The shadow of Solzhenitsyn, who is well known or even a star in the West, still hides the oeuvre of Varlam Shalamov, the representative of Gulag literature overgrowing him. The importance of him can be compared of Gogol, Platonov and Bely. Shalamov, until the end of his life, insisted on the ethos of the Trotskyist opposition of the 1920s and the revolutionary message of the Russian intelligentsia on the "unity of words and act" – not matching anti-Stalinism with anti-Soviet theories.