And smiling—both to himself and his past—he told with reverence how he had touched the file of the executed poet Gumilyov, calling it the affair of lycée pupils. It was as if a Pushkinist were telling how he had held the goose quill pen with which Pushkin wrote Poltava. It was just as if he had touched the Stone of Kaaba, such was the bliss, the purification in every feature of his face. I couldn’t help but think that this too was a way of being introduced to poetry, an amazing, extremely rare manner of introduction in the office of the criminal investigator. Of course, the moral values of poetry are not transmitted in the process.

“When reading books I would first of all turn to the notes, the comments. Man is a creature of notes and comments.”

“How about the text?”

“Not always. There is always time for that.”

Obscene as this may sound, Fleming and his co-workers could partake of culture only in their work as investigators. Their familiarity with persons of literary and social circles was distorted but nevertheless real and genuine in a sense, not concealed behind a thousand masks.

From Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1982 (first published in 1980), pp. 214-215.

Addendum (December 27, 1988)

At the risk of insulting the reader’s intelligence once again—as well as betraying my unflagging respect for the Soviet police establishment—I feel compelled to say that I conceive of this passage as a proof of the form and content of my Residua. There are two aspects of this proof: first, the claim that “man is a creature of notes and comments” comes from a professional with immense literary experience in the Soviet Union, where literature is a serious business; and second, Shalamov’s literature has nothing to do with fiction.