I’ve read around ten of the short stories in Kolyma Stories now, and they’re rather bleak, being tales based on the author’s experiences in the Gulag. But I just read one that is in a different format — it’s in the form of an official report — and it’s…actually a joke?!
It’s especially striking and relieving in the midst of a bunch of stories about starvation and freezing and people just calmly killing themselves. If all of those stories (which are good in their own right) were all just a setup for this joke, well-played, Shamalov!