Books by Varlam Shalamov
“Of all the books of the Gulag, the one that struck me the most is this because it is just so brutally matter of fact. It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in Russia’s polar northeast, and Shalamov himself spent 17 years there. This is not an overtly literary description of his experiences: it is written with such clarity and coldness that the brutality and the dehumanisation of the Gulag is palpable.” Read more...
The best books on Race and Slavery
David Olusoga, Historian
Interviews where books by Varlam Shalamov were recommended
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1
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy -
2
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler -
3
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky -
4
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
by Vladimir Nabokov -
5
A Hero of Our Time
by Mikhail Lermontov & translator Vladimir Nabokov -
6
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
by Nikolai Leskov
Books by Russian Authors
Books by Russian Authors
From the Enlightenment onwards, Russian authors have produced a vast and influential literary canon, including historic epics, absurdist classics, and tortured reflections on the human condition. Russia’s political turmoil also led to the writing of many moving memoirs and political works that sought to find solutions in spite of censorship and, for some authors, exile.
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1
Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
by Adam Hochschild -
2
Islam’s Black Slaves
by Ronald Segal -
3
Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle
by Leith Mullings, Manning Marable & Sophie Spencer-Wood -
4
The Interesting Narrative
by Olaudah Equiano -
5
Kolyma Tales
by Varlam Shalamov
The best books on Race and Slavery, recommended by David Olusoga
The best books on Race and Slavery, recommended by David Olusoga
Race is a real and powerful force and one he has spent his adult life trying to understand, says Anglo-Nigerian historian, writer and producer, David Olusoga. He talks us through five books on the tragedy of slavery—from the horrors of the gulag, to the plantations of Virginia, to the Islamic slave trade.
