Kolyma Tales

The book is considered Shalamov's magnum opus as a writer and one of the important works of Russian 20th-century literature[broken anchor].

He was able to publish five collections of poetry during his lifetime, and was well known as a poet before "Kolyma Tales" established his reputation as a Gulag writer.

In 2013, the Soviet scholar David Satter wrote that "Shalamov's short stories are the definitive chronicle of those camps".

[3] Shalamov described his writing style as an emotional non-fiction, where every story "is absolutely true" and has "the authenticity of the document".

His big hands, swollen by starvation, with their bloodless white fingers and dirty, overgrown, curling nails, lay exposed on his chest, despite the cold.

His gloves had been stolen a long time ago.Shalamov said he considered his teachers to be modernist writers Andrei Bely and Aleksey Remizov.

Shalamov himself thought that after the crimes and key moments of the 20th century, art - and the human being itself - must be rethought, and that writers should find a new form, adequate to it: "In the new prose - after Hiroshima, after Auschwitz and Kolyma, after wars and revolutions - everything didactic should be rejected.