From Avvakum to Dostoevsky: Varlam Shalamov and Russian Narratives of Political Imprisonment

Abstract

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.