Sketches of the Criminal World

✍ Scribed by Varlam Shalamov

• Publisher: New York Review Books
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 343 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1681373688

✦ Synopsis

In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches from of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.

Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953 and continued for the next twenty years. In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral...