Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales explores the theme of coping with the horrors of the Gulags.  “A Pushover Collection,” the first in the sample we were given, introduces the theme of reducing one’s surroundings to their instrumentality. The narrator comments on how he “had long since come to understand and appreciate the enviable haste with which poor northern nature chawed its eager wealth with equally indignant men, blossoming for him with every variety of flower” (21). We can see from the manner in which the quotation is introduced that this is an outlook imposed through hardship, while the theme of exploitation and indignity likely owes to dialectical materialism. More importantly, a message of nature being a means to an end emerges. The cedar tree functioning as an indicator of the seasons (22) also references this imposed instrumentality. However, we do not see the true foundation for this view until “In the Night.” In this story, Glebov and Bagretsov exhume the corpse of a guard. In some sense, the act is Tolstoyan: a dead man has no use for accumulated material wealth, even if said wealth merely takes the form of a pair of boots or underwear. On the other hand, there is clearly a difference between claiming the boots of a recently deceased man and prying the underwear from a frozen corpse. Despite having the trappings (and maybe even internal justification) of an institutional Russian belief, the act is better understood as a physical and psychological defense agains the camp environment.

Another defense that emerges is the prisoners’ endorsement of irrational beliefs. The most striking example is when crowds of starving prisoners ravage a drum of machine grease on the pretense that it is “American butter,” drawing an analogy to the nourishment offered by “American wheat” despite resembling an inedible industrial product (175–6). Here, the belief serves as a reaffirmation of hope against the prevailing gloom of the camp. Another important sequence is the camp’s broader attitude toward the dwarf cedar needles in “A Pushover Job.” In that story, the narrator endorses collecting the needles in spite of failing to gather enough to receive compensatory meat and vegetables (25) and the extract from the needles likely harming the prisoners who inject it. This particular belief works as a defense of the narrator against returning to the traumatic mines (24). Shalamov makes it clear that the irrational beliefs do not meaningfully aid the prisoners outside of facilitating interactions between prisoners. More generally, he shows the weakness of the mechanisms when the narrator is rendered distraught by a child’s drawing in the eponymous story (137). If anything, the belief that the Gulags can be endured through any particular strategy short of change is made out to be the ultimate irrational belief.