Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov was born in 1907 in Vologda, Russia, and first arrested in 1929 for distributing Lenin's suppressed political testament. After a second arrest in 1937 on fabricated charges of counter-revolutionary activity, he was sentenced to the Kolyma gold-mining camps in northeastern Siberia, where temperatures routinely plunged below minus fifty degrees. He spent seventeen years in the camps and exile before his release in 1953, enduring forced labor, near-fatal illness, and conditions designed to break both body and spirit. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Kolyma Stories.