VARLAM SHALAMOV - PROSE & POETRY
Needing more than bread,
I dip a crust of dry sky,
in the morning chill,
in the stream flowing by.
29th May, 7.30 pm at Pushkin House, 5A Bloomsbury Square.
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/varlam-shalamov-prose-poetry
http://www.sarahjyoung.com
Varlam Shalamov has been described as the Russian Primo Levi. The son
of a priest and a schoolteacher, he was first arrested in 1929, for
helping to print and distribute copies of Lenin's suppressed
'Testament', a letter sharply critical of Stalin. He was sentenced to
three years in a camp in the Urals. In 1937, he was rearrested,
convicted of "counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities" and sent to
Kolyma, the vast network of labour camps in the north-east of Siberia.
He remained there until 1953. In 1956 he returned to Moscow. By then
he had already began work on the Kolyma Tales, his long collection of
stories about life in the Gulag.
The Kolyma Tales is generally recognised in Russia as the
greatest of all works of literature about the Gulag. The stories have
a documentary-like quality that is reminiscent of Hemingway;
astonishingly, this is fused with a formal, sometimes almost
mathematical perfection more reminiscent of Borges. What has gone
strangely recognised is that Shalamov's poetry, his Kolyma Notebooks,
is no less fine than his prose. Boris Pasternak greatly admired
Shalamov's poetry, as did many other of his contemporaries - but
during the last few decades it has been neglected.
Robert Chandler (translator of Vasily Grossman and Andrey
Platonov) will read some of his translations of Shalamov's poems,
which will also be read in Russian. Sarah Young (a lecturer at UCL
SSEES who has written numerous articles on Shalamov and Russian labour
camp literature and who is also currently translating some of the
Kolyma Tales) will talk with Robert about the similarities and
differences between Shalamov's poetry and his prose.
Tickets: £7, conc. £5
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