Varlam Shalom was arrested and sent to camp in 1929. He was twenty-one, and a law student; and unlike many other millions so designated, he really was a Trotskyite. That "T" in his  crime-description  folder ("Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Activities") would have dramatically worsened his first two terms. He was tried and sentenced a third time in 1943 – for having praised Ivan Bunin – and reclassified as a mere Anti-Soviet Agitator. He got out of Kolyma in 1951 and, after two years of internal exile, he got out of Magadan. Then he wrote Kolyma Tales.
Nature simplifies itself as it heads toward the poles (and we head north now because so many scores of thousands were doing so, as Stalin's rule developed, and as the camps crazily multiplied). Nature simplifies itself, and so does human discourse:
    My language was the crude language of the mines and it was as impoverished as the emotions that lived near the bones. Get up, go to work, rest, citizen chief, may I speak, shovel, trench, yes sir, drill, pick, it's cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, ration, leave me the butt-these few dozen words were all I had needed for years.

Life was reduced. Kolyma Tales is a great groan from someone chronically reduced. Solzhenitsyn captured the agony of the gulag in the epic frame, in 1,800 unflagging, unwavering pages. Shalamov does it in the short story -for him, the only possible form. His suffering in the gulag was more extreme, more complete and more inward than that of Solzhenitsyn, who candidly observes:
    Shalamov's experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess to him and not me was it given to touch the depths of bestiality and despair towards which life in the camp dragged us all.

Shalamov told Nadezhda Mandelstam that he could have spent a lifetime "quite happily" in the camp described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Whereas Kolyma, in the late 1930s (after Stalin's speech demanding worse conditions), amounted to negative perfection. Osip Mandelstam was on his way to Kolyma, in 1938, when he died of hunger and dementia in the transit prison at Vtoraya Rechka.

Kolyma Tales.... Two prisoners take a long trek, at night, to exhume a corpse: they will exchange its underwear for tobacco. One prisoner hangs himself in a tree fork "without even using a rope." Another finds that his fingers have been permanently molded by the tools he wields (he "never expected to be able to straighten out his hands again"). Another's rubber galoshes "were so full of pus and blood that his feet sloshed at every step-as if through a puddle." Men weep frequently, over a lost pair of socks, for instance, or from the cold (but not from hunger, which produces an agonized but tearless wrath). They all dream the same dream "of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels." And they are forgetting everything. A professor of philosophy forgets his wife's name. A doctor begins to doubt that he ever was a doctor: "Real were the minute, the hour, the day.... He never guessed further, nor did he have the strength to guess. Nor did anyone else." "I had forgotten everything," says one narrator: "I didn't even remember what it was like to remember." All emotions evaporate: all emotions except bitterness.
In Volume Two of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn sharply disagrees with what he takes to be Shalamov's conclusion, that "[i]n the camp situation human beings never remain human beings - the camps were created to this end." Arguing for a more generous estimate of spiritual resilience, Solzhenitsyn adduces Shalamov's own person. Shalamov, after all, never betrayed anyone, never denounced, never informed, never sought the lowest level. "Why is that, Varlam Tikhonovich?" asks Solzhenitsyn (and note the coaxing patronymic). "Does it mean that you found a footing on some stone-and did not slide down any further? ...
Do you not refute your own concept with your character and verses?" A footnote then adds, "Alas, he decided not to refute it," and goes on to tell of Shalamov's "renunciation" of his own work in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of February 1972. Here, for no clear reason, Shalamov denounced his American publishers and declared himself a loyal Soviet citizen. "The problematics of the Kolyma Stories," he wrote, "have long since been crossed out by life." Solzhenitsyn adds: "This renunciation was printed in a black mourning frame, and thus all of us understood that Shalamov had died. (Footnote of 1972.)" In fact, Shalamov died in 1982. And even so, even metaphorically, Solzhenitsyn got the date wrong.
Shalamov "died" in 1937, if not earlier. Despite its originality, its weight of voice, and its boundless talent, Kolyma Tales is an utterly exhausted book. Exhaustion is what it describes and exhaustion is what it enacts. Shalamov can soar, he can ride his epiphanies, but his sentences plod, limp and stagger like a work gang returning from a twelve-hour shift. He repeats himself, contradicts himself, entangles himself, as if in a dreadful dream of retardation and thwarted escape. In a poem that made Solzhenitsyn "tremble as though I had met a long-lost brother," Shalamov spoke of his vow "[t]o sing and to weep to the very end." And this he did, with honor. But he had encountered negative perfection, as Solzhenitsyn had not; and it broke him.
On the other hand, the book lives, and to that extent Solzhenitsyn's point remains pertinent. In "The Red Cross" Shalamov writes:
In camp a human being learns sloth, deception and viciousness. In "mourning his fate," he blames the entire world.... He has forgotten empathy for another's sorrow; he simply does not understand it and does not desire to understand it.
Shalamov did not forget empathy. In the four-page story "An Individual Assignment" the young prisoner Dugaev is working sixteen hours a day and fulfilling only a quarter of his norm. He is surprised, one night, when his workmate Baranov rolls him a cigarette.
Greedily Dugaev inhaled the sweet smoke of home-grown tobacco, and his head began to spin.
I'm getting weaker," he said.
Baranov said nothing.
Dugaev has difficulty sleeping, and is losing the inclination to eat; his work deteriorates further. The story ends:
The next day he was again working in the work gang with Baranov, and the following night soldiers took him behind the horse barns along a path that led into the woods. They came to a tall fence topped with barbed wire. The fence nearly blocked off a small ravine, and in the night the prisoners could hear tractors backfiring in the distance. When he realized what was about to happen, Dugaev regretted that he had worked for nothing. There had been no reason for him to exhaust himself on this, his last day.
The cigarette Baranov gave him: that was Dugaev's final smoke.
At the moment of arrest, wrote the poet, "you tire as in a lifetime." In Shalamov's Kolyma, every moment was that kind of moment.
 Martin Amis: Koba The Dread