page_title: Kolyma Tales
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Kolyma Tales / Background
caption_attribution_description: Ruins of the Camp Commandant’s office and guard house at Butugycheg tin mine – a gulag prison camp until 1955 which finally closed in 1958.
context_page_description: Kolyma Tales or Kolyma Stories is the name given to six collections of short stories by Russian author Varlam Shalamov, about labour camp life in the Soviet Union. He began working on this book in 1954 and continued until 1973.
context_section_description: Shalamov was born in 1907 and was arrested in 1929 while he was a student at Moscow University for attempting to publish Lenin's Testament. He was sentenced to three years in Vishera, a satellite of the extensive labour camp system centered on a former monastery on Solovki. He was arrested again in 1937 and sentenced to five years in Kolyma, northeastern Siberia. His sentence was extended in 1942 until the end of the war and then in 1943 he was sentenced to another 10 years for describing Ivan Bunin as a great Russian writer. In total Shalamov spent around 17 years in the camps.
  He began to write Kolyma Tales after he was released but it was not to be published in the Soviet Union until after his death in 1982. He was able to publish five collections of poetry during his lifetime, and was well known as a poet before "Kolyma Tales" established his reputation as a Gulag writer. In 2013 the Soviet scholar David Satter wrote that "Shalamov's short stories are the definitive chronicle of those camps".
caption: Butugychag tin mine – a Gulag camp in the Kolyma area
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