The poet and writer Warlam Shalamov had no doubts about having spoken an independent word in literature. However, the longed-for recognition eluded him throughout his life. His main work, the six cycles of stories from Kolyma, which reflect the events in the forced labor camps of the Gulag at the cold pole of the Earth, was published posthumously after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Shalamov lived in a time of Russian history marked by breaks and losses, where hardly anyone could escape the threatening power of politics. Poetry became his form of resistance. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein compellingly narrates the life and work of Shalamov in the first comprehensive biography, without subjecting them to a simplistic developmental logic. Here, too, contradictions and fragments stand side by side, illuminating a unique life that was brutally ravaged by its time. The strength to resist his era and to engage in a lifelong struggle for the preservation of independence in life as well as in writing was drawn by Warlam Shalamov throughout his life—from childhood, as a young man, and after Kolyma—from art, from poetry.