Varlam Shalamov (1907-82), who ought to know, opens a poem with this line: “Memory has veiled / much evil . . .” Shalamov survived almost eighteen years in the Gulag, in the Arctic region known as Kolyma. His final imprisonment, from 1937 to 1951, was imposed after he referred to Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin as “a classic Russian writer.” Don’t read his stories looking for inspirational tales of courage, perseverance and adversity overcome. He would laugh bitterly at such foolish naiveté. That he survived the Gulag, unlike at least 1.7 million others, may be impressive. That so physically and emotionally damaged a man could write so many stories, Chekhovian in their understated precision, is miraculous. Today, the seventy-second anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, is an appropriate time to read Shalamov’s poem, as translated by Robert Chandler:  “Memory has veiled         much evil; her long lies leave nothing         to believe.   “There may be no cities         or green gardens; only fields of ice         and salty oceans.   “The world may be pure snow,         a starry road; just northern forest         in the mind of God.”   The Anglophone world is finally catching up with Shalamov’s accomplishment. Now we have Donald Rayfield’s versions of his Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. Their combined 1,200 pages include 145 stories. An English-language website devoted to Shalamov and his work has posted a remarkable document, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps” (trans. Dmitry Subbotin and Robert Denis). The piece is dated 1961, ten years after his release from Kolyma. Here is the first of his forty-six hard-earned observations: “The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.”   Shalamov lived his final years in the Soviet Union in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.” Here is a poem by Shalamov from 1955, as translated by Chandler:   “All that is human slips away; everything was mere husk. All that is left, indivisible, is birdsong and dusk.   “A sharp scent of warm mint, the river’s far-off noise; all equal, and equally light — all my losses and joys.”   “Slowly, with its warm towel the wind dries my face; moths immolate themselves in the campfire’s flames.”   [Chandler translates nineteen poems by Shalamov in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]

Often, I think of the late Adam Zagajewski urging young poets – and by extension, the rest of us -- to “read everything.” The suggestion is not dictatorial. The Pole even admits he is a “chaotic reader,” as most of us are. I’ve never been systematic about much of anything and inevitably there are embarrassing holes in my education. Call it the Autodidact Syndrome. When it comes to books, we never know in advance what will come in handy, which volume will help solve a problem we didn’t know we were asking. Here is Zagajewski the literary cheerleader:  “Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”   Zagajewski’s enthusiasm is almost embarrassing but the juggernaut of aliteracy and the threat it poses to Western Civilization may already be irreversible. My friend Cynthia Haven published an interview with Zagajewski not long after his death in 2021 in which she reminds him of his “read everything” essay. He replies:      “What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.”   Good advice. Don’t be intimidated by the vastness of the reading list. Choose a volume someone once mentioned he enjoyed or that had a strong emotional or intellectual impact on him. Say, the Life of Johnson, Richard Wilbur’s poems, Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Read it and see where it carries you.

Fortune cookies no longer contain fortunes. Tucked inside the sugary shells are slips of paper printed with platitudes. I carry one such slip in my wallet, salvaged from a forgotten meal at least a decade ago: “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” Neither fortune nor platitude, the advice packs more writerly wisdom than The Elements of Style. The shift from fortune to platitude, however, is disappointing and hints at a certain weak-minded, authoritarian streak among fortune-cookie writers and perhaps in the larger culture as well. Some of us, encountering a cliché, ignore it and flee the room.   Another reaction to platitudes is possible: amusement. It’s always funny when someone emits a cliché in the solemn tones used by Lincoln at Gettysburg. As in, “It is what it is,” a contemporary bit of nonsense. Tom Disch agrees in his poem “Dueling Platitudes”:   “Because it is an imperative voiced in the accents of ancestors             otherwise unremembered,   “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may carries a proverbial force             that makes us pay attention.   “Only the dead may address us as ‘ye.’ But where are these rosebuds? Are they cheap as the hay   “We’re to make while the sun shines?             What penalties and fines  can we expect to pay   “If we’re caught in the act of gathering someone else’s rosebuds?  Ancestral voices disagree   “On these issues, and we must choose our authorities carefully; one false step and there is   “A piper to pay, and who knows how much a piper requires when the fat’s in the fire?   “Eat, drink, and be merry: okay, but will you still love me  when I'm old and gray?   “Which brings us to the Middle Way,             another idea old as those hills   “Where rosebuds are rare as a day in June and pipers play another tune   “Love’s old sweet song, maybe,             or other golden oldies from the age of the Golden Mean.   “Songs are seldom what they seem; the sirens who charm us may suddenly scream   “Rape!, and words can harm us as brutally as sticks and stones. It depends on our tone.   “A queen who tells us to eat cake may be making a big mistake,   But the same advice from our corner baker is par for the course, not grounds for divorce.   “All adages are relative; each will have its season. So dare to eat your peach, My friend, but keep it within reason.”   I count at least at least fifteen clichés/platitudes in Disch’s sixteen stanzas, including those coined by Robert Herrick, James Russell Lowell and T.S. Eliot, which, of course, are low-hanging fruit.   [Disch’s poem was published in the Autumn 1986 issue of Grand Street and collected in About the Size of It (Anvil Press, 2007).]

We shouldn’t be surprised that bookish tastes change across time. They mature, just as some of us do. The books we choose to read and reread follow a path parallel to our experience and maturity. This isn’t to imply “progress.” It’s not as though all of us shed bad taste and move irrevocably toward good taste. Our needs change as we get older. What once amused and nourished us no longer does. Conversely, a few books remain prized across a lifetime.  A reader tells me he’s offended that I no longer read Hart Crane. He suggests I might be doing this because Crane was gay. That’s a cheap and ridiculous accusation. Why do I continue reading Cavafy, Proust and Auden? Crane is not a “bad” poet. He is no longer a poet for me. Plenty of others read him for admirable and silly reasons. He is their writer and no longer mine. No one can dictate what gives us pleasure and sustenance.   I think of the writers who didn’t much interest me when I was thirty, though I thought of myself as a pretty sophisticated reader – among them, Louis MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen, Max Beerbohm, Henry Green. All are now in regular rotation. Who did I read passionately when young but can no longer abide? Kafka, James T. Farrell, Hemingway, Pound, Dreiser. Just listing these writers feels like an oblique form of autobiography, a mingling of nostalgia and regret. William Hazlitt writes in “On Reading Old Books”:   “A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years.”