Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) was an outstanding Russian prose writer and poet who spent seventeen years in Stalin’s labor camps. “Remember, the most important thing is that the camp is a negative school from the first day to the last for anyone,” Shalamov wrote. “A person—neither guard nor prisoner—should not have to see it. But if you have seen it, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it is. [...] I decided long ago that I would dedicate the rest of my life specifically to this truth.” Kolyma Tales is Shalamov’s major work, recounting the lives of prisoners in correctional labor camps during 1930–1950. The stories were written between 1954 and 1973 and are presented in this edition in their entirety—across six cycles: “Kolyma Tales,” “The Left Bank,” “The Artist of the Shovel,” “Essays on the Criminal World,” “The Resurrection of the Larch,” and “The Glove, or KR-2.” Shalamov’s stories were first published between 1966 and 1976 in the American Russian-language journal “Novy Zhurnal” (The New Journal); in the writer’s homeland, the works only appeared after the author’s death in the late 1980s.