[There] is a calmness and a judiciousness in Shalamov's consideration of his 17 years in Kolyma. All Russian authors have been connoisseurs, in their various ways, of the condition of servitude, imprisonment. When Dostoyevsky wrote "The House of the Dead," or Chekhov his account of the prison settlements of Sakhalin Island, they told the truth about those things in a way that at the time seemed horrifying. It was the truth but it wasn't so bad as this, not on the same scale, not so wholly without form and void. As for Tolstoy's account of Pierre's experiences as a prisoner of war and his friendship with Platon Karataev, that too is true no doubt, but somehow irrelevant, because too "significant." Shalamov's style is curiously light and weightless, as if it took for granted that "significance" had not returned and never would. Various things had happened to him; that was...