Kolyma?  I recently had opportunity to reread Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  I first read it over forty years ago, and have never forgotten it.  Denisovich describes one day in the life of a prisoner in one of Russian dictator Josef Stalin's gulag camps, the prison camps he ordered built around the country to house people with whom he was displeased.  (And Stalin was a person who liked very few others.)
     Denisovich is a harrowing tale of survival.  Rising and working in minus twenty-eight degree weather, its protagonist writes movingly of the little things he does to survive, the way he procures extra bread, his ingenuity in securing a place near a fire, his discovery of a piece of metal which he can use for other things.  We marvel at his energy and optimism, always wondering whether we'd be able to do likewise.
     And we think also of the paranoia of Stalin, a man who, most historians believe, is responsible for over fifty million deaths.  We cannot grasp the scale of the terror he waged upon the Russian people.

     As I reread Denisovich, I also read, for the first time, Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov.  Like Solzhenitsyn, Shalmov wrote from direct experience.  It is set in the region of Kolyma River, deep in far northeastern Siberia, thousands and thousands of miles away from anything, much farther from Moscow than was Solzhenitsyn (and this is in no way intended to minimize Solzhenitsyn's situation:  both men deserve our deep respect for surviving and writing about it).  It is a place where, as Shalamov describes it, people who see a person dying do what they can to hasten it, a place where temperatures plunge to fifty degrees below zero and, despite an "official edict" stating that no one shall work in temperatures lower than minus forty, people are still forced to work.  It is a place to come and die, a place utterly without hope, a place that underscores the darkness of the human heart.
     The other day I wrote about the glory of humanity.  Today I write about its tragedy.  What kind of being is the human being, this unworldy blend of darkness and light, an entity capable of such artistic power yet equally adept at destroying life?
     It's enough to make one want to believe in sin.