Grim reminder …

… How the Gulag robbed Varlam Shalamov of his humanity | Prospect Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

That there is no redemption or resolution here is surely one of the reasons why Shalamov never gained the widespread renown achieved by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose own account of camp life in the novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich shocked the world after its publication in 1962. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s title character was straight out of the 19th-century Russian novel, Shalamov’s shifting cast of desolate figures are far more modern creations, far less literary, far less comprehensible. Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan resembles a human being; Shalamov’s heroes have had the humanity beaten out of them.