In 1936, Varlam Salamov, a journalist and writer, is arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to serve his sentence in the Soviet labor camps - one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalin's purges. "Kolyma Tales," this masterpiece of 20th-century literature, is an epic series of short stories that depict the seventeen years the author spent in the Soviet gulags: six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma and then, in a less unbearable condition, as paid medical personnel in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953. It is, on the one hand, the autobiographical testimony of one of the few survivors of the camps and, on the other hand, a historical record of the gulags themselves; but above all, it is a literary work of incomparable power, insight, and faith. Through his writing, Salamov aims to answer the fundamental ethical questions that tormented him during his years in the camps, where he firsthand experienced the world of crime as it truly is, much worse than in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment": "How does someone cease to be human?" "How do criminals come into being?" In 1972, when he was writing his final stories, the camps were being demolished, the guard towers were being razed, and the barracks were being leveled. "Did we exist?" Salamov asks, and then, without hesitation: "I answer: We did exist."