F. Thun-Hohenstein’s Das Leben Schreiben. Warlam Schalamow. Biographie und Poetik — the result of long-term archival and analytical research — is the experience in creating an intellectual biography of one of the main representatives of unofficial literature of the Soviet era. The reconstruction of Shalamov’s biography of a prisoner of Stalin’s concentration camps develops into an in-depth analysis of the crisis of humanism and the transformation of avant-garde aesthetics in the conditions of this crisis. The researcher pays special attention to how the writer’s ethical and aesthetic position was formed and attempts to fit the drama of his life and the analysis of his works into the context of Soviet culture in the 1920s–1970s. The book expressively demonstrates the view of a modern German researcher on one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of Russian culture.