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Cover of “I racconti di Kolyma”, Savelli editore, 1976. Source: www.memorialitalia.it<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Title: <\/strong><\/em>Kolymskie rasskazy [The Kolyma Stories]
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Author:<\/strong><\/em> Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982)<\/p>\n

Years:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a01954-1973<\/p>\n

Description:
\n<\/strong><\/em>Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories<\/em> 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 <\/em>is a collection of 145 stories divided into six cycles describing the reality of the Soviet labour camps in eastern Siberia.
\nAfter 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 \u201cwhite crematorium\u201d 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<\/em> (Kolymskie tetradi<\/em>, 1949-56), and after his release he began to write the short stories which won him posthumous fame.
\nWhile Shalamov\u2019s poems appeared in the literary journals \u201cZnamia\u201d, \u201cMoskva\u201d and \u201cIunost’\u201d 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published by Sovetskii Pisatel’ from 1961 to 1977, his short stories, which he began to write in 1954, remained unpublished in his homeland until the end of the 1980s.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<\/em><\/a> (cf. \u201cNovyi mir\u201d, 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<\/em>, which appeared in the pages of \u201cSel’skaia molodezh’\u201d in 1965 (cf. Solov’ev 2015).
\nIn 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<\/em> (Artist lopaty<\/em>), The Left Bank<\/em> (Levyi bereg<\/em>) and Resurrection of the Larch<\/em> (Voskreshenie listvennitsy<\/em>) (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, \u201cenjoying warm and immediate success among readers\u201d (Scammell 1970: 18, Mal’cev<\/a> 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 \u201cLes Lettres Nouvelles\u201d through Pinskii’s acquaintances at the French embassy and Natal’ia Stoliarova, a former lager inmate and secretary to Il’ia \u0116renburg (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 emigr\u00e9<\/em> journals who \u201cunderestimated 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\u201d (Rapetti 2015: 207). In New York forty-nine short stories were published in \u201cNovyi Zhurnal\u201d by Roman Gul’ (between 1966 and 1976), in Frankfurt Kaligula<\/em> and Pocherk<\/em> were published in the magazine \u201cPosev<\/a>\u201d (1967) and fifteen short stories were published in \u201cGrani<\/a>\u201d (in 1970, 76-77).\u00a0 In Paris, \u201cVestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo dvizheniia\u201d published Dve vstrechi <\/em>and\u00a0Chuzhoi khleb<\/em> (1968, nos. 89-90) and \u201cLes Lettres Nouvelles\u201d, Berdy Onzhen<\/em> (1968), and in London included in Michael Scammell’s anthology Russia’s Other Writers <\/em>were\u00a0Pocherk<\/em>, under the title A good hand<\/em>, and Kaligula<\/em> (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 H\u00e4ftlings Schalanow<\/em>, which was reissued in 1975 under the title: Kolyma: Insel im Archipel<\/em>) 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).
\nShalamov, 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 \u201cabominable practice\u201d of the \u201cdisgusting fascist magazines\u201d (\u201cfetide rivistucole fasciste\u201d, Sinatti 1992:\u00a0 259) in a letter to the editorial staff of the \u201cLiteraturnaia gazeta\u201d (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<\/em> (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 \u201clong since erased from life\u201d, according to Leona Toker, as the only official record in Russia of the existence of the Kolyma Stories,<\/em>\u00a0it 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).
\nIn Italy until the early 1970s Shalamov was known only to a few specialists, such as Vittorio Strada\u00a0<\/a>and Piero Sinatti<\/a>. His name first appeared in the Italian press in 1971, when the writer Gustaw Herling-Grudzi\u0144ski, a leading figure among Polish emigrants, survivor of the Stalinist Gulag and author of A World Apart<\/em><\/a>, wrote a history of Shalamov\u2019s life, referring to him as \u201ca writer considered by some to be of equal importance to Solzhenitsyn\u201d, for \u201cIl Corriere della Sera\u201d. As new publications appeared in France and Germany, he hoped for an Italian translation of the Kolyma Stories<\/em>, 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\u201d (Herling, 1971).
\nFive years later, Piero Sinatti was responsible for the first Italian translation of the stories: Kolyma. Trenta racconti dai lager staliniani <\/em>(Kolyma. Thirty Stories from Stalinist labour camps<\/em>), published by Savelli in July 1976. Having come across Shalamov\u2019s name \u201calmost by chance\u201d 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 \u201cGrani\u201d and \u201cNovyi zhurnal\u201d, which he had obtained from Irina Alberti, and showed them first to Einaudi<\/a>, 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).
\nThe book – which includes a biographical and critical note on the author, Shalamov’s letter to the newspaper \u201cLiteraturnaia Gazeta\u201d in 1972, the text of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code punishing \u201ccounter-revolutionary activities\u201d, on the basis of which Shalamov was condemned, and a glossary of untranslated Russian terms – was positively reviewed by Strada and Herling (\u201cIl giornale nuovo\u201d), and was the subject of an article by Primo Levi (for \u201cLa Stampa\u201d), which was to cause controversy twenty years later: “\u2026men 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 \u201cinfinite patience\u201d) but without pride” (Levi 1976).
\nLevi denies any similarity between the \u201ctotalitarian twins\u201d 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 \u201cmuch more ferocious and effective terror\u201d.\u00a0 This \u201cone-sided polemic\u201d \u2013 as Strada would call it in 1992 in the \u201cCorriere della Sera\u201d \u2013 \u00a0demonstrates Levi’s failure to understand the stylistic novelty of the Kolyma Stories; <\/em>he considered the \u201cdegradation\u201d and \u201cmute despair\u201d of their author a “weakness” and expression of a desire \u201cfor nothing more than the end of his suffering, he has no star to aim for\u201d.\u00a0 Herling is said to have commented: \u201cPretentious aesthetic considerations to delegitimize a book or an uncomfortable author in its entirety\u201d. He defined the review as \u201cpetty\u201d (\u201cLa Stampa\u201d 1992) and in 1999 wrote: \u201cIt 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\u201d (Herling 1999).
\nThe 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 \u201cas an external event, at least peripheral to European history\u201d that could be pushed \u201cbehind the scenes of consciousness\u201d (Jurgenson-Pieralli 2019). This vision determined the scarce critical attention given to Shalamov in Italy: \u201cThere was an almost total silence around Shalamov’s book and the volume was for us one of the most resounding failures\u201d \u2013 \u00a0declared Savelli’s editorial director, Dino Audino \u2013 “Twenty-three years after Stalin’s death, the Gulag was still a taboo\u201d(\u201cLa Stampa\u201d, 1992).
\nThe \u201ccurtain of silence\u201d that had \u201cconcealed the name-symbol of the Stalinist gulag\u201d (Sinatti, \u201cIl Sole 24 Ore\u201d, 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<\/em> in Russian (103 short stories divided into three cycles: First Death<\/em>, The Virtuoso Shovelman<\/em> and The Left Bank<\/em>) 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<\/em> 1980, Graphite<\/em> 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<\/em> (Voskreshenie listvennitsy<\/em>), a collection of short stories preceded by an autobiographical essay (Kratkoe zhizneopisanie Varlama Shalamova, sostavlennoe im samim<\/em>) and the autobiography The Fourth Vologda<\/em> (Chetvertaia Vologda<\/em>). 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 \u201cLa nuova rivista europea\u201d (Shalamov, Vakhtin and other victims<\/em>), and by Guido Ceronetti who in \u201cLa Stampa\u201d, in 1987, quoted the short story Auntie Polia<\/em> (Tetia Polia<\/em>) and, a year later, compared the Kolyma Stories<\/em> to the works of Kafka and C\u00e9line, authors who \u201cmore than other writers had interpreted and expressed all the horror of the 20th century\u201d.
\nIt was only in the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, that the \u201cdeafness of the Italian intelligentsia\u201d (Sinatti, \u201cIl sole 24 Ore\u201d, 2007) ceased and Shalamov\u2019s work, which appeared for the first time in his homeland from 1988 onwards, in the pages of the magazines \u201cNovyi mir\u201d, \u201cNa severe Dal’nem\u201d, \u201cMoskva\u201d and \u201cIunost’\u201d, attracted the attention of publishers and critics: \u201cIt is of enormous importance that today in the USSR, in a magazine as authoritative as \u201cNovyi Mir” (one million and 150 thousand copies), appear some of Varlam Scialamov’s Kolyma Stories<\/em>, a monument to the victims of the gulag made up of more than one hundred short stories\u201d (Sinatti, \u201cDomenica\u201d, 1988).
\nIn 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\u2019s New Prose<\/em>) and a collection of ten unpublished works from his last cycle, The Glove, or KT-2<\/em>, 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 \u201cNovyi mir\u201d. These include My Prose<\/em>, the title given by the editor to the letter Shalamov wrote to her in 1971, the literary manifesto of his \u201cnew prose\u201d. 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<\/em>, taken from the autobiographical work Vishera: an Antinovel<\/em>, 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 \u201cIl Corriere della Sera\u201d, Strada hoped that \u201ca book of such bitter and high human and literary significance\u201d might find \u201cmore readers open to its authenticity\u201d. Shortly afterwards Ceronetti, praising the recent publications, hoped that the Kolyma Stories<\/em> would be read and welcomed as the work of \u201ca great poet and an extraordinary writer\u201d: “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).
\nThanks to Ceronetti, in 1995, 55 short stories were also published by Adelphi, translated by Marco Binni.\u00a0 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. \u201cThe Adelphi edition has disappointed us\u201d – declared Sinatti (for \u201cDomenica\u201d, 1995) – \u201cit is certainly not … a \u2018wide choice\u2019 from the Sirotinskaia edition, … [which consists of] … two volumes of over a thousand, dense pages, with 145 works\u201d. The disappointment was shared by Herling in the article Memorie dall’inferno – Ma si pu\u00f2 \u2018tagliare\u2019 un capolavoro?<\/em> (Memories from Hell – How can you ‘cut’ a masterpiece?), while the editorial decision was supported by Roberto Calasso as \u201ca very wide choice that does not betray the author\u201d (both articles appeared in \u201cLa Stampa\u201d in March 1995) and by Alfonso Silipo who defined it \u201cthe widest choice so far published in Italian of short stories\u201d in \u201cSlavia\u201d.
\nAlso in the early 1990s, individual short stories appeared in the Sunday supplement of \u201cIl Sole 24 Ore\u201d (Cherry-Brandy<\/em>, 9 February 1992), in \u201cLa Stampa\u201d (The Snake Charmer<\/em>, 25 January 1995) and in \u201cIl Corriere della Sera\u201d (Memory<\/em>, 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.
\nThe world’s first complete translation of Kolyma Stories<\/em> finally appeared in June 1999 translated by Sergio Rapetti<\/a>, for Einaudi as part of the prestigious \u201cI millenni\u201d series, and at the same time in the Einaudi Tascabili-Letteratura (there would be many reprints). \u201cThe Einaudi edition is complete, and in addition, it is as the author had conceived it\u201d wrote Fausto Malcovati for \u201cL’Indice dei Libri del Mese\u201d, praising Rapetti’s translation, \u201cbetter than this could not be done\u201d (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 \u201cthe weight of the historical reasoning\u201d in the preface was \u201cexcessive compared to the literary discussion\u201d. 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 \u0160alamov<\/em> (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).
\nThe affair was widely reported in Italian newspapers: Paolo Mieli wrote about the \u201cmystery of the preface\u201d in \u201cLa Stampa\u201d, describing the Einaudi edition as \u201ca brilliant intuition\u201d, 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 \u201ccertain Italian publishers to seriously and definitively confront what happened in communist countries between 1917 and 1989\u201d. Dario Fertilio also defended Herling and Sinatti in an article for \u201cIl Corriere della Sera\u201d with the headline Il mio Salamov censurato<\/em> (My Censored Shalamov): \u201cIs it really possible that, at the turn of the century, ideological curtains continue to be drawn around facts?\u201d. The following day, Vittorio Bo replied in \u201cLa Stampa\u201d, emphasising the historical importance of Einaudi’s edition for Italian readers and supporting the editorial decision: \u201cin our … opinion, the interview does not succeed in presenting the work, that is to say, in providing a synthesis and broadening its horizons\u201d. Sinatti himself took part in the debate, revealing that the publisher had suggested he cut the passages dealing with the \u201cmisunderstanding of the Gulag phenomenon\u201d and the opinions of Primo Levi, Italo Calvino and Norberto Bobbio: \u201cWe 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<\/em> until the 1990s or delayed full recognition of Shalamov’s greatness\u201d. The case of the censored preface is indicative of the unease with which Shalamov’s work was received in Italy; as Battista wrote in \u201cIl Corriere della Sera\u201d, the stories risked being an “ideological embarrassment\u201d in some quarters.\u00a0 However, the scandal also drew attention to the Kolyma Stories<\/em> and Adelphi took advantage of the “embarrassing” incident to reissue its incomplete edition of the book \u201cwrapped in a paper band that, without citing the source, scream[ed] a phrase taken from Gustaw Herling’s expunged introduction\u201d (Luigi Amicone, interview with Gustaw Herling, \u201cTempi\u201d, 1999).
\nIn the 2000s, in addition to the various editions of Kolyma Stories<\/em> (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<\/em>, published by Adelphi and edited by Anna Raffetto, and a collection of one hundred poems published in 2006 by the La Casa di Matriona<\/a> with a preface and translation by Angela Dioletta Siclari. A further acknowledgement of Shalamov\u2019s genius in Italy, beyond the discipline of Slavic studies, is found in article for \u201cLa Repubblica\u201d (12 September 2001) by Pietro Citati, whose work was later included in the anthology of 20th century classics, La malattia dell’infinito<\/em> (The Malady of the Infinite) in 2008, which describes the stories as \u201csplinters of wounded flesh, removed from time: events and images captured in their absolute presence\u201d and their author as \u201ca great prose poet\u201d.
\nBetween 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 \u201cIl Sole 24 Ore\u201d, two other important books appeared. Mondadori<\/a> published Alcune mie vite. Documenti segreti e racconti inediti<\/em> (Several of My Lives. <\/em>Secret documents and unpublished stories<\/em>), 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 \u201cZnamia\u201d on the occasion of the writer’s definitive rehabilitation in 2000 (the volume was widely covered by \u201cIl Manifesto\u201d with two articles by Stefano Garzonio and Antonio Moscato). Adelphi published Vi\u0161era. Antiromanzo<\/em> (Vishera: an Antinovel), edited by Claudia Zonghetti and with an introduction by Roberto Saviano, La conferma del bene<\/em> (A Confirmation of good). The author of Gomorra said that \u201creading Shalamov changed my life\u201d, and defined Kolyma as \u201ca hell that readers do not know as well as Auschwitz\u201d, because \u201csilence has fallen around the atrocities of Soviet labour camps\u201d (Saviano 2010).
\nA year earlier, on 11 November 2009, Saviano, a guest on the television show presented by Fabio Fazio, \u201cChe tempo che fa\u201d, had helped to make the Kolyma Stories<\/em> known to the general public by declaring: \u201cI 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\u201d. In the following months, Shalamov\u2019s 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 \u201cSaviano effect\u201d, the Kolyma Stories<\/em> 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. <\/em>Tavola di moltiplicazione per giovani poeti <\/em>(The books of my life. Table of multiplication for young poets) with two essays by Shalamov (Slishkom knizhnoe<\/em> and Tablitsa umnozheniia dlia molodykh po\u0117tov<\/em>) translated by Anastasia Pasquinelli and Walter Minella, an expanded edition of the text that appeared in 1994.
\nMore recently, between 2014 and 2015, an exhibition on the life and work of Shalamov, organised by Literaturhaus Berlin and Memorial Italia entitled, \u201cLife or Literature. Varlam Shalamov\u201d, 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 (\u201cRassegna sovietica\u201d, \u201cArca\u201d, \u201cSlavia\u201d) edited by Gario Zappi for Giometti & Antonello (Quaderni della Kolyma<\/em>, April 2021) is worthy of note.
\nAlthough 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<\/em> (Beyond the Thaw, 2002); Angela Dioletta Siclari’s essay introducing the collection of poems (La concezione dell’arte<\/em>, 2006); Piero Sinatti’s article, Fortuna di \u0160alamov in Italia<\/em> (The Italian reception of Shalamov, \u201cLo Straniero\u201d 136, 2011); the introduction to the 2009 volume Alcune mie vite<\/em> (Several of My Lives) and Sergio Rapetti’s essay, Varlam \u0160alamov. La luce della sofferenza<\/em> (Varlam Shalamov. The Light of Suffering, 2015).
\nFull translations of the Kolyma Stories<\/em> have also appeared in France (R\u00e9cits de la Kolyma<\/em>, Verdier, 2003), Germany (Erz\u00e4hlungen aus Kolyma<\/em>, Matthes&Seitz, in four volumes, 2007-2011), and Spain (Relatos de Kolim\u00e1<\/em>, Min\u00fascula, 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<\/em>, Norton).
\nThe history of the Italian reception of the Kolyma Stories –<\/em> \u201cslow and difficult, as the process of discovery, reconstruction and reading of Shalamov\u2019s literary legacy has been and still is” (Garzonio, \u201cIl Manifesto\u201d) – demonstrates the \u201ctenacious vitality of a work of art capable of speaking to the heart and intelligence of generations of readers\u201d (Rapetti 2015: 214). Having passed almost unnoticed in the 1970s, Shalamov\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s poetry will also be studied and translated.<\/p>\n

Anna De Ponti
\n<\/em><\/strong>[30th June 2021]\n

Translation by Anna De Ponti<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Italian language editions<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Kolyma Stories<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n