Varlam Shalamov between Tamizdat and the Soviet Writers’ Union (1966–1978)

Abstract

Based on archival findings, the paper traces the itinerary of Shalamov’s manuscript from Moscow to the United States, where it was serialized, in an edited form, in the Russian émigré periodical Novyi zhurnal from 1966 until 1978. It focuses on the patterns of its reception across generations of Russian émigré writers and critics and situates Kolymskie rasskazy in the socio-political and linguistic contexts of its first tamizdat publication. The paper also analyzes the western reception of Kolymskie rasskazy vis-à-vis Solzhenitsyn’s novella Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha, which seems to have overshadowed nearly every other text on the Gulag topic since its official publication in Novyi mir in 1962. It argues that the formal(ist) features of Shalamov’s “new prose” remained ultimately inaccessible to the older generation of Russian émigré critics, who lacked the necessary familiarity with the new Soviet language, let alone a first-hand experience of the Gulag, where much of this language and Soviet culture in general had been tempered. The example of Kolymskie rasskazy and the history of its first publication and reception abroad is used as a case study of the transnational network of tamizdat, which mediated the relationships of many Soviet authors, including Shalamov, with official state publishing (or gosizdat), on the one hand, and with the non-conformist literary underground, including samizdat, on the other.