Last Years and Death
The Western publishers always provided the disclaimer that Shalamov's stories were being published without the author's knowledge or consent. As his health deteriorated, he spent the last three years of his life in a house for elderly and disabled literary workers in Tushino. Shalamov died on January 17, 1982, and was interred at Kuntsevo Cemetery, Moscow.
The book was finally published on Russian soil in 1987, as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy. Selections from Kolyma Tales are now mandatory reading for high school children in the Russian Federation.
Read more about this topic: Varlam Shalamov
Famous quotes containing the words years and/or death:
“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)