Shalamov or The Laws of Life

From the genocide of the Herero and Nama to the Holocaust, the terror of the Khmer Rouge and the massacre of Srebrenica: the 20th century is a mass grave in which the most recent dead are piled on top of the previously murdered until they are no longer visible. There are few authors of our time who have seen so much suffering and written about so much inhumanity as William T. Vollmann. This makes his horror at the stories from Kolyma all the more astonishing. In it, Varlam Shalamov asks the question: “Did we exist?” Yes, Vollmann answers in his deeply impressive exploration of the archipelago of Shalamov, the still incomprehensible and probably most important literary chronicler of Stalinist horror. And yet Shalamov wrote more than literature. His stories are also testimonies – testimonies of an experience that Vollmann places in a rich context of extremes in his haunting essay, in the hope of making them somewhat more comprehensible. Testimonies that remind us never to forget the humanity of all those who were broken, blunt, ugly and turned into animals.

“Regardless of what Shalamov says, he does not merely record the atrocities in his 'documents'. He hands them over to memory by turning them into stories.”