), a piece of bread (to chew it up and rub it through a rag to get starch - to glue the sheets), a stub of a chemical pencil (instead of printing ink) and a knife (for cutting out and stencils of suits, and the cards themselves).

Today's cards have just been cut from a volume by Victor Hugo - the book was forgotten by someone in the office yesterday. The paper was thick, thick - the sheets did not have to be glued, which is done when the paper is thin. In the camp, during all searches, chemical pencils were rigorously taken away. They were also selected when checking the received parcels. This was done not only to suppress the possibility of making documents and stamps (there were many artists and such), but to destroy everything that can compete with the state card monopoly. They made ink from a chemical pencil, and with ink, through the made paper stencil, they applied patterns on the card - ladies, jacks, dozens of all stripes ... The suits did not differ in color - and the player does not need a difference. The jack of spades, for example, corresponded to the image of a spades in two opposite corners of the card. The location and shape of the patterns have been the same for centuries - the ability to make cards with your own hand is included in the program of the "knightly" education of a young blatar.

About the title Shalamovskaya parable, or a possible epigraph to the "Kolyma Tales"

I About the miniature "In the Snow"

In my opinion, Francishek Apanovich very aptly called the miniature sketch “In the Snow” (1956), which opens “Kolyma Tales”, “a symbolic introduction to Kolyma prose in general,” considering that it plays the role of a kind of metatext in relation to the whole. ... I completely agree with this interpretation. Attention is drawn to the mysterious sounding ending of this very first text in Shalamovsky five-books. “In the snow” should be recognized as a kind of epigraph to all the cycles of the “Kolyma stories” 2. The very last phrase in this first sketch story reads like this:
And tractors and horses are not ridden by writers, but by readers. ## ("In the snow") 3
How so? In what sense? - because if under a writer Shalamov understands himself, and to readers relates us to you, how we involved in the text itself? Does he really think that we will also go to the Kolyma, whether on tractors or on horses? Or does “readers” mean - servants, guards, exiles, civilians, camp officials, etc.? It seems that this ending phrase is sharply discordant with the lyrical sketch as a whole and with the phrases preceding it, explaining the specific "technology" of trampling the road on the hard-to-pass Kolyma snowy virgin lands (but not at all - the relationship between readers and writers). Here are the phrases that precede it, from the beginning:
# The first is the hardest of all, and when he is exhausted, another 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 into someone else's trail4.
Those. the lot of those who ride, but do not go, get the "easy" life, and those who trample, trample 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 that follows it, since the paragraph began with the crossed out:
# This is how literature goes. Either one, then the other, comes out ahead paves the way, and of those following the trail, even everyone, even the weakest, the smallest must step on a piece of snowy virgin soil, and not into someone else's trail.
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 tractors and horses are not driven by writers, but by readers. 5 ##
However, actually 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 ("For a presentation" 1956; "Night" 6 1954, "Carpenters" 1954) - actually not says 7. A semantic gap arises, which the reader does not know with what to fill, and the writer, apparently, was trying to achieve this? Thus, as it were, the first Shalamov parable is revealed - not directly, but indirectly expressed, implied meaning.
I am grateful for help in its interpretation - Francishek Apanovich. He had previously written about the whole story as a whole:
One gets the impression that there is no storyteller here, there is only this strange world that grows by itself from the meager words of the story. But even this - mimetic - style of perception is refuted by the last sentence of the essay, which is completely incomprehensible from this point of view.<…>if one understands [him] literally, one would have to come to the ridiculous conclusion that only writers trample the roads in the camps in Kolyma. The absurdity of such a conclusion makes us reinterpret this sentence and understand it as a kind of metatext statement, belonging not to the narrator, but to some other subject, and perceived as the voice of the author himself.
It seems to me that Shalamov's text is deliberately flawed here. The reader loses the thread of the story and contact with the narrator, not knowing where one of them is. The meaning of the mysterious final phrase can be interpreted as a kind of reproach: the prisoners make their way into virgin snow, - intentionally not walking one after another in the trail, do not trample general the path and generally enter not this way, how reader, who is accustomed to using ready-made means, established by someone before him (guided, for example, by what books are in fashion now, or what "techniques" are used by writers), but - they act exactly as real writers: try to put the foot separately, walking each my way, paving the way for those who follow them. And only rare of them - i.e. the very five selected pioneers - it is brought for a short time, until they are exhausted, to punch this necessary path - for those who follow, on sleds and on tractors. Writers, from the point of view of Shalamov, and should - they are directly obliged, if, of course, they are real writers, to move on the virgin soil ("their own track", as Vysotsky would later sing about this). That is, they just, unlike us, mere mortals, do not ride tractors and horses. Shalamov also invites the reader to take the place of those who are building the road. 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 "Resurrection of the Larch" - a much later sketch "The Path" (1967) 9. Let us recall what is happening there and what stands, as it were, behind the scenes of what is happening: the narrator finds "his" path (here the narration is personified, unlike In the Snow, where it is impersonal10) - a path along which he walks alone, during almost three years old, and on which poetry is born to him. However, as soon as it turns out that this path, which he liked, well-trodden, taken, as it were, in the ownership of the path is also opened by someone else (he notices someone else's trace on it), it loses its miraculous properties:
I had a wonderful path in the taiga. I myself laid it in the summer, when I was saving firewood for the winter. (…) The trail was getting dark every day and in the end it became an ordinary dark gray mountain trail. Nobody but me walked on it. (…) # I have walked this own path for almost three years. Poems were written well on it. Sometimes, you come back from a trip, get ready for the trail, and you will certainly go out on this trail to 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, in contrast to the epigraph to the first cycle ("Through the Snow"), here, in the "Path", the emphasis shifts: firstly, the action itself is not collective, but - emphasized individually, even individually. 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 a trace in the trail" was overlapped by the effect of "collective benefit" - all the torments of the pioneers were needed only in order to follow them further. horse and tractor readers. (The author did not go into details, well, is this ride necessary at all?) Now, as if no reader and no altruistic benefit are already visible or envisaged. A certain psychological bias can be detected here. Or even - the author's deliberate departure from the reader.

II Recognition - in school essay

Oddly enough, the views of Shalamov himself on what the "new prose" should be, and what, in fact, the modern writer should strive for, are most clearly presented not in his letters, not in notebooks and not in treatises, but in essays , 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 very Irina entered the Literary Institute. As a result, the text itself, compiled by Shalamov deliberately in a somewhat school-like manner, firstly received from the examiner, N.B. Tomashevsky, the son of a well-known Pushkin scholar, has a "super-positive response" (ibid., P. 130-1) 11, and secondly, by a happy coincidence, a lot can now be clarified for us from the views on literature of Shalamov himself, who was already fully ripe by the age of 50. m years for his prose, but at that time, it seems, had not yet "muddied" his aesthetic principles too much, which he obviously did later. Here is how, using the example of Hemingway's stories "Something's Over" (1925), he illustrates his captivating method of reducing details and constructing prose to symbols:
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". There is almost only an image here. In the beginning, the landscape 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 Hemingway period - "Where it is clear, light" 12. # 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 the most striking and wonderful stories of Hemingway. Everything there is brought to the symbol.<…># The path from early stories to "Clear, light" is a path of liberation from everyday, several naturalistic details.<…>These are the principles of subtext, laconicism. "<…>The greatness of the iceberg's movement is that it rises only one eighth above the surface of the water ”13. Language devices, tropes, metaphors, comparisons, landscape as a function of Hemingway's style are minimized. #… 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 from the reader a special culture, careful reading, inner consonance with the feelings of Hemingway's heroes.<…># Hemingway's landscape is also relatively neutral. Usually the 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 the background, the scenery in the stage directions. If the landscape is repeated once more during the story, it is for the most part the same as in the beginning. #<…># Take Chekhov's landscape. For example, from "Ward 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 invented stylistic devices. For example, in the collection of short stories "In Our Time" these are a kind of reminiscences, pre-sent to the story. These are the famous key phrases in which the emotional pathos of the story is concentrated.<…># It is difficult to tell right away what the task of reminiscences is. It depends both on the story and on the content of the reminiscences themselves14.
So, laconicism, silence, reduction of space for the landscape and - showing, as it were, individual "frames" - instead of detailed descriptions, and even the obligatory disposal of comparisons and metaphors, this "literary" phrases, reminiscences - here literally all the principles of Shalamov's prose are listed! It seems that neither later (in the treatise set forth in a letter to I.P. Sirotinskaya "On Prose", nor in letters to Yu.A. theory new prose.
This is what, perhaps, Shalamov did not succeed in any way - but what he constantly strived for was to restrain the too direct, direct expression of his thoughts and feelings, concluding the main thing from the story - in subtext and avoiding categorical direct statements and assessments. His ideals seemed to be completely Platonic (or, perhaps, in his view, Hemingway's). Let us compare this assessment of the most "Hemingway", as it is usually believed for Platonov, "The Third Son":
The third son atoned for the sin of his brothers, who made a row next to the corpse of his mother. But Platonov does not even have a shadow of their condemnation, he generally refrains from any assessments, in his arsenal there are only facts and images. This is, in a way, the ideal of Hemingway, who stubbornly sought to erase any assessments from his works: he practically never communicated the thoughts of the heroes - only their actions, diligently crossed out all the phrases in the manuscripts that began with the word "how", his famous statement about one eighth part of the iceberg was heavily about evaluations and emotions. In Platonov's calm, unhurried prose, the iceberg of emotions does not just stick out to any part - one has to dive to a considerable depth after 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 demonstrates to us his underwater part ... Political, and simply the everyday, "cheerleader" temperament of this writer always went off scale, he could not keep the narration within the framework of impassivity.

1 Apanovich F. On the semantic functions of intertextual connections in the “Kolyma stories” by Varlam Shalamov // IV International Shalamov readings. Moscow, June 18-19, 1997:
Abstracts of reports and messages. - M .: Respublika, 1997, p. 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 Resurrection of the Larch and The Glove) for twenty years, from 1954 to 1973. They can be considered five or even six books, depending on whether the “Sketches of the Underworld”, which are somewhat aloof, are referred to the CD.
3 Sign # denotes the beginning (or end) of a new paragraph in a quote; sign ## - end (or beginning) of the whole text - M.M.
4 As if by a refrain the modality is given here duties... It is addressed by the author to himself, but therefore also to the reader. Then it will be repeated in many other stories, as, for example, in the finale of the next one (“For the introduction”): Now it was necessary to look for another partner for sawing wood.
5 Manuscript "In the Snow" (code in RGALI 2596-2-2 - on the site 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 you can see from the manuscript (http://shalamov.ru/manuscripts/text/5/1.html), the original name of this short story, then crossed out, was "Linen" - here the word is in quotation marks, or it is on both sides of the signs new paragraph "Z"? - That is, ["Lingerie" at Night] or: [zLingeriez At Night]. Here is the title of the story "Kant" (1956) - in the manuscript in quotation marks, they were left in the American edition of R. Gulya ("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 it an oversight (arbitrariness?) Of the publisher. According to the manuscript, quotation marks are also found in many other places where the reader is confronted with specifically camp terms (for example, in the title of the story "Into the Presentation").
7 For the first time, the tractor will be mentioned for the first time only at the end of "Single measurement" (1955), i.e. three stories from the beginning. The very first hint about horseback riding in the same cycle is in the story "The Snake Charmer", that is, after only 16 stories from this. Well, and about horses in sledge wagons - in "Shock Therapy" (1956), after 27 stories, already closer to the end of the entire cycle.
8 Franciszek Apanowicz, "Nowa proza" Warłama Szałamowa. Problemy wypowiedzi artystycznej, Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1986, s. 101-193 (translated by the author himself). So in his personal correspondence, Francishek Apanovich adds: “Shalamov was convinced that he was paving a new path in literature, on which no man had yet set foot. He not only saw himself as a discoverer, but believed that there were few such writers making new paths.<…>Well, in a symbolic sense, writers (I would even say - artists in general) trample the road here, and not readers, about whom we will not learn anything, except that they ride tractors and horses. "
9 This is a kind of prose poem, says Nitsch: “the path serves as a path to poetry only as long as another person has not walked along it. That is, a poet or writer cannot tread in the footsteps of others ”(in the correspondence by e-mail).
10 Like a treadmill NS road on virgin snow? (...) Roads are always paved hut on quiet days, so that the winds do not sweep away human labor. Man himself outlining no landmarks in the vastness of the snow: a rock, a tall tree ... (my emphasis - MM).
11 Irina Emelyanova. Unknown pages of Varlam Shalamov or the History of one "receipt" // Facets №241-242, January-June 2012. Tarusa pages. Volume 1, Moscow-Paris-Munich-San Francisco, p. 131-2) - also on the website http://shalamov.ru/memory/178/
12 [The story was published in 1926.]
13 [Shalamov quotes Hemingway himself, without explicitly referring to