Okay, I confess I like reading about cold weather more than I do living in it. And lately, I’ve been reading a criminally unknown (in this country) giant of Russian literature, Varlam Shalamov. To my mind, he’s one of the very best short story writers of the last century, and sadly, most of his many, many stories are true. After being imprisoned for counter revolutionary activities, Shalamov survived fifteen grueling years in Stalin’s gulag, much of them working slave labor in a notorious gold mine in the Kolyma basin in the far northeastern corner of the Soviet Union. Shalamov knew the prison cold as intimately, I’d say, as few writers ever have. Here’s a paragraph from “Carpenters”:
The workmen were not allowed to see a thermometer, and they didn’t need one. No matter what the temperature was, they had to go to work. In any case, the old hands could tell almost exactly how many degrees below zero it was. If there was a frosty mist, then it was minus forty centigrade outside; if there was a noise when you breathed out but you could still breathe normally, then it was minus forty-five; if your breath was noisy and you were out of breath, then it was minus fifty. Below fifty-five degrees a gob of spit freezes solid in midair. Spit had been freezing in midair for two weeks.
That’s from a new edition (2018) of Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories, translated by Donald Rayfield and published by New York Review of Books. This first volume alone has 734 pages of mostly brief stories. It’s as if, in re-living these experiences, Shalamov could only write so much before his hands themselves remembered that cold.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He's written two novels, three short story collections, and his essay collection, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Before moving to the region he was acting chair of the MFA writing program at San Francisco State. He's a former member of the Bolinas, CA Volunteer Fire Department and a current member of the Norwich VFD.
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