“Several of my lives” - that’s what the writer Varlam Shalamov called his biography. I started writing, but stopped the story on the fifth page. At that time it had not yet been revealed to him that his prose was his biography. At the end of the eighties of the last century, Shalamov’s archive occupied a corner of the office of the deputy director of TsGALI, where it was hidden in cardboard boxes stacked in a closet. One could only dream that this prose would one day be published in the USSR. I was familiar with the harsh “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov by ear: they were read by good voices on banned radio stations. Most of all - “Deutsche Welle”. Only a crazy person could imagine that one day I would write a script about Shalamov and the Soviet state would give money to shoot a film about Kolyma. But in 1985, perestroika began. Following Mikhail Gorbachev, young people came to power, and my comrades took the helm at Goskino. One, sensing change, sent me the memoirs of a nameless old woman about the hero of the revolution and civil war, Fyodor Ilyin-Raskolnikov. He suggested reading and thinking. Raskolnikov's name was banned, but the wind of change allowed hope. I climbed into the archives. Raskolnikov’s papers were scattered and hidden by archivists who had once received an order to destroy the papers. In the files of his closest associates - from the leader Vladimir Lenin to his beautiful wife Larisa Reisner - one could find his leaflets. Each folder was called a “storage unit” and had its own number. Folder after folder I sorted through “parallel” destinies, fishing out “storage units” related to Raskolnikov, until one day they all ended up in a pile in front of me in the empty hall of the Rumyantsev Library in the Manuscripts Department. I could start working. I loved looking at the issue form to find out who touched these pieces of paper and in what year. I was surprised to find only one name carefully written in each form - “Shalamov”... I was allowed to see Shalamov’s archive. It was the ocean. “So that they, bitches, know” was the ingenuous title of the script, based on the biography and “Kolyma Tales” by Varlam Shalamov. From fragments of scattered texts by a writer who had just begun to be published in thick magazines, I put together a kind of conventional dying monologue-confession about his terrible life experience. That same attempt at a biography that Shalamov himself abandoned. His reflection on the two forms of existence of the Poet - in reality and creativity. About two views of Kolyma - the real one - made of snow and ice, where his frail body lived for twenty years, and the mythological, majestic, like the kingdom of Hades, sung by him in poetry and prose with all the power of his unearthly gift and spirit.