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From Avvakum to Dostoevsky: Varlam Shalamov and Russian Narratives of Political Imprisonment
Author(s) -
KLOTS YASHA
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/russ.12059
Subject(s) - gulag , imprisonment , memoir , narrative , literature , politics , reading (process) , history , subject (documents) , close reading , subject matter , philosophy , art , law , political science , linguistics , archaeology , library science , computer science , curriculum
This paper explores the synthesis of fictional and documentary techniques in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales seen through the prism of Dostoevsky’s nineteenth‐century novel The House of the Dead . It argues that it was Dostoevsky’s oscillation between fiction and reportage, rather than the subject matter of his novel, that defines the complexity of Shalamov’s relationships with the classic. After a brief discussion of various strategies of reading The House of the Dead in the Gulag, the paper concludes by outlining Dostoevsky’s role in the literary polemics between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, two writers who went far beyond the confines of the memoir genre, albeit in opposite directions and along different paths.