Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales

Abstract

This chapter traces the itinerary of the first manuscript of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales from Moscow to New York, based on archival findings. It analyzes the work's reception abroad, in particular vis-à-vis Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich, which seems to have overshadowed most other texts on the gulag since its momentous publication in Russia in 1962. In contrast to Solzhenitsyn's pioneering work on the topic published in gosizdat, it was the formal(ist) orchestration of the topic in Shalamov's “new prose,” defined by the author as neither memoirs, nor short stories, nor even literature as such, but as “prose suffered through like a document” [proza, vystradannaia kak document]. This remained virtually inaccessible to the Russian émigré community of the old generation, who lacked sufficient familiarity with the Soviet vernacular, let alone a firsthand experience of the gulag, where much of this language and Soviet culture had been tempered. With Kolyma Tales as a case study, the chapter revisits the traditional dichotomy between official and underground fields of Russian literature in the late 1960s and 1970s, with tamizdat as their common denominator.