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Life in a Russian gulag, based on the author's own years in the Gulag, chronicled in an epic masterpiece.Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, composed of short fictional tales based on Russian writer Varlam Shalamov's fifteen years in the Gulag. This NYRB Classics edition (and an accompanying second volume forthcoming in 2019) is the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories, based on the definitive edition of his collected works, published in Russia in 2013.Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma, a far northeast region of the USSR and one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on Earth, before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953 and continued until his own physical and mental decline in the late 1970s.