Translated from Russian by Tamaz Natroshvili

Aleksadr Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer, says in the epilogue of his well-known Gulag Archipelago that he suggested writing it together, but Varlam Shalamov declined his offer.

Varlam Shalamov, the camp mate of the future Nobel Prize winner, turned his painful experience and infernal impressions into literature. He comes forth not as a mere recorder of the events, but as a narrator of the drama leaving the boundaries of the Soviet camp.