The Daily Stoic

Varlam Shalamov was a brilliant writer who was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. If that were not painful enough, though he was eventually freed, his writings were more or less lost to history until today—his book, Kolyma Tales, is finally enjoying a well-deserved resurgence. In a piece published by the Paris Review, Shalamov lists things he learned in the Gulag:“I am proud to have decided right at the beginning, in 1937, that I would never be a foreman if my freedom could lead to another man’s death, if my freedom had to serve the bosses by oppressing other people, prisoners like myself.”“Both my physical and my spiritual strength turned out to be stronger than I thought in this great test, and I am proud that I never sold anyone, never sent anyone to their death or to another sentence, and never denounced anyone.”“I learned to “plan” my life one day ahead, no more.”All are worth reading, but one stands out to the aspiring Stoic:“I discovered that the world should be divided not int