The Italian Reception of “The Kolyma Stories”: a historical-bibliographical outline

Cover of “I racconti di Kolyma”, Savelli editore, 1976. Source: www.memorialitalia.it

Title: Kolymskie rasskazy [The Kolyma Stories]

Author: Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982)

Years: 1954-1973

Description:
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories represents one of the finest examples of Gulag literature and indeed of 20th-century prose writing. The result of twenty years work, in the version that has come down to us, edited by Irina Sirotinskaia, Kolyma Stories is a collection of 145 stories divided into six cycles describing the reality of the Soviet labour camps in eastern Siberia.
After an earlier three-year sentence in the Vishera correctional labour camp in the northern Urals (1929-31), Shalamov was imprisoned for almost fifteen years (1937-51) in Kolyma, the so called “white crematorium” where he managed to survive by attending a paramedical course. While still in the camp, he composed the poems that would make up the Kolyma Notebooks (Kolymskie tetradi, 1949-56), and after his release he began to write the short stories which won him posthumous fame.
While Shalamov’s poems appeared in the literary journals “Znamia”, “Moskva” and “Iunost’” and in five collections published by Sovetskii Pisatel’ from 1961 to 1977, his short stories, which he began to write in 1954, remained unpublished in his homeland until the end of the 1980s. In 1962, after the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (cf. “Novyi mir”, 1962, 11), Shalamov sent his manuscripts to Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s literary magazine and to official State Publishers. However, despite positive internal reviews from the writer Oleg Volkov and the editor El’vira Moroz, on the advice of the critic Anatolii Dremov, the stories were all returned to him, with the exception of the tale Dwarf Pine, which appeared in the pages of “Sel’skaia molodezh’” in 1965 (cf. Solov’ev 2015).
In the second half of the 1960s, together with his friend Leonid Pinskii, a former lager inmate and literary scholar, Shalamov defined the composition of the cycles The Virtuoso Shovelman (Artist lopaty), The Left Bank (Levyi bereg) and Resurrection of the Larch (Voskreshenie listvennitsy) (cf. Nich 2020: 17-23), and permitted the circulation of his work, known until then only to a small circle of friends (cf. Toker 2008: 742), in the samizdat in four typewritten volumes containing the stories he had composed up to then, “enjoying warm and immediate success among readers” (Scammell 1970: 18, Mal’cev 1976: 416). All the stories of the first five cycles reached the West by three different channels: an original manuscript was entrusted by Nadezhda Mandel’shtam to the Princeton professor Clarence Brown, a copy, was given to Nikita Struve by Shalamov’s friend, Irina Kanevskaia-Khenkina, who had emigrated to Prague, and the typescript volumes were delivered to the Parisian literary magazine “Les Lettres Nouvelles” through Pinskii’s acquaintances at the French embassy and Natal’ia Stoliarova, a former lager inmate and secretary to Il’ia Ėrenburg (cf. Kanevskaia 1982, Toker 2009: 742, Klots 2018: 146, Nich 2020: 25). The stories were not published as a volume, as had been the author’s wish, but appeared as fragments, selected by the editors, in Russian emigré journals who “underestimated or chose to ignore the stylistic and compositional unity of the work and, without recognising it as a literary masterpiece, broke it up for their own needs” (Rapetti 2015: 207). In New York forty-nine short stories were published in “Novyi Zhurnal” by Roman Gul’ (between 1966 and 1976), in Frankfurt Kaligula and Pocherk were published in the magazine “Posev” (1967) and fifteen short stories were published in “Grani” (in 1970, 76-77).  In Paris, “Vestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo dvizheniia” published Dve vstrechi and Chuzhoi khleb (1968, nos. 89-90) and “Les Lettres Nouvelles”, Berdy Onzhen (1968), and in London included in Michael Scammell’s anthology Russia’s Other Writers were Pocherk, under the title A good hand, and Kaligula (1970). Volume editions were also incomplete: in 1967, twenty-six stories from the first cycle appeared in Cologne, printed by Friedrich Middelhauve (Artikel 58, Die Aufzeichnungen des Häftlings Schalanow, which was reissued in 1975 under the title: Kolyma: Insel im Archipel) with a misspelling of the author’s surname, which was repeated in translations that appeared in South Africa (1968), France (for Gallimard 1969) and Belgium (1973). A subsequent edition published by Denoel in 1971 included twenty-seven stories (cf. Brewer 1995; Nich 2020).
Shalamov, who had encouraged the circulation of his stories abroad so that they could be published in their unabridged form, realising that he no longer had control over his work, disowned his masterpiece and condemned the “abominable practice” of the “disgusting fascist magazines” (“fetide rivistucole fasciste”, Sinatti 1992:  259) in a letter to the editorial staff of the “Literaturnaia gazeta” (23 February 1972), a denunciation which secured him admission to the Writers’ Union and guaranteed the publication of his fourth collection of poems, Moskovskie oblaka (Moscow Clouds, 1972), but which cost him his reputation in dissident circles and left him isolated until his death on 17th January 1982. However, although the letter was interpreted as a disavowal of his work and of the theme of Kolyma, which he claimed was “long since erased from life”, according to Leona Toker, as the only official record in Russia of the existence of the Kolyma Stories, it can be read as a declaration of the author taking responsibility for his work and a heartfelt desire to influence its fate (cf. Toker 2008: 752).
In Italy until the early 1970s Shalamov was known only to a few specialists, such as Vittorio Strada and Piero Sinatti. His name first appeared in the Italian press in 1971, when the writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a leading figure among Polish emigrants, survivor of the Stalinist Gulag and author of A World Apart, wrote a history of Shalamov’s life, referring to him as “a writer considered by some to be of equal importance to Solzhenitsyn”, for “Il Corriere della Sera”. As new publications appeared in France and Germany, he hoped for an Italian translation of the Kolyma Stories, which he saw as “ideograms of a world in which the excess of cruelty no longer seems to leave room even for a simple gesture of pity on the part of the onlooker” (Herling, 1971).
Five years later, Piero Sinatti was responsible for the first Italian translation of the stories: Kolyma. Trenta racconti dai lager staliniani (Kolyma. Thirty Stories from Stalinist labour camps), published by Savelli in July 1976. Having come across Shalamov’s name “almost by chance” in a review of the French edition by Pyotr Rawicz in “Le Monde” in 1970, Sinatti translated the stories he had read in the magazines “Grani” and “Novyi zhurnal”, which he had obtained from Irina Alberti, and showed them first to Einaudi, thanks to Vittorio Strada, and then to Savelli: “We are publishing almost thirty short stories that came into our possession almost by chance. We are publishing them without the authorisation of the author, whom we were unable to contact and question. We have found the text in other editions published in Russian in the West. We apologise to the author for this publication and take full responsibility for it” (Sinatti 1976: 3).
The book – which includes a biographical and critical note on the author, Shalamov’s letter to the newspaper “Literaturnaia Gazeta” in 1972, the text of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code punishing “counter-revolutionary activities”, on the basis of which Shalamov was condemned, and a glossary of untranslated Russian terms – was positively reviewed by Strada and Herling (“Il giornale nuovo”), and was the subject of an article by Primo Levi (for “La Stampa”), which was to cause controversy twenty years later: “…men like Salamov still deserve our respect, but their stature is inferior to that of their counterparts who fought Hitler’s terror […]. Their political maturity appears to us to be meagre and coarse: the label of “political prisoners” is assigned to them more or less at random, with the double aim of sowing terror and recruiting free labour, and they bear it with Russian resignation (Tiutchev’s “infinite patience”) but without pride” (Levi 1976).
Levi denies any similarity between the “totalitarian twins” of Stalin and Hitler and regards the moral stature of the victims of the Gulag as less than that of the victims of Hitler’s “much more ferocious and effective terror”.  This “one-sided polemic” – as Strada would call it in 1992 in the “Corriere della Sera” –  demonstrates Levi’s failure to understand the stylistic novelty of the Kolyma Stories; he considered the “degradation” and “mute despair” of their author a “weakness” and expression of a desire “for nothing more than the end of his suffering, he has no star to aim for”.  Herling is said to have commented: “Pretentious aesthetic considerations to delegitimize a book or an uncomfortable author in its entirety”. He defined the review as “petty” (“La Stampa” 1992) and in 1999 wrote: “It was a shock to me. I revere Primo Levi, I consider him one of the greatest writers of the post-World War II period, but his review, so biased, so conditioned by political prejudices, caused me great pain” (Herling 1999).
The judgement of Primo Levi was typical of the pro-Soviet intellectual left who considered the Gulag system an error of the communist regime, and Soviet repressions “as an external event, at least peripheral to European history” that could be pushed “behind the scenes of consciousness” (Jurgenson-Pieralli 2019). This vision determined the scarce critical attention given to Shalamov in Italy: “There was an almost total silence around Shalamov’s book and the volume was for us one of the most resounding failures” –  declared Savelli’s editorial director, Dino Audino – “Twenty-three years after Stalin’s death, the Gulag was still a taboo”(“La Stampa”, 1992).
The “curtain of silence” that had “concealed the name-symbol of the Stalinist gulag” (Sinatti, “Il Sole 24 Ore”, 1988) lasted until the end of the 1980s, despite the growing number of incomplete and unauthorised translations that were published in Europe and the United States. The first edition of the Kolyma Stories in Russian (103 short stories divided into three cycles: First Death, The Virtuoso Shovelman and The Left Bank) was published in London in 1978 by Overseas Publications, edited by Mikhail Heller. Shalamov was informed three years later, thanks to Natal’ia Stoliarova and his friend, mathematician and philosopher, Iulii Shreider. This was followed by an English translation by John Glad for Norton (Kolyma Tales 1980, Graphite 1981), a French translation by Maspero (in three volumes published between 1980 and 1982, translated by Catherine Fournier with a preface by Andrei Siniavskii), and three volumes in Russian by YMCA Press with an introduction by Heller, two reprints of the London edition, and, in 1985, under the title Resurrection of the Larch (Voskreshenie listvennitsy), a collection of short stories preceded by an autobiographical essay (Kratkoe zhizneopisanie Varlama Shalamova, sostavlennoe im samim) and the autobiography The Fourth Vologda (Chetvertaia Vologda). In Italy, the silence was interrupted by Strada and Sinatti who continued to promote Shalamov’s work, by obituaries in January 1982, by Pietro Zveteremich’s article in “La nuova rivista europea” (Shalamov, Vakhtin and other victims), and by Guido Ceronetti who in “La Stampa”, in 1987, quoted the short story Auntie Polia (Tetia Polia) and, a year later, compared the Kolyma Stories to the works of Kafka and Céline, authors who “more than other writers had interpreted and expressed all the horror of the 20th century”.
It was only in the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, that the “deafness of the Italian intelligentsia” (Sinatti, “Il sole 24 Ore”, 2007) ceased and Shalamov’s work, which appeared for the first time in his homeland from 1988 onwards, in the pages of the magazines “Novyi mir”, “Na severe Dal’nem”, “Moskva” and “Iunost’”, attracted the attention of publishers and critics: “It is of enormous importance that today in the USSR, in a magazine as authoritative as “Novyi Mir” (one million and 150 thousand copies), appear some of Varlam Scialamov’s Kolyma Stories, a monument to the victims of the gulag made up of more than one hundred short stories” (Sinatti, “Domenica”, 1988).
In 1992, ten years after his death, two publications briefly brought Shalamov back into the spotlight: a collection of thirteen short stories published by Sellerio with an introduction by Victor Zaslavsky (Shalamov’s New Prose) and a collection of ten unpublished works from his last cycle, The Glove, or KT-2, for Theoria (translated by Laura Salmon), based on new texts from the 1970s published posthumously by Irina Sirotinskaia, heir to the writer’s literary legacy, in the December 1989 issue of “Novyi mir”. These include My Prose, the title given by the editor to the letter Shalamov wrote to her in 1971, the literary manifesto of his “new prose”. The texts are reproduced in the order intended by the author, with the exception of the passage In the Camp There Are No Guilty People, taken from the autobiographical work Vishera: an Antinovel, which closes the Russian edition and is placed before the short stories. In discussing Shalamov’s lack of success in Italy in an article for “Il Corriere della Sera”, Strada hoped that “a book of such bitter and high human and literary significance” might find “more readers open to its authenticity”. Shortly afterwards Ceronetti, praising the recent publications, hoped that the Kolyma Stories would be read and welcomed as the work of “a great poet and an extraordinary writer”: “Shalamov has so far circulated in free Italy as in a samizdat […] We must shout loudly that Shalamov must be read, discovered, meditated upon, because our encounter with him is crucial: it forces us to think, to think that the lager is out there, that the lager is not in the past but is a night that lies before us and a shadow that follows us, a perpetual ambush, one of the normal outcomes of bureaucratic-technical society” (Ceronetti 1992).
Thanks to Ceronetti, in 1995, 55 short stories were also published by Adelphi, translated by Marco Binni.  Despite the fact that the first complete publication of the short stories in two volumes had appeared in Russia in 1992, there was still no complete version in Italian. “The Adelphi edition has disappointed us” – declared Sinatti (for “Domenica”, 1995) – “it is certainly not … a ‘wide choice’ from the Sirotinskaia edition, … [which consists of] … two volumes of over a thousand, dense pages, with 145 works”. The disappointment was shared by Herling in the article Memorie dall’inferno – Ma si può ‘tagliare’ un capolavoro? (Memories from Hell – How can you ‘cut’ a masterpiece?), while the editorial decision was supported by Roberto Calasso as “a very wide choice that does not betray the author” (both articles appeared in “La Stampa” in March 1995) and by Alfonso Silipo who defined it “the widest choice so far published in Italian of short stories” in “Slavia”.
Also in the early 1990s, individual short stories appeared in the Sunday supplement of “Il Sole 24 Ore” (Cherry-Brandy, 9 February 1992), in “La Stampa” (The Snake Charmer, 25 January 1995) and in “Il Corriere della Sera” (Memory, 15 March 1995). A selection of the correspondence between Shalamov and Boris Pasternak, together with the memories of the writer from Vologda, was published by Archinto in 1993, translated by Luciana Montagnani.
The world’s first complete translation of Kolyma Stories finally appeared in June 1999 translated by Sergio Rapetti, for Einaudi as part of the prestigious “I millenni” series, and at the same time in the Einaudi Tascabili-Letteratura (there would be many reprints). “The Einaudi edition is complete, and in addition, it is as the author had conceived it” wrote Fausto Malcovati for “L’Indice dei Libri del Mese”, praising Rapetti’s translation, “better than this could not be done” (1999). Based on the definitive Russian edition published in Moscow in 1998, the volume became the focus of controversy following the publisher’s refusal to publish the preface written by Gustaw Herling in the form of a dialogue with Piero Sinatti under the supervision of Anna Raffetto. On the eve of printing, Mauro Bersani, the chief literary editor, announced the decision to Herling and Sinatti, which he said had been made for stylistic reasons and because “the weight of the historical reasoning” in the preface was “excessive compared to the literary discussion”. Herling’s responded by sending the rejected preface, together with his correspondence with Einaudi and an account of what had happened to the Neapolitan publishing house L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, which printed the material in May with the title Ricordare, raccontare – conversazione su Šalamov (Remembering, recounting – conversation on Shalamov): “I find it hard to imagine a work on Shalamov focused on ‘literary discussion at the expense of historical-political arguments. The truth is that none of the Einaudi executives have bothered to read the stories, and I am not talking about all of them, you haven’t even read a dozen. If you had done so, you would be able to understand that our dialogue, which in your opinion is over-politicised and historicised, is a very modest and moderate commentary on the shocking message of Shalamov’s work” (Herling-Sinatti 1999: 12).
The affair was widely reported in Italian newspapers: Paolo Mieli wrote about the “mystery of the preface” in “La Stampa”, describing the Einaudi edition as “a brilliant intuition”, betrayed by the bitter political censorship of Herling who had been guilty of no more than daring to compare Nazi and Soviet concentration camps which was evidence of the inability of “certain Italian publishers to seriously and definitively confront what happened in communist countries between 1917 and 1989”. Dario Fertilio also defended Herling and Sinatti in an article for “Il Corriere della Sera” with the headline Il mio Salamov censurato (My Censored Shalamov): “Is it really possible that, at the turn of the century, ideological curtains continue to be drawn around facts?”. The following day, Vittorio Bo replied in “La Stampa”, emphasising the historical importance of Einaudi’s edition for Italian readers and supporting the editorial decision: “in our … opinion, the interview does not succeed in presenting the work, that is to say, in providing a synthesis and broadening its horizons”. Sinatti himself took part in the debate, revealing that the publisher had suggested he cut the passages dealing with the “misunderstanding of the Gulag phenomenon” and the opinions of Primo Levi, Italo Calvino and Norberto Bobbio: “We were outraged that on the eve of the year 2000, ghosts of the past, censorship, ‘totems’ and outdated taboos were returning. Like those that obscured A World Apart until the 1990s or delayed full recognition of Shalamov’s greatness”. The case of the censored preface is indicative of the unease with which Shalamov’s work was received in Italy; as Battista wrote in “Il Corriere della Sera”, the stories risked being an “ideological embarrassment” in some quarters.  However, the scandal also drew attention to the Kolyma Stories and Adelphi took advantage of the “embarrassing” incident to reissue its incomplete edition of the book “wrapped in a paper band that, without citing the source, scream[ed] a phrase taken from Gustaw Herling’s expunged introduction” (Luigi Amicone, interview with Gustaw Herling, “Tempi”, 1999).
In the 2000s, in addition to the various editions of Kolyma Stories (reprinted by ET scrittori and Einaudi Scuola in 2005, and eleven times by Adelphi), new works by Shalamov were translated, such as the autobiographical prose The fourth Vologda, published by Adelphi and edited by Anna Raffetto, and a collection of one hundred poems published in 2006 by the La Casa di Matriona with a preface and translation by Angela Dioletta Siclari. A further acknowledgement of Shalamov’s genius in Italy, beyond the discipline of Slavic studies, is found in article for “La Repubblica” (12 September 2001) by Pietro Citati, whose work was later included in the anthology of 20th century classics, La malattia dell’infinito (The Malady of the Infinite) in 2008, which describes the stories as “splinters of wounded flesh, removed from time: events and images captured in their absolute presence” and their author as “a great prose poet”.
Between 2009 and 2010, shortly after the centenary of Shalamov’s birth, celebrated by an international conference held in Berlin and commemorated in Italy by an article by Sinatti for “Il Sole 24 Ore”, two other important books appeared. Mondadori published Alcune mie vite. Documenti segreti e racconti inediti (Several of My Lives. Secret documents and unpublished stories), edited by Irina Sirotinskaia, Francesco Bigazzi and Sergio Rapetti, a reconstruction of the three judicial proceedings the author was subject to and his prison experiences, alternating excerpts from his memoirs with documents and primary material, which had appeared in Russia in the literary magazine “Znamia” on the occasion of the writer’s definitive rehabilitation in 2000 (the volume was widely covered by “Il Manifesto” with two articles by Stefano Garzonio and Antonio Moscato). Adelphi published Višera. Antiromanzo (Vishera: an Antinovel), edited by Claudia Zonghetti and with an introduction by Roberto Saviano, La conferma del bene (A Confirmation of good). The author of Gomorra said that “reading Shalamov changed my life”, and defined Kolyma as “a hell that readers do not know as well as Auschwitz”, because “silence has fallen around the atrocities of Soviet labour camps” (Saviano 2010).
A year earlier, on 11 November 2009, Saviano, a guest on the television show presented by Fabio Fazio, “Che tempo che fa”, had helped to make the Kolyma Stories known to the general public by declaring: “I would certainly not be the man I am if I had not read him. I consider his work one of the three fundamental books that changed my way of seeing things”. In the following months, Shalamov’s work reached the top of the paperback charts (between 2009 and 2010, the Einaudi paperback edition sold over 16,600 copies, Adelphi reached 40,000 – Sinatti 2011: 132), leading to a huge number of reprints and new editions. Thanks to the “Saviano effect”, the Kolyma Stories were published in 2010 by B.C. Dalai Editore (51 texts followed by a glossary), in Leone Metz’s translation and with a preface by Leonardo Coen, and in 2012 by Newton Compton edited by Sinatti (19 texts accompanied by a bio-bibliographical note and historical notes on the Kolyma). The same year also saw the publication of I libri della mia vita. Tavola di moltiplicazione per giovani poeti (The books of my life. Table of multiplication for young poets) with two essays by Shalamov (Slishkom knizhnoe and Tablitsa umnozheniia dlia molodykh poėtov) translated by Anastasia Pasquinelli and Walter Minella, an expanded edition of the text that appeared in 1994.
More recently, between 2014 and 2015, an exhibition on the life and work of Shalamov, organised by Literaturhaus Berlin and Memorial Italia entitled, “Life or Literature. Varlam Shalamov”, visited several Italian and included photographs, films, testimonies and archive documents. Finally, ten years after the last Italian translations, the publication of a selection of 59 poems which had already appeared in magazines at the end of the century (“Rassegna sovietica”, “Arca”, “Slavia”) edited by Gario Zappi for Giometti & Antonello (Quaderni della Kolyma, April 2021) is worthy of note.
Although there are still no monographs dedicated to Shalamov, in addition to the numerous contributions by Vittorio Strada and Piero Sinatti, critical contributions from Italian Slavists include Pietro Zveteremich’s article in 1982; Mauro Martini’s comparison with Solzhenitsyn in the monograph, Oltre il disgelo (Beyond the Thaw, 2002); Angela Dioletta Siclari’s essay introducing the collection of poems (La concezione dell’arte, 2006); Piero Sinatti’s article, Fortuna di Šalamov in Italia (The Italian reception of Shalamov, “Lo Straniero” 136, 2011); the introduction to the 2009 volume Alcune mie vite (Several of My Lives) and Sergio Rapetti’s essay, Varlam Šalamov. La luce della sofferenza (Varlam Shalamov. The Light of Suffering, 2015).
Full translations of the Kolyma Stories have also appeared in France (Récits de la Kolyma, Verdier, 2003), Germany (Erzählungen aus Kolyma, Matthes&Seitz, in four volumes, 2007-2011), and Spain (Relatos de Kolimá, Minúscula, in six volumes, 2007-2017). The most recent is the English translation, released in two volumes between 2018 and 2020 (Kolyma Stories. Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, Norton).
The history of the Italian reception of the Kolyma Stories – “slow and difficult, as the process of discovery, reconstruction and reading of Shalamov’s literary legacy has been and still is” (Garzonio, “Il Manifesto”) – demonstrates the “tenacious vitality of a work of art capable of speaking to the heart and intelligence of generations of readers” (Rapetti 2015: 214). Having passed almost unnoticed in the 1970s, Shalamov’s work has been accepted in its entirety since the 1990s; it has a wide circulation thanks to the first complete edition of the Kolyma Stories, the debate that arose around the case of the rejected preface, and new translations in the early 2000s. It is to be hoped that, in addition to his prose, Shalamov’s poetry will also be studied and translated.

Anna De Ponti
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Anna De Ponti

Bibliography

Italian language editions

The Kolyma Stories

• Šalamov V., Kolyma. Trenta racconti dal lager staliniani, introd. and ed. by Piero Sinatti, Savelli, Roma 1976 (1978² Kolyma. Racconti dai lager staliniani).
• Šalamov V., Nel lager non ci sono colpevoli. Gli ultimi racconti della Kolyma, introd. by Sinatti, it. transl. by Laura Salmon, Theoria, Roma-Napoli 1992.
• Šalamov V., I racconti di Kolyma, introduzione a cura di Victor Zaslavsky, it. transl. by Anita Guido, Sellerio editore, Palermo 1992.
• Šalamov V., I racconti della Kolyma, it. transl. by Marco Binni, Adelphi, Milano 1995 (1999² e ff. 11 editions).
• Šalamov V., I racconti di Kolyma, introd. by Irina P. Sirotinskaja e Anna Raffetto, it. transl. by Sergio Rapetti, Einaudi, collana “I millenni”, Torino 1999 (collana “I tascabili” 1999, ET Scrittori 2005).
• Šalamov V., Racconti di Kolyma, ed. by Marisa Visintin e Beppe Gouthier, Einaudi scuola, Milano 2005.
• Šalamov V., I racconti della Kolyma, pref. by Leonardo Coen, it. transl. by Leone Metz, BC Dalai, Milano 2010 (2014²), ebook 2015.
• Šalamov V., Racconti della Kolyma. Storie dei lager staliniani, it. trans. by Piero Sinatti, Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma 2012 (2016²).

The Kolyma Notebooks

• Šalamov V., Il destino di poeta, ed. by Angela Dioletta Siclari, La casa di Matriona, Milano 2006.
• Šalamov V., Quaderni della Kolyma, it. transl. by G. Zappi, Giometti&Antonello, Macerata 2021.

Selected poems appeared in the journals

• “Rassegna sovietica”, it. transl. by Gario Zappi, 5 (1990): 9-18.
• “La Nuova Europa”, it. transl. by Anastasia Pasquinelli, 5 (1994): 40-48.
• “Arca”, V. Šalamov, Personale e confidenziale, it. transl. by Gario Zappi, 6 (2000): 7-17.
• “Slavia”, V. Šalamov, Lo strumento, it. transl. by Gario Zappi, 4 (2004): 45-47.
• “La Nuova Europa”, Varlam Šalamov, la poesia come destino, it. transl. byAngela Dioletta Siclari, 3 (2006): 41-49.
• “Lo straniero”, V. Šalamov, Poesie, it. transl. by Angela Dioletta Siclari, 131 (2011): 5-10.

Autobiographical prose and non-fiction. Correspondence with Boris Pasternak

• Šalamov V., La quarta Vologda, ed. by Anna Raffetto, Adelphi, Milano 2001 (2010²).
• Šalamov V., Pasternak B., Parole salvate dalle fiamme. Lettere 1952-1956. E Ricordi di V. Šalamov, ed. by Luciana Montagnani, R. Archinto, Milano 1993 (2009²).
• Šalamov V., Alcune mie vite: documenti segreti e racconti inediti, a cura di Francesco Bigazzi, Sergio Rapetti e Irina Sirotinskaja, Mondadori, Milano 2009.
• Šalamov V., Višera: antiromanzo, introd. by Roberto Saviano, it. transl. by Claudia Zonghetti, Adelphi, Milano 2010.
• Šalamov V., I libri della mia vita; Tavola di moltiplicazione per i giovani poeti, it. transl. by Anastasia Pasquinelli e Walter Minella, Ibis, Como-Pavia 2012.

Foreign editions

• Schalanow W., Artikel 58, Die Aufzeichnungen des Häftlings Schalanow, Friedrich Middelhauve Verlag, Köln 1967.
• Chalamov V., Article 58: Mèmoires du Prissonier Chalanov, trad. par Marie-Louise Ponty, Gallimard, Paris 1969.
• Chalamov V., Rècits de Kolyma, trad. par Katia Kerel & Olivier Simon, Denoël, Paris 1969.
• Scammell M., Russia’s Other Writers. An Anthology of Samizdat, Longman, London 1970.
• Schalamow W., Kolyma: Insel im Archipel, Übers. von Gisela Drohla, Langen-Müller, München 1975.
• Šalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy, pred. Michaila Gellera, Overseas Publications Interchange, London 1978.
• Chalamov V., Récits de Kolyma, voll. I-III (Kolyma I: Recits de la vie des camps; Kolyma II: La nuit; Kolyma III: L’homme transi), préf. Andrei Siniavski, trad. par Catherine Fournier, Librairie François Maspero, Paris 1980-1982 (1986²).
• Shalamov V., The Kolyma Tales, trans. and pref. by John Glad, W. W. Norton, New York 1980.
• Shalamov V., Graphite, trans. and pref. by John Glad, W. W. Norton, New York 1981.
• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy, pred. Michaila Gellera, YMCA press, Paris 1982 (1985).
• Shalamov V., Voskreshenie listvennitsy, s prilozheniem “Kratkogo zhizneopisanija Varlama Shalamova, sostavlennogo im samim” YMCA press, Paris 1985.
• Shalamov V., The Kolyma Tales, trans. by John Glad, Penguin Books, New York 1994.
• Chalamov V., Récits de la Kolyma, trad. par Sophie Benech, Catherine Fournier, Luba Jurgenson, préface de Luba Jurgenson, Éd. Verdier, Paris 2003.
• Schalamow W., Durch den Schnee. Erzählungen aus Kolyma (2007); Linkes Ufer (2008); Künstler der Schaufel (2010); Die Auferweckung der Lärche (2011), Übers. von Gabriele Leupold (Hg.), Nachwort, Glossar und Anm. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin.
• Shalàmov V., Relatos de Kolimá (2007); La orilla izquierda (2009); El artista de la pala (2010);. La resurrección del alerce (2011); El guante o RK-2t (2013); Ensayos sobre el mundo del hampa (2017), trad. Ricardo San Vicente, Minúscula, Barcelona.
• Shalamov V., Kolyma Stories, trans. by D. Rayfield, NYRB Classics, New York 2018.
• Shalamov V., Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, trans. by D. Rayfield, NYRB Classics, New York 2020.

Soviet editions

• Shalamov V., Proza, Stikhi, “Novyi Mir”, 6 (1988): 106-151.
• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy, “Na severe dal’nem”, 2 (1988): 3-76.
• Shalamov V., Dva rasskaza, “Moskva”, 9 (1988): 133-138.
• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy, “Iunost’”, 10 (1988): 36-53.
• Shalamov V., Iz Kolymskikh rasskazov, in Zarok: Povest’, rasskazy, vospominaniia, Molodaia Gvardiia, Moskva 1989: 299-430.
• Shalamov V., Novaia proza: iz chernovykh zapisei 70-ikh godov, “Novyi mir”, 12 (1989): 3-71.
• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy, in Podvig (pril. k zhurnalu “Sel’skaia Molodezh’”, 4 (1989): 5-145.

Russian editions

• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy v dvukh tomakh, pod red. I. P. Sirotinskaia, Russkaia Kniga, Moskva 1992.
• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy v dvukh tomakh, I. P. Sirotinskaia (sost., avtor vstupitel’noj stat’i), Nashe nasledie, Moskva 1992.
• Shalamov V., Kolymskie rasskazy, Sovetskaia Rossiia, Moskva 1992.
• Shalamov V., Vospominaniia, podgot. teksta i publ. I. P. Sirotinskaia, “Znamia”, 4 (1993): 114-170.
• Shalamov V., Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrëkh tomakh, sost. i red. I. P. Sirotinskoi, “Kolymskie rasskazy”, Chudozhestvennaia Literatura-Vagrius, Moskva 1998.
• Shalamov V., Novaia kniga: Vospominaniia, zapisnye knizhki, perepiska, sledstvennye dela, pod red. I. P. Sirotinskaia, Moskva 2004.

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• Levi P., Dai Lager di Stalin, “La Stampa”, collana “Tuttolibri”, 25th September 1976.
• Strada V., Se il lager diventa uno specchio, “la Repubblica”, 20th October 1976.
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• Mal’cev Ju., L’altra letteratura (1957-76). La letteratura del samizdat da Pasternak a Solženicyn, La casa di Matriona, Milano 1976: 174-182.
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• Sinatti P., Voci dal girone di ghiaccio, “Domenica”, n. 39, 9th February 1992.
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• Mieli P., Herling, Einaudi e il giallo della prefazione, “La Stampa”, 23rd May 1999.
• Fertilio D., Herling – Il mio Salamov censurato, “Il Corriere della Sera”, 24th May 1999.
• Bo V., Ma con lo stalinismo abbiamo fatto i conti, “La Stampa”, 25th May 1999.
• Strada V., E Solgenitsin punge Salamov:“Nostalgico della Rivoluzione”, “Corriere della sera”, 29th May 1999.
• Sinatti P., Fino a dove è ammesso ricordare? Affaire Shalamov, “Domenica”, 30th May 1999.
• De Michelis C., Gulag e lager, arcipelaghi lontani, “Il Manifesto”, 4th June 1999.
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• Amicone L., Il pelo (e il vizio) di Einaudi, interview to Gustav Herling, “Tempi”, 7th July 1999.
• Toker L., Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2000: 148-149.
• Malcovati F., L’ultima nudità è la più terribile, “L’Indice dei Libri del Mese”, 12 (1999): 7.
• Sinatti P., Disonora il padre, “Domenica”, 23rd September 2001.
• Strada V., Kolyma, gelida sorella di Auschwitz, “Corriere della sera”, 27th November 2001.
• Citati P., Salamov. Come si può distruggere un uomo torturandolo al di là di ogni limite, “la Repubblica”, 12th September 2001.
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• Sinatti P., Il centenario di Varlam Shalamov, il condannato, “Il Sole 24 Ore”, 17th June 2007.
• Garzonio S., Varlam Šalamov, in Dizionario del Comunismo, v. 2, Einaudi, Torino 2007: 380-381.
• Toker L., Samizdat and the Problem of Authorial Control: The Case of Varlam Shalamov, “Poetics Today”, 29.4 (2008): 735-758.
• Citati P., La malattia dell’infinito. La letteratura del Novecento, Mondadori, Milano 2008.
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