Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam
People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of the human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from non-existence disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the questioner: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.
What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boilermaker - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could be kicked out - but where? The taiga is far away, our village, "business trip" in Kolyma, it's like an island in the taiga world. I could hardly drag my legs, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed to me endless, and I sat down to rest more than once. I still remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried now on my shoulder, now by drag, holding by one handle, seemed to me a load of incredible weight.
I have never been able to boil water in time, to get titanium to boil for dinner.
But none of the workers - from the freemen, they were all yesterday's prisoners - did not pay attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.
We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.
I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - trimmings, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a "free" cauldron. No, our freemen didn't have yesterday's soup.
In our tent there were two guns, two shotguns. Partridges were not afraid of people, and at first they beat the bird right from the threshold of the tent. Prey was baked whole in the ashes of a fire or boiled when carefully plucked. Down-feather - on the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra money from the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted, plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter cans hung from fires. From these mysterious birds, I have never found any remnants. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, sucked out all the bird bones without a trace. It was also one of the wonders of the taiga.
Text provided by LitRes LLC.
You can safely pay for the book with a Visa, MasterCard, Maestro bank card, from a mobile phone account, from a payment terminal, in an MTS or Svyaznoy salon, via PayPal, WebMoney, Yandex.Money, QIWI Wallet, bonus cards or another method convenient for you.
Consider Shalamov's collection, on which he worked from 1954 to 1962. Let's describe its brief content. "Kolyma Tales" is a collection, the plot of which is a description of the camp and prison life of the Gulag prisoners, their tragic destinies, similar to one another, in which chance rules. The author constantly focuses on hunger and satiety, painful dying and recovery, exhaustion, moral humiliation and degradation. You will learn more about the issues raised by Shalamov by reading the summary. "Kolyma stories" is a collection that is a reflection of what the author experienced and saw over the 17 years he spent in prison (1929-1931) and Kolyma (from 1937 to 1951). The photo of the author is presented below.
The author recalls his comrades from the camps. We will not list their names, as we are compiling a summary. "Kolyma stories" is a collection in which artistry and documentary are intertwined. However, all the murderers are given real names in the stories.
Continuing the story, the author describes how the prisoners died, what torments they experienced, talks about their hopes and behavior in "Auschwitz without ovens", as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, but few survived and did not break morally.
Let us dwell on the following curious story, which we could not help but describe, making up a summary. "Kolyma Tales" is a collection in which the author, who has not sold or betrayed anyone, says that he has worked out a formula for protecting his own existence. It consists in the fact that a person can survive if he is ready to die at any moment, he can commit suicide. But later he realizes that he only built a comfortable shelter for himself, since it is not known what you will become at a decisive moment, whether you will have enough not only mental strength, but also physical.
Kipreev, an engineer-physicist arrested in 1938, not only was able to withstand the interrogation with a beating, but even attacked the investigator, as a result of which he was put in a punishment cell. But all the same, they are trying to get him to give false testimony, threatening to arrest his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continues to prove to everyone that he is not a slave, like all prisoners, but a man. Thanks to his talent (he fixed the broken one and found a way to restore burnt out light bulbs), this hero manages to avoid the most difficult work, but not always. It is only by a miracle that he survives, but the moral shock does not let him go.
Shalamov, who wrote the Kolyma Tales, a summary of which interests us, testifies that the camp corruption affected everyone to one degree or another. It was carried out in various forms. Let us describe in a few words one more work from the collection "Kolyma stories" - "On the show". A summary of his story is as follows.
Two thieves play cards. One loses and asks to play on credit. Exasperated at some point, he orders an unexpectedly imprisoned intellectual, who happened to be among the spectators, to hand over his sweater. He refuses. One of the thieves "finishes" him, and the thieves get the sweater anyway.
We turn to the description of another work from the collection "Kolyma stories" - "At night". A brief summary of it, in our opinion, will also be interesting to the reader.
Two prisoners sneak to the grave. The body of their comrade was buried here in the morning. They take off the dead man's linen in order to exchange it tomorrow for tobacco or bread, or sell it. Disgust for the clothes of the deceased is replaced by the thought that perhaps tomorrow they will be able to smoke or eat a little more.
There are a lot of works in the collection "Kolyma stories". "Carpenters", the summary of which we have omitted, follows the story "Night". We invite you to familiarize yourself with it. The product is small in size. The format of one article, unfortunately, does not allow describing all the stories. Also, a very small work from the collection "Kolyma stories" - "Berries". A summary of the main and most interesting, in our opinion, stories is presented in this article.
Defined by the author as slave camp labor - another form of corruption. The prisoner, exhausted by him, cannot work out the norm, labor turns into torture and leads to slow death. Dugaev, the convict, is getting weaker and weaker because of the 16-hour working day. He pours, kaylit, carries. In the evening, the caretaker measures what he has done. The figure of 25%, named by the caretaker, seems very large to Dugaev. His hands, head, aching calves are unbearable. The prisoner does not even feel hunger anymore. Later, he is called to the investigator. He asks: "Name, surname, term, article." The soldiers take the prisoner every other day to a remote place surrounded by a fence with barbed wire. At night, the sound of tractors can be heard from here. Dugaev guesses why he was brought here, and understands that life is over. He regrets only that he suffered in vain for an extra day.
You can talk for a very long time about such a collection as Kolyma Tales. A summary of the chapters of the works is for informational purposes only. We bring to your attention the following story - "Rain".
The poet-prisoner, who was considered the first poet of the 20th century in our country, dies. He lies on the bunk, in the depths of their bottom row. The poet dies for a long time. Sometimes a thought comes to him, for example, that someone stole bread from him, which the poet put under his head. He is ready to seek, fight, swear... However, he no longer has the strength to do so. When a daily ration is put into his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucks it, tries to gnaw and tear with loose scurvy teeth. When a poet dies, he is not written off for another 2 days. During the distribution, the neighbors manage to get bread for him as if it were alive. They arrange for him to raise his hand like a puppet.
Merzlyakov, one of the heroes of the collection "Kolmysk Stories", a summary of which we are considering, a convict of large build, understands that he is failing at general work. He falls, cannot get up and refuses to take the log. First, he is beaten by his own, then by the escorts. He is brought to the camp with lower back pain and a broken rib. After recovering, Merzlyakov does not stop complaining and pretends that he cannot straighten up. He does this in order to delay the discharge. He is sent to the surgical department of the central hospital, and then to the nervous one for research. Merzlyakov has a chance to be written off due to illness. He tries his best not to be exposed. But Pyotr Ivanovich, a doctor, himself a former convict, exposes him. Everything human in him replaces the professional. He spends the bulk of his time precisely exposing those who feign. Pyotr Ivanovich is looking forward to the effect that the case with Merzlyakov will produce. The doctor first makes him anesthetized, during which he manages to unbend Merzlyakov's body. A week later, the patient is prescribed shock therapy, after which he asks to be discharged himself.
Andreev enters quarantine, having contracted typhus. The position of the patient compared to the work in the mines gives him a chance to survive, which he hardly hoped for. Then Andreev decides to stay here as long as possible, and then, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where death, beatings, hunger. Andreev does not respond to the roll call before sending the recovered to work. He manages to hide in this way for quite a long time. The transit line is gradually emptying, and finally Andreev's turn comes. But now it seems to him that he has won the battle for life, and if now there will be dispatches, then only for local, close business trips. But when a truck with a group of prisoners who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms crosses the line separating long-distance and short-range business trips, Andreev realizes that fate has laughed at him.
In the photo below - on the house in Vologda, where Shalamov lived.
In Shalamov's stories, illness and hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot. Ekaterina Glovatskaya, a prisoner, is taken to the hospital. This beauty immediately attracted Zaitsev, the doctor on duty. He knows that she is in a relationship with the convict Podshivalov, his acquaintance, who leads the local amateur art circle, the doctor still decides to try his luck. As usual, he begins with a medical examination of the patient, with auscultation of the heart. However, male interest is replaced by medical concern. In Glovatsky, he discovers This is a disease in which every careless movement can provoke death. The authorities, who made it a rule to separate lovers, once sent the girl to a penal female mine. The head of the hospital, after the doctor's report about her illness, is sure that these are the machinations of Podshivalov, who wants to detain his mistress. The girl is discharged, but she dies during loading, which Zaitsev warned about.
The author testifies that after the Great Patriotic War, prisoners began to arrive in the camps, who fought and went through captivity. These people are of a different temper: able to take risks, courageous. They only believe in weapons. Camp slavery did not corrupt them, they were not yet exhausted to the point of losing their will and strength. Their "guilt" was that these prisoners were captured or surrounded. It was clear to one of them, Major Pugachev, that they had been brought here to die. Then he gathers strong and determined, to match himself, prisoners who are ready to die or become free. Escape is prepared all winter. Pugachev realized that after surviving the winter, only those who managed to bypass the common work could escape. One by one, the participants in the conspiracy are moving into service. One of them becomes a cook, the other becomes a cult trader, the third repairs weapons for the guards.
One spring day, at 5 am, they knocked on the watch. The attendant admits the prisoner-cook, who, as usual, came for the keys to the pantry. The cook strangles him, and another prisoner changes into his uniform. The same thing happens with other attendants who returned a little later. Then everything happens according to Pugachev's plan. The conspirators burst into the security room and take possession of the weapon, shooting the guard on duty. They stock up on provisions and put on military uniforms, holding suddenly awakened fighters at gunpoint. Leaving the territory of the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, drop the driver off and drive until the gas runs out. Then they go to the taiga. Pugachev, waking up at night after many months of captivity, recalls how in 1944 he escaped from a German camp, crossed the front line, survived interrogation in a special department, after which he was accused of espionage and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He also recalls how emissaries of General Vlasov came to the German camp, who recruited Russians, convincing them that the captured soldiers for the Soviet regime were traitors to the Motherland. Then Pugachev did not believe them, but soon he himself was convinced of this. He looks lovingly at his comrades sleeping beside him. A little later, a hopeless battle ensues with the soldiers who surrounded the fugitives. Almost all of the prisoners die, except for one, who is cured after a severe wound in order to be shot. Only Pugachev manages to escape. He is hiding in a bear den, but he knows that they will find him too. He does not regret what he did. His last shot is to himself.
So, we examined the main stories from the collection, authored by Varlam Shalamov ("Kolyma stories"). The summary introduces the reader to the main events. You can read more about them on the pages of the work. The collection was first published in 1966 by Varlam Shalamov. "Kolyma Tales", a summary of which you now know, appeared on the pages of the New York edition of "New Journal".
In New York in 1966, only 4 stories were published. The following year, 1967, 26 stories by this author, mostly from the collection we are interested in, were translated into German in the city of Cologne. During his lifetime, Shalamov never published the collection "Kolyma Tales" in the USSR. The summary of all chapters, unfortunately, is not included in the format of one article, since there are a lot of stories in the collection. Therefore, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the rest.
In addition to those described above, we will tell about one more work from the collection "Kolyma Stories" - Its summary is as follows.
Shestakov, an acquaintance of the narrator, did not work at the mine in the face, since he was a geological engineer, and he was taken to the office. He met with the narrator and said that he wanted to take the workers and go to the Black Keys, to the sea. And although the latter understood that this was not feasible (the path to the sea is very long), he nevertheless agreed. The narrator reasoned that Shestakov probably wants to hand over all those who will participate in this. But the promised condensed milk (to overcome the path, it was necessary to eat) bribed him. Going to Shestakov's, he ate two cans of this delicacy. And then suddenly he said that he had changed his mind. A week later, other workers fled. Two of them were killed, three were tried a month later. And Shestakov was transferred to another mine.
We recommend reading other works in the original. Shalamov wrote Kolyma Tales very talentedly. The summary ("Berries", "Rain" and "Children's Pictures" we also recommend reading in the original) conveys only the plot. The author's style, artistic merits can only be appreciated by getting acquainted with the work itself.
Not included in the collection "Kolyma stories" "Sentence". We did not describe the summary of this story for this reason. However, this work is one of the most mysterious in Shalamov's work. Fans of his talent will be interested to get acquainted with him.
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam
People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunks, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from nothingness disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.
What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boilermaker - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could be kicked out - but where? The taiga is far away, our village, "business trip" in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could hardly drag my legs, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed to me endless, and I sat down to rest more than once. I still remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried now on my shoulder, now by drag, holding by one handle, seemed to me a load of incredible weight.
I have never been able to boil water in time, to get titanium to boil for dinner.
But none of the workers from the freemen, they were all yesterday's prisoners, did not pay attention to whether the water was boiling or not.
Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.
We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.
I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - trimmings, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a "free" cauldron. No, our freemen didn't have yesterday's soup.
In our tent there were two guns, two shotguns. Partridges were not afraid of people, and at first they beat the bird right from the threshold of the tent. Prey was baked whole in the ashes of a fire or boiled when carefully plucked. Down-feather - on the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra money from the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted, plucked partridges were boiled in tin cans - three liters, hung from the fires. From these mysterious birds, I have never found any remnants. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, sucked out all the bones without a trace. It was also one of the wonders of the taiga.
I have never tasted a morsel of these partridges. Mine were berries, grass roots, rations. And I didn't die. I began to look more and more indifferently, without malice, at the cold red sun, at the mountains, the loaches, where everything: rocks, bends of the stream, larches, poplars - was angular and unfriendly. In the evenings, a cold fog rose from the river, and there was not an hour in the taiga days when I would be warm.
Frostbitten fingers and toes ached, buzzed with pain. The bright pink skin of the fingers remained pink, easily vulnerable. The fingers were forever wrapped in some kind of dirty rags, protecting the hand from a new wound, from pain, but not from infection. Pus oozed from the big toes on both feet, and there was no end to the pus.
I was awakened by a blow to the rail. They were removed from work by a blow to the rail. After eating, I immediately lay down on the bunk, without undressing, of course, and fell asleep. I could see the tent in which I slept and lived as if through a fog - people were moving somewhere, loud swearing arose, fights broke out, there was an instant silence before a dangerous blow. The fights quickly faded away - on their own, no one held back, did not separate, the fight motors simply stalled - and there was a cold night silence with a pale high sky through the holes in the canvas ceiling, with snoring, wheezing, groans, coughing and unconscious curses of the sleeping people.
One night I felt that I heard these groans and wheezing. The sensation was sudden, like a revelation, and did not please me. Later, recalling this moment of surprise, I realized that the need for sleep, oblivion, unconsciousness became less - I slept well, as Moisei Moiseevich Kuznetsov, our blacksmith, a smart one of the smart girls, said.
There was persistent pain in the muscles. What kind of muscles I had then - I don’t know, but the pain in them was, it angered me, did not allow me to distract myself from the body. Then I had something other than anger or anger that exists with anger. There was indifference - fearlessness. I realized that it didn't matter to me whether they would beat me or not, whether they would give me dinner and rations or not. And although in reconnaissance, on an unescorted business trip, they didn’t beat me - they beat me only at the mines - I, remembering the mine, measured my courage by the measure of the mine. With this indifference, this fearlessness, some kind of bridge was thrown over from death. The consciousness that there would be no beating, no beating and no beating, gave birth to new strengths, new feelings.
Indifference was followed by fear - not a very strong fear - the fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of a boiled fryer, a high cold sky and aching pain in worn muscles. I realized that I was afraid to leave here for the mine. I'm afraid that's all. I have never looked for the best of good in my entire life. The meat on my bones grew day by day. Envy was the name of the next feeling that came back to me. I envied my dead comrades - people who died in the thirty-eighth year. I envied the living neighbors who are chewing something, the neighbors who are smoking something. I did not envy the boss, the foreman, the foreman - it was a different world.
Love didn't come back to me. Ah, how far love is from envy, from fear, from anger. How little love people need. Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, comes back last, and does it come back? But not only indifference, envy and fear witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned before pity for people.
As the weakest in this world of pits and exploratory ditches, I worked with a topographer - I dragged a rail and a theodolite behind the topographer. It happened that for the speed of movement the topographer would fit the theodolite straps behind his back, and I got only the lightest rail, painted with numbers. The topographer was one of the prisoners. With him for courage - that summer there were many fugitives in the taiga - the topographer carried a small-caliber rifle, asking for weapons from his superiors. But the rifle only got in the way. And not only because it was an extra thing in our difficult journey. We sat down to rest in a clearing, and the topographer, playing with a small-caliber rifle, took aim at a red-breasted bullfinch, which flew up to take a closer look at the danger, to take it aside. If necessary, sacrifice your life. The female bullfinch was sitting somewhere on her eggs - only this explained the insane courage of the bird. The topographer raised his rifle, and I moved the muzzle aside.
Put away your gun!
- Yes, what are you? Crazy?
"Leave the bird, and that's it."
- I'll report to the boss.
“To hell with you and your boss.
But the topographer did not want to quarrel and did not say anything to the chief. I realized that something important had returned to me.
For many years I have not seen newspapers and books, and long ago I taught myself not to regret this loss. All fifty of my neighbors in the tent, in the ragged canvas tent, felt the same way - not a single newspaper, not a single book appeared in our barracks. The higher authorities - the foreman, the head of intelligence, the foreman - descended into our world without books.
My tongue, a rough mine tongue, was poor, as poor were the feelings that still lived near the bones. Rise, work divorce, lunch, end of work, lights out, citizen boss, let me turn, shovel, pit, I obey, drill, pick, it's cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, rations, leave a smoke - two I managed dozens of words for more than a year. Half of those words were swear words. There was an anecdote in my youth, in childhood, how a Russian managed in a story about a trip abroad with just one word in different intonation combinations. The richness of Russian swearing, its inexhaustible offensiveness, was revealed to me not in childhood and not in youth. A joke with a curse here looked like the language of some institute girl. But I didn't look for other words. I was happy that I didn't have to search for any other words. Whether these other words exist, I did not know. I did not know how to answer this question.
I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, right here - I remember it clearly - under the right parietal bone - a word was born that was completely unsuitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades. I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity:
Maxim! Maxim!
And laughed.
Maxim! - I shouted straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, shouted, not yet understanding the meaning of this word born in me. And if this word is returned, found again, so much the better, so much the better! Great joy filled my whole being.
Maxim!
- That's psycho!
-- Psycho and there is! You are a foreigner, right? asked the mining engineer Vronsky, the same Vronsky, caustically. "Three tobaccos".
Vronsky, let me smoke.
-- No, I do not have.
- Well, at least three tobaccos.
- Three tobaccos? Please.
From a pouch full of shag, three tobaccos were extracted with a dirty fingernail.
-- Foreigner? - The question translated our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, consequences and extensions of the term.
But I didn't care about Vronsky's provocative question. The find was too huge.
-- A maxim!
- Psycho and there is.
The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person went into oblivion, into a dead world. Is it dead? Even the stone did not seem dead to me, not to mention the grass, trees, river. The river was not only the embodiment of life, not only a symbol of life, but life itself. Her eternal movement, incessant roar, some kind of conversation, her own business, which makes the water run downstream through the headwind, breaking through the rocks, crossing the steppes, meadows. The river, which changed the sun-dried, bare bed and, as a barely visible thread of water, made its way somewhere in the stones, obeying its eternal duty, like a stream that had lost hope for the help of heaven - for saving rain. The first thunderstorm, the first downpour - and the water changed its banks, broke rocks, threw trees up and rushed furiously down the same eternal road.
Maxim! I myself did not believe myself, I was afraid, falling asleep, that during the night this word that had returned to me would disappear. But the word did not disappear.
Maxim. Let them rename the river on which our village stood, our business trip "Rio-rita". Why is it better than "Sentence"? The bad taste of the owner of the earth - the cartographer introduced Rio-ritu on the world maps. And it can't be fixed.
There was something Roman, solid, Latin in this word. Ancient Rome for my childhood was the history of political struggle, the struggle of people, and Ancient Greece was the realm of art. Although in ancient Greece there were politicians and murderers, in ancient Rome there were many people of art. But my childhood sharpened, simplified, narrowed and divided these two very different worlds. A maxim is a Roman word. For a week I did not understand what the word "maxim" meant. I whispered this word, shouted it out, frightened and made the neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from heaven, clues, explanations, translations. And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy of Fear - because I was afraid of returning to this world, where there was no return for me. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.
It took many days until I learned to call from the depths of the brain more and more new words, one after another. Each came with difficulty, each arose suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words did not come back in a stream. Each returned singly, without a convoy of other familiar words, and arose first in the language, and then in the brain.
And then the day came when everyone, all fifty workers quit their jobs and ran to the village, to the river, getting out of their pits, ditches, leaving unsawn trees, undercooked soup in the boiler. Everyone ran faster than me, but I hobbled in time, helping myself in this run down the mountain with my hands.
The chief came from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On a huge larch stump that stood at the entrance to the tent, there was a gramophone. The gramophone played, overcoming the hiss of the needle, playing some kind of symphonic music.
And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraers, foremen and hard workers And the boss stood nearby And his expression was as if he had written this music for us, for our remote taiga business trip The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years.
IT WOULD BE WRONG TO REDUCE THE ALL SIGNIFICANCE OF SHALAMOV'S EXPERIENCE ONLY TO PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, SINCE PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ARE A DIRECT CONTINUATION OF SPIRITUAL, AND THERE IS NO SPIRIT ON EARTH TODAY.
FOR THE SPIRIT IS THE ONLY CONDITION FROM THE BEGINNING OF CREATION WHICH WILL ALLOW MAN TO LIVE AN INDEPENDENT LIFE IN NATURE, A LIFE WITHOUT NEEDS. THIS IS CONFIRMED BY ALL THE ANCIENT DOCTRINES AND PRACTICES. BUT HUMANITY HAS NEVER TRYED TO FOLLOW THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE WHOLE HISTORY, WITHOUT TASTING WHAT IT IS.
However, it is impossible here, in connection with the main features of Shalamov’s work, to ignore the facts confirming that society only continues to cover the truth that he himself, by and large, is only a fake masquerade mask, behind which is completely different - its unreliability and THE FULL INSECURE OF HUMAN IN THIS WORLD, WHICH THEY HAVE NOT COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDED THEM. LET'S REMEMBER THE LAST, UNEXPECTED FOR MOST, JUST RINGED REMINDER ALARM CLOCK, WHICH MAN RECEIVED FROM NATURE, AGAIN EXPOSING THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY - JAPAN.
IS IT TIME FOR MAN TO WAKE UP?
REFERENCE:
“Despite the impression you give, less than 8% of the world's undernourished people are left starving as a result of emerging emergencies due to the media. Few people realize that over one billion hungry people on our planet do not make headlines. , which is equal to the population of the United States, Japan, and the European Union combined.They are people of all ages, from infancy, whose mothers cannot produce enough breast milk, to the elderly, who have no relatives who could They are unemployed urban slum dwellers, landless farmers cultivating foreign land, orphaned children of AIDS patients and patients who need special intensive nutrition in order to survive.
4 - Where do the hungry live?
The percentage of people who go hungry is highest in east, central and southern Africa. About three quarters of undernourished people live in rural areas of developing countries with the lowest per capita incomes. However, the number of hungry people in cities has also increased recently.
Of the one billion hungry people on our planet, more than half live in Asia and the Pacific, and about a quarter of the hungry live in sub-Saharan Africa.
5 - Is the number of hungry people in the world decreasing?
While significant progress was made in reducing the number of undernourished people in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the number of undernourished people has slowly but steadily increased in the last decade, according to FAO. In 1995-97 and 2004-2006, their number increased in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. But even in these regions, gains made in the fight against hunger have been reversed by high oil prices and the onset of the global economic crisis."
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam
People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of the human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from non-existence disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the questioner: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.
What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away.
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam
People emerged from non-existence - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat, quilted jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, got up at a cry, dressed and obediently obeyed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of the human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who arose from non-existence disappeared during the day - there were many sites in the coal exploration - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed an Arabic proverb: don't ask and you won't be lied to. It didn't matter to me whether they would lie to me or not, I was outside the truth, outside the lie. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, imbued with deep contempt for the questioner: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn't question or listen to stories.
What remained with me until the end? Malice. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence that has no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boilermaker - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could be kicked out - but where? The taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could hardly drag my legs, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed to me endless, and I sat down to rest more than once. I still remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried now on my shoulder, now by drag, holding by one handle, seemed to me a load of incredible weight.
I have never been able to boil water in time, to get titanium to boil for dinner.
But none of the workers from the freemen, all of them were yesterday's prisoners, did not pay attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.
We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We
...Here is an excerpt from the book.
Only part of the text is open for free reading (restriction of the copyright holder). If you liked the book, the full text can be obtained from our partner's website.
