Varlam Shalamov

(1907 - 1982)

While a student at Moscow University in 1929, Varlam Shalamov was accused of counterrevolutionary activities and sentenced to hard labor in the Ural Mountains. Six years after his release in 1931, he was rearrested and spent a further fifteen years toiling under brutal conditions in the labor camps of the Kolyma River basin in northeastern Siberia. Upon his return, Shalamov began writing his Kolyma Stories, a collection of over a hundred short stories based on his gulag experiences.