Reviews

Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

5starliv's review

challenging dark informative sad slow-paced

5.0

Hard to put into words the emotional black hole that this writing conjures up. Felt as if I was being told stories from memories as they were recollected. It exposed a life and death in the camps that I cannot fully comprehend. The bodies will still be in the permafrost despite the deconstruction of the gulag. Gold and death remain buried 

juansnchz's review

dark reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

It's a long book but each story is unique. There are some stories that are more powerful and captivating than others but otherwise it's a good and reflective read.

nikita_barsukov's review against another edition

5.0

One of the bleakest, saddest, most depressing texts. Almost unbearably so.
A cornerstone of prison literature, postulates nothing positive can come out of it, a man can only become worse there. Even more, he underlined that a prisoner doesn’t have any agency, only a chance can get a prisoner through.

klarastan's review

5.0

This is one of my favorite books by a Russian/Soviet author. Shalamov's writing is gorgeous; the stories are awe-inspiring in their description of degradation and deprivation.

writerreader's review

4.75

Probably one of the best short story collections by a single author out there. Most of the stories just sting. 🦂 
It is bleak stuff made up of gulag life and really breaks how the human spirit can be crushed by a machine.

sloatsj's review

5.0

Such an excellent book. Vivid and brutal. The reader becomes the inmate, not gladly, but with great interest (and, unlike the inmates, not inextricably).

Some of the best Gulag/labor camp literature I've ever read. For me it's superior to [b:Survival in Auschwitz|6174|Survival in Auschwitz|Primo Levi|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165555421s/6174.jpg|851110], and richer (if bleak is rich) to [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316638560s/17125.jpg|838042].

tomnana's review against another edition

5.0

The suffering endured in the gulags is boggling. Really any systemized, mass violence eludes reason or imagination. Often, we view these events through a historical context in which numbers of victims, sheer volume of horror, are the point of contact and define the atrocities. This book cannot truly explicate on the magnitude of suffering created in the gulag system. The reality may be that there is no proper reckoning with it. Suffering in Kolyma Stories is personal, the forces which control for ones life are vague and outcomes arbitrary. Perhaps this is the only way you can accurately approach an atrocity. At the very least, if we typically focus on the number of victims, this book ensures that we also know and don't lose sight of the monstrous degree to which an oppressive regime can bear its power with crushing force on one person. Kolyma Stories is a strident illustration of what it means to suffer, and, through absolute deprivation demonstrates what is truly valuable for life.

vision__'s review

challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

4.75

captaincocanutty's review

5.0

Very striking depiction of life in the camp system and what it does to people.

neural_lauren_unreal's review

5.0

"I learned that spite is the last human emotion to survive. A starving man has only enough flesh to feel spite — he is indifferent to everything else."