Kolyma Tales is a collection of short stories written between 1954 and 1973 by the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov about life in the gulag of Kolyma. Shalamav, who himself spent many years as a prisoner in the gulag, describes the daily lives and experiences of prisoners. Unlike other gulag accounts, such as the famous accounts by Solzhenitsyn, the Kolyma Tales are more fictionalized, employing a more impressionistic style and extensive subjective narration to convey the injustices, horrors, death, hopes and spirituality of gulag prisoners.
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