An Exceptional Foreword To An Exceptional Book

'In our positivistic civilisation one of the inappropriate compliments sometimes paid to literature is to reduce it to 'artistic knowledge'. Not that such cognizance does not exist but art is both more and less than knowledge. It is unique, sui generis, a thing in and of itself. And it's experience is one of the justifications for our own existence.

  While the work of art 'enriches' (another unsuitable analogy), at the same time it creates a post partum sense of loss: the first experience is unique, an act never to be repeated - no matter how great the understanding and appreciation later achieved through the most intent study. If only we could erase from our minds the memory of our favourite books and return to the still unsuspected wonder of those works! When we recommend them to our friends, we do so in envy - that we cannot recreate that initial magic in ourselves. And the more we love a book, the greater our wistfulness. We cannot step into the same river twice, not so much because the river is different, but because we ourselves are in flux.

  If you are about to read the stories of Varlam Shalamov for the first time, you are a person to be envied, a person whose life is about the be changed, a person who will envy others when you yourself have forded these waters.

  Kolyma tales tells of life on the Soviet forced-labour camps and the stories are regarded by historians as important documentary materials. Nevertheless the Gulag has many chronicles and only one Varlam Shalamov. This book can profitably read as a fictionalised history; the phrase 'historical novel' is itself a 'historical accident'; history in literature is not limited to the larger genres. But Kolyma Tales is much more than that. lf the camps never existed, this volume, one of the great books of world literature, would be only the more astounding as a creation of the imagination.'-John Glad.

John Glad translated the tales into English from Russian and was writer of this foreword. The collected stories 'Kolyma Tales' - Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982), was published in 1994 where this excerpt from the full foreword comes from.