The literary value of Shalamov's stories

There's no question as the value of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories (from ca 1955-1965, recently published in English by the great NYRB press, ed/tr Rayfield) as historical documents, providing a first-hand account of life in the gulag of Siberia, where Shalamov, accused by the Stalin government of crimes against the Soviet state, spent an incredible 15 years. So few survived the horrors of enforced hard labor in the Siberian gold and coal mines that there are relatively few accounts - most of the prisoners died in incarceration or if they returned were so damaged and traumatized that they were unlikely to describe the conditions and terrors of the camps. That said - these stories and sketches would be worth preserving, publishing, and reading simply as historical documents - but it's also remarkable that these stories are excellent as literature alone (if you could conduct a thought-experiment and try to believe that the Siberian prison camps were completely fictional, how well to these sketches stand up?). What makes these pieces exemplary as literature? First of all, the precision and clarity and verbal economy with which Shalamov sets each scene: each story has a simple point to make, the characters in each story are clearly delineated, the writing is in "plain stye," with a minimum of description and background. Second, Shalamov has an unerring instinct for closing out these stories and sketches with a twist, a revelation, or a striking image. Three example: the story of the pig rustler tells of a plot to break into a food-storage shack and grab some of the frozen mean; the "rustler" grabs a frozen piglet and then makes a dash back toward his dormitory - pursued by men and dogs. He finds temporary refuge in a storage room; when the guards break down the door, he's sitting on the ground, having consumed half of the - frozen! - piglet. Another story - the Dwaf Pine - which was the only one published in VS's lifetime and which translator Rayfield notes is the least "offensive" (politically) of any, is an essay in praise of the tiny scrub pine of Siberia and it sensitivity to changes in climate and weather - and the story ends w/ the kicker that the dwarf pine makes for the best firewood, thus, after all his praise of this remarkable plant, the narrator notes that we chop them down and burn them for warmth - an emblem, which the censors missed of course - for the treatment of prisoners in the Gulag. A third example - Dominoes (one of the first in the collection focusing on the prison hospitals, where VS worked late in his imprisonment) - the protagonist is invited by a doctor to play dominoes, a game that he finds stupid and boring; at the end the doctor reveals that the hates dominoes as well but invited the prisoner to join him in an attempt to cheer him up: an image of two men playing a game that they both hate but assume the other enjoys, again an emblem from thecontradictions and falsehoods, most much more malevolent, of life in prison.