“Poetics of camp prose” (V. Shalamov). Read the book “Sentence” online in full - Varlam Shalamov - MyBook The Last Battle of Major Pugachev

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

* * *

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, it’s like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the workers - from the freewomen, all of them were yesterday's prisoners - paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - scraps, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a “free” cauldron. No, our freewomen didn’t have any soup left from yesterday.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feather - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted and plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter tins suspended from fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bird bones without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

End of introductory fragment.

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In the horsemen's barracks they play cards. The guards never look there, they watch over those convicted under Article 58, so it’s safe to play near the horsemen. Every night the thieves gather there and, under the light of a homemade “stick” light bulb, have fights on a dirty pillow. The maps are homemade, from sheets cut out from Hugo's volume. This time the players were the sharpie Sevochka, an expert in card games, and Naumov, the horse-riding foreman, a railway thief from the Kuban.

The narrator and former textile engineer Garkunov are doing night work, sawing wood for the horse barracks. After work they are given something to eat and watch the game. Naumov lost trousers and a jacket with a shirt, then a pillow and a blanket, a Ukrainian towel with roosters, a cigarette case with an embossed profile of Gogol. According to the rules, the fight cannot be over while there is something to lose. When there is nothing left, Naumov ingratiatingly offers to play for the show - as a loan. This is not necessary, but Sevochka gives him a chance to win back and gives him an hour of introduction. Naumov won back the blanket, the pillow, the trousers and lost it all again. Sevochka put the winnings in a plywood suitcase. Naumov examines the narrator and Garkunov and demands to take off their padded jackets. Under his padded jacket, Garkunov is wearing a red woolen sweater - the last gift from his wife. Naumov demands to remove it. Sevochka approvingly examines the valuable item: wash it and you can wear it. Garkunov replies that he will only take off the sweater with the skin on. He is knocked down, he bites, Sashka, Naumov’s orderly, hits him with a knife. The dead man's sweater is pulled off; the blood on the red is invisible. Sevochka puts the sweater in her suitcase. The game is over, the narrator states that he needs to look for a new partner for sawing wood.

Maxim

One after another, new people come to the camp, they all look like dead people. The last feeling for the narrator is not indifference, but anger. Neighbors appear and disappear forever, the hero does not ask them anything. Keeping anger in his heart, he awaits death, but instead, life is replaced by a semi-conscious existence. The narrator works as a boiler - it’s an easy job, but it’s also hard: he doesn’t have time to chop wood, he can’t boil water on time, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seems endless to him, and the two-handed saw is incredibly heavy.

None of the free settlers even paid attention to whether the water was boiling - the main thing was that it was hot. The hero eats whatever he gets. Despite the meager nutrition and frozen, purulent limbs, he does not die, living as if in a fog. But one day the narrator realizes that he hears the groans and wheezes of his comrades, and from that moment on the need to forget himself decreases. His muscles began to ache, he began to feel his body. The anger was replaced by indifference and fearlessness; he no longer cared whether they would beat him or not, whether they would feed him or not. But they only beat me in the mines, and this calmed me down and gave me strength.

Indifference is replaced by fear - a person is afraid of losing the life-saving work of a boiler worker, afraid of leaving for a mine. Then comes envy of the dead and living comrades. The narrator regrets that the feeling of love has not returned, but after he prevents the surveyor from shooting the bullfinch defending the nest, he realizes that something else important has returned. The hero's impoverished language and feelings are poor: two dozen words, half of them are curses. The narrator did not look for other words and was amazed when suddenly the word “sentence”, “unsuitable for the taiga,” was born in his head. The word stuns a person, and he shouts it throughout the taiga, not yet understanding its meaning, but rejoicing at its acquisition. And even a provocative question about whether he is a foreigner does not make him forget the word. There is something solid and Roman in it. Only after a week does the narrator understand what it means and realize that he is being reborn. New words come back with difficulty, but there are more and more of them. Then the day came when the workers abandoned work and food and ran to the village: the boss arrived from Magadan. A gramophone is playing on a stump at the entrance to the tent, and nearby there are murderers, horse thieves, thieves, fraers, foremen and hard workers. The boss looks as if he himself wrote this music: “The shellac record was spinning and hissing, the stump itself was spinning, wound up for all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring twisted for three hundred years...”

The authenticity of “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov

Shalamov created “Kolyma Stories” from 1954 to 1973. The writer divided them into six books: “Kolyma Stories”, “Left Bank”, “Shovel Artist”, “Sketches of the Underworld”, “Resurrection of Larch” and “The Glove, or KR” -2". The writer's terrible long-term camp experience, which consisted of superhuman trials - death, hunger and cold, humiliation, formed the basis of Shalamov's prose. It contains the truth about the years of terror. Each story describes the prison and camp life of Gulag prisoners, the tragic fates of people dependent on chance, bosses and thieves. The running theme of the stories is man in inhuman conditions.

The truth about the camps is merciless; Shalamov shows the reader terrible details, acting as their witness. In the camp, a person lost everything that connected him with his former, pre-camp life, which Shalamov calls “first,” a second life began, and all everyday experience had to be acquired again. The fate of the prisoner is determined by chance. Intellectuals, political prisoners, so-called enemies of the people, were given over to be torn to pieces by criminals. Humiliation, bullying, beatings, violence are a natural thing in the camp.

Humiliation was worse than hunger and disease, they lowered a person to the level of an animal, he stopped thinking and feeling, limiting himself to a semi-conscious existence (the only feeling of the hero of the story “Maintenance” is anger). The famous Stalinist slogan “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, valor and heroism,” hanging over the gates of each camp, is in fact about forced, slave labor. This is how human life depreciates, the concepts of good and evil change.

When moral and physical strength dries up, a person becomes a goner with an atrophied will. Hunger turns into a disease, into torture for a tortured and humiliated person, whose main goal is to survive. Another facet of human humiliation is to submit to thieves. The author appreciates those who are able to resist circumstances even at the cost of their own lives. This is an artistic document of the era, a work of enormous psychological impact. “Kolyma Tales” became an indictment of the Soviet totalitarian regime that gave birth to the camps.

The camp personifies absolute evil, but people dream of breaking out of it not into freedom, but into prison: “Prison is freedom. This is the only place I know where people said what they thought without fear. Where they rested their souls" (“Tombstone”).

Despite the details, what is happening seems unreal, it is so cruel. But it really happened, this is our story.

Varlam Shalamov’s story “Sentence” is included in the collection of Kolyma stories “Left Bank”.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the free workers, all of them yesterday’s prisoners, paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - scraps, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a “free” cauldron. No, our freewomen didn’t have any soup left from yesterday.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feather - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for the free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted and plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter cans, hung from fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bird bones without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

End of introductory fragment.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam


People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was only enough for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the free workers, all of them yesterday’s prisoners, paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not. Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We

...

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Maxim

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

People emerged from oblivion - one after another. A stranger lay down next to me on the bunk, leaned against my bony shoulder at night, giving away his warmth - drops of warmth - and receiving mine in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the scraps of a pea coat or padded jacket, and in the morning I looked at my neighbor as if he were a dead man, and was a little surprised that the dead man was alive, stood up when called, got dressed and obediently followed the command. I had little warmth. Not much meat left on my bones. This meat was enough only for anger - the last of human feelings. Not indifference, but anger was the last human feeling - the one that is closer to the bones. A man who emerged from oblivion disappeared during the day - there were many coal exploration sites - and disappeared forever. I don't know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arabic proverb: don’t ask and they won’t lie to you. I didn’t care whether they would lie to me or not, I was beyond the truth, beyond lies. The thieves have a tough, bright, rude saying on this subject, permeated with deep contempt for the person asking the question: if you don’t believe it, take it for a fairy tale. I didn’t ask questions or listen to fairy tales.

What stayed with me until the end? Anger. And keeping this anger, I expected to die. But death, so close just recently, began to gradually move away. Death was not replaced by life, but by half-consciousness, an existence for which there are no formulas and which cannot be called life. Every day, every sunrise brought the danger of a new, deadly shock. But there was no push. I worked as a boiler operator - the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a watchman, but I did not have time to chop wood for the titanium, the boiler of the Titan system. I could have been kicked out - but where? Taiga is far away, our village, “business trip” in Kolyma, is like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag my feet, the distance of two hundred meters from the tent to work seemed endless to me, and I sat down to rest more than once. Even now I remember all the potholes, all the holes, all the ruts on this mortal path; a stream in front of which I lay down on my stomach and lapped up the cold, tasty, healing water. The two-handed saw, which I carried either on my shoulder or dragged, holding it by one handle, seemed to me like a load of incredible weight.

I could never boil water on time, get the titanium to boil by lunchtime.

But none of the free workers, all of them yesterday’s prisoners, paid attention to whether the water was boiling or not.

Kolyma taught us all to distinguish drinking water only by temperature. Hot, cold, not boiled and raw.

We did not care about the dialectical leap in the transition from quantity to quality. We were not philosophers. We were hard workers, and our hot drinking water did not have these important qualities of a jump.

I ate, indifferently trying to eat everything that caught my eye - scraps, fragments of food, last year's berries in the swamp. Yesterday's or the day before yesterday's soup from a “free” cauldron. No, our freewomen didn’t have any soup left from yesterday.

In our tent there were two rifles, two shotguns. The partridges were not afraid of people, and at first the bird was beaten right from the threshold of the tent. The prey was baked whole in the ashes of the fire or boiled after being carefully plucked. Down and feathers - for the pillow, also commerce, sure money - extra income for free owners of guns and taiga birds. Gutted, plucked partridges were boiled in three-liter cans, hung from the fires. I have never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry free stomachs crushed, ground, and sucked up all the bones of the dog without a trace. This was also one of the wonders of the taiga.

I have never tasted a single piece of these partridges. Mine were berries, grass roots, rations. And I didn't die. I began to look more and more indifferently, without malice, at the cold red sun, at the mountains, the loaches, where everything: rocks, turns of the stream, larch, poplars - was angular and unfriendly. In the evenings, a cold fog rose from the river - and there was not an hour in the taiga day when I felt warm.

Frostbitten fingers and toes ached and buzzed with pain. The bright pink skin of the fingers remained pink, easily vulnerable. The fingers were always wrapped in some dirty rags, protecting the hand from a new wound, from pain, but not from infection. Pus oozed from the big toes on both feet, and there was no end to the pus.

They woke me up with a blow to the rail. They were fired from work by hitting the rail. After eating, I immediately lay down on the bunk, without undressing, of course, and fell asleep. The tent in which I slept and lived seemed to me as if through a fog - people were moving somewhere, loud swearing arose, fights broke out, there was instant silence before a dangerous blow. The fights quickly died out - on their own, no one restrained, did not separate, the engines of the fight simply stalled - and a cold night silence set in with a pale high sky through the holes in the tarpaulin ceiling, with snoring, wheezing, groans, coughing and the unconscious swearing of the sleeping people.

One night I felt that I heard these moans and wheezes. The feeling was sudden, like an epiphany, and did not make me happy. Later, remembering this moment of surprise, I realized that the need for sleep, oblivion, unconsciousness became less - I got enough sleep, as Moisey Moiseevich Kuznetsov, our blacksmith, said, the smartest of smartest people.

There was persistent pain in the muscles. I don’t know what kind of muscles I had then, but there was pain in them, it made me angry, and didn’t let me distract myself from my body. Then something appeared in me other than anger or malice, which exists along with anger. Indifference appeared - fearlessness. I realized that I didn’t care whether they would beat me or not, whether they would give me lunch and rations or not. And although in reconnaissance, on an unescorted business trip, they didn’t beat me - they only beat me in the mines - when I remembered the mine, I measured my courage by the measure of the mine. This indifference, this fearlessness, built some kind of bridge from death. The consciousness that they would not beat here, did not beat and would not beat, gave birth to new strength, new feelings.

Behind indifference came fear - not very strong fear - fear of losing this saving life, this saving work of the boiler, the high cold sky and the aching pain in worn-out muscles. I realized that I was afraid to leave here for the mine. I'm afraid, that's all. I have never sought the best from the good throughout my life. The meat on my bones grew day by day. Envy was the name of the next feeling that returned to me. I envied my dead comrades - people who died in '38. I also envied the living neighbors who chew something, the neighbors who light something. I didn’t envy the boss, the foreman, the foreman - it was a different world.

Love didn't come back to me. Oh, how far love is from envy, from fear, from anger. How little love people need. Love comes when all human feelings have already returned. Love comes last, returns last, and does it return? But it was not only indifference, envy and fear that witnessed my return to life. Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.

As the weakest in this world of pits and exploratory ditches, I worked with a topographer - I carried a staff and a theodolite behind the topographer. It happened that in order to speed up the movement, the topographer would fit the theodolite straps behind his back, and I would only get the lightest rod, painted with numbers. The topographer was one of the prisoners. For courage - that summer there were many fugitives in the taiga - the topographer carried a small-caliber rifle, having begged the weapon from his superiors. But the rifle only got in our way. And not only because she was an extra thing on our difficult journey. We sat down to rest in a clearing, and the topographer, playing with a small-caliber rifle, took aim at a red-breasted bullfinch, which flew up to take a closer look at the danger and lead it to the side. If necessary, sacrifice your life. The female bullfinch was sitting somewhere on her eggs - this was the only explanation for the bird’s insane courage. The topographer raised his rifle, and I moved the barrel to the side.

Put the gun away!
-What are you talking about? Are you crazy?
- Leave the bird, that's all.
- I'll report to the boss.
- To hell with you and your boss.

But the topographer did not want to quarrel and did not say anything to the boss. I realized that something important had returned to me.

I have not seen newspapers or books for many years and have long taught myself not to regret this loss. All fifty of my neighbors in the tent, in the torn tarpaulin tent, felt the same way - not a single newspaper, not a single book appeared in our barracks. The highest authorities - foreman, intelligence chief, foreman - descended into our world without books.

My language, the rough language of a mine, was poor, just as poor were the feelings still living near the bones. Getting up, divorce for work, lunch, end of work, lights out, citizen boss, allow me to address you, shovel, pit, I obey, drill, pick, it’s cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, rations, leave me to smoke - two It’s not the first year I’ve made do with dozens of words. Half of these words were curse words. In my youth, in childhood, there was an anecdote about how a Russian used just one word in different intonation combinations in a story about traveling abroad. The richness of Russian swearing, its inexhaustible offensiveness, was revealed to me not in childhood or youth. An anecdote with a curse word looked like the language of some college girl. But I didn't look for other words. I was happy that I didn't have to look for any other words. I didn’t know whether these other words existed. I didn’t know how to answer this question.

I was frightened, stunned, when in my brain, right here - I remember it clearly - under the right parietal bone - a word was born that was completely unsuitable for the taiga, a word that I myself did not understand, not only my comrades. I shouted this word, standing on the bunk, turning to the sky, to infinity:

Maxim! Maxim!
And he started laughing.

Maxim! - I screamed straight into the northern sky, into the double dawn, I screamed, not yet understanding the meaning of this word that was born in me. And if this word has returned, been found again, so much the better, so much the better! Great joy filled my entire being.

Maxim!
- What a psycho!
- He is a psycho! Are you a foreigner or what? - the mining engineer Vronsky, the same Vronsky, asked sarcastically. "Three tobaccos."

Vronsky, let me light a cigarette.
- No, I don’t have any.
- Well, at least three pieces of tobacco.
- Three pieces of tobacco? Please.

From a pouch full of shag, three pieces of tobacco were extracted with a dirty fingernail.
-- Foreigner? - The question transferred our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, consequences and extensions of time.

But I didn’t care about Vronsky’s provocative question. The find was too huge.
- Sentence!
- He is a psycho.

The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person goes into oblivion, into a dead world. Is he dead? Even the stone did not seem dead to me, not to mention the grass, trees, and river. The river was not only the embodiment of life, not only a symbol of life, but life itself. Its eternal movement, incessant rumble, its own conversation, its own business, which makes the water run downstream through the headwind, breaking through rocks, crossing steppes and meadows. The river, which changed the sun-dried, naked bed and made its way somewhere in the stones as a barely visible thread of water, obeying its eternal duty, was a stream that had lost hope of the help of the sky - of the saving rain. The first thunderstorm, the first downpour - and the water changed banks, broke rocks, threw trees up and madly rushed down the same eternal path.

Maxim! I didn’t believe myself, I was afraid, falling asleep, that this word that had returned to me would disappear overnight. But the word did not disappear.

Maxim. Let them rename the river on which our village stood, our business trip “Rio-Rita”. How is this better than "Sententia"? The bad taste of the owner of the earth, the cartographer, introduced Rio Rita onto world maps. And it can't be fixed.

Sentence - there was something Roman, solid, Latin in this word. Ancient Rome for my childhood was the history of political struggle, the struggle of people, and Ancient Greece was the kingdom of art. Although in Ancient Greece there were politicians and murderers, and in Ancient Rome there were many people of art. But my childhood sharpened, simplified, narrowed and separated these two very different worlds. Sentence is a Roman word. For a week I didn’t understand what the word “maximum” meant. I whispered this word, shouted it, scared and made my neighbors laugh with this word. I demanded from the world, from the sky, a solution, an explanation, a translation. And a week later I understood - and shuddered with fear and joy of Fear - because I was afraid of returning to a world where I had no return. Joy - because I saw that life was returning to me against my own will.

Many days passed until I learned to summon more and more new words from the depths of my brain, one after another. Each came with difficulty, each arose suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words did not return in a stream. Each returned alone, without the escort of other familiar words, and appeared first in the tongue, and then in the brain.

And then the day came when everyone, all fifty workers, quit their jobs and ran to the village, to the river, getting out of their pits, ditches, throwing half-cut trees, half-cooked soup in the cauldron. Everyone ran faster than me, but I also hobbled on time, helping myself in this run down the mountain with my hands.

The chief arrived from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On a huge larch stump at the entrance to the tent, there was a gramophone. The gramophone played, overcoming the hiss of the needle, playing some kind of symphonic music.

And everyone stood around - murderers and horse thieves, thieves and fraers, foremen and hard workers. And the boss stood nearby and the expression on his face was as if he himself had written this music for us, for our remote taiga business trip. The shellac record spun and hissed, The stump itself was spinning, wound up in all its three hundred circles, like a tight spring, twisted for three hundred years.

IT WOULD BE INCORRECT TO REDUCE THE ENTIRE SIGNIFICANCE OF SHALAMOV'S EXPERIENCE ONLY TO PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS, SINCE PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ARE A DIRECT CONTINUATION OF SPIRITUAL PROBLEMS, AND THE SPIRIT IS NOT ON THE EARTH TODAY.

FOR SPIRIT IS THE ONLY CONDITION FROM THE BEGINNING OF CREATION THAT WILL ALLOW MAN TO LIVE AN INDEPENDENT LIFE IN NATURE, A LIFE WITHOUT NEEDS. THIS IS CONFIRMED BY ALL ANCIENT TEACHINGS AND PRACTICES. BUT HUMANITY HAS NEVER TRIED TO FOLLOW THE PATH OF THE SPIRIT IN ALL HISTORY WITHOUT TASTING WHAT IT IS.

HOWEVER, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE HERE, IN CONNECTION WITH THE MAIN FEATURES OF SHALAMOV’S CREATIVITY, TO LEAVE WITHOUT ATTENTION THE FACTS CONFIRMING THAT SOCIETY ONLY CONTINUES TO COVER THE TRUTH THAT HE HIMSELF IS BY GREATLY FAKE A MASQUERADE MASK BEHIND WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING - ITS UNRELIABILITY AND THERE IS STILL THE COMPLETE INPROTECTION OF MAN IN THIS WORLD, WHICH THEY HAVE NOT COMPLETELY UNDERSTOOD. LET'S REMEMBER THE LAST, UNEXPECTED FOR MOST, JUST RINGING A REMINDING ALARM CLOCK THAT MAN RECEIVED FROM NATURE, AGAIN EXPOSING THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY - JAPAN.

IS IT TIME FOR MAN TO WAKE UP?

REFERENCE:

“Despite the impression you may get from the media, less than 8% of the world's hungry population goes hungry as a result of emerging emergencies. Few people realize that the more than one billion hungry people on our planet do not make the headlines. This number is equal to the population of the United States, Japan and the European Union combined. These are people of all ages, from infancy whose mothers cannot produce enough breast milk to the elderly who have no relatives who could. to take care of them: these are unemployed residents of urban slums, farmers who do not have their own land and cultivate someone else's land, orphaned children of AIDS patients and patients who need special intensive nutrition in order to survive.

4 - Where do the starving people live?

The percentage of hungry people is highest in eastern, central and southern Africa. About three-quarters of undernourished people live in rural areas of developing countries, where per capita incomes are lowest. However, the number of hungry people in cities has also been increasing recently.

Of the one billion hungry people on our planet, more than half live in Asia and the Pacific, and about a quarter live in sub-Saharan Africa.

5 - Is the number of hungry people in the world decreasing?

According to FAO, while significant progress was made in reducing the number of hungry people in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the number of hungry people has been slowly but steadily increasing in the last decade. In 1995-97 and 2004-2006, their numbers increased in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. But even in these regions, gains made in the fight against hunger have been reversed by high oil prices and the ensuing global economic crisis."