“I hate literature,” wrote Varlam Shalamov in a 1965 letter. “I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories. That is, I try to write not a short story but something that would not be literature.” Despite Shalamov’s misgivings, his collection of short stories, Kolyma Tales, contains some of the greatest writing to emerge from the gulag.

What he was expressing, in agonised terms, was that everything in his writing serves a purpose. As in the gulag, where survival could come down to receiving the thicker part of the soup or an extra ration of bread, or simply owning your own bowl, there is no room in his stories for the non-essential. What he is also stating, purposefully or not, is that his writing is unique.

The gulag was a vast concentration-camp network that spread across some of the most inhospitable regions of Russia, and of all these regions Kolyma was the most extreme. “In the same way that Auschwitz has become, in popular memory, the camp which symbolises all other Nazi camps,” the historian Anne Applebaum writes, “so too has the word ‘Kolyma’ come to signify the greatest hardships of the gulag.” Shalamov’s translator John Glad describes the region as “an enormous natural prison bounded by the Pacific on the east, the Arctic Circle on the north and impassable mountains on the third side of the triangle”. The temperature can reach minus 45 degrees centigrade, cold that, in Shalamov’s words, “crushed the muscles and squeezed a man’s temples”.

First arrested in 1929 for trying to distribute a suppressed letter by Lenin, Shalamov was released in 1932 after three years’ hard labour. Rearrested in 1937, at the outset of the great purge, he spent the next 17 years in Kolyma. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of him that his imprisonment “was more bitter and longer than mine, and I say with respect that it fell to him, not to me, to touch that bottom of brutalisation and despair to which the whole of camp life dragged us”. For his part, Shalamov was largely dismissive of Solzhenitsyn, whose fame he envied: he refused Solzhenitsyn’s offer to co-author The Gulag Archipelago, and once described the camps as a subject “that can freely accommodate a hundred writers of Solzhenitsyn’s rank, and five Tolstoys”.

Between 1954 and 1973, Shalamov wrote 147 stories about Russian prisons, transit camps, the mines of Kolyma, life in the camp hospitals, and the troubled experience of returning home. It is tempting, at first, to consider the stories autobiographical, if not straight memoir. This impression is only strengthened if you have encountered Shalamov’s stories quoted as primary source material in historical works by Robert Conquest and Applebaum, or by the political philosopher John Gray. It is a judgment his prose style supports: “Shalamov holds himself in severe check as an artist”, wrote Irving Howe, “he is simply intent, with a grey passion, upon exactitude.”

Yet the more you read, the less documentary-like the experience becomes. Unusual repetitions occur, such as the selection of a work crew described from different perspectives across three separate stories: three discrete pathways that unexpectedly intersect. Similarly, particular images and phrases repeat; objects exhibit a strong symbolic power; meanings double, as accounts of daily camp life take on aesthetic and philosophical dimensions. As Robert Chandler and Nathan Wilkinson describe:

A reader who knows only a few of the stories may well imagine the Kolyma Tales to be simply a factual account of Shalamov’s experiences. The events described in each individual story seem entirely real. Only when we read further, when we try to grasp the whole of this epic cycle, do we begin to realise that its truth can never be grasped: we begin, at last, to sense the terrible unreality of the survivor’s world. Successive narrators suffer identical fates, their stories intertwine impossibly, and time stands still. This fusion of realism and the surreal endows Kolyma Tales with extraordinary power.

Shalamov’s work is often described as “web-like” in its complexity. The stories are quite capable of standing alone (several are outright masterpieces), but ideally they should be read as a totality, arranged in the order Shalamov intended. Unfortunately, because the stories were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published piecemeal in the west (none of them appeared in print in Shalamov’s home country before 1989, seven years after his death), and because to date only a third of the stories have been translated into other languages, non-Russian speakers are unable to experience their intended effect in full.

Circa 1930: Russian prisoners. Photograph: Popperfoto

Shalamov’s stories evoke the “world-like” camps as vast structures of pain, devourers of the men and women trapped within them. In Dry Rations, he writes: “All human emotions – love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty – had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during their long fasts.” In Typhoid Quarantine, he catalogues the long-term effects of hard labour: clawed hands, frostbite, scurvy ulcers and pus-leaking toes. In The Lepers, an orderly is described as being trapped “in a terrible kettle where he himself was being boiled away”.

Shalamov casts us into a world where prisoners sprinkle dirt in their wounds to extend their time away from the mines, and mutilate themselves for the same reason (“Kolya’s happiness began the day his hand was blown off”); where men dig up the recently dead to steal their clothing (“‘You know the shorts are like new,’ Bagretsov said with satisfaction”); where the bunkmates of the poet Osip Mandelstam raise his hand “like a puppet” for two days after his death, so they can claim his bread ration; where prisoners are tempted into a forbidden zone by “enchanted” berries, “bright blue and wrinkled like an empty leather purse, but continuing a dark blue-black juice that was indescribably delicious”, and shot dead.

Here is the narrator of that last story, Berries, looking at the body of his companion:

Rybakov looked strangely small as he lay among the hummocks. The sky, mountains and river were enormous, and God only knew how many people could be killed and buried among the hummocks along these mountain paths.

This conception of Kolyma as a space filled with the dead – the actual and soon-to-be dead – runs throughout the stories, and reveals something of fundamental importance to Shalamov’s project. Consider the following lines from Lend-Lease, set during the second world war, in which a logging operation uncovers mass graves from 1938:

In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognised even after tens of years. There were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost … The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice … The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.

The frozen earth, then, keeper and revealer of secrets, acts as an archive, the physical counterpart to Shalamov’s memorialising stories. Because despite their pessimism, and despite his contention that nothing good could come from the camps (“We had all been permanently poisoned by the north, and we knew it”), his writing is an act of defiance, not despair. He genuinely believed that his stories, in Leona Toker’s description, were “a truthful but not despondent or cynical testimony”; that they “are – rather than are about – the victory of good, a slap in the face of evil”.

Shalamov’s belief can be detected in the stories themselves. The first in the entire sequence, Through the Snow, describes the way a new road is trodden down by a team of prisoners. The story appears to be a straightforward description of a physical process. Until, that is, we come to the final lines:

Every one of them, even the smallest, even the weakest, must tread on a little virgin snow – not in someone else’s footsteps. The people on the tractors and horses, however, will not be writers but readers.

At once, as the convicts are described as writers, the new road becomes not simply a supply route between camp and mine, but a route of transmission between the camp and the wider society, between secrecy and truth, and Kolyma Tales announces itself as a work that will, at all times, operate simultaneously on distinct levels. Similarly, in The Life of Engineer Kipreev, the description of a mirror appears to double as comment on the importance and the cost of bearing witness:

Mirrors do not preserve memories. It is difficult to call the object that I keep hidden in my suitcase a mirror. It is a piece of glass that looks like the surface of some muddy river. The river has been muddied and will stay dirty for ever, because it has remembered something important, something eternally important. It can no longer be the crystal, transparent flow of water that is clear right down to its bed. The mirror is muddied and no longer reflects anything.

If we take the muddy mirror for Shalamov, whose act of remembrance (of something “eternally important”) has left its mark on him, then the description of the bulldozer at the end of Lend-Lease, after it has reburied the unearthed corpses, becomes part of a dialogue about the revelation and keeping of secrets:

The bulldozer roared past us; on the mirror-like blade there was no scratch, not a single spot.

To confront truth, these parallels suggest, is to accept a degree of damage. Relatedly, we read in Dry Rations that “a human being survives by his ability to forget”, but the statement is made ironical by appearing within a story that is itself a conscious act of remembrance. Reading Kolyma Tales is about encountering moments like this, and it is about discovering the intersections and tangents that lie not only within but between the stories. “Like every novelist,” Shalamov wrote, “I endow the first and final phrases with exceptional significance.” He might have said the same about the words between those two points, and about the dense, dynamic spaces between each separate but interconnected text.

Translations from the work are by John Glad, Robert Chandler and Nathan Wilkinson.

Next: William Sansom