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Speaker(s): Michael Nicholson, Oxford University

Shalamov tends to be known in the West for his Tales of Kolyma (Kolymskie rasskazy), which, though written in the 1950s and 1960s and sporadically published in the West, did not enjoy official publication in his homeland until some years after his death in 1982.  Shalamov has often been contrasted with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, both for the terse, pugnacious manner of his writing and, no less, for his refusal to find in the Gulag world any hint of epiphany or moral improvement.  However, this talk will consider two less familiar aspects of Shalamov’s writing: firstly, the fact that his initial response to the experiences of the Gulag came not in prose at all, but in the lyric verse of the Kolyma Notebooks (Kolymskie tetradi); and, secondly, the significance of Shalamov’s surviving stories of the 1930s, i.e. works written before the arrest which heralded his sixteen years in Kolyma.

Dr MICHAEL NICHOLSON is Emeritus Fellow, University College, Oxford. The bulk of his publications have been on unofficial Russian literature and especially the Gulag theme.  His work on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ranges from the phenomenology of his reception in East and West to textological and bibliographical aspects of his work, and he has translated several of his writings over the years. His current project is a study of Solzhenitsyn's writing in the 1940s and 1950s (provisional title: Solzhenitsyn's Road to 'Ivan Denisovich').