Varlam Shalamov

Research

Section contains Russian and foreign scientific articles and books dedicated to Shalamov's works analysis, to his life, to the perception of his art, and also reviews and annotations to scientific issues, methodical studies and theses abstracts. High scientific standard of researches is selection criterion here, though works may be written from different points of view.

Site staff is highly interested in contacts with Shalamov's legacy researchers and in publication of their works on shalamov.ru.


  • Yasha Klots From Avvakum to Dostoevsky: Varlam Shalamov and Russian Narratives of Political Imprisonment (2016)

  • Thus, in an extended sense, the entire tradition of Russian prison-camp writing since Avvakum is likened to a file of prisoners beating a path through the snow. Every author in this literary procession is also bound to play the role of a reader – of those who came before him, of times and places where s/he has not been. Throughout his own works, Shalamov consistently invokes his literary precursors and refers not only to Dostoevsky, as well as tsarist-time revolutionaries such as Vera Figner and Nikolai Morozov, but also to Avvakum, whose trace he follows in one of his most memorable poems, “Avvakum in Pustozersk”.


  • Josefina Lundblad-Janjic Poetry and Politics: An Allegorical Reading of Varlam Shalamov’s Poem «Аввакум в Пустозерске»

  • "Shalamov considered his 1955 poem «Аввакум в Пустозерске», composed two years after his return from the camps of Kolyma, one of his most important poems. He also considered the poem, written in amphibrachic dimeter and composed of thirty seven four-line stanzas, to unite the “historical figure” of the seventeenth-century schismatic archpriest Avvakum with elements of “the author’s biography.” Read as an allegory, the poem appears to deal with the violent oppression in the twentieth century which Shalamov personally experienced: the terror under Stalin. A self-proclaimed atheist, Shalamov endows the historical figure of Avvakum not solely with religious but also with political significance: the archpriest of his poem becomes a prominent representative of Russian resistance to the abuse of power. Through the use of allegory, “a place where the political can meet the aesthetic,” Shalamov creates a lyric which, as Avvakum did through his Autobiography three hundred years prior, presents not only a challenge to contemporary society but also an alternative perspective on its most recent past".


  • Josefina Lundblad-Janjic Shalamov Rediscovered: When A Poet Writes Prose (january 2014)

  • «This year’s International Shalamov Conference made the daring move from theory to practice in a most literal manner: from discussing literary works about the Gulag to visiting the physical site of an actual camp, Vojna, an experience that left all of us deeply moved».


  • Robert Chandler The poetry of Varlam Shalamov (1907-82)

  • Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is generally recognised — at least by Russians and readers of Russian — as a masterpiece of Russian prose and the greatest work of literature about the Gulag; this thousand-page cycle of stories draws mainly on Shalamov’s experiences as a prisoner in Kolyma, a vast area in the far northeast of the USSR that, throughout most of the Stalin era, was in effect a mini-State run by the NKVD; most of the inmates of its hundreds of camps were either felling trees or mining coal or gold. Shalamov’s poetry, however, still has few readers even in Russia, although he himself seems to have valued it above his prose.


  • Lysander Jaffe “Writing as a Stranger:” Two Translations of Shalamov’s “The Snake Charmer”

  • “What does it mean, then, to retell “The Snake Charmer” in another language? For translators, this challenge has proven formidable, not least because of the original text’s long, convoluted history of publication. “The Snake Charmer” and other Kolyma Tales first appeared in the Russian émigré journal Novyi Zhurnal in 1967, and was not re-published until 1978. The 1967 version differs drastically from all subsequent versions, omitting significant portions of Shalamov’s prose. John Glad first translated this and other Kolyma Tales into English in 1980, and his translation reflects many of these omissions. Glaring inaccuracies also result from the many typos in the 1967 version; the most unfortunate of these is the line “Эх, скука, ночи длинные,” written as “Эх, скука, ноги длинные” in the first publication, and rendered by Glad as “It’s so boring my legs are getting longer.” (my italics) It may be argued that on a small scale, Glad was working from a different original than Robert Chandler and Nathan Wilkinson, who re-translated “The Snake Charmer” almost thirty years later.”


  • Josefina Lundblad-Janjic Life and work, world literature and Soviet history. Exploring the moral necessity of Varlam Shalamov

  • During two scorching hot days in the middle of June, a diverse assembly of scholars from Russia and beyond converged in Moscow in search of answers to two questions: What is Varlam Shalamov? And why do we need him?


  • Michael Meyer Brewer “Authorial,” Lyric and Narrative Voices in Varlam Shalamov's Kolymskie rasskazy: A Close Reading of "Sententsiia”

  • “Shalamov's work has been much criticized for its wholly pessimistic, misanthropic tone, its artistically uneven nature, as well as for its occasional factual or historical inaccuracy. But, as argued in this paper, when viewed as a work of fiction within the larger authorial framework, which dialogizes the disparate “voices” and invalidates any question of unevenness by freeing the “stories” themselves from specific generic limitations, these criticisms cease to be appropriate. The entire work, itself dense and coiled-tight like a taut spring, must be left intact to play itself out. Dissonant to be sure, at times in minor keys, it finds its incremental power in contrapuntally recurrent sub-themes, and the interaction of disparate discourses of authority that give Kolymskie rasskazy its profound ambivalence, and semantic and ethical breadth.”


  • Michael Meyer Brewer Varlam Shalamov's Kolymskie rasskazy: The Problem of Ordering

  • “The author's correspondence and notes support the view that the work has an intended ordering and that it was constructed and reconstructed by the author toward a certain artistic and semantic goal. I have researched the placement of certain stories within the work, positing why the author's ordering in these instances is important. The repetitions of key narrative events, lyrical passages, camp aphorisms, and other units of text, also link into the importance of ordering — Shalamov's ordering of stories with repeated elements serves to build on their meaning as symbols, as well as ironically juxtapose diverse narratives. The close readings of “Po snegu,” “Sententsia,” “Kant” and “Stlanik” are meant to elucidate how the work, when read in the author's intended ordering, reveals its richness and web-like complexity”.


  • Sarah J. Young Shalamov's Symbolism. Rebirth from Kolyma? Shalamov’s Cosmology of Alienation

  • “For Shalamov, the result is the fractured form of his short story collections, where recurring incidents, characters and images undermine the stability of the text through constant shifts of meaning. For the reader, it leads to an acknowledgement of the inability truly to comprehend and share the horror of that experience; we, thankfully, perhaps, must remain alienated from it, and the snake, coiling around the stories, stands, finally, as an image not only of that world and its recreation in narrative, but also of the alienated reader”.


  • Valery Yesipov Cerebration or Genuflection? (Varlam Shalamov and Alexander Solzhenitsin)

  • “Many thought he had already died. “Varlam Shalamov is dead,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared to the whole world from America. Meanwhile, Shalamov still walked the streets of Moscow. He could be seen on Tverskaya, when he ventured out from his hole to buy groceries. He was a ghastly sight, reeling down the street like a drunk, falling over.”