Language and Resistance

The Russian poet Varlam Shalamov spent almost 25 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, 17 of them in Kolyma, for “counterrevolutionary activities.” One of his Kolyma Stories, published here under the title “Lend-Lease Comes to a Soviet Camp” (these stories have not been published in the Soviet Union but have circulated in samizdat), tells about the arrival, during the war years, of an American bulldozer in one of the Kolyma mining camps and about t...