Word: shalamov
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...Camps. She then lays out in sober detail the daily life, work and death of the prisoners, their survival mechanisms and their resistance. She has read just about everything written on the subject. This includes the brilliant memoirs of Lev Razgon, the bleak searing stories and poems of Varlaam Shalamov, the son of an orthodox missionary to Alaska who spent over 20 years in the most horrific of the camps. (He died, largely unrecognized, in misery in Moscow in 1982. There are few happy endings to Gulag stories.) But she makes superb use of the Gulag records and internal reports...
Some of the Soviet Union's most important writing has never been published there at all. Instead, it circulates widely from hand to hand in the process known as samizdat (literally, self-publishing). Varlam Shalamov's lapidary concentration-camp stories, some of which were recently published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton under the title Kolyma Tales, have been in samizdat for 20 years. Currently the most prized samizdat work is Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki. The account of a phantasmagoric drunken excursion on a suburban train, Yerofeyev's novella may be the most innovative piece...
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