Varlam Shalamov > Quotes

“Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friend.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“There is a much that a man should not see, should not know, and if he should see it, it is better for him to die.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy

“A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.”
― Varlam Shalamov

“Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“We realized that life, even the worst of life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrow, successes and failure more than the successes.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“I remember the old northern legend of how God created the taiga while he was still a child. There were few colors, but they were childishly fresh and vivid, and their subjects were simple. Later, when God grew up and became an adult, he learned to cut out complicated patters from his pages and created many bright birds. God grew bored with his former child's world and he threw snow on his forest creation and went south forever.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Cold, hunger, and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible, and Dugaev – despite his youth – understood the falseness of the belief that friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy. For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man – only mistrust, rage, and lies. Dugaev remembered well the northern proverb that listed the three commandments of prison life: ‘Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“If bones could freeze, then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over. And the soul shuddered and froze- perhaps to remain frozen forever.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“We realized that life, even the worst life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there was no need to fear the failures more than the successes.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself — frequently — and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Trees in the north die lying down – like people.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Nothing could be avoided, and nothing could be foreseen. What was the point of unnecessary fear?”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“We learned one other amazing thing: in the eyes of the state and its representatives a physically strong person was better – yes, better – more moral, more valuable than a weak person who couldn’t shovel twenty cubic meters of dirt out of a trench in a day. The former was more moral than the latter. He fulfilled his ‘quota’, that is, carried out his chief duty to the state and society and was therefore respected by all. His advice was asked and his desires were taken into consideration, he was invited to meetings whose topics were far removed from shovelling heavy slippery dirt from wet and slimy ditches.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“An intellectual, once imprisoned, is crushed by the camp. Everything that used to be dear to him is trampled into the dust, and he sheds his civilization and culture in the shortest imaginable time, a matter of weeks.
In any discussion the main argument is a fist or a stick. The means of compulsion is a rifle butt or a punch in the mouth.
An intellectual turns into a coward, and his own brain suggests a justification for his actions. He can persuade himself of anything, he can take any side in an argument. The criminal world calls intellectuals "life teachers," fighters "for the people's rights."
A "slapping," a punch, is enough to turn an intellectual into the obedient servant of some thieving Senia or Kostia.
Physical influence becomes moral influence.
The intellectual becomes a permanently scared creature. His spirit is broken. Even when he gets back to life in freedom, he will still have this intimidated and broken spirit.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“We were disciplined and obedient to authority. We realized that truth and lies were twin sisters, and that truth on earth came in thousands of different forms.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“Kolyma is Auschwitz without the ovens.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends. Only real need can determine one’s spiritual and physical strength and set the limits of one’s physical endurance and moral courage.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Not a lot of flesh was left on my bones. This flesh sufficed only for malice, the last human feeling to go. Not indifference but malice was the last human feeling, it was the closest to the bone.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“That same sense of direction that animals possess perfectly also awakens in man under the right conditions.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“I'm dressed appropriate for the season mama, I'm dressed appropriately for the season.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“For many months there day and night, at the morning and the evening checks, innumerable execution orders were read out. In a temperature of fifty below zero [Fahrenheit] the musicians from among the non-political offenders played a flourish before and after each order was read. The smoking gasoline torches ripped apart the darkness…. The thin sheet on which the order was written was covered with hoarfrost, and some chief or other who was reading the order would brush the snowflakes from it with his sleeve so as to decipher and shout out the name of the next man on the list of those shot.”
― Varlam Shalamov, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“A horse can't endure even a month of the local winter life in a cold stall if it's worked hard hours in subzero weather. . . . But man lives on. Perhaps he lives by virtue of his hopes? But he doesn't have any hope . . . . . He is saved by a drive for self-preservation, a tenacious clinging to life, a physical tenacity to which his entire consciousness is subordinated. He lives on the same things as a bird or a dog, but he clings more strongly to life than they do. He has a greater endurance than that of any animal.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Real friendship needed to have firm foundations laid before the conditions of everyday life had reached the extreme point beyond which human beings have nothing human about them except mistrust, anger, and lies.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“Every minute of camp life is poisoned.
There is a lot in the camps that a man must not know or see, and if he does see it, he is better off dead.
Prisoners in the camps learn to hate labor. That is all they can learn there.
They are taught flattery, lying, vileness, petty and serious, and they become egotists.
When they are released, they see that not only have they failed to grow while in the camps but that their interests have narrowed and become wretched and coarse.
Moral barriers have been pushed aside.
You find out that you can do something vile and still live.
You can lie and still live.
You can make promises and fail to keep them and still live.
You can spend a friend's money on drink.
You can beg for charity and still live! You can live as a beggar.
It turns out that a man who has done something vile doesn't then die.
He learns to live a life of idleness, deceit, and resentment against everyone and everything.
He overvalues his own sufferings and forgets that everyone has their own grief; he just can't understand it and doesn't want to.
Skepticism is all very well, and that is the best you can take away from the camp.
The prisoner learns to hate people.
He is afraid that he is a coward. He is afraid that he will suffer the same fate again. He is afraid of denunciations, of his neighbors, of everything a human being should not be afraid of.
He is morally crushed. His ideas of morality have changed and he hasn't noticed.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“The agnosticism I had upheld throughout my conscious life had not made me a Christian. But in the camps I had not seen better people than the believers. Depravity affected everyone's souls; only the believers held out.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

“All my life I have been unable to make myself call a swine a decent human being. And I believe it's better not to be alive at all if you can't say a word to anyone, or if you can only say the opposite of what you think.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories