Poet, writer. Born in Vologde in 1907. The son of a priest. He was in school from the years 1926 to 1929. He was then arrested for supposedly writing against Lenin in 1929. He left prison in 1932 and was was again arrested in 1937, at the time of the great Stalinist purge, and was sent to 17 years at Kolima, a kind of concentration camp for intellectuals.

After he returned from prison, after the downfall of Stalin, he started publishing his poems in the journal "Yunost" ("Youth"), and "Moscow". And it was about this time that he started being a somewhat underground figure. He walked with a very shadowy atmosphere, always seeming to be somewhere else. His eyes, people would say, shined with distaste and carelessness towards the systems of the world around him: Soviet Union, America's McCarthyism, etc. He began writing a series of stories called "Stories from Kolima" about his prison experiences. It wasn't long until they started circulating in the Moscow underground.

The 1960s were a very cultural time for the youth of Soviet cities, especially Moscow. For out of this underground came some of the best modern Russian poets and writers that the country has seen since. People would take his stories and copy them down either by typewriter or by hand and pass them around in their circles, much like they did with the poems of Esenin, and the works of foreign writers. Finally in 1977 they were published, but of course not by the Soviets but a publishing house in London. Shalamov was forced to denounce this publication, which was a heartbreaking time for him.

He died in 1982 in a kind of senior citizens home of the Soviet Union, alone and forgotten, never seeing his great work in print. They say there are three great works of "camp literature" and those are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevich by Solzhenitsyn, Twisted Path by I. Ginsburg, and Stories from Kolima by Shalamov. They were published in 1987, towards the very end of the Soviet regime. Still many readers view Shalamov as the greatest concentration camp writer, and perhaps the saddest and truest. His prose is written in truthful, confessional, and almost heartbreaking style. As a Russian critic said, "he writes from the inside". His poetry is much more literary, in his style and wording, but still there is a feeling of a wound that will never heal, that of a life wasted by the cruel whirlwind of the twentieth century.