ABSTRACT
Three years ago a colleague approached me about doing a theatrical production with music based on the gulag, the notorious Soviet prison system. The gulag forced bodies to endure under extreme, but not terminal conditions. In the Shoah, the Hebrew word for holocaust, the conditions were deliberately terminal. The totalitarian weapons of the gulag were spiritual (despair), physical (starvation), and ethical (what would you do to someone else for a crust of bread). In that very first conversation, I decided to title the production Gulag Follies, even before I had settled on Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales as a performance text. I chose Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales because I thought they were cold, beautiful, and brutally honest. Varlam Shalamov spent seventeen years in the gulag. A law student at Moscow University in 1927, Shalamov joined a group of Trotskyites, was arrested, and sentenced to three years of hard labor. Released in 1932, he was rearrested in 1937 for counter-revolutionary activities. Retried in 1943 he was sentenced to remain in the camps until the end of the war: his crime—calling Bunin a “classic Russian writer.” One of the most notorious labor camps was in Kolyma, Siberia—a region rich in natural resources necessary for industrialization—where the winter lasted half the year with temperatures ranging from -2 to -36 degrees Fahrenheit. A million or more people died there. Shalamov was released in 1951 and rehabilitated in 1956. He wrote Kolyma Tales between 1954 and 1973.
