Soviet prison literature and Varlam Shalamov

There's probably a whole sub-genre of Soviet-era prison literature, from Solzhenitsyn on down, but the works of Varlam Shalamov deserve a high place of honor in this frightful milieu. His work - mostly very short stories and sketches - collected in the newly issued Kolyma Stories (another great NYRB edition!) - has been little-known to English-language readers until recently. Shalamov, born about 1910, spend a solid 15 years or more in the prison camps and began writing about them on his release in the early 1950s. From what I can see in the edition I started reading yesterday, he completed most of the stories and sketches over about a 10-year span, from roughly 1955-65. (The edition, Kolyma Stories, comes in five sections, of books, with the title section first; not sure yet if all of the stories are about prison life in the far eastern stretch of the USSR, and not sure yet of the chronology - Shalamov died in the 1980s, but not sure if he wrote till the end of his life nor if his works were published in Russian in his lifetime - will read more about that going forward.) The stories at the top of this collection are terrific - most just a page or two, none stores in arising out of any European tradition of modernism; they're more like expert testimony about barbarous and cruel system. The suffering of these men - sentenced to work in the coal or gold mines of the Kalyma region for the most innocuous of "political" crimes, most completely unprepared for the rigors of life in the tundra - temperatures plunging far below zero throughout the winter, never sufficial clothing of food, horrible working conditions and living conditions, constant pressure from the guards and overseers to meet unreachable "quotas," mean turned against one another in struggle for survival, constant death and danger - powerful and upsetting material. Some of the stories are gruesome - e.g., one in which two prisoners unearth a corpse in order to steal the clothing on the the dead body, another in which a man chops off his fingers w/ an axe in hopes of getting off a work detail. A few have that odd Soviet black humor, such as one that appears as a report to authorities on the impossibility of meeting quota because of the failure of a machine called an "injector" and the response in which the officials believe Injector is the name of a recalcitrant prisoner. All powerful stuff - though I'm not sure it's humanly possible to read this (700+-page) collection straight through to the end.