Varlam Shalamov completed six cycles of stories, well over a thousand pages, inspired by his eighteen years as a slave in the Gulag's farthest northern camps. The tales are graphic, brutal, abrupt—intended, in his words, as “slaps in the face of Stalinism.” In the volume under review, Donald Rayfield has translated the first three cycles; cycles 4 through 6 followed in 2020. Although fame came late to Shalamov (1907–82), his intimate circle was of the highest quality. Released from the Gulag in 1951, he became a close friend of Nadezhda Mandelstam, corresponded with Boris Pasternak, published a few poems, and circulated several of his camp tales in samizdat. He died in Moscow, crippled with Ménière's disease, deaf and almost blind.During his lifetime, Shalamov as literary artist knew largely scandal. When, in 1966, the Kolyma stories began to appear in the New York émigré venue Novyi zhurnal, randomly ordered and often heavily edited, Shalamov was outraged. (Inaccuracies in the overall fluent Rayfield translations continue to plague his legacy today.) But the scandals were not limited to aesthetic matters. Shalamov would not play by the Cold-War tenets being codified by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: that twentieth-century Russian communism was a sinful falling away from religious truth, that redemption was possible only by returning to archaic nationalism, and that suffering (of individuals and nations) guaranteed spiritual superiority. In 1962, Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to world acclaim, and asked Shalamov to collaborate with him on a comprehensive history of the Gulag. Shalamov brusquely refused. He considered himself a poet and a philosopher, and let it be known that Solzhenitsyn, in his opinion, was a “businessman” (delets), a social activist, a publicist, and an opportunist. Solzhenitsyn never forgave him. Shalamov, for his part, never renounced his avant-garde enthusiasms and antiauthoritarian modernism of the 1920s. Furthermore, he added, “I am not religious. I don't have the gift. It's like a musical ear: either one has it, or not.”So, what sort of ear did Shalamov have, what did he hear? First, that unfreedom and deprivation over long stretches of time tune up the animal instincts, not the spiritual ones. Shalamov's first prison term (1929–32) was followed by rearrest in 1937 and a decade of goldmining on the dreaded Kolyma pit face; then, near death, his life was saved by assignment as a medical attendant in a camp hospital. In “Unconverted” (1963), the narrator, a paramedic-in-training, receives on loan from his supervising doctor (who had lost her husband and both her sons in the war) a volume of Alexander Blok's poetry and a New Testament. The narrator devours Blok but cannot connect with the Bible. “Is the only way out of human tragedy the religious one?” he asks the doctor. Rather the contrary, the narrator thinks. He is more impressed with the practical, physiological know-how of the kitchen server Shura, five months pregnant by an obliging fellow prisoner and thus soon eligible for release. An inmate lives by the body, losing all long-term curiosity, all appetite for thought, staying alive on a hybrid of anger and indifference. Kolyma made friendships impossible and taught the human creature three lessons: “don't trust, don't be afraid, don't ask.” Astonishingly, one could go on living for years “like a tree, a stone, a dog.” This principled materialism generated its own moral code and catalog of the passions. The final entry in cycle 2, the 1965 story “Maxim” (dedicated to Nadezhda Mandelstam), tries to relay this semiconscious life “through a mist” that persists even after the expectation of dying recedes: no conversions, revelations, or epiphanies. Malice and envy remain until the end because these human feelings lie “closest to the bone”; sometimes there is also a flicker of fear. The one feeling that cannot come back is love.Shalamov's ear picks up other sounds too, not of the animal sort. He acknowledges heroes. Among them are idealistic martyrs of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) movement, successful terrorists as well as those like Maria Dobroliubova who would rather kill herself than target another. These are honorable truth-tellers, who could “keep their word as well as their lie.” A consistent, courageous true believer, even in error, could remain decent to the end. What infuriates Shalamov is mass repression—stupid, arbitrary, faceless, wasteful—in which “politics doesn't know the concept of guilt.” Or, for that matter, the concept of economy, a sense of how human energy should be spent. Workers blow off their limbs to avoid assignments with impossibly high quotas (in “The Businessman,” however, a successful self-mutilator is plagued by phantom pain); injuries are faked and fantastical ingenuity is deployed, at absurd levels of cost, to expose the fakery. Alongside this utter squandering of resources there is fanatical record-keeping; “certificates of search” and a scrap of paper, a “receipt,” are issued for each item confiscated.In the predigital prison age, such significant scraps of paper could be heroically—if never triumphantly—manipulated. Shalamov relates one such event in his 1965 story “Lida.” The autobiographical narrator Krist, first arrested at age nineteen and now a paramedic, manages to free a female prisoner, Lida, from the clutches of her camp boss by accepting her into the hospital. She gets work there as a copying clerk. As his own release time approaches, Krist worries that his identifying “letters,” the KRTD (Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity) stamped in his document, would make reentry into life impossible. He seeks out Lida. With the fewest of words, he asks her if she could “leave out the T” when preparing his exit papers. Knowing the risks, she instantly nods yes. But “Krist never thanked her. For a favor like that you don't get thanked. Gratitude is not the right word.” Although friendship might not be possible in the Gulag, the isolated good deed does leave its mark. It took patience and intense artistic purpose to wait them out and write them down, but Shalamov had both. Another of his autobiographical narrators registers deep satisfaction upon receiving “The Highest Praise” (title of a 1964 story, the one that contains the Martyrdom of Maria Dobroliubova) from another prisoner, an elderly and respected SR: “You are able to do time, you can do it.”“Doing time,” then, means exiting the type of time in which we are active agents—and committing to the hard physical labor of creating literature. In book 3 (the third cycle of stories) there is an odd, powerful prose poem from 1963, “The Duck.” Too exhausted to fly south, a duck is resting on the ice. Too exhausted to hunt it down, a prisoner is feebly running toward it, waving a branch. The starving man's goal is not to roast the duck and eat it, but to capture it as a bribe for his foreman, who is compiling a list of prisoners to deport the next day, in hopes that his name might be omitted from that list. Both parties, hunter and prey, are disoriented. But then the picture opens out. The foreman (who is watching the paralyzed pursuit from his cabin) hopes to use the duck to bribe the clerk to get him off the deportation list as well; the clerk, however, is also watching. He wants the duck in order to bribe the big boss. Meanwhile the duck continues to die on its unfrozen patch of water as the story runs out of energy, its participants out of time. It is often noticed in commentary on Shalamov that he is, above all, against passive spectatorship. But how can words alone, even when authored by a witness and survivor, communicate an experience? As readers of these stories, we are all sitting ducks for that unanswerable question.