Kolyma stories at night summary. Varlam Shalamov - single measurement

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

"Kolyma stories"

Summary

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 destinies similar to one another, in which chance, merciless or merciful, helper or murderer, arbitrariness of bosses and thieves dominate. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful death, a slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention.

Gravestone

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

Life of engineer Kipreev

Having never betrayed or sold anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for actively protecting his existence: a person can only consider himself a person and survive if he is ready to commit suicide at any moment, ready to die. However, later he realizes that he only built himself a comfortable shelter, because it is not known what you will be like at a decisive moment, whether you just have enough physical strength, and not just mental. 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 try to get him to sign false testimony, intimidating him with the arrest of his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continued to prove to himself and 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 work, but not always. He miraculously survives, but the moral shock remains in him forever.

For the show

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

At night

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

Single metering

Camp labor, unequivocally defined by Shalamov as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. A goner-prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand the sixteen-hour working day. He drives, turns, pours, again drives and again turns, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures Dugaev's work with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev to be very large, his calves are aching, his arms, shoulders, head are unbearably sore, he even lost the feeling of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he regrets only that the last day was in vain.

Rain

Sherry Brandy

A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He dies for a long time. Sometimes a thought comes - for example, that they stole bread from him, which he put under his head, and it 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 too weakens. When a daily ration is put into his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucks it, tries to tear and gnaw with scurvy loose teeth. When he dies, they don’t write him off for another two days, and ingenious neighbors manage to get bread for the dead man as if it were alive during the distribution: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself at common work, feels that he is gradually losing. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately 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 pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed, and the rib grew together, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness at will. Remembering the mine, aching cold, a bowl of empty soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be convicted of deceit and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, was not a blunder. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing the fakers. This amuses his vanity: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite the year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a simulator, and anticipates the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him roush anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov’s body can be straightened, and a week later, 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 an extract.

Typhoid Quarantine

Prisoner Andreev, ill with typhus, is quarantined. Compared to general work in the mines, the position of the patient gives a chance to survive, which the hero almost no longer hoped 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 gold mines, where there is hunger, beatings and death. At the roll call before the next dispatch to work of those who are considered recovered, Andreev does not respond, and thus he manages to hide for quite a long time. The transit is gradually emptying, and the line finally reaches Andreev as well. But now it seems to him that he has won his battle for life, that now the taiga is full, and if there are shipments, then only for nearby, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms passes the line separating short trips from long ones, he realizes with an internal shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.

aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “goal” prisoners is quite tantamount to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered as such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, 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, the prisoner Podshivalov, the head of the amateur art circle, (“the 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 Głowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest is quickly replaced by a purely medical concern. He finds an aortic aneurysm in Glovatsky, 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 penal female mine. 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 machinations of the same Podshivalov, who is trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but already when loading into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

Major Pugachev's last fight

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, to stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941−1945. prisoners who fought and passed German captivity began to arrive in the northeastern camps. 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 the war awakened in them. 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 “guilt” was that they were surrounded or captured. And it is clear to Major Pugachev, one of those people who have not yet been broken: “they were brought to their deaths - to change these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers prisoners who are just as determined and strong, to match, 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. All winter they are preparing an escape. Pugachev realized that only those who bypassed the general work could survive the winter and then run away. And the participants in the conspiracy, one by one, advance into the service: someone becomes a cook, someone a cultist who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But spring is coming, and with it the day ahead.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The attendant lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who, as usual, has come for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the duty officer is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with another, who returned a little later on duty. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, take possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms 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. At night - the first night at liberty after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from the German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, accusation of espionage and a sentence of twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of the emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet authorities all of them, who were captured, are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He lovingly looks over the sleeping comrades who believe in him and stretch out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "the best, worthy of all." And a little later, a fight ensues, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in a bear's lair, that he will be found anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot is to himself.

Shock therapy

One of the prisoners named Merzlyakov, being at common work, felt that he was getting worse and worse. When he once fell while dragging a log, he refused to get up. For this, he was beaten first by his own people, then by the guards. And he ended up in the camp with a broken rib and back pain. The rib healed and the pains disappeared, but Merzlyakov did not show this, trying to stay longer in the infirmary. Realizing that the doctors cannot cure the prisoner, he is taken to a local hospital for an examination by specialists. For him, there is a chance to be activated for health reasons, because with such diseases he will not be sent back to the machinations, where it was damp, cold, and fed incomprehensible soups, where there was only water, which could easily be drunk without the help of a spoon. Now he concentrated entirely on his behavior so as not to be carried away in a lie and earn himself more and fine mines.

But Merzlyakov was not lucky with the doctor. He was treated by Pyotr Ivanovich, a doctor who specialized in exposing malingerers. And although he himself had a one-year sentence, he was guided by true medical principles. Realizing that Merzlyakov is a malingerer, he first directs the patient to round anesthesia, which allows him to straighten the patient, as it were, and then to shock therapy, after which the patient himself asked to be discharged.

Typhoid Quarantine

After falling ill with typhus, the prisoner Andreev is placed under quarantine. At the mines themselves, in comparison with general work, health plays a big role. Andreev wakes up a hope that has long subsided not to return to the place where dampness, hunger and death reigned. He hopes to stay longer in transit, and there, perhaps, he will be lucky that he will not be returned to the mines. Andreev did not respond to the formation of the prisoners before being sent, since he was considered not yet recovered. He was in transit until it was empty, and the line approached him. It seemed to Andreev that he had conquered death, that the way to the mines in the taiga had already been closed to him, that now he would only be sent on local business trips. But when a truck full of prisoners who were given winter clothes suddenly crosses the dividing line between short and long trips, Andreev realizes that the essence has simply mocked him, and that everything starts anew.

aortic aneurysm

In the hospital, where there were emaciated prisoners-goners, the prisoner Glovatskaya Ekaterina ends up. She was good-looking, which immediately attracted Zaitsev, the doctor on duty at the hospital. He is aware that Katya and his prisoner friend Podshivalov, who was the leader of the amateur art circle, had a relationship. But this did not stop him, and Zaitsev decides to try his own luck.

He began, as befits a doctor, with a medical examination of a sick prisoner. But that male interest in a beautiful woman quickly changes to medical concern when he finds out that Katya suffers from an aortic aneurysm - a disease that, with the slightest wrong movement, can lead to death. The authorities thought that these were the tricks of Podshivalov, so that his beloved would be around longer, and instructed Zaitsev to discharge the patient.

The next day, when the prisoners were loaded into the car, what happened was what the doctor had warned about - Ekaterina was dying.

Compositions

Shalamov - Kolyma Tales

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 destinies similar to each other, in which chance, merciless or merciful, helper or murderer, arbitrariness of bosses and thieves dominate. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful dying, a slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention.

Gravestone

Life of engineer Kipreev

For the show

At night

Single metering

Camp labor, unequivocally defined by Shalamov as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. A goner-prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand the sixteen-hour working day. He drives, turns, pours, again drives and again turns, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures Dugaev's work with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev to be very large, his calves are aching, his arms, shoulders, head are unbearably sore, he even lost his sense of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he regrets only that the last day was in vain.

Rain

Sherry Brandy

A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He dies for a long time. Sometimes a thought comes - for example, that they stole bread from him, which he put under his head, and it is so terrible 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 presses the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucks it, tries to tear and gnaw with scurvy loose teeth. When he dies, they don’t write him off for another two days, and ingenious neighbors manage to get bread for the dead man as if it were alive during the distribution: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself at common work, feels that he is gradually losing. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by the escorts, they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed, and the rib grew together, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness at will. Remembering the mine, aching cold, a bowl of empty soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be convicted of deceit and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, was not a blunder. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing the fakers. This amuses his vanity: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite the year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a simulator and looks forward to the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him roush anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov’s body can be straightened, and a week later, 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 an extract.

Typhoid Quarantine

aortic aneurysm

Major Pugachev's last fight

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, to stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941-1945. prisoners who fought and passed German captivity began to arrive in the northeastern camps. These are people of a different temper, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and reconnaissance...”. But most importantly, they possessed the instinct of freedom, which the war awakened in them. 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 “guilt” was that they were surrounded or captured. And Major Pugachev, one of these people who has not yet been broken, is clear: “they were brought to their deaths - to change these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers prisoners who are just as determined and strong, to match, 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. All winter they are preparing an escape. Pugachev realized that only those who bypassed the general work could survive the winter and then run away. And the participants in the conspiracy, one by one, advance into the service: someone becomes a cook, someone a cultist who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But spring is coming, and with it the day ahead.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The attendant lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who, as usual, has come for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the duty officer is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with another, who returned a little later on duty. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, take possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms 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. At night - the first night at liberty after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from the German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, accusation of espionage and sentence - twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of the emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet authorities all of them, who were captured, are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He lovingly looks over the sleeping comrades who believe in him and stretch out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "the best, worthy of all." And a little later, a fight ensues, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in a bear's lair, that he will be found anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

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 destinies similar to one another, in which chance, merciless or merciful, helper or murderer, arbitrariness of bosses and thieves dominate. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful death, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention.

Gravestone

The author recalls by name his comrades in the camps. Calling to mind a mournful martyrology, he tells who died and how, 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

For the show

Camp corruption, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and took place in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is played down and asks to play for a “representation”, that is, in debt. At some point, irritated by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, 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, and the sweater still goes to the thieves.

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

Single metering

Camp labor, unequivocally defined by Shalamov as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. A goner-prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow mortification. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand the sixteen-hour working day. He drives, turns, pours, again drives and again turns, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures Dugaev's work with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev to be very large, his calves are aching, his hands, shoulders, head are unbearably sore, he even lost the feeling of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he regrets only that the last day was in vain.

Sherry Brandy

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself at common work, feels that he is gradually losing. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately 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 pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed, and the rib grew together, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness at will. Remembering the mine, aching cold, a bowl of empty soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be convicted of deceit and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, did not miss. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing the fakers. This amuses his vanity: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite the year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a simulator, and anticipates the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him roush anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov's body can be straightened, and a week later, 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 to be discharged.

Typhoid Quarantine

aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “goal” prisoners is quite tantamount to a serious illness, although officially it was not considered as such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, 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, the prisoner Podshivalov, the head of the amateur art circle, (“the 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 Głowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest is quickly replaced by a purely medical concern. He finds an aortic aneurysm in Glovatskaya, a disease in which any careless movement can be fatal. The authorities, who took it as an unwritten rule to separate lovers, had already once sent Glovatskaya to a penal female mine. 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 machinations of the same Podshivalov, who is trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but already when loading into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

Major Pugachev's last fight

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, to stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941-1945. prisoners who fought and passed German captivity began to arrive in the northeastern camps. 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 the war awakened in them. 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 “guilt” was that they were surrounded or captured. And it is clear to Major Pugachev, one of those people who have not yet been broken: “they were brought to their deaths - to replace these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers just as determined and strong, to match, prisoners 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. All winter they are preparing an escape. Pugachev realized that only those who bypassed the general work could survive the winter and then run away. And the participants in the conspiracy, one by one, advance into the service: someone becomes a cook, someone a cultist who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But spring is coming, and with it the day ahead.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The attendant lets in the prisoner camp cook, who has come, as usual, for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the duty officer is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with another, who returned a little later on duty. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, take possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Having gone outside the camp, they stop a 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. At night - the first night at liberty after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from the German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, charged with espionage and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of the emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet authorities all of them, who were captured, are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He lovingly looks over the sleeping comrades who believe in him and stretch out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "the best, worthy of all." A little later, a fight breaks out, the last hopeless fight between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in a bear's lair, that he will be found anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot is to himself.

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Summary of Shalamov's collection "Kolyma Tales"

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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 destinies similar to one another, in which chance, merciless or merciful, helper or murderer, arbitrariness of bosses and thieves dominate. Hunger and its convulsive satiety, exhaustion, painful dying, a slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the center of the writer's attention.

Gravestone

Life of engineer Kipreev

For the show

Camp corruption, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and took place in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is played down and asks to play for a "representation", that is, in debt. At some point, irritated by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, 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, and the thieves still get the sweater.

Single metering

Camp labor, unequivocally defined by Shalamov as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. A goner-prisoner is not able to give a percentage rate, so labor becomes torture and slow mortification. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand the sixteen-hour working day. He drives, turns, pours, again drives and again turns, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures Dugaev's work with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems to Dugaev to be very large, his calves are aching, his arms, shoulders, head are unbearably sore, he even lost his sense of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. A day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the chirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he regrets only that the last day was in vain.

Sherry Brandy

A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He dies for a long time. Sometimes a thought comes - for example, that they stole bread from him, which he put under his head, and it 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 too weakens. When a daily ration is put into his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucks it, tries to tear and gnaw with scurvy loose teeth. When he dies, they don’t write him off for another two days, and inventive neighbors manage to get bread for the dead man as if it were alive during the distribution: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.

Shock therapy

Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself at common work, feels that he is gradually losing. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by the escorts, they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed, and the rib grew together, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for research. He has a chance to be activated, that is, written off due to illness at will. Remembering the mine, aching cold, a bowl of empty soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be convicted of deceit and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a prisoner in the past, did not miss. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing the fakers. This amuses his vanity: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite the year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a simulator and looks forward to the theatrical effect of a new exposure. First, the doctor gives him roush anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov's body can be straightened, and a week later, 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 to be discharged.

Typhoid Quarantine

aortic aneurysm

Illness (and the emaciated state of the “goal” prisoners is quite tantamount to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered as such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, 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, the prisoner Podshivalov, the head of the amateur art circle, (“the 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 Głowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest is quickly replaced by a purely medical concern. He finds an aortic aneurysm in Glovatsky, 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 penal female mine. 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 machinations of the same Podshivalov, who is trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but already when loading into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.

Major Pugachev's last fight

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, to stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941-1945. prisoners who fought and passed German captivity began to arrive in the northeastern camps. 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 the war awakened in them. 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 “guilt” was that they were surrounded or captured. And Major Pugachev, one of these people who has not yet been broken, is clear: “they were brought to their deaths - to change these living dead,” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers just as determined and strong, to match, prisoners 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. All winter they are preparing an escape. Pugachev realized that only those who bypassed the general work could survive the winter and then run away. And the participants in the conspiracy, one by one, advance into the service: someone becomes a cook, someone a cultist who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But spring is coming, and with it the day ahead.

At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The attendant lets in the prisoner camp cook, who has come, as usual, for the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the duty officer is strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with another, who returned a little later on duty. Then everything goes according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the guard detachment and, having shot the guard on duty, take possession of the weapon. Keeping the suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Having gone outside the camp, they stop a 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. At night - the first night at liberty after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, recalls his escape from the German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, accusation of espionage and sentence - twenty-five years in prison. He also recalls the visits to the German camp of the emissaries of General Vlasov, who recruited Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet authorities all of them, who were captured, are traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He looks lovingly at the sleeping comrades who believe in him and stretch out their hands to freedom, he knows that they are "the best, worthy of all." A little later, a fight breaks out, the last hopeless fight between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in a bear's lair, that he will be found anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.

G. Vladimov

Faithful Ruslan

Reads in 10-15 minutes.

Original - in 2-3 hours.

Watchdog Ruslan heard howling outside all night, lanterns swaying with a screech. It calmed down only in the morning. The owner came and finally led him to the service. But when the door opened, a bright white light suddenly flooded into her eyes. Snow - that's what howled at night. And there was something else that made Ruslan alert. An extraordinary, unheard-of silence hung over the world. The camp gates are wide open. The tower was completely ruined - one searchlight was lying below, covered with snow, the other hung on a wire. The white sheepskin coat, the earflap, and the black ribbed trunk, always turned down, disappeared from it somewhere. And in the barracks, Ruslan felt it right away, there was no one. Losses and destruction stunned Ruslan. They fled, the dog realized, and rage overwhelmed him. Pulling on the leash, he dragged the owner out of the gate - to catch up! The owner shouted angrily, then let go of the leash and waved his hand. “Look” - this is how Ruslan understood him, but only he did not feel any trace and was confused. The owner looked at him, pursing his lips unkindly, then slowly pulled the machine gun from his shoulder. And Ruslan understood: everything! Just not clear why? But the owner knows best what to do. Ruslan dutifully waited. Something prevented the owner from shooting, some kind of rattling and clanging. Ruslan looked back and saw an approaching tractor. And then something completely unbelievable followed - a driver, little resembling a camp inmate, got out of the tractor and spoke to the owner without fear, assertively and cheerfully: “Hey, Vologda, is it a pity that the service is over? And don't touch the dog. Leave it to us. The dog is expensive." “Go ahead,” the owner said. - You talk a lot. The owner did not stop the driver even when the tractor began to destroy the camp fence posts. Instead, the owner waved his hand at Ruslan: “Go away. And I won't see you again." Ruslan complied. He ran along the road to the village, at first in grave bewilderment, and then, suddenly guessing where and why he had been sent, at full speed.

... In the morning of the next day, the railwaymen at the station observed a picture that would probably have struck them if they did not know its real meaning. A dozen or two dogs gathered on the platform near the cul-de-sac, pacing along it or sitting in unison, barking at the passing trains. The animals were beautiful, worthy to admire them from afar, no one dared to climb the platform, the local people knew that it would be much more difficult to get off it. The dogs were waiting for the prisoners, but they were not brought either that day, or the next, or a week later, or two later. And the number of them coming to the platform began to decrease. Ruslan also ran here every morning, but did not stay, but after checking the guard, he fled to the camp - here, he felt it, his master still remained. He ran to the camp alone. Other dogs gradually began to settle down in the village, violating their nature, agreed to serve with new owners or stole chickens, chased cats. Ruslan endured hunger, but did not take food from other people's hands. His only food was field mice and snow. From constant hunger and pain in the stomach, his memory weakened, he began to turn into a mangy stray dog, but he did not leave the service - every day he appeared on the platform, and then fled to the camp.

Once he smelled the owner here in the village. The smell led him to the station canteen. The owner was sitting at a table with some shabby peasant. “You are late, sergeant,” Shabby told him. “All your soles have long been greased.” - “I carried out the task, I guarded the archive. Now you are all free and think that you cannot be reached, but everything is listed in the archive. Just a little, and immediately all of you - back. Our time is yet to come." The owner was delighted with Ruslan: "This is what our state stands on." He held out the bread. But Ruslan did not take it. The owner got angry, smeared the bread with mustard and ordered: “Take it!” Voices were heard all around: “Don’t torture the dog, guard!” - “We need to wean him. And then all of you are compassionate, but no one has pity to kill, ”the owner snapped. Reluctantly opening his fangs, Ruslan took the bread and looked around, where to put it. But the master slammed his jaws shut with force. The poison burned from the inside, the flame flared up in the belly. But even worse was the betrayal of the owner. From now on, the owner became his enemy. And so the very next day Ruslan responded to the call of the Shabby and followed him. Both were satisfied, Shabby, who believes that he has acquired a true friend and protector, and Ruslan, who nevertheless returned to his former service - escorting a camper, albeit a former one.

Ruslan did not take food from his new owners - he supplemented himself by hunting in the forest. As before, Ruslan appeared daily at the station. But he didn’t run to the camp anymore, only memories remained from the camp. Happy - about the service. And unpleasant. Let's talk about their dog riot. This is when, in terrible frosts, in which they usually did not work, a camp informer ran up to the chief and said something like that, after which the Chief and all the authorities rushed to one of the barracks. "Go to work," ordered the Chief. Barack did not comply. And then, on the order of the Chief, the guards dragged a long intestine from the fire pump to the barracks, water gushed out of this intestine, washing off the prisoners from the bunks with its pressure, breaking the glass in the windows. People fell, covered with an icy crust. Ruslan felt his rage boil up at the sight of a thick, live, stirring intestine, from which water gushed. Ingus, their most intelligent dog, was ahead of him - he tightly grabbed his sleeve with his teeth and did not react to the shouts of the guards. Ingus was shot from a machine gun by the Chief. But all the other camp dogs were already tearing the hose with their teeth, and the authorities were powerless ...

Once Ruslan decided to visit the camp, but what he saw there stunned him: there was no trace of the barracks - huge, half-glazed buildings stood there. And no barbed wire, no towers. And everything is so stained with cement, bonfires, that the smells of the camp are gone ...

And finally, Ruslan waited for his service. A train approached the platform, and crowds of people with backpacks began to leave it, and these people, as in the old days, lined up in columns, and in front of them the bosses spoke, only Ruslan heard some unfamiliar words: construction, combine. Finally, the columns moved, and Ruslan began his service. Unusual was only the absence of escorts with machine guns and the overly cheerful behavior of those marching in the column. Well, nothing, thought Ruslan, at first everyone makes noise, then they calm down. And indeed, they began to subside. This is when camp dogs began to run from lanes and streets to the column and line up along the edges, accompanying those walking. And the views of the locals from the windows became gloomy. Those walking still did not fully understand what was happening, but they were alert. And the inevitable happened - someone tried to get out of the column, and one of the dogs rushed at the intruder. There was a scream, a scuffle began. Observing order, Ruslan watched the formation and saw the unexpected: camp dogs began to jump out of the column and cowardly go into neighboring streets. Ruslan rushed into battle. The fight was unexpectedly hard. People refused to obey the dogs. They beat Ruslan with sacks, sticks, poles broken from the fence. Ruslan was furious. He jumped, aiming at the throat of a young boy, but missed and immediately received a crushing blow. With a broken spine, he fell silent on the ground. A man appeared, perhaps the only one from whom he would accept help. “Why did they break the backbone,” said Shabby. - That's it. Gotta get it. Pity the dog." Ruslan still found the strength to jump and with his teeth to intercept the shovel brought in for a blow. The people retreated, leaving Ruslan to die. He might still be able to survive if he knew why. He, who honestly performed the service that the people had taught him, was severely punished by them. And Ruslan had no reason to live.

S. Zalygin

On the Irtysh

Reads in 5-10 minutes.

It was March in the year nine hundred and thirty-one. In the village of Krutye Luki, the windows of the collective-farm office were burning until late - either the board was in session, or the peasants simply gathered and endlessly judged and argued about their affairs. Spring was coming. Sowing. Just today, the collective farm barn was completely filled up - this is after the floor was raised in the barn of Alexander Udartsev. The conversation now went on how not to confuse the seeds of different varieties. And suddenly someone shouted from the street: “We are on fire!” They rushed to the windows - a barn with grain was on fire ... They extinguished it with the whole village. The fire was covered with snow, the grain was pulled out. Stepan Chauzov was at work in the inferno. They pulled out of the fire as much as they could. But, and burned a lot - almost a quarter of the prepared. After they started talking: “But it’s not without reason that it caught fire. It just couldn’t,” and they remembered about Udartsev: where is he? And then his wife Olga came out: “He is not there. Escape." - "How?" - “He said that he was dressed up in the city. Gathered and horse leaned somewhere. “Maybe he’s already at home? Chauzov asked. "Let's go and see." Only old Udartsev met them in the house: “Well, get out of here, you damned ones! - And with a crowbar moved to the peasants. - I'll kill anyone! The men jumped out, but Stepan did not budge. Olga Udartseva hung on her father-in-law: “Dad, come to your senses!” The old man stopped, trembled, dropped the crowbar ... “Well, get everyone alive out of here,” Chauzov ordered and ran out into the street. - Kick out the crown from the underground, guys! Get on the other side! And ... pile on. The peasants rested against the wall, pressed on, and the house crawled down the slope along the beds. The shutters flung open, something cracked - the house hung over the ravine and collapsed down, crumbling. “The house was kind,” Fofanov, deputy chairman, sighed. “Where did it come from, our common life…”

The excited peasants did not disperse, met again in the office, and a conversation began about what kind of life awaits them on the collective farm. “If the authorities continue to divide us into kulaks and the poor, then where will they stop,” Lame Nechai reasoned. After all, the man, he is originally - the owner. Otherwise, he is not a man. And the new authorities do not recognize the owners. How then to work on the ground? This is the worker's property to anything. He works hard. And the peasant? And it turns out that any of us can be declared a fist.” Nechay said this and looked at Stepan, right? Stepan Chauzov was respected in the village - both for his thriftiness, and for his courage, and for his smart head. But Stepan was silent, not just everyone. And when he returned home, Stepan also discovered that his wife Klasha settled Olga Udartseva with her children in their hut: “You ruined their house,” said the wife. “Are you going to let the kids die?” And Olga stayed with them until spring.

And the next day, Yegorka Gilev, a peasant from the most unlucky in the village, went into the hut: “I am behind you, Stepan. The investigator has arrived and is waiting for you.” The investigator began sternly and forcefully: “How and why was the house destroyed? Who led? Was it an act of class struggle? No, Stepan decided, you can’t talk about this - what does he understand in our life, except for the “class struggle”? And he answered evasively to the questions of the investigator, so as not to harm any of his fellow villagers. It seems that he fought back, and in the paper that he signed, there was nothing superfluous. It would be possible to continue to live normally, calmly, but then the chairman Pavel Pechura returned from the district and immediately - to Stepan with a serious conversation: “I used to think that collective farms were a rural matter. but no, they are engaged in the city. And how! And I realized that I was not fit. Here not only the peasant mind but experience are needed. Here you need a strong character, and most importantly, to be able to deal with the new policy. I'll be chairman until spring, and then I'll leave. And in my opinion, you need to be the chairman, Stepan. Think about it". A day later, Egorka Gilev showed up again. He looked around and quietly said: “Lyaksandra Udartsev summons you to his place this afternoon.” - "Like this?!" - “He is buried in my hut. Wants to talk to you. Maybe they, the fugitives, want to attract a man like you to themselves. ” “What am I supposed to do with them? Against who? Against Fofanov? Against Pechora? Against Soviet power? I am not an enemy to my children when she promises them life ... And you need to be beaten to death, Yegorka! So as not to push. From people like you - the main harm!

“And what kind of life is this,” Stepan was angry, “one day is not given to a peasant to take a breath and take care of the household. I would lock myself in the hut, say that I fell ill, and lie on the stove. But Stepan went to the meeting. He already knew what the meeting would be about. In the Pechura region, he received a task - to increase crops. Where to get seeds? The last one, left for food, to carry to the collective farm? .. There were people in the hut-reading room - they couldn’t breathe. Koryakin himself came from the district. He was from Krutoluchensky, but now he is no longer a man, but a boss. The speaker, the investigator, began to talk about justice, about social labor, as the most correct thing: “Now the cars have gone, and who can buy them? Only the rich. So, and therefore - we need to unite. “Yes, a car is not a horse,” Stepan thought, “it really requires a different management.” Finally, it came to the seeds: "Conscientious people, devoted to our cause, I think, will set an example, from their personal stock they will replenish the seed fund of the collective farm." But the men were silent. “I give a pood,” said Pechura. "And how many Chauzov will give?" the speaker asked. Stepan got up. He stood. Looked. "Not a grain!" - and sat down again. Then Koryakin raised his voice: “To feed your family and the wife of a class enemy with children, do you have grain, but not for the collective farm?” - "Because it is not, that there are more eaters." - "So, no grain?" - "Not a single one ..." The meeting ended. And that very night the troika met to expose the kulaks. No matter how Pechura and the investigator defended Chauzov, Koryakin insisted: to declare a fist and evict him with his family. “I immediately sent Gilev to him, to say that Udartsev allegedly wants to meet with him, so at least he didn’t go to the meeting, but he didn’t tell us anything. Clearly the enemy.

... And now Klashka collects junk on a long journey, Stepan says goodbye to the hut in which he grew up. “Where they will take you, what they will do with you is none of your business,” he argues. “You’ll be in place - then grab onto life again, for the gloomy land, for some kind of hut ...” Lame Nechai came in a sheepskin coat, with a whip: “Are you ready, Styopa? I will take you. We are neighbours. And buddies." Pechura ran to say goodbye when the sleigh had already started. “And why is such a price set for our, for the peasant truth? Pechura asked Nechai. - And who is it for the future? BUT?" Nechai did not answer.

Cruelty

Reads in 5-10 minutes.

Original - in 2-3 hours.

District Siberian town of Dudari. 20s The narration is conducted on behalf of the participant of the described events, which he recalls many years later.

The author of the story, who is never mentioned by name in the story (hereinafter - the Author), works in the criminal investigation department together with his friend Veniamin Malyshev, whose position is the assistant chief for the secret operational unit. Both of them are very young - they are not yet twenty years old. The main task of the criminal investigation department at the time described - after the end of the civil war - was to clear the Dudarinsky district from bandits hiding in the taiga. Bandits kill rural activists, attack cooperatives, try to recruit as many accomplices as possible into their ranks.

The own correspondent of the provincial newspaper Yakov Uzelkov, who writes under the pseudonym Yakuz, arrives in Dudari, a young man of seventeen or nineteen years old. Yakuz gives the impression of an educated person on Venka Malyshev and his friend, since he loves to use tricky words in his speech, for example: patron of the arts, exaltation, pessimism, familiarity, etc., but his friends didn’t like him for some reason, and his Correspondence devoted to the everyday life of the criminal investigation department and written in an overly ornate style, they find untrue.

Employees of the criminal investigation department are carrying out an operation to neutralize the gang of ataman Klochkov. During the operation, Venka was wounded. Klochkov and several members of the gang are killed, and the rest are arrested. Venka interrogates one of the arrested - Lazar Baukin, and comes to the conclusion that Baukin, a hunter and tar smoker, got to the bandits by accident. During interrogations, Venka talks to Baukin for a long time, learns the details of his life and clearly sympathizes with this arrested bandit, who, moreover, confessed that it was he who wounded Venka. Soon, Lazar and two other arrested people escape from custody. Venka is stunned by the escape of his ward.

In a grocery store located not far from the criminal investigation department, a pretty young cashier appears, whom both friends really like, but they are shy and do not dare to get to know her. Soon they learn from Uzelkov that her name is Yulia Maltseva and he knows her - he goes to visit her, they talk, discuss the books they read. Friends, envying Uzelkov's education, write to the library and, despite the lack of time, read a lot. Soon they learn from a familiar librarian that Uzelkov's entire education was drawn by him from the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron.

Meanwhile, in a remote area of the Dudarinsky district, the Voevodsky corner, a gang of Konstantin Vorontsov, the “emperor of the whole taiga,” as he calls himself, is announced. And the capture of the elusive Kostya Vorontsov becomes the main problem for the criminal investigation department. Venka Malyshev goes to the Voevodsky corner, and no one knows what he does there, even his best friend.

In the absence of Venka, the Author accidentally meets Yulia Maltseva and, when Venka returns from the Voivodeship Corner, introduces him to her. Venka loves Yulia, but believes that he is not worth it: a few years ago he met a woman and then fell ill. Although he soon recovered, nevertheless he believes that he should tell Yulia about this. Venka writes a letter in which he explains his love to Yulia and admits that he is oppressed. Venka puts the letter in the mailbox that very night, and the next morning, as part of a detachment of six people, he goes to the taiga to catch Kostya Vorontsov.

The detachment drives up to the zaimka where Kostya's beloved woman, Klanka Zvyagina, lives. After a signal, the detachment approaches the house, where they find Lazar Baukin, as well as Kostya and several members of his gang who are tied up. The detachment returns to Dudari, on the way it is surrounded by mounted police, who arrest Lazar. The head of the criminal investigation department informs Venka that he has been presented with a reward for organizing the operation to capture Kostya Vorontsov. Venka refuses the reward, believing that he did not deserve it - this is Lazar, whom Venka convinced of the merits of Soviet power, detained Kostya, and the fact that Lazar was imprisoned "for verification" is unfair: he himself wanted everything to be according to the law, that he be judged for what he is guilty of, and there is nothing to check him after what he did.

Venka is waiting for a letter from Yulia in response to a confession sent the day before. Uzelkov arrives and asks Venka to let him see Vorontsov. Venka refuses this, and then Uzelkov says that Venka is a narrow-minded person, which he knew about before: today he accidentally read his love letter - it was in the book that he gave Yulia to read.

On the same evening, Venka commits suicide with a shot in the temple, never knowing that Yulia did not give Uzelkov his letters, and he himself, in her absence, took his book with the letter enclosed in it.

V. Rasputin

Deadline

Reads in 5-10 minutes.

Original - in 2-3 hours.

Old Anna lies motionless, without opening her eyes; she almost froze, but life is still glimmering. Daughters realize this by bringing a piece of a broken mirror to their lips. It fogs up, so mom is still alive. However, Varvara, one of Anna's daughters, considers it possible already to mourn, "repeal her", which she selflessly does first at the bedside, then at the table, "where it is more convenient." Daughter Lucy at this time sews a mourning dress tailored back in the city. The sewing machine chirps to the beat of Varvarin's sobs.

Anna is the mother of five children, her two sons died, the first ones, born one for God, the other for a guy. Varvara came to say goodbye to her mother from the regional center, Lusya and Ilya from nearby provincial towns.

Can't wait for Anna Tanya from distant Kyiv. And next to her in the village was always her son Mikhail, along with his wife and daughter. Having gathered around the old woman in the morning of the day following the arrival, the children, seeing their mother perked up, do not know how to react to her strange rebirth.

“Mikhail and Ilya, having brought vodka, now did not know what to do with them: everything else seemed trifles compared to this, they toiled, as if passing every minute through themselves.” Having huddled in the barn, they get drunk almost without a snack, except for the products that Mikhail Ninka's little daughter carries for them. This causes legitimate female anger, but the first shots of vodka give the peasants a feeling of a genuine holiday. After all, the mother is alive. Ignoring the girl collecting empty and unfinished bottles, they no longer understand what thought they want to drown out this time, maybe it's fear. “The fear from the consciousness that the mother is about to die is not like all the previous fears that fall to them in life, because this fear is the worst of all, it comes from death ... It seemed that death had already noticed them all in the face and no longer will forget."

Having drunk thoroughly and feeling the next day as if they had been put through a meat grinder, Mikhail and Ilya thoroughly get drunk the next day. “But how not to drink? - says Michael. - Day, second, let even a week - it is still possible. What if you don't drink until you die? Just think, there is nothing ahead. All the same. How many ropes hold us both at work and at home, that you can’t gasp, so much you had to do and didn’t do, everything must, must, must, must, and the farther, the more you must - it’s all gone to hell. And I drank, as soon as I got free, I did everything that was necessary. And what he didn’t do, he shouldn’t have done, and he did the right thing, what he didn’t do. This does not mean that Mikhail and Ilya do not know how to work and have never known any other joy, except from drunkenness. In the village where they all once lived together, there was a common work - “friendly, inveterate, sonorous, with a dissonance of saws and axes, with a desperate hoot of fallen woods, resounding in the soul with enthusiastic anxiety with the obligatory joking with each other. Such work happens once during the firewood harvesting season - in the spring, so that they have time to dry over the summer, yellow pine logs with a thin silky skin that are pleasant to the eye are placed in neat woodpile. These Sundays are organized for themselves, one family helps another, which is still possible now. But the collective farm in the village is falling apart, people are leaving for the city, there is no one to feed and raise livestock.

Remembering her former life, the townswoman Lusya with great warmth and joy imagines her beloved horse Igrenka, on which “slap a mosquito, it will fall down”, which in the end happened: the horse died. Igren dragged a lot, but did not manage. Wandering around the village through the fields and arable land, Lucy realizes that she does not choose where she goes, that she is directed by some outsider who lives in these places and professes her power. ... It seemed that life came back, because she, Lucy, forgot something here, lost something very valuable and necessary for her, without which it is impossible ...

While the children are drinking and reminiscing, the old woman Anna, having eaten the children's semolina porridge specially cooked for her, cheers up even more and goes out onto the porch. She is hung by a long-awaited friend Mironikha. “Ochi-mochi! Are you, old woman, alive? Mironikha says. “Why doesn’t death take you? .. I’m going to her wake, I think she chided like a kind one, but she’s still here.”

Anna grieves that Tatyana, Tanchora, as she calls her, is not among the children gathered at her bedside. Tanchora was not like any of the sisters. She stood as if between them with her special character, soft and joyful, human. So without waiting for her daughter, the old woman decides to die. “There was nothing more for her to do in this world, and there was no need to postpone death. While the guys are here, let them bury, carry out, as usual with people, so that another time they do not return to this concern. Then, you see, Tanchora will also come ... The old woman thought about death many times and knew her as herself. In recent years, they have become friends, the old woman often talked to her, and death, having settled down somewhere on the sidelines, listened to her reasonable whisper and sighed understandingly. They agreed that the old woman would leave at night, first fall asleep, like all people, so as not to frighten death with her eyes open, then she would gently snuggle up, remove her short worldly sleep and give her eternal rest. That's how it all comes out.

V. Rasputin

Live and remember

Reads in 5-10 minutes.

Original - in 3-4 hours.

It so happened that in the last war year, a local resident Andrei Guskov secretly returned from the war to a distant village on the Angara. The deserter does not think that he will be welcomed with open arms in his father's house, but he believes in the understanding of his wife and is not deceived. Although his wife Nastena is afraid to admit it to herself, she instinctively understands that her husband has returned, there are several signs of this. Does she love him? Nastya did not marry for love, four years of her marriage were not so happy, but she is very devoted to her man, because, having left her parents early, for the first time in her life she found protection and reliability in his house. “They agreed quickly: Nastya was also spurred on by the fact that she was tired of living with her aunt as workers, bending her back on someone else’s family ...”

Nastena rushed into marriage like water - without much thought: you still have to go out, few people do without it - why pull? And what awaits her in a new family and a strange village, she did not imagine well. But it turned out that from the workers she got into the workers, only the yard is different, the economy is larger and the demand is stricter. “Maybe the attitude towards her in the new family would be better if she gave birth to a child, but there are no children.”

Childlessness forced Nastena to endure everything. Since childhood, she heard that a hollow woman without children is no longer a woman, but only half a woman. So by the beginning of the war, nothing came of the efforts of Nastena and Andrey. Guilty Nastena considers herself. “Only once, when Andrei, reproaching her, said something completely unbearable, she replied with resentment that it was not known yet which of them was the reason - she or he, she had not tried other men. He beat her half to death." And when Andrei is taken to the war, Nastena is even a little glad that she is left alone without children, not like in other families. Letters from the front from Andrey come regularly, then from the hospital, where he also ends up wounded, maybe he will soon arrive on vacation; and suddenly there is no news for a long time, only once the chairman of the village council and a policeman enter the hut and ask to see the correspondence. "Did he say anything else about himself?" - “No… What's the matter with him? Where is he?" “So we want to find out where he is.”

When an ax disappears in the Guskovs' family bath, only Nastya thinks if her husband has returned: “Who would think of looking under the floorboard?” And just in case, she leaves bread in the bath, and once even heats the bath and meets in it the one she expects to see. The return of her husband becomes her secret and is perceived by her as a cross. “Nastena believed that in the fate of Andrei since he left home, in some way there is her participation, she believed and was afraid that she probably lived for herself alone, so she waited: on, Nastena, take don't show it to anyone."

She readily comes to her husband's aid, is ready to lie and steal for him, is ready to take the blame for a crime in which she is not guilty. In marriage, you have to accept both bad and good: “You and I agreed to live together. When everything is good, it's easy to be together, when it's bad - that's what people come together for.

Enthusiasm and courage settle in Nastena's soul - to fulfill her feminine duty to the end, she selflessly helps her husband, especially when she realizes that she is carrying his child under her heart. Meeting with her husband in a winter hut across the river, long mournful conversations about the hopelessness of their situation, hard work at home, settled insincerity in relations with the villagers - Nastena is ready for anything, realizing the inevitability of her fate. And although love for her husband is more of a duty for her, she pulls her life strap with remarkable masculine strength.

Andrei is not a murderer, not a traitor, but just a deserter who escaped from the hospital, from where they were going to send him to the front, without really treating him. Setting himself up for a vacation after a four-year absence from home, he cannot give up the thought of returning. As a country man, not a city man and not a military man, he is already in the hospital in a situation from which the only salvation is escape. So everything turned out for him, it could have turned out differently if he had been firmer on his feet, but the reality is that in the world, in his village, in his country, there will be no forgiveness for him. Realizing this, he wants to pull to the last, not thinking about his parents, his wife, and even more so about the unborn child. The deeply personal thing that connects Nastena with Andrey conflicts with their way of life. Nastena cannot raise her eyes to those women who receive funerals, cannot rejoice, as she would have rejoiced before when the neighboring peasants returned from the war. At a village celebration on the occasion of the victory, she recalls Andrei with unexpected anger: “Because of him, because of him, she has no right, like everyone else, to rejoice in victory.” The fugitive husband posed a difficult and insoluble question to Nastya: with whom should she be? She condemns Andrei, especially now, when the war is ending and when it seems that he would have remained alive and unharmed, like everyone who survived, but, condemning him at times to anger, to hatred and despair, she retreats in despair: yes because she is his wife. And if so, it is necessary either to completely abandon it, jumping on the fence like a rooster: I am not me and it is not my fault, or go along with it to the end. At least to hell. No wonder it is said: whoever marries whom, he will be born into that.

Noticing Nastena's pregnancy, her former friends begin to laugh at her, and her mother-in-law completely kicks her out of the house. “It was not easy to endlessly withstand the grasping and judgmental looks of people - curious, suspicious, angry.” Forced to hide her feelings, to restrain them, Nastena is more and more exhausted, her fearlessness turns into a risk, into feelings wasted in vain. It is they who push her to suicide, drag her into the waters of the Angara, shimmering like a river from a terrible and beautiful fairy tale: “She is tired. Who would know how tired she is and how much she wants to rest.

V. Rasputin

Farewell to Matera

Reads in 5-10 minutes.

Original - in 2-3 hours.

Having stood for more than three hundred years on the banks of the Angara, Matyora has seen everything in her lifetime. “In ancient times, bearded Cossacks climbed past it up the Angara to set up an Irkutsk prison; merchants turned up to her for the night, scurrying in one direction and the other; prisoners were carried along the water and, seeing the inhabited shore right at the bow, they also rowed up to it: they lit fires, cooked fish soup from fish caught right there; for two full days the battle rumbled here between the Kolchakites, who occupied the island, and the partisans, who went in boats to attack from both banks. Matera has its own church on a high bank, but it has long been adapted as a warehouse, there is a mill and an “airport” on an old pasture: twice a week people fly to the city.

But then one day, down the Angara, they begin to build a dam for a power plant, and it becomes clear that many surrounding villages, and primarily the island of Matera, will be flooded. “Even if you put five such islands on top of each other, it will still flood with the top of your head and then you won’t show the place where people settled there. You'll have to move." The small population of Matera and those who are connected with the city have relatives there, and those who are not connected with it in any way think about the "end of the world." No amount of persuasion, explanations and appeals to common sense can make people easily leave their habitable place. Here is the memory of the ancestors (cemetery), and the usual and comfortable walls, and the usual way of life, which, like a mitten from your hand, you can’t take off. Everything that was desperately needed here is not needed in the city. “Grips, frying pans, sourdough, whorls, cast irons, tuesas, krinks, tubs, tubs, lagoons, tongs, krosna ... And also: pitchforks, shovels, rakes, saws, axes (only one was taken out of four axes), whetstone, iron stove , cart, sled ... And also: traps, loops, wicker muzzles, skis, other hunting and fishing tackle, any artisan tool. What to sort through all this? What to execute the heart? Of course, there is cold and hot water in the city, but there are so many inconveniences that you can’t count them, and most importantly, if you’re not used to it, it must become very dreary. Light air, open spaces, the noise of the Angara, tea drinking from samovars, leisurely conversations at a long table - there is no substitute for this. And burying in memory is not the same as burying in the ground. Those who were less in a hurry to leave Matera, weak, lonely old women, are witnessing how the village is set on fire from one end. “More than ever, the motionless faces of the old women in the light of the fire seemed stuck together, waxy; long ugly shadows bounced and writhed. In this situation, “people forgot that each of them is not alone, they lost each other, and now there was no need for each other. It’s always like this: in the event of an unpleasant, shameful event, no matter how many people are together, everyone tries, not noticing anyone, to remain alone - it’s easier to get rid of shame later. In their hearts it was not good for them, it was embarrassing that they were standing motionless, that they did not try at all, when it was still possible, to save the hut - there was nothing to try. The same will happen with other huts.” When, after a fire, the women judge and judge whether such a fire happened on purpose or by chance, then the opinion is formed: by chance. No one wants to believe in such folly that the owner himself set fire to a good (“Christian”) house. Parting with her hut, Daria not only sweeps and cleans it, but also whitens it, as if for a future happy life. She is terribly upset that somewhere she forgot to grease. Nastasya worries about a runaway cat who will not be allowed on the transport, and asks Daria to feed her, not thinking that soon the neighbor will leave here altogether. And cats, and dogs, and every object, and huts, and the whole village are as alive for those who have lived in them all their lives from birth. And since you have to leave, you need to clean up everything, as they clean up the dead for wires to the next world. And although the rituals and the church for the generation of Daria and Nastasya exist separately, the rites are not forgotten and exist in the souls of the saints and the immaculate.

The women are afraid that before the flood, a sanitary brigade will arrive and level the village cemetery to the ground. Daria, an old woman with character, under whose protection all the weak and suffering gather, organizes the offended and tries to oppose. She is not limited only to cursing the heads of offenders, calling on God, but also directly enters into battle, armed with a stick. Daria is decisive, militant, assertive. Many people in her place would have come to terms with the situation, but not her. This is by no means a meek and passive old woman, she judges other people, and first of all her son Pavel and her daughter-in-law. Daria is also strict with the local youth, she not only scolds her for leaving the familiar world, but also threatens: "You will regret it." It is Daria who turns to God more often than others: “Forgive us, Lord, that we are weak, slow-witted and ruined in soul.” She really does not want to part with the graves of her ancestors, and, referring to her father's grave, she calls herself "stupid." She believes that when she dies, all relatives will gather to judge her. “It seemed to her that she could see them well, standing in a huge wedge, dispersing in an endless formation, all with gloomy, stern and inquiring faces.”

Dissatisfaction with what is happening is felt not only by Daria and other old women. “I understand,” Pavel says, “that without technology, without the greatest technology, nothing can be done today and there is no way to go anywhere. Everyone understands this, but how to understand, how to recognize what has been done to the village? Why did they demand from the people who live here, vain labors? You can, of course, not ask these questions, but live as you live, and swim as you swim, but I’m involved in that: to know what is how much and what is for what, to get to the bottom of the truth myself. That's what you're human for."

A. Solzhenitsyn

Matryonin yard

Read in 4 min.

Original - 30-30 min.

In the summer of 1956, at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, a passenger got off along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is a narrator whose fate is reminiscent of the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front he “delayed with the return of ten years”, that is, he spent time in the camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents "perepal"). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But living in the village with the wonderful name High Field did not work out, because they did not bake bread and did not sell anything edible there. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his hearing Peat product. However, it turns out that “not everything is around peat extraction” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo ...

This reconciles the narrator with his share, for it promises him "condo Russia". In one of the villages called Talnovo, he settles. The mistress of the hut in which the narrator lodges is called Matryona Vasilievna Grigoryeva, or simply Matryona.

The fate of Matryona, about which she does not immediately, not considering it interesting for a "cultured" person, sometimes in the evenings tells the guest, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in her fate, which is not noticed by fellow villagers and relatives of Matryona. The husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her like village husbands beat their wives. But Matryona herself hardly loved him. She was supposed to marry her husband's older brother, Thaddeus. However, he went to the front in the First World War and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of the Thaddeus family, she married her younger brother, Yefim. And suddenly Thaddeus returned, who was in Hungarian captivity. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband with an ax just because Yefim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride for himself with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to Thaddeus six children, but the “first Matryona” had all the children from Yefim (also six) died before they even lived for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “spoiled”, and she herself believed in it. Then she took up the daughter of the “second Matryona” - Kira, raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.

Matryona lived all her life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. There is a huge inner strength in Matryona. For example, she is able to stop a rushing horse on the run, which men cannot stop.

Gradually, the narrator realizes that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without a trace, that the whole village and the whole Russian land still rests. But this discovery hardly pleases him. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to her next?

Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for the death of Matryona and decided to take the inheritance for the young during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of duty than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona's property.

Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.

A. Solzhenitsyn

One day Ivan Denisovich

Reads in 5-10 minutes.

Original - in 80−110 min.

The peasant and front-line soldier Ivan Denisovich Shukhov turned out to be a "state criminal", a "spy" and ended up in one of Stalin's camps, like millions of Soviet people who were convicted without guilt during the "cult of personality" and mass repressions. He left home on June 23, 1941, on the second day after the start of the war with Nazi Germany, “... in February of the forty-second year on the North-Western [front] they surrounded their entire army, and they didn’t throw anything to eat from the planes, but there were no planes. They got to the point where they cut the hooves from the horses that had died, soaked that cornea in water and ate, ”that is, the command of the Red Army left its soldiers to die surrounded. Together with a group of fighters, Shukhov ended up in German captivity, fled from the Germans and miraculously reached his own. A careless story about how he was captured led him to a Soviet concentration camp, since the state security agencies indiscriminately considered all those who escaped from captivity to be spies and saboteurs.

The second part of Shukhov's memoirs and reflections during the long camp work and a short rest in the barracks refers to his life in the countryside. From the fact that his relatives do not send him food (in a letter to his wife he himself refused to send parcels), we understand that the people in the village are starving no less than in the camp. His wife writes to Shukhov that the collective farmers make a living painting fake carpets and selling them to the townspeople.

Leaving aside flashbacks and incidental details about life outside the barbed wire, the whole story takes exactly one day. In this short period of time, a panorama of camp life unfolds before us, a kind of “encyclopedia” of life in the camp.

Firstly, a whole gallery of social types and at the same time bright human characters: Caesar is a metropolitan intellectual, a former filmmaker, who, however, in the camp leads a "lordly" life compared to Shukhov: he receives food parcels, enjoys some benefits during work ; Kavtorang - repressed naval officer; an old convict who was still in tsarist prisons and hard labor (the old revolutionary guard, who did not find a common language with the policy of Bolshevism in the 30s); Estonians and Latvians - the so-called "bourgeois nationalists"; the Baptist Alyosha - the spokesman for the thoughts and way of life of a very heterogeneous religious Russia; Gopchik is a sixteen-year-old teenager whose fate shows that repression did not distinguish between children and adults. Yes, and Shukhov himself is a characteristic representative of the Russian peasantry with his special business acumen and organic way of thinking. Against the background of these people who suffered from repression, a figure of a different series emerges - the head of the regime, Volkov, who regulates the life of prisoners and, as it were, symbolizes the merciless communist regime.

Secondly, a detailed picture of camp life and work. Life in the camp remains life with its visible and invisible passions and subtlest experiences. They are mainly related to the problem of obtaining food. They feed little and badly with a terrible gruel with frozen cabbage and small fish. A kind of art of life in the camp is to get yourself an extra ration of bread and an extra bowl of gruel, and if you're lucky, some tobacco. For this, one has to go to the greatest tricks, currying favor with "authorities" like Caesar and others. At the same time, it is important to preserve one’s human dignity, not to become a “descended” beggar, like, for example, Fetyukov (however, there are few of them in the camp). This is important not even from lofty considerations, but out of necessity: a “descended” person loses the will to live and will surely die. Thus, the question of preserving the human image in oneself becomes a matter of survival. The second vital issue is the attitude towards forced labor. Prisoners, especially in winter, work hunting, almost competing with each other and brigade with brigade, in order not to freeze and in a peculiar way "reduce" the time from overnight to overnight, from feeding to feeding. On this stimulus the terrible system of collective labor is built. But nevertheless, it does not completely destroy the natural joy of physical labor in people: the scene of building a house by a team where Shukhov works is one of the most inspired in the story. The ability to work “correctly” (not overstraining, but not shirking), as well as the ability to get yourself extra rations, is also a high art. As well as the ability to hide from the eyes of the guards a piece of a saw that turned up, from which the camp craftsmen make miniature knives to exchange for food, tobacco, warm clothes ... In relation to the guards, who constantly carry out "shmons", Shukhov and the rest of the prisoners are in the position of wild animals: they must be more cunning and dexterous than armed people who have the right to punish them and even shoot them for deviating from the camp regime. To deceive the guards and the camp authorities is also a high art.

That day, which the hero narrates about, was, in his own opinion, successful - “they didn’t put them in a punishment cell, they didn’t kick out the brigade to Sotsgorodok (work in a bare field in winter - ed.), At lunchtime he mowed down porridge (he got an extra portion - ed.), the brigadier closed the percentage well (the system for evaluating camp labor - ed.), Shukhov laid the wall cheerfully, didn’t get caught with a hacksaw, worked part-time with Caesar in the evening and bought tobacco. And I didn't get sick, I got over it. The day passed, nothing marred, almost happy. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days in his term from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added ... "

At the end of the story, a brief dictionary of thieves' expressions and specific camp terms and abbreviations that are found in the text is given.

A. Solzhenitsyn

Gulag archipelago

Read in an hour.

Original - in 24-25 hours.

That is why the narration in Kolyma Tales captures the simplest, primitively simple things. Details are selected sparingly, subjected to a rigorous selection - they convey only the main, vital. The feelings of many of Shalamov's heroes are blunted.

“They didn’t show the workers a thermometer, and it wasn’t necessary - they had to go to work at any degree. In addition, the old-timers almost accurately determined the frost without a thermometer: if there is a frosty fog, then it’s forty degrees below zero outside; if the air while breathing comes out noisy, but breathing is not yet difficult - that means forty-five degrees; if breathing is noisy and shortness of breath is noticeable - fifty degrees. Over fifty-five degrees - the spit freezes on the fly. The spit has been frozen on the fly for two weeks already. " ("Carpenters", 1954").

It may seem that the spiritual life of Shalamov's heroes is also primitive, that a person who has lost touch with his past cannot but lose himself and ceases to be a complex multifaceted personality. However, it is not. Take a closer look at the hero of the story "Kant". It was like there was nothing left for him in life. And suddenly it turns out that he looks at the world with the eyes of an artist. Otherwise, he would not be able to perceive and describe the phenomena of the surrounding world so subtly.

Shalamov's prose conveys the feelings of the characters, their complex transitions; The narrator and the characters of the Kolyma Tales are constantly reflecting on their lives. It is interesting that this introspection is perceived not as Shalamov's artistic device, but as a natural need of a developed human consciousness to comprehend what is happening. This is how the narrator of the story “Rain” explains the nature of the search for answers to, as he himself writes, “star” questions: “So, mixing “star” questions and trifles in my brain, I waited, soaked to the skin, but calm. Was this reasoning some kind of brain training? In no case. It was all natural, it was life. I understood that the body, and therefore the brain cells, were not getting enough nutrition, my brain had long been on a starvation diet, and that this would inevitably lead to insanity, early sclerosis, or something else ... And it was fun for me to think that I would not live to see , I will not have time to live up to a sclerosis. It rained."

Such introspection simultaneously turns out to be a way to preserve one's own intellect, and often the basis for philosophical understanding of the laws of human existence; it allows you to discover something in a person that can only be spoken of in a pathetic style. To his surprise, the reader, already accustomed to the laconicism of Shalamov's prose, finds in it such a style as a pathetic style.

In the most terrible, tragic moments, when a person is forced to think about injuring himself in order to save his life, the hero of the story “Rain” recalls the great, divine essence of man, his beauty and physical strength: “It was at this time I began to understand the essence of the great instinct of life - the very quality that a person is endowed with in the highest degree "or" ... I understood the most important thing that a person became a person not because he is God's creation, and not because he has an amazing thumb on every hand. But because he was (physically) stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced his spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle.

Reflecting on the essence and strength of man, Shalamov puts himself on a par with other Russian writers who wrote on this topic. It is quite possible to put his words next to Gorky's famous statement: "Man - it sounds proud!". It is no coincidence that when talking about his idea to break his own leg, the narrator recalls the “Russian poet”: “Out of this unkind gravity, I thought to create something beautiful - according to the Russian poet. I thought to save my life by breaking my leg. Indeed, it was a beautiful intention, a phenomenon of a completely aesthetic kind. The stone was supposed to collapse and crush my leg. And I am forever disabled!

If you read the poem “Notre Dame”, you will find there an image of “bad gravity”, however, in Mandelstam this image has a completely different meaning - this is the material from which poetry is created; i.e. words. It is difficult for a poet to work with the word, so Mandelstam speaks of the "unkind heaviness." Of course, the “bad” heaviness that Shalamov's hero thinks about is of a completely different nature, but the fact that this hero remembers Mandelstam's poems - remembers them in the hell of the Gulag - is extremely important.

The stinginess of the narration and the richness of reflections make us perceive Shalamov's prose not as artistic, but as documentary or memoir. And yet we have before us exquisite artistic prose.

"Single freeze"

"Single metering" is a short story about one day in the life of the prisoner Dugaev - the last day of his life. Rather, the story begins with a description of what happened on the eve of this last day: "In the evening, winding up the tape measure, the caretaker said that Dugaev would receive a single measurement the next day." This phrase contains an exposition, a kind of prologue to the story. It already contains the plot of the whole story in a collapsed form, predicts the course of development of this plot.

However, what the “single measurement” portends to the hero, we do not yet know, just as the hero of the story does not know either. But the foreman, in whose presence the caretaker utters the words about “single measurement” for Dugaev, apparently knows: “The foreman, who was standing nearby and asking the caretaker to lend “ten cubes until the day after tomorrow”, suddenly fell silent and began to look at the flickering behind crest of the hill the evening star.

What was the brigadier thinking? Really daydreaming, looking at the "evening star"? It is unlikely that once he asks to give the brigade the opportunity to pass the norm (ten cubic meters of soil selected from the face) later than the due date. The foreman is not up to dreams now, the brigade is going through a difficult moment. And in general, what kind of dreams can we talk about in camp life? Here they dream only in a dream.

The “detachment” of the brigadier is the exact artistic detail that Shalamov needs to show a person who instinctively strives to separate himself from what is happening. The brigadier already knows what the reader will understand very soon: we are talking about the murder of the prisoner Dugaev, who does not work out his norm, which means that he is useless, from the point of view of the camp authorities, a person in the zone.

The foreman either does not want to participate in what is happening (it is hard to be a witness or an accomplice in the murder of a person), or is guilty of such a turn in Dugaev’s fate: the foreman in the brigade needs workers, not extra mouths. The last explanation of the foreman's "thoughtfulness" is perhaps more plausible, especially since the warden's warning to Dugaev follows immediately after the foreman's request for a delay in the production period.

The image of the “evening star”, which the foreman stared at, has another artistic function. The star is a symbol of the romantic world (remember at least the last lines of Lermontov’s poem “I go out alone on the road ...”: “And the star speaks to the star”), which remained outside the world of Shalamov’s heroes.

And, finally, the exposition of the story “Single Measurement” concludes with the following phrase: “Dugaev was twenty-three years old, and everything he saw and heard here surprised him more than frightened him.” Here he is, the main character of the story, who has a little bit left to live, just one day. And his youth, and his lack of understanding of what is happening, and some kind of "detachment" from the environment, and the inability to steal and adapt, as others do - all this leaves the reader with the same feeling as the hero, surprise and a keen sense of anxiety.

The laconicism of the story, on the one hand, is due to the brevity of the hero's rigidly measured path. On the other hand, this is the artistic technique that creates the effect of reticence. As a result, the reader experiences a sense of bewilderment; everything that happens seems to him as strange as to Dugaev. The reader begins to understand the inevitability of the outcome not immediately, almost along with the hero. And that makes the story especially compelling.

The last phrase of the story - "And, realizing what was the matter, Dugaev regretted that he had worked in vain, that this last day had been tormented in vain" - this is also its climax, at which the action ends. Further development of the action or an epilogue is not needed and impossible here.

Despite the deliberate isolation of the story, which ends with the death of the hero, its abruptness and reticence create the effect of an open ending. Realizing that he is being led to the execution, the hero of the novel regrets that he worked, suffered this last and therefore especially dear day of his life. This means that he recognizes the incredible value of this life, understands that there is another free life, and it is possible even in the camp. Finishing the story in this way, the writer makes us think about the most important issues of human existence, and in the first place is the question of a person's ability to feel inner freedom, regardless of external circumstances.

Pay attention to how much meaning Shalamov contains in every artistic detail. First, we simply read the story and understand its general meaning, then we highlight such phrases or words that have something more than their direct meaning. Next, we begin to gradually “unfold” these moments significant for the story. As a result, the narrative is no longer perceived by us as mean, describing only the momentary - carefully choosing words, playing on semitones, the writer constantly shows us how much life remains behind the simple events of his stories.

"Sherry Brandy" (1958)

The hero of the story "Sherry Brandy" differs from most of the heroes of the "Kolyma Tales". This is a poet. A poet who is on the edge of life, and he thinks philosophically. As if from the outside, he observes what is happening, including what is happening to him: “... he slowly thought about the great monotony of death movements, about what doctors understood and described earlier than artists and poets.” Like any poet, he speaks of himself as one of many, as a person in general. Poetry lines and images emerge in his mind: Pushkin, Tyutchev, Blok ... He reflects on life and poetry. The world is compared in his imagination with poetry; poems are life.

Even now the stanzas stood up easily, one after another, and although he had not written down and could not write down his poems for a long time, nevertheless the words easily stood up in some given and each time extraordinary rhythm. Rhyme was a finder, a tool for magnetic search of words and concepts. Each word was part of the world, it responded to rhyme, and the whole world rushed by with the speed of some kind of electronic machine. Everything screamed: take me. I am not here. There was nothing to look for. I just had to throw it away. It was as if there were two people here - the one who composes, who launched his turntable with might and main, and the other who selects and from time to time stops the running machine. And, seeing that he was two people, the poet realized that he was now composing real poems. What if they are not recorded? Write down, print - all this is vanity of vanities. Everything that is born unselfishly is not the best. The best thing that is not written down, that was composed and disappeared, melted away without a trace, and only the creative joy that he feels and which cannot be confused with anything proves that the poem was created, that the beautiful was created.

Portal for the student. Self-training

"Kolyma stories"

Gravestone

Life of engineer Kipreev

For the show

At night

Single metering

Rain

Sherry Brandy

Shock therapy

Typhoid Quarantine

aortic aneurysm

Major Pugachev's last fight

Shock therapy

Typhoid Quarantine

aortic aneurysm

Compositions

Gravestone

Life of engineer Kipreev

For the show

At night

Single metering

Rain

Sherry Brandy

Shock therapy

Typhoid Quarantine

aortic aneurysm

Major Pugachev's last fight

Other essays on the topic:

"Single freeze"

"Sherry Brandy" (1958)

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