St. Petersburg Institute of Management and Law
psychology faculty
TEST
by discipline:
“Psychologism is thin. literature"
“Problematics and stylistics of “Kolyma Tales”
V. Shalamova"
Completed:
3rd year student
correspondence courses
Nikulin V.I.
Saint Petersburg
Biographical information.
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born on June 18 (June 5, old style) in 1907 in the northern provincial city of Vologda, equidistant from the then capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which, of course, left an imprint on his life, morals, social and cultural life. Possessing a strong receptivity since childhood, he could not help but feel the various currents in the living atmosphere of the city, “with a special moral and cultural climate,” especially since the Shalamov family was actually at the very center of spiritual life.
The writer's father, Tikhon Nikolaevich, a hereditary priest, was a prominent person in the city, because he not only served in the church, but was also involved in active social activities, he maintained contacts with exiled revolutionaries, sharply opposed the Black Hundreds, and fought to introduce knowledge and culture to the people. Having served in the Aleutian Islands for almost 11 years as an Orthodox missionary, he was a European-educated man who held fairly free and independent views, which, naturally, aroused more than just sympathy for him. From the height of his difficult experience, Varlam Shalamov rather skeptically assessed his father’s Christian and educational activities, which he witnessed during his Vologda youth. He wrote in “Fourth Vologda”: “Father guessed nothing in the future... He looked at himself as a man who came not only to serve God, but also to fight for a better future for Russia... Everyone took revenge on his father - and for everything. For literacy, for intelligence. All the historical passions of the Russian people poured through the threshold of our house.” The last sentence can serve as an epigraph to Shalamov’s life. “In 1915, a German prisoner of war stabbed my second brother in the stomach on the boulevard, and my brother almost died - his life was in danger for several months - there was no penicillin then. The then famous Vologda surgeon Mokrovsky saved his life. Alas, this wound was only a warning. Three or four years later, the brother was killed. Both of my older brothers were in the war. The second brother was a Red Army soldier in the chemical company of the VI Army and died on the Northern Front in 1920. My father became blind after the death of his beloved son and lived for thirteen years blind.” In 1926, V. Shalamov entered Moscow University at the Faculty of Soviet Law. On February 19, 1929, he was arrested for distributing the “Will of V.I. Lenin" "...I consider this day and hour the beginning of my public life... After being fascinated by the history of the Russian liberation movement, after the boiling Moscow University of 1926, boiling Moscow - I had to experience my true spiritual qualities.” V.T. Shalamov was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in the camps and sent to the Vishera camp (Northern Urals). In 1932, after serving his sentence, he returned to Moscow, was engaged in literary creativity, and also wrote for magazines. On January 12, 1937, Varlam Shalamov, “as a former “oppositionist,” was again arrested and sentenced for “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities” to five years of imprisonment in camps with heavy physical labor. In 1943, a new sentence - 10 years for anti-Soviet agitation: he called I. Bunin, who was in exile, “a great Russian classic.” V. Shalamov’s acquaintance with the camp doctors saved him from death. Thanks to their help, he completed paramedic courses and worked in the central hospital for prisoners until his release from the camp. He returned to Moscow in 1953, but, not receiving registration, was forced to work at one of the peat enterprises in the Kalinin region. Rehabilitated V.T. Shalamov was there in 1954. The writer’s further lonely life was spent in persistent literary work. However, during the life of V.T. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” were not published. A very small part of the poems was published, and even then often in a distorted form...
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov died on January 17, 1982, having lost his hearing and sight, completely defenseless in the Literary Fund House for the Invalids, having completely drunk the cup of non-recognition during his lifetime.
“Kolyma Tales” is the main work of the writer V.T. Shalamova.
He devoted 20 years to their creation.
Artistic features of “Kolyma Tales”
The question of the artistic affiliation of camp literature deserves a separate study, however, the common theme and personal experience of the authors does not imply genre homogeneity. Camp literature should be considered not as a single phenomenon, but as a unification of works that are very different in mentality, genre, artistic features, and - oddly enough - in theme... It must be taken into account that the authors of camp literature do not may not have foreseen that most readers would perceive their books as literature of testimony, a source of knowledge. And thus, the nature of reading becomes one of the artistic properties of the work.
Literary critics never classified Shalamov as a documentarian, but for most of them the theme, the plan of content of “Kolyma Tales”, as a rule, overshadowed the plan of expression, and they most often turned to Shalamov’s artistic style only to record its differences (mainly intonation ) from the style of other works of camp literature. "Kolyma Stories" consists of six cycles of stories; In addition, Shalamov wrote a large series of essays dedicated to the criminal world. In one of the author’s prefaces, Shalamov wrote: “The camp is a negative experience for a person from the first to the last hour; a person should not know, should not even hear about it.”1 And further, in full accordance with the above declaration, Shalamov describes the camp with literary skill, which in these circumstances is a property, as it were, not of the author, but of the text.
“It rained for three days without stopping. On the rocky soil it is impossible to tell whether it has been raining for an hour or a month. Cold, fine rain... Gray stone shore, gray mountains, gray rain, people in gray torn clothes - everything was very soft, very agreeable. with a friend. Everything was some kind of single color harmony..."2
“We saw a small light gray moon in the black sky, surrounded by a rainbow halo, which lit up in severe frosts.”3
The chronotope of “Kolyma Tales” is the chronotope of the other world: an endless colorless plain bordered by mountains, incessant rain (or snow), cold, wind, endless day. Moreover, this chronotope is secondary, literary - just remember the Hades of the Odyssey or the Hell of the Divine Comedy: “I am in the third circle, where the rain flows...”4. Snow rarely melts in Kolyma; in winter it cakes and freezes, smoothing out all the unevenness of the relief. Winter in Kolyma lasts most of the year. It sometimes rains for months. And the working day of prisoners is sixteen hours. The hidden quote turns into the utmost authenticity. Shalamov is accurate. Therefore, the explanation for all the features and seeming incongruities of his artistic style, apparently, should be sought in the features and incongruities of the material. That is, camps.
The oddities of Shalamov’s style are not so much that they catch the eye, but rather appear as you read. Varlam Shalamov is a poet, journalist, author of a work on sound harmony, however, the reader of “Kolyma Tales” may get the impression that the author does not fully speak Russian:
“Christ did not go to the camp when it was open around the clock.”5
“But they didn’t let anyone go beyond the wire without an escort.”6
"... and in any case, they did not refuse a glass of alcohol, even if it was offered by a provocateur."7.
At the level of vocabulary, the author's text is the speech of an educated person. The failure occurs at the grammatical level. Stumbling, awkward, labored speech organizes an equally awkward, uneven narrative. The rapidly unfolding plot suddenly “freezes,” displaced by a long, detailed description of some small detail of camp life, and then the fate of the character is decided by a completely unexpected circumstance, hitherto not mentioned in the story. The story “To the Show” begins like this: “They played cards at the horse guard Naumov.”8 Horse guardsman Narumov from “The Queen of Spades” (the presence of a paraphrase was noted by many researchers) lost the letter “r”, but remained with horses and a guards rank - in the camp the horse guard is representative of the highest aristocracy. The first phrase seems to outline a circle of associations. A detailed story about the card traditions of criminals, a restrained and tense description of the game itself finally convinces the reader that he is watching a card fight that is fatal for the participants. All his attention is focused on the game. But at the moment of the highest tension, when, according to all the laws of a suburban ballad, two knives should flash in the air, the rapid flow of the plot turns in an unexpected direction and instead of one of the players, a completely outsider, and until that moment not involved in the plot in any way, “fryer” Garkunov, dies - one of spectators. And in the story “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy,” the hero’s long journey to the seemingly inevitable death, according to the camp laws, ends with the death of the careerist investigator and the termination of the “conspiracy case” that was deadly for the hero. The mainspring of the plot is obvious and hidden cause-and-effect relationships. According to Bettelheim, one of the most powerful means of transforming a person from an individual into a model prisoner deprived of individuality is the inability to influence his future. The unpredictability of the result of any step, the inability to count even a day in advance forced us to live in the present, and even better - by momentary physical need - giving rise to a feeling of disorientation and total helplessness. In German concentration camps this drug was used quite deliberately. In the Soviet camps, a similar situation was created, it seems to us, rather as a result of the combination of an atmosphere of terror with traditional imperial bureaucracy and the widespread theft and bribery of any camp authorities. Within the bounds of inevitable death, anything could happen to a person in the camp. Shalamov narrates the story in a dry, epic, maximally objectified manner. This intonation does not change, no matter what he describes. Shalamov does not give any assessments of the behavior of his heroes and the author’s attitude can only be guessed by subtle signs, and more often it cannot be guessed at all. It seems that sometimes Shalamov’s dispassion flows into black, guignol irony. The reader may have the feeling that the detachment of the author's intonation is created partly due to the stinginess and discoloration of the graphic series of "Kolyma Tales". Shalamov’s speech seems as faded and lifeless as the Kolyma landscapes he describes. The series of sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical structure carry the maximum semantic load. Shalamov’s images, as a rule, are polysemantic and multifunctional. So, for example, the first phrase of the story “To the Show” sets the intonation, lays a false trail - and at the same time gives the story volume, introduces the concept of historical time into its frame of reference, for the “minor night incident” in the horse barracks appears to the reader as a reflection, a projection of Pushkin’s tragedy. Shalamov uses the classic plot as a probe - by the degree and nature of the damage, the reader can judge the properties of the camp universe. "Kolyma Stories" is written in a free and vivid language, the pace of the narrative is very high - and imperceptible, because it is the same everywhere. The density of meaning per unit of text is such that, trying to cope with it, the reader’s consciousness is practically unable to be distracted by the peculiarities of the style itself; at some point, the author’s artistic style ceases to be a surprise and becomes a given. Reading Shalamov requires a lot of emotional and mental tension - and this tension becomes, as it were, a characteristic of the text. In a sense, the initial feeling of the stinginess and monotony of the visual plan of “Kolyma Tales” is correct - Shalamov saves on the space of the text due to the extreme concentration of meaning.
Problems of the work.
“Kolyma Stories” is a collection of stories included in the Kolyma epic by Varlam Shalamov. The author himself went through this “iciest” hell of Stalin’s camps, so each of his stories is absolutely reliable.
“Kolyma Stories” reflects the problem of confrontation between the individual and the state machine, the tragedy of man in a totalitarian state. Moreover, the last stage of this conflict is shown - a person in a camp. And not just in a camp, but in the most terrible of camps, erected by the most inhumane of systems. This is the maximum suppression of the human personality by the state. In the story “Dry Rations” Shalamov writes: “nothing bothered us anymore.” It was easy for us to live at the mercy of someone else’s will. We didn’t even care about saving our lives, and if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the camp daily routine... We had long ago become fatalists, we did not count on our life beyond the day ahead... Any interference in fate, the will of the gods was indecent.” You can’t say it more precisely than the author, and the worst thing is that the will of the state completely suppresses and dissolves the will of man. She deprives him of all human feelings, erases the line between life and death. Gradually killing a person physically, they kill his soul. Hunger and cold do things to people that make them scary. “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - came from us with the meat that we lost during our fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was distinguishable - the most durable human feeling.” In order to eat and keep warm, people are ready to do anything, and if they do not commit betrayal, then it is subconsciously, mechanically, since the very concept of betrayal, like many other things, has been erased, gone, disappeared. “We have learned humility, we have forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, selfishness, self-love, and jealousy and old age seemed to us Martian concepts and, moreover, trifles... We understood that death was no worse than life.” You just need to imagine a life that seems no worse than death. Everything human disappears in a person. The state will suppresses everything, only the thirst for life remains, great survival: “Hungry and angry, I knew that nothing in the world would make me commit suicide... and I realized the most important thing is that I became a man not because he is God’s creation , but because he was physically stronger, more resilient than all animals, and later because he forced the spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle.” That's it, contrary to all theories about the origin of man.
Conclusion
If in the story “Sherry Brandy” Shalamov writes about the poet’s life, about its meaning, then in the first story, which is called “In the Snow,” Shalamov talks about the purpose and role of writers, comparing it with how they trample a road through virgin snow. Writers are the ones who trample it. There is the first one who has the hardest time of all, but if you follow only his footsteps, you will only get a narrow path. Others follow him and trample down the wide road along which readers travel. “And each of them, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s footsteps. And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.”
And Shalamov does not follow the beaten path, he steps on “virgin snow.” “The literary and human feat of Shalamov is that he not only endured 17 years of camps, kept his soul alive, but also found the strength to return in thought and feeling to the terrible years, to carve from the most durable material - Words - truly a Memorial in memory those who died, for the edification of posterity.”
Bibliography:
1. Materials from the site shalamov.ru
2. Mikhailik E. In the context of literature and history (article)
3. Shalamov collection / Donin S., [Compiled by V.V. Esipov]. - Vologda: Grifon, 1997
The autobiographical basis, the reality of destinies and situations give “Kolyma Tales” the meaning of a historical document. In the context of the Gulag theme in Russian literature, Shalamov’s work is one of the peaks - along with the work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. The names of these writers are perceived as symbols of different approaches to the topic: fundamental artistic research, historical and philosophical generalizations of the “GULAG Archipelago” - and Shalamov’s pictures of the irrational world of Kolyma, a world beyond logic, beyond truth, beyond lies, in which death reigns for bodies and corruption for souls. Shalamov wrote a number of notes about his artistic principles, which he called “new prose”: “It is important to resurrect the feeling<...>, extraordinary new details, descriptions in a new way are needed to make one believe in the story, in everything else not as information, but as an open heart wound." The poetics of Shalamov's story outwardly resembles the canons of the adventure genre; it consists of a laconic, precise description of one a specific case, an event experienced by the author. The description is fundamentally ascetic, unemotional and mysteriously highlights the extreme inhumanity of what is happening. Examples are the masterpieces of “Kolyma Tales” - “Golden Taiga”, “Sherry Brandy”, “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”, “The Spellcaster”. snake", "Magic", "Lawyers' Conspiracy", "The Glove", "The Verdict", "Condensed Milk", "The Weismanist". The gigantic corpus of "Kolyma Stories" connects the personality of the author, the tension of his soul, thoughts, and the vicissitudes of fate. Twenty years , spent in camps - three in the Urals, seventeen in Kolyma - the inhuman price of this work “The artist is Pluto rising from hell, and not Orpheus descending into hell,” is the hard-won principle of Shalamov’s new prose.
Shalamov was not satisfied with how his contemporaries understood him. This concerns primarily those aspects of the general concept of the “Kolyma Tales” that were perceived as controversial and caused controversy. Shalamov rejects the entire literary tradition with its humanistic foundations, since, in his opinion, it has shown its inability to prevent the brutalization of people and the world; “The ovens of Auschwitz and the shame of Kolyma proved that art and literature are zero” (see also the letter to A.I. Solzhenitsyn in 1962, which says: “Remember the most important thing: the camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone.” ). The world of the camps is reflected in “Kolyma Tales” as a world of absolute evil, sepulchral closed space and stopped time - a world of existential nothingness. But all the contradictions hidden in the maximalism of this position paradoxically give rise to a strong and pure light of genuine love for people, the high artistic pathos of “Kolyma Tales”. "Kolyma Stories", as well as the autobiographical story "The Fourth Vologda", the story "Butyrskaya Prison", the anti-novel "Vishera" in their spiritual and literary meaning belong to the final values of Russian literature for the 20th century.
The spirit of death lingers over "Kolyma Tales". But the word "death" doesn't mean anything here. It doesn't convey anything. In general, we understand death abstractly: it’s the end, we’ll all die. To imagine death as life stretching on endlessly, exhausted by the last physical strength of a person, is much more terrible. They said and say: “in the face of death.” Shalamov's stories were written in the face of life. Life is the worst thing. Not just because it's flour. Having experienced life, a person asks himself: why are you alive? In the Kolyma situation, all life is selfishness, sin, the murder of your neighbor, whom you surpassed only by surviving, and life is meanness. Life is generally indecent. A survivor under these conditions will forever have a residue of “life” in his soul, as something shameful, shameful, Why didn’t you die? - the last question that is posed to a person... Indeed: why am I still alive when everyone has died?..
Worse than death is the loss of life during life, of the human image in a person. It turns out that a person cannot stand it and turns into matter - into wood, into stone - from which the builders make what they want. Living, moving material reveals unexpected properties along the way. Firstly, humans were found to be tougher and stronger than horses. Stronger than any animal. Secondly, spiritual, intellectual, moral qualities are something secondary, and they easily fall away like husks, once a person is brought to the appropriate material condition. Thirdly, it turns out that in such a state a person does not think about anything, does not remember anything, loses his mind, feelings, and willpower. Committing suicide is already showing independence. However, for this step you must first eat a piece of bread. Fourthly, hope corrupts. Hope is the most dangerous thing in the camp (bait, traitor). Fifthly, as soon as a person recovers, his first movements will be fear and envy. Sixth, seventh, tenth, the facts say - there is no place for man. Just one cross-section of human material, which speaks about one thing: the psyche has disappeared, there is physics that reacts to shock, to rations of bread, to hunger, to heat... In this sense, the nature of Kolyma is similar to man - permafrost. “Artistic means” in Shalamov’s stories come down to listing our residual properties: dry, parchment-like, cracked skin; muscles as thin as ropes; dried out brain cells that can no longer perceive anything; frostbitten fingers that are not sensitive to objects; festering sores wrapped in dirty rags. This is a man. A man descending to his own bones, from which he builds a bridge to socialism across the tundra and taiga of Kolyma. Not a denunciation - a statement: this is how it was done...
In general, there are no heroes in Shalamov’s stories. There are no characters: no time for psychology. There are more or less uniform segments of “man-time” - the stories themselves. The main plot is the survival of a person, which is unknown how it will end, and another question: is it good or bad to survive in a situation where everyone dies, presented as a given, as the starting point of the story. The challenge of survival is a double-edged sword and stimulates both the worst and the best in people, while maintaining interest, like body temperature, in Shalamov's narrative.
It's difficult for the reader here. Unlike other literary works, the reader in “Kolyma Stories” is equated not with the author, not with the writer (who “knows everything” and leads the reader), but with the arrested person. To a person who is forbidden in the conditions of the story. No choice. Please read these short stories in a row, without finding rest, dragging a log, a wheelbarrow with a stone. This is a test of endurance, a test of human (including reader) goodness. You can throw away the book and return to life. After all, the reader is not a prisoner! But how can you live without reading to the end? - A traitor? A coward who does not have the strength to face the truth? A future executioner or a victim of the situations described here?
To all existing camp literature, Shalamov in “Kolyma Tales” is an antipode. He leaves us no choice. It seems that he is as merciless to readers as life was merciless to him, to the people he portrays. Like Kolyma. Hence the feeling of authenticity, adequacy of the text - the plot. And this is Shalamov’s special advantage over other authors. He writes as if he were dead. He brought back extremely negative experiences from the camp. And he never tires of repeating:
“It’s terrible to see a camp, and not a single person in the world needs to know about camps. The camp experience is completely negative down to a single minute. A person only gets worse. And it cannot be otherwise...”
“The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and ninety-nine percent of people could not stand this test. Those who stood it died along with those who could not stand it...”
“Everything that was dear is trampled into dust, civilization and culture fly away from a person in the shortest possible time, calculated in weeks...”
One can argue with this: is it really nothing, no one? For example, Solzhenitsyn argues in “The Gulag Archipelago”: “Shalamov himself... writes: I won’t inform on others! After all, I won’t become a foreman to force others to work. And why is this, Varlam Tikhonovich? Why is this suddenly you won’t become an informer or a foreman, since no one in the camp can avoid this inclined slide of corruption? Since truth and lies are sisters, then you clung to some branch, stumbled into some stone, and didn’t crawl any further? Maybe anger is not the most durable feeling after all? With your personality... aren’t you refuting your own concept?”
Maybe he denies it. Doesn't matter. That's not the point. The point is that the camp denies a person, and that’s where we need to start. Shalamov is the initiator. He has Kolyma. And there is nowhere to go further. And the same Solzhenitsyn, embracing the Archipelago, takes Shalamov beyond the brackets of his own and general experience. Comparing with his book, Solzhenitsyn writes: “Perhaps in Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories the reader will more accurately feel the ruthlessness of the spirit of the Archipelago and the edge of human despair.”
All this can be represented in the form of an iceberg; “Kolyma Tales” is part of its underwater part. Seeing an ice mass swaying on the surface, you need to remember - what is underneath it, what is at its core? There is nothing. There is no death. Time stopped, froze. Historical development is not reflected in the ice.
When life has reached the stage of "semi-consciousness", can we talk about the soul? It turned out it was possible. The soul is material. You don’t read it, you read into it, you bite into it. A section of the material - bypassing "morality" - shows us a concentrated person. In good and evil. And even on the other side. In good? - we'll ask. Yes. He jumped out of the hole, saving his comrade, risking himself, contrary to reason - just like that, obeying the residual tension of the muscles (story “Rain”). This is concentration. A concentrated person, surviving, orients himself cruelly but firmly: “... I hoped to help someone, and to settle scores with someone ten years ago. I hoped to become human again.”
In the draft notes of the 70s there are the following statements: “I do not believe in literature. I do not believe in its ability to correct a person. The experience of humanistic literature led to the bloody executions of the twentieth century before my eyes. I do not believe in the possibility of preventing anything, prevent repetition. History repeats itself. And any execution of 1937 can be repeated." Why did Shalamov persistently write and write about his camp experience, overcoming severe illness, fatigue and despair from the fact that almost nothing of what he wrote was published? Probably the fact is that the writer felt a moral responsibility, which is obligatory for a poet.
His body does not contain heat, and his soul no longer distinguishes between truth and lies. And this difference no longer interests a person. All need for simple human communication disappears. “I don’t know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them questions, and not because I followed the Arab proverb: “Don’t ask, and you won’t be lied to.” I didn’t care whether they lied to me or not , I was beyond the truth, beyond lies,” writes Shalamov in the story “Sentence”.
But in some of the heroes of “Kolyma Tales” there still lives a desire to break free. A whole series of short stories called “The Green Prosecutor” is dedicated to escaping from the camp. But all escapes end in failure, because luck is basically impossible here. Shalamov's closed space acquires symbolic meaning. These are not just Kolyma camps, fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which normal free people live. But everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the same abyss. That is, the writer associates the whole country with a huge camp, where everyone living in it is already doomed.
A new theory of selection rules here, unnatural and unlike any previous one. But it is built on the material of the life and death of millions. “Tall people died first. No habit of hard work changed absolutely anything here. A puny intellectual still lasted longer than the giant Kaluga resident - a natural digger - if they were fed the same, in accordance with the camp rations. In increasing rations for percentages of production, too it was of little use, because the main painting remained the same, in no way designed for tall people." Here little depended on moral qualities, beliefs, and faith. The most persistent and strong feeling was anger; everything else was frozen out and lost. Life was limited to hard physical labor, and the soul, thoughts, feelings, speech were an unnecessary burden from which the body tried to free itself. The Kolyma camp contributed to new unexpected discoveries. For example, the fact that in the eyes of the state a physically strong person is better, more valuable than a weak one, since he can throw 20 cubic meters of soil out of a trench per shift. If he fulfills his “interest,” that is, his main duty to the state, then he is more moral than a goner-intellectual. That is, physical strength turns into moral strength.
Perhaps the main feature of the Gulag: in the camp there is no concept of guilt, because here are the victims of lawlessness: in the Kolyma camp hell, prisoners do not know their guilt, therefore they know neither repentance nor the desire to atone for their sin.
Addressing the reader, the author seeks to convey the idea that the camp is not a separate, isolated part of the world. This is a cast of our entire society. “There is nothing in it that would not exist in the wild, in its social and spiritual structure. Camp ideas only repeat the ideas of the will transmitted by order of the authorities. Not a single social movement, campaign, the slightest turn in the wild remains without an immediate reflection, a trace in the camp The camp reflects not only the struggle of the political cliques that succeed each other in power, but the culture of these people, their secret aspirations, tastes, habits, repressed desires." Only by thoroughly mastering this knowledge, which was acquired by millions of exterminated people at the cost of their own lives and conveyed by Shalamov at the cost of his own life, will we be able to defeat the surrounding evil and prevent a new Gulag.
“Reflect life? I don’t want to reflect anything, I don’t have the right to speak for anyone (except for the Kolyma dead, maybe). I want to speak out about some patterns of human behavior in some circumstances, not in order to teach someone something. Not at all." “Art is deprived of the right to preach. No one can teach anyone, has no right to teach... New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description. That is, a document, the direct participation of the author in the events of life. Prose experienced as a document. .. The prose of the future is the prose of experienced people." Shalamov does not try to teach or moralize about his experience. He provides the reader with the facts he has obtained “looking at himself as an instrument for understanding the world, as the perfect of perfect instruments...”. Shalamov was in conditions where there was no hope of preserving existence; he testifies to the death of people crushed by the camp. It seems miraculous that the author himself managed not only to survive physically, but also to survive as a person. However, to the question asked to him: “How did you manage not to break down, what is the secret of this?” Shalamov answered without hesitation: “There is no secret, anyone can break.” This answer indicates that the author overcame the temptation to consider himself the winner of the hell that he went through and explains why Shalamov does not teach how to survive in the camp, does not try to convey the experience of camp life, but only testifies to what the camp system is. Shalamov's prose is a continuation of Pushkin's prose tradition of describing a person in a special situation through his behavior, and not through psychological analysis. In such prose there is no place for the hero’s confession, there is no place for detailed reflection.
In Russian literature of the 20th century, much has been written about camps and prisoners. The camp theme has not been completely eradicated and makes itself felt in language, in musical preferences and social patterns of behavior: in the incredible and often unconscious craving of Russian people for thieves' songs, the popularity of camp chanson, in the manner of behaving, building a business, and communicating.
If we talk about the most influential authors who dedicated their main works to the metamorphoses that happen to a person behind barbed wire, then Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Sergei Dovlatov are inevitably included among these (of course, the list is not exhausted by these names).
“Shalamov,” writes Alexander Genis in the script for the radio program “Dovlatov and the Surroundings,” “as you know, cursed his camp experience, but Solzhenitsyn blessed the prison that made him a writer...” The youngest of this triad is Dovlatov, who served in the paramilitary guards, then there was someone on this side of the barbed wire who knew Shalamov. “I knew Varlam Tikhonovich a little. He was an amazing man. Still, I disagree. Did Shalamov hate prison? I think this is not enough. Such a feeling does not mean love for freedom. And even hatred of tyranny.” Dovlatov said about his prose: “I am interested in life, not prison. And they are people, not monsters."
For Shalamov, prison deprives people of everything human, except for a timid, gradually fading hope for an end to torment: be it death or at least some easing of the regime. Shalamov’s heroes most often do not even dare to dream of complete liberation. Shalamov’s heroes are soulless characters in the style of Goya, fading with consciousness and the desire to cling to the life of a goner...
The world of the camp is a world of fading human reflexes. In the camp, a person’s life is simplified as much as possible. The author of the stories is an indifferent writer of everyday life of the absurdly cruel hierarchical camp world, in which there are guards with enormous rights, a thieves' aristocracy inflicting arbitrariness in the camp barracks, and petty, powerless human bastards.
In the story “To the Show,” which begins with an allusion to Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”: “We played cards at Naumov’s horse-driver...”, one prisoner loses his things to another. When there is nothing else to play for, Naumov’s gaze falls on two strangers - prisoners from another barracks, sawing firewood in the horse breeders’ barracks for a small food reward. On the mountain of one of the prisoners, he turns out to be wearing a sweater sent by his wife. He refuses to give it up. “Sashka, Naumov’s orderly, the same Sashka who an hour ago poured us soup for cutting wood, sat down a little and pulled something out from behind the top of his felt boots. Then he extended his hand to Garkunov, and Garkunov sobbed and began to fall on his side.” The sweater Naumov lost was removed from the dead body. “The sweater was red and there was barely any blood on it... The game was over and I could go home. Now we had to look for another partner to cut wood.” The last line expresses indifference to someone else's life, which arose as a reaction to inhumane conditions, which you cannot help in any way. In the camp, a person is deprived of personal property and personal dignity. The experience of the camp, according to Shalamov, cannot be useful to a person anywhere other than the camp, because it is beyond everything that we call human, which persists where, in addition to systematic humiliation, there is some other effort aimed at creating the individual.
The heroes of the stories are prisoners, civilians, bosses, guards, and sometimes natural phenomena.
In the very first story, “Across the Snow,” prisoners make their way through virgin snow. Five or six people move forward shoulder to shoulder, having outlined a landmark somewhere far ahead: a rock, a tall tree. Here it is very important not to fall into the tracks of those walking next to you, otherwise there will be a hole through which it is more difficult to walk than on virgin soil. After these people, other people, carts, tractors can already come. “Everyone who follows the trail, even the smallest and weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else’s trail.” And only in the last sentence do we understand that this entire story, in addition to the everyday winter camp ritual, describes literary creativity. “And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.” It is writers who trample the virgin snow of untouched living spaces, clothe what exists around us fleetingly and implicitly in obvious permanent verbal images, like a developer for photographic paper, show what is seen and heard by many, but without any internal connection, without the logic of plot development, in an understandable contrast material form. And despite his own conviction that the camp experience cannot give a person anything positive, Shalamov, in the totality of his stories, perhaps even contrary to his own conviction, argues that a person who has gone through the camps and has not lost the memory of his calling is likened to a taiga dwarf, an unpretentious distant relative cedar, unusually sensitive and stubborn, like all northern trees. “In the midst of the endless snowy whiteness, in the midst of complete hopelessness, an elfin tree suddenly rises. He shakes off the snow, straightens up to his full height, and raises his green, icy needles to the sky. He hears the call of spring, elusive to us, and, believing in it, gets up before anyone else in the North. Winter is over." Shalamov considered the dwarf dwarf tree to be the most poetic Russian tree, “better than the famous weeping willow, plane tree, and cypress.” And wood from elfin wood is hotter, adds the author, who has realized in permafrost conditions the price of any, even the most insignificant manifestation of heat.
In the Gulag camps, the hope that the long winter of humiliation and unconsciousness would end died only with the person. Deprived of even basic needs, a person becomes like a dwarf, ready to trust even the short-term warmth of a fire; more gullible, because any promise, any hint about the calories the body needs, a prisoner lowered below the level of survival is ready to perceive as a possible, albeit momentary, improvement in his fate. Years of camps are compressed into granite temporary monoliths. A person tortured by meaningless hard work ceases to notice time. And therefore, the smallest detail that distracts him from the trajectory set by days, months, years of imprisonment is perceived as something amazing.
And today Shalamov’s short stories burn the reader’s soul. They push him to the inevitable question: how could such a terrifying, such universal scale of evil happen in such a huge country as diverse in its national and cultural structure as Russia? And how did it happen that other completely cultured and independent peoples were also drawn into this funnel of pure unalloyed evil? Without answers to these and many other questions prompted by reading Shalamov, we will not be able to answer those that arise in our minds today when reading the latest newspapers.
Students, graduate students, young scientists who use the knowledge base in their studies and work will be very grateful to you.
Posted on http://www.allbest.ru/
Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus
Educational institution
"Gomel State University
named after Francysk Skaryna"
Faculty of Philology
Department of Russian and World Literature
Course work
MORAL ISSUES
“KOLYMA STORIES” by V.T.SHALAMOVA
Executor
student of group RF-22 A.N. Solution
Scientific director
senior teacher I.B. Azarova
Gomel 2016
Key words: anti-world, antithesis, archipelago, fiction, memories, ascent, Gulag, humanity, detail, documentary, prisoner, concentration camp, inhuman conditions, descent, morality, inhabitants, images-symbols, chronotope.
The object of research in this course work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.
As a result of the study, it was concluded that “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov was written on an autobiographical basis, raises moral questions of time, choice, duty, honor, nobility, friendship and love and is a significant event in camp prose.
The scientific novelty of this work lies in the fact that “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamov are considered on the basis of the writer’s documentary experience. The stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov are systematized according to moral issues, according to the system of images and historiography, etc.
As for the scope of application of this course work, it can be used not only for writing other coursework and dissertations, but also in preparation for practical and seminar classes.
Introduction
1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary in the works of V.T. Shalamova
2.2 The rise of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
3. Figurative concepts of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Conclusion
List of sources used
Application
Introduction
Readers met Shalamov the poet in the late 50s. And the meeting with Shalamov the prose writer took place only in the late 80s. To talk about the prose of Varlam Shalamov means to talk about the artistic and philosophical meaning of non-existence, about death as the compositional basis of the work. It would seem that there is something new: even before, before Shalamov, death, its threat, expectation and approach were often the main driving force of the plot, and the fact of death itself served as the denouement... But in “Kolyma Tales” it is different. No threats, no waiting. Here death, non-existence is the artistic world in which the plot usually unfolds. The fact of death precedes the beginning of the plot.
By the end of 1989, about a hundred stories about Kolyma had been published. Now everyone reads Shalamov - from students to prime ministers. And at the same time, Shalamov’s prose seems to be dissolved in a huge wave of documentaries - memories, notes, diaries about the era of Stalinism. In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Tales” became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of an original aesthetics based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world.
Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. V.T. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox and symbolism.
The camp theme is growing into a large and very important phenomenon, within the framework of which writers strive to fully comprehend the terrible experience of Stalinism and at the same time not forget that behind the dark curtain of decades it is necessary to discern a person.
True poetry, according to Shalamov, is original poetry, where each line is provided with the talent of a lonely soul that has suffered a lot. She is waiting for her reader.
In the prose of V.T. Shalamov, not only the Kolyma camps are depicted, fenced off with barbed wire, outside of which free people live, but everything that is outside the zone is also drawn into the abyss of violence and repression. The whole country is a camp where those living in it are doomed. The camp is not an isolated part of the world. This is a cast of that society.
There is a large amount of literature dedicated to V.T. Shalamov and his work. The subject of research of this course work is the moral issues of “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, therefore the main source of information is the monograph by N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky (“In a blizzard freezing age”: About “Kolyma Stories”), which tells about the established way of life, about the order, scale of values and social hierarchy of the country “Kolyma”, and also shows the symbolism that the author finds in the everyday realities of prison life. Particular importance was attached to various articles in magazines. Researcher M. Mikheev (“On the “new” prose of Varlam Shalamov”) in his work showed that every detail in Shalamov, even the most “ethnographic”, is built on hyperbole, grotesque, stunning comparison, where the low and high, naturalistically rough and spiritual, and also described the laws of time, which are taken beyond the natural course. I. Nichiporov (“Prose, suffered as a document: V. Shalamov’s Kolyma epic”) expresses his opinion on the documentary basis of stories about Kolyma, using the works of V. T. Shalamov himself. But G. Nefagina (“The Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants”) in her work pays attention to the spiritual and psychological side of the stories, showing the choice of a person in unnatural conditions. Researcher E. Shklovsky (“About Varlam Shalamov”) examines the denial of traditional fiction in “Kolyma Tales” in the author’s desire to achieve something unattainable, to explore the material from the point of view of the biography of V.T. Shalamov. Great assistance in writing this course work was also provided by the scientific publications of L. Timofeev (“Poetics of camp prose”), in which the researcher compares the stories of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko to identify similarities and differences in the poetics of camp prose from various authors of the 20th century; and E. Volkova (“Varlam Shalamov: The Duel of the Word with the Absurd”), who drew attention to the phobias and feelings of prisoners in the story “Sentence.”
When revealing the theoretical part of the course project, various information from history was drawn upon, and considerable attention was also paid to information gleaned from various encyclopedias and dictionaries (dictionary by S.I. Ozhegov, “Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary” edited by V.M. Kozhevnikova).
The topic of this course work is relevant because it is always interesting to return to that era, which shows the events of Stalinism, the problems of human relationships and the psychology of an individual in concentration camps, in order to prevent the repetition of the terrible stories of those years. This work takes on particular urgency in the present time, in an era of people’s lack of spirituality, misunderstanding, disinterest, indifference to each other, and unwillingness to come to the aid of a person. The same problems remain in the world as in Shalamov’s works: the same heartlessness towards each other, sometimes hatred, spiritual hunger, etc.
The novelty of the work is that the gallery of images is systematized, moral issues are identified and the historiography of the issue is presented. The consideration of stories on a documentary basis gives a special uniqueness.
This course project aims to study the originality of V.T. Shalamov’s prose using the example of “Kolyma Tales”, to reveal the ideological content and artistic features of V.T. Shalamov’s stories, and also to expose acute moral problems in concentration camps in his works.
The object of research in the work is a series of stories about Kolyma by V.T. Shalamov.
Some individual stories were also subjected to literary review.
The objectives of this course project are:
1) study of the historiography of the issue;
2) research of literary critical materials about the creativity and fate of the writer;
3) consideration of the features of the categories “space” and “time” in Shalamov’s stories about Kolyma;
4) identifying the specifics of the implementation of images and symbols in “Kolyma Stories”;
When writing the work, comparative historical and systematic methods were used.
The course work has the following architecture: introduction, main part, conclusion and list of sources used, appendix.
The introduction outlines the relevance of the problem, historiography, discusses discussions on this topic, defines the goals, object, subject, novelty and objectives of the course work.
The main part consists of 3 sections. The first section examines the documentary basis of the stories, as well as the denial of traditional fiction by V.T. Shalamov in “Kolyma Stories”. The second section examines the Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants: a definition of the term “country of Kolyma” is given, the low and high in the stories are considered, and a parallel is drawn with other authors who created camp prose. The third section studies figurative concepts in “Kolyma Stories” by V.T. Shalamov, namely the antitheses of image-symbols, the religious and psychological side of the stories.
The conclusion summarizes the work done on the stated topic.
The list of sources used contains the literature on which the author of the course project relied in his work.
1. Aesthetics of artistic documentary
in the works of V.T. Shalamova
In the history of literature of the twentieth century, “Kolyma Stories” (1954 - 1982) by V.T. Shalamov became not only a significant phenomenon of camp prose, but also a kind of writer’s manifesto, the embodiment of an original aesthetics based on a fusion of documentary and artistic vision of the world, opening the way to a generalizing comprehension of man in inhuman circumstances, to the understanding of the camp as a model of historical, social existence, and the world order as a whole. Shalamov informs readers: “The camp is world-like. There is nothing in it that would not exist in the wild, in its structure, social and spiritual.” The fundamental postulates of the aesthetics of artistic documentaryism are formulated by Shalamov in the essay “On Prose,” which serves as the key to the interpretation of his stories. The starting point here is the judgment that in the modern literary situation “the need for the art of the writer has been preserved, but trust in fiction has been undermined.” The Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following definition of fiction. Fiction - (from the French belles lettres - elegant literature) fiction. The willfulness of creative fiction must give way to a memoir, a documentary in its essence, recreation of the artist’s personal experience, for “today’s reader argues only with the document and is convinced only by the document.” Shalamov substantiates the idea of “literature of fact” in a new way, believing that “it is necessary and possible to write a story that is indistinguishable from a document,” which will become a living “document about the author,” “a document of the soul” and will present the writer “not as an observer, not as a spectator, but a participant in the drama of life."
Here is Shalamov’s famous programmatic opposition to 1) a report of events and 2) their description - 3) the events themselves. This is how the author himself speaks about his prose: “New prose is the event itself, the battle, and not its description. That is, a document, the direct participation of the author in life events. Prose experienced as a document." Judging by this and the previously quoted statements, Shalamov’s understanding of the document itself, of course, was not entirely traditional. Rather, it is some kind of volitional act or action. In the essay “On Prose,” Shalamov informs his reader: “When people ask me what I write, I answer: I don’t write memoirs. There are no memories in Kolyma Tales. I don’t write stories either - or rather, I try to write not a story, but something that would not be literature. Not the prose of a document, but the prose labored through as a document.”
Here are more fragments reflecting Shalamov’s original, but very paradoxical views on “new prose”, with the denial of traditional fiction - in an effort to achieve something seemingly unattainable.
The writer’s desire to “explore his material with his own skin” leads to the establishment of his special aesthetic relationship with the reader, who will believe in the story “not as information, but as an open heart wound.” Approaching the definition of his own creative experience, Shalamov emphasizes the intention to create “something that would not be literature,” since his “Kolyma Stories” “offers new prose, the prose of living life, which at the same time is a transformed reality, a transformed document.” In the “prose that the writer seeks, labored through as a document,” there is no room left for descriptiveness in the spirit of Tolstoy’s “writing commandments.” Here the need for capacious symbolization, intensely affecting the reader’s detailing, increases, and “details that do not contain a symbol seem superfluous in the artistic fabric of the new prose.” At the level of creative practice, the identified principles of artistic writing receive multifaceted expression from Shalamov. The integration of document and image takes on various forms and has a complex impact on the poetics of “Kolyma Tales”. Shalamov’s method of in-depth knowledge of camp life and the psychology of a prisoner is sometimes the introduction of a private human document into the discursive space.
In the story “Dry Rations”, the narrator’s intense psychological observations about the “great indifference” that “possessed us”, about how “only anger was housed in an insignificant muscular layer ...”, turn into a portrait of Fedya Shchapov - the “Altai teenager”, “ the widow’s only son,” who was “tried for illegal slaughter of livestock.” His contradictory position as a “goneer”, who, however, retains a “healthy peasant beginning” and is alien to the general camp fatalism, is concentratedly revealed in the final psychological touch to the incomprehensible paradoxes of camp life and consciousness. This is a compositionally isolated fragment of a human document, snatched from the stream of oblivion, which captures - more clearly than any external characteristics - a desperate attempt at physical and moral stability: “Mom,” Fedya wrote, “Mom, I live well. Mom, I’m dressed for the season...” As Shklovsky E.A. believes: “Shalamov’s story sometimes appears as an invariant of the writer’s manifesto, becoming “documentary” evidence of the hidden facets of the creative process.”
In the story “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova”, noteworthy is the flashing auto-commentary that in “The Lawyers’ Conspiracy” “every letter is documented.” In the story “Tie”, a scrupulous reconstruction of the life paths of Marusya Kryukova, who was arrested upon returning from Japanese emigration, the artist Shukhaev, who was broken by the camp and capitulated to the regime, commenting on the slogan “Work is a matter of honor…” posted on the gates of the camp - allow both the biography of the characters and creative production Shukhaev, and present the various signs of the camp as components of a holistic documentary discourse. Shklovsky E.A. states: “The core of this multi-level human document becomes the author’s creative self-reflection, implanted into the narrative series, about his search for “a special kind of truth,” about the desire to make this story “a thing of prose of the future,” about the fact that future writers are not writers, but truly “people of the profession” who know their environment will “tell only about what they know and have seen. Authenticity is the strength of the literature of the future."
The author's references to his own experience throughout Kolyma prose emphasize his role not just as an artist, but as a documentary witness. In the story “Lepers,” these signs of direct authorial presence perform an expositional function in relation to both the main action and individual links in the series of events: “Immediately after the war, another drama was played before my eyes in the hospital”; “I also walked in this group, slightly bent over, along the high basement of the hospital...”. The author sometimes appears in “Kolyma Tales” as a “witness” of the historical process, its bizarre and tragic turns. The story “The Best Praise” is based on a historical excursion, in which the origins and motivations of Russian revolutionary terror are artistically comprehended, portraits of revolutionaries are drawn that “lived heroically and died heroically.” The vivid impressions of the narrator’s communication with his acquaintance from Butyrskaya prison, Alexander Andreev, a former Socialist-Revolutionary and general secretary of the society of political prisoners, turn in the final part into a strictly documentary recording of information about the historical figure, her revolutionary and prison path - in the form of a “certificate from the magazine “Katorga and exile” . Such a juxtaposition reveals the mysterious depths of a documentary text about private human existence, revealing irrational twists of fate behind formalized biographical data.
In the story “Gold Medal,” significant layers of historical memory are reconstructed through symbolically rich fragments of St. Petersburg and Moscow “texts.” The fate of the revolutionary Natalya Klimova and her daughter, who passed through the Soviet camps, becomes in the artistic whole of the story the starting point of the historical narrative about the trials of revolutionary terrorists at the beginning of the century, about their “sacrifice, self-denial to the point of namelessness,” their readiness to “seek the meaning of life passionately, selflessly ". The narrator acts here as a documentary researcher who “held in his hands” the verdict of members of a secret revolutionary organization, noting in its text indicative “literary errors”, and personal letters from Natalya Klimova “after the bloody iron broom of the thirties.” Here there is a deep feeling for the very “matter” of a human document, where the features of handwriting and punctuation recreate the “manner of conversation” and indicate the vicissitudes of the relationship of the individual with the rhythms of history. The narrator comes to an aesthetic generalization about the story as a kind of material document, “a living, not yet dead thing that saw the hero,” for “writing a story is a search, and the smell of a scarf, a scarf, lost by the hero or heroine must enter into the vague consciousness of the brain.” .
In private documentary observations, the author’s historiosophical intuition crystallizes about how, in social upheavals, “the best people of the Russian revolution” were torn apart, as a result of which “there were no people left to lead Russia” and a “crack was formed along which time split - not only Russia , but a world where on one side is all the humanism of the nineteenth century, its sacrifice, its moral climate, its literature and art, and on the other - Hiroshima, the bloody war and concentration camps." The combination of the “documentary” biography of the hero with large-scale historical generalizations is also achieved in the story “The Green Prosecutor”. The “text” of the camp fate of Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshey, a non-party engineer, collector of antiques, convicted of embezzling government funds and managing to escape from Kolyma, leads the narrator to a “documentary” reconstruction of the history of Soviet camps from the point of view of those changes in attitude towards fugitives, in the prism of which are drawn internal transformations of the punitive system.
Sharing his experience of “literary” development of this topic (“in my early youth I had the opportunity to read about Kropotkin’s escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress”), the narrator establishes areas of inconsistency between literature and camp reality, creates his own “chronicle of escapes,” scrupulously tracing how by the end of the 30s x years “Kolyma was turned into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyists,” and if earlier “no sentence was given for escape,” then from now on “escape was punishable by three years.” Many stories from the Kolyma cycle are characterized by the special quality of Shalamov’s artistry observed in “The Green Prosecutor,” based primarily not on the modeling of a fictional reality, but on figurative generalizations that grow on the basis of documentary observations, sketch narration about various spheres of prison life, and specific social-hierarchical relations among prisoners (“Kombedy”, “Bathhouse”, etc.). The text of an official document in Shalamov’s story can act as a constructively significant element of the narrative. In “The Red Cross”, the prerequisite for artistic generalizations about camp life is the narrator’s appeal to the absurdist “large printed notices” on the walls of the barracks called “Rights and Responsibilities of a Prisoner,” where it is fatal “many responsibilities and few rights.” The prisoner’s “right” to medical care, declared by them, leads the narrator to think about the saving mission of medicine and the doctor as the “sole defender of the prisoner” in the camp. Relying on the “documented” recorded, personally suffered experience (“for many years I attended stages in a large camp hospital”), the narrator resurrects the tragic stories of the destinies of camp doctors and comes to generalizations about the camp, honed to the point of aphorisms, as if snatched from a diary: “ negative school of life entirely and completely”, that “every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.” The story “Injector” is based on the reproduction of a small fragment of intra-camp official correspondence, where the author’s word is completely reduced, with the exception of a brief remark about the “clear handwriting” of the resolution imposed by the head of the mine on the report of the head of the site. The report on “poor performance of the injector” in the Kolyma frosts “over fifty degrees”” evokes an absurd, but at the same time formally rational and systemic resolution on the need to “transfer the case to the investigative authorities in order to bring the Injector to legal responsibility.” Through the suffocating network of official words placed in the service of repressive paperwork, one can see the fusion of the fantastic grotesque and reality, as well as the total violation of common sense, which allows the camp’s all-suppression to extend its influence even to the inanimate world of technology.
In Shalamov’s depiction, the relationship between a living person and an official document appears full of dark collisions. In the story “Echo in the Mountains,” where a “documentary” reconstruction of the biography of the central character, clerk Mikhail Stepanov, takes place, it is on such collisions that the plot outline is tied. The profile of Stepanov, who was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1905, his “delicate case in a green cover,” which included information about how, when he was the commander of a detachment of armored trains, he released from custody Antonov, with whom he was once imprisoned in Shlisselburg, - make a decisive revolution in his subsequent “Solovetsky” fate. The milestones of history aggressively invade the individual biography here, giving rise to a vicious circle of destructive relationships between the individual and historical time. Man as a powerless hostage of an official document also appears in the story “The Birds of Onge.” The “typist’s mistake,” who “numbered” the prisoner’s criminal nickname (aka Berdy) as the name of another person, forces the authorities to declare the random Turkmen Toshaev a “fugitive” Onzhe Berdy and doom him to camp hopelessness, to being “listed in the group” for life “unaccounted persons” - persons imprisoned without documents." In this, according to the author’s definition, “an anecdote that has turned into a mystical symbol,” the position of the prisoner - the bearer of the notorious nickname - is noteworthy. “Having fun” with the game of prison paperwork, he concealed the identity of the nickname, since “everyone is happy about the embarrassment and panic in the ranks of the authorities.”
In Kolyma Stories, the sphere of everyday detail is often used as a means of documentary and artistic capturing of reality. In the story “Graphite”, through the title subject image, the entire picture of the world created here is symbolized, and the discovery of ontological depth in it is outlined. As the narrator records, for documents and tags for the deceased, “only a black pencil, simple graphite is allowed”; not a chemical pencil, but certainly graphite, “which can write down everything that he knew and saw.” Thus, wittingly or unwittingly, the camp system preserves itself for the subsequent judgment of history, for “graphite is nature”, “graphite is eternity”, “neither rain nor underground springs will wash away the personal file number”, and with the awakening of historical memory among the people the realization will also come that “all guests of the permafrost are immortal and are ready to return to us.” Bitter irony permeates the narrator’s words that “a tag on the leg is a sign of culture” - in the sense that “a tag with a personal file number stores not only the place of death, but also the secret of death. This number on the tag is written in graphite." Even the physical state of a former prisoner can become a “document” opposing unconsciousness, especially actualized when “the documents of our past are destroyed, the guard towers are cut down.” With pellagra, a common disease among camp inmates, the skin peels off the hand, forming a kind of “glove,” which more than eloquently acts, according to Shalamov, as “prose, accusation, protocol,” “a living exhibit for the museum of the history of the region.”
The author emphasizes that “if the artistic and historical consciousness of the 19th century. characterized by a tendency to “interpret an event”, “a thirst for an explanation of the inexplicable”, then in the half of the twentieth century the document would have supplanted everything. And they would only believe the document."
I saw everything: sand and snow,
Blizzard and heat.
What can a person endure...
I have experienced everything.
And the butt broke my bones,
Someone else's boot.
And I bet
That God will not help.
After all, God, God, why?
Galley slave?
And nothing can help him,
He is exhausted and weak.
I lost my bet
Risking my head.
Today - whatever you say,
I am with you - and alive.
Thus, the synthesis of artistic thinking and documentary is the main “nerve” of the aesthetic system of the author of “Kolyma Tales”. The weakening of artistic fiction opens up in Shalamov other original sources of figurative generalizations, based not on the construction of conventional spatio-temporal forms, but on empathizing with the contents of various kinds of private, official, historical documents truly preserved in the personal and national memory of camp life. Mikheev M.O. says that “the author appears in the “Kolyma” epic both as a sensitive documentary artist, and as a biased witness of history, convinced of the moral need to “remember all the good things for a hundred years, and all the bad things for two hundred years,” and as the creator of the original concept of a “new prose”, acquiring before the reader’s eyes the authenticity of a “transformed document”. That revolutionary “transcendence beyond literature” that Shalamov so strived for did not take place. But even without it, which is hardly feasible at all, without this breakthrough beyond what is permitted by nature itself, Shalamov’s prose certainly remains valuable for humanity, interesting for study - precisely as a unique fact of literature. His texts are unconditional evidence of the era:
Not indoor begonia
The trembling of a petal
And the trembling of human agony
The hand remembered.
And his prose is a document of literary innovation.
2. Kolyma “anti-world” and its inhabitants
According to E.A. Shklovsky: “It is difficult to write about the work of Varlam Shalamov. It is difficult, first of all, because his tragic fate, which is largely reflected in the famous “Kolyma Stories” and many poems, seems to require commensurate experience. An experience that even your enemy will not regret." Almost twenty years of prison, camps, exile, loneliness and neglect in the last years of his life, a miserable nursing home and, ultimately, death in a psychiatric hospital, where the writer was forcibly transported to soon die from pneumonia. In the person of V. Shalamov, in his gift as a great writer, a national tragedy is shown, which received its witness-martyr with his own soul and paid with blood for terrible knowledge.
Kolyma Stories is the first collection of stories by Varlam Shalamov, which reflects the life of Gulag prisoners. Gulag - the main directorate of the camps, as well as an extensive network of concentration camps during mass repressions. The collection was created from 1954 to 1962, after Shalamov returned from Kolyma. Kolyma stories are an artistic interpretation of everything Shalamov saw and experienced during the 13 years he spent in prison in Kolyma (1938-1951).
V.T. Shalamov formulated the problems of his work as follows: ““Kolyma Tales” is an attempt to pose and solve some important moral questions of the time, questions that simply cannot be resolved using other material. The question of the meeting of man and the world, the struggle of man with the state machine, the truth of this struggle, the struggle for oneself, within oneself - and outside oneself. Is it possible to actively influence one’s destiny, which is being ground by the teeth of the state machine, by the teeth of evil? The illusory nature and heaviness of hope. The ability to rely on forces other than hope."
As G.L. Nefagina wrote: “Realistic works about the Gulag system were devoted, as a rule, to the lives of political prisoners. They depicted camp horrors, torture, and abuse. But in such works (A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, V. Grossman, An. Marchenko) the victory of the human spirit over evil was demonstrated.”
Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Shalamov is not only, and perhaps not so much, historical evidence of crimes that are criminal to forget. Shalamov is a style, a unique rhythm of prose, innovation, pervasive paradox, symbolism, a brilliant mastery of the word in its semantic, sound form, a subtle strategy of the master.
The Kolyma wound constantly bled, and while working on stories, Shalamov “screamed, threatened, cried” - and wiped away his tears only after the story was finished. But at the same time, he never tired of repeating that “the work of an artist is precisely the form,” working with words.
Shalamovskaya Kolyma is a set of island camps. It was Shalamov, as Timofeev claimed, who found this metaphor - “camp-island”. Already in the story “The Snake Charmer,” the prisoner Platonov, “a film scriptwriter in his first life,” speaks with bitter sarcasm about the sophistication of the human mind, which came up with “such things as our islands with all the improbability of their life.” And in the story “The Man from the Steamboat,” the camp doctor, a man of a sharp sardonic mind, expresses a secret dream to his listener: “...If only our islands - would you understand me? “Our islands have sunk through the ground.”
Islands, an archipelago of islands, are a precise and highly expressive image. He “captured” the forced isolation and at the same time the connection by a single slave regime of all these prisons, camps, settlements, “business trips” that were part of the GULAG system. An archipelago is a group of sea islands located close to each other. But for Solzhenitsyn, “archipelago,” as Nefagina argued, is primarily a conventional term-metaphor denoting the object of research. For Shalamov, “our islands” are a huge holistic image. He is not subject to the narrator, he has epic self-development, he absorbs and subordinates to his ominous whirlwind, his “plot” everything, absolutely everything - the sky, snow, trees, faces, destinies, thoughts, executions...
There is nothing else that would be located outside of “our islands” in “Kolyma Tales”. That pre-camp, free life is called the “first life”; it ended, disappeared, melted, it no longer exists. And did she exist? The prisoners of “our islands” themselves think of it as a fabulous, unrealizable land that lies somewhere “beyond the blue seas, behind the high mountains,” as, for example, in “The Snake Charmer.” The camp swallowed up any other existence. He subjected everything and everyone to the ruthless dictates of his prison rules. Having grown limitlessly, it became an entire country. The concept of “the country of Kolyma” is directly stated in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “In this country of hopes, and therefore, the country of rumors, guesses, assumptions, hypotheses.”
A concentration camp that has replaced the entire country, a country turned into a huge archipelago of camps—this is the grotesque-monumental image of the world that is formed from the mosaic of “Kolyma Tales.” It is orderly and expedient in its own way, this world. This is what the prison camp looks like in the “Golden Taiga”: “The small zone is a transfer. A large zone - a camp for the mining department - endless barracks, prison streets, a triple fence of barbed wire, winter-style guard towers that look like birdhouses.” And then it follows: “The architecture of the Small Zone is ideal.” It turns out that this is a whole city, built in full accordance with its purpose. And there is architecture here, and even one to which the highest aesthetic criteria are applicable. In a word, everything is as it should be, everything is “like with people.”
Brewer M. reports: “This is the space of the “country of Kolyma.” The laws of time also apply here. True, in contrast to the hidden sarcasm in the depiction of the seemingly normal and expedient camp space, camp time is openly taken outside the framework of the natural course, it is a strange, abnormal time.”
“Months in the Far North are considered years - so great is the experience, the human experience acquired there.” This generalization belongs to the impersonal narrator from the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev.” But here is the subjective, personal perception of time by one of the prisoners, the former doctor Glebov, in the story “At Night”: “The minute, the hour, the day from getting up to lights out was real - he didn’t guess further and didn’t find the strength to guess. Like all" .
In this space and in this time, the life of a prisoner passes for years. It has its own way of life, its own rules, its own scale of values, its own social hierarchy. Shalamov describes this way of life with the meticulousness of an ethnographer. Here are the details of everyday life: how, for example, a camp barracks are built (“a sparse fence in two rows, the gap is filled with pieces of frosty moss and peat”), how the stove in the barracks is heated, what a homemade camp lamp is like - a gasoline “kolyma” ... The social structure of the camp is also the subject of careful description. Two poles: “blatars”, they are “friends of the people” - on one, and on the other - political prisoners, they are “enemies of the people”. Union of thieves' laws and government regulations. The vile power of all these Fedechkas, Senechkas, served by a motley crew of “masks”, “crows”, “heel scratchers”. And no less merciless oppression of a whole pyramid of official bosses: foremen, accountants, supervisors, guards...
This is the established and established order of life on “our islands.” In a different regime, the GULAG would not be able to fulfill its function: to absorb millions of people, and in return “give out” gold and timber. But why do all these Shalamov “ethnographies” and “physiologies” evoke a feeling of apocalyptic horror? Just recently, one of the former Kolyma prisoners reassuringly said that “the winter there, in general, is a little colder than Leningrad” and that on Butugychag, for example, “mortality was actually insignificant,” and appropriate treatment and preventive measures were carried out to combat scurvy , like forced drinking of dwarf extract, etc.
And Shalamov has information about this extract and much more. But he does not write ethnographic essays about Kolyma, he creates the image of Kolyma as the embodiment of an entire country turned into a Gulag. The apparent outline is only the “first layer” of the image. Shalamov goes through “ethnography” to the spiritual essence of Kolyma; he looks for this essence in the aesthetic core of real facts and events.
In the anti-world of Kolyma, where everything is aimed at trampling and trampling the dignity of the prisoner, the liquidation of personality occurs. Among the “Kolyma Stories” there are those that describe the behavior of creatures that have sunk almost to the complete loss of human consciousness. Here is the short story “At Night”. Former doctor Glebov and his partner Bagretsov commit what, according to generally accepted moral standards, has always been considered extreme blasphemy: they tear up the grave, undress the corpse of their partner in order to then exchange his pathetic underwear for bread. This is already beyond the limit: the personality is no longer there, only a purely animal vital reflex remains.
However, in the anti-world of Kolyma, not only is mental strength exhausted, not only is reason extinguished, but such a final phase begins when the very reflex of life disappears: a person no longer cares about his own death. This state is described in the story “Single Measurement”. Student Dugaev, still very young - twenty-three years old, is so crushed by the camp that he no longer even has the strength to suffer. All that remains is - before the execution - a dull regret, “that I worked in vain, suffered this last day in vain.”
As Nefagina G.L. points out: “Shalamov writes brutally and harshly about the dehumanization of man by the Gulag system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Shalamov’s sixty Kolyma stories and his “Sketches of the Underworld,” noted: “Shalamov’s camp experience was worse and longer than mine, and I respectfully admit that it was he, and not I, who got to touch that bottom of brutality and despair, to which the whole camp life pulled us."
In “Kolyma Tales” the object of comprehension is not the System, but a person in the millstones of the System. Shalamov is not interested in how the repressive machine of the Gulag works, but in how the human soul “works,” which this machine is trying to crush and grind. And what dominates in “Kolyma Stories” is not the logic of the concatenation of judgments, but the logic of the concatenation of images - the primordial artistic logic. All this is directly related not only to the dispute about the “image of the uprising,” but much more broadly to the problem of adequate reading of the “Kolyma Tales”, in accordance with their own nature and the creative principles that guided their author.
Of course, everything humane is extremely dear to Shalamov. He sometimes even with tenderness “extracts” from the gloomy chaos of Kolyma the most microscopic evidence that the System was not able to completely freeze out in human souls - that primary moral feeling, which is called the ability to compassion.
When the doctor Lidia Ivanovna in the story “Typhoid Quarantine” in her quiet voice confronts the paramedic for yelling at Andreev, he remembered her “for the rest of his life” - “for the kind word spoken on time.” When an elderly tool maker in the story “Carpenters” covers for two incompetent intellectuals who called themselves carpenters, just to spend at least a day in the warmth of a carpentry workshop, and gives them his own turned ax handles. When the bakers from the bakery in the story “Bread” try first of all to feed the camp goons sent to them. When the prisoners, embittered by fate and the struggle for survival, in the story “The Apostle Paul” burn a letter and a statement from the old carpenter’s only daughter renouncing her father, then all these seemingly insignificant actions appear as acts of high humanity. And what the investigator does in the story “Handwriting” - he throws into the oven the case of Christ, who was included in the next list of those sentenced to death - this is, by existing standards, a desperate act, a real feat of compassion.
So, a normal “average” person in completely abnormal, absolutely inhuman circumstances. Shalamov explores the process of interaction of the Kolyma prisoner with the System not at the level of ideology, not even at the level of ordinary consciousness, but at the level of the subconscious, on that border strip where the Gulag winepress pushed a person - on the precarious line between a person who still retains the ability to think and suffer , and that impersonal being who no longer controls himself and begins to live by the most primitive reflexes.
2.1 The descent of heroes in “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova
Shalamov shows new things about man, his boundaries and capabilities, strength and weaknesses - truths gained by many years of inhuman tension and observation of hundreds and thousands of people placed in inhuman conditions.
What truth about the man was revealed to Shalamov in the camp? Golden N. believed: “The camp was a great test of a person’s moral strength, ordinary human morality, and 99% of people could not stand this test. Those who could stand it died along with those who couldn’t stand it, trying to be the best, the hardest, only for themselves.” “A great experiment in the corruption of human souls” - this is how Shalamov characterizes the creation of the Gulag archipelago.
Of course, his contingent had very little to do with the problem of eradicating crime in the country. According to Silaikin’s observations from the story “Courses,” “there are no criminals at all, except thieves. All the other prisoners behaved in freedom the same way as all the others - they stole just as much from the state, made just as many mistakes, violated the law just as much as those who were not convicted under the articles of the Criminal Code and each continued to do his own work. The thirty-seventh year emphasized this with particular force - by destroying any guarantee among the Russian people. It became impossible to get around the prison, no one could get around it.”
The overwhelming majority of prisoners in the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”: “were not enemies of the authorities and, dying, did not understand why they had to die. The absence of a single unifying idea weakened the moral fortitude of the prisoners; they immediately learned not to stand up for each other, not to support each other. This is what the management was striving for."
At first they are still like people: “the lucky one who caught the bread divided it among everyone who wanted it - a nobility that after three weeks we weaned off forever.” “He shared the last piece, or rather, he shared some more. This means that he never managed to live to a time when no one had the last piece, when no one shared anything with anyone.”
Inhuman living conditions quickly destroy not only the body, but also the soul of the prisoner. Shalamov states: “The camp is a completely negative school of life. No one will take anything useful or necessary out of there, not the prisoner himself, not his boss, not his guards... Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute. There is a lot there that a person should not know, should not see, and if he has seen, it is better for him to die... It turns out that you can do mean things and still live. You can lie and live. Not keeping promises - and still living... Skepticism is still good, this is even the best of the camp heritage.”
The bestial nature in a person is extremely exposed, sadism no longer appears as a perversion of human nature, but as an integral property of it, as an essential anthropological phenomenon: “for a person there is no better feeling than realizing that someone is even weaker, even worse... Power is molestation. The beast unleashed from the chain, hidden in the human soul, seeks greedy satisfaction of its eternal human essence - in beatings, in murders.” The story “Berries” describes the cold-blooded murder by a guard, nicknamed Seroshapka, of a prisoner who was picking berries for a “smoke break” and, unnoticed by himself, crossed the border of the work area marked with markers; after this murder, the guard turns to the main character of the story: “I wanted you,” said Seroshapka, “but he didn’t show up, you bastard!” . In the story “The Parcel,” the hero’s bag of food is taken away: “someone hit me on the head with something heavy, and when I jumped up and came to my senses, the bag was gone. Everyone remained in their places and looked at me with evil joy. The entertainment was of the best kind. In such cases, we were doubly happy: firstly, someone felt bad, and secondly, it wasn’t me who felt bad. This is not envy, no."
But where are those spiritual gains that are believed to be almost directly related to material deprivation? Aren’t the prisoners similar to ascetics and, dying of hunger and cold, didn’t they repeat the ascetic experience of past centuries?
The likening of prisoners to holy ascetics is, in fact, repeatedly found in Shalamov’s story “Dry Rations”: “We considered ourselves almost saints - thinking that during the camp years we had atoned for all our sins... Nothing worried us anymore, life was easy for us at the mercy of someone else's will. We didn’t even care about saving our lives, and even if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the camp daily routine. The peace of mind achieved by the dullness of our feelings was reminiscent of the supreme freedom of the barracks that Lawrence dreamed of, or Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil - someone else’s will was always guarding our peace of mind.”
However, the dispassion achieved by camp prisoners bore little resemblance to the dispassion to which ascetics of all times and peoples aspired. It seemed to the latter that when they were freed from feelings - these transitory states of theirs, the most important, central and lofty things would remain in their souls. Alas, from personal experience, the Kolyma ascetic slaves were convinced of the opposite: the last thing that remains after the death of all feelings is hatred and malice. “The feeling of anger is the last feeling with which a person goes into oblivion.” “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for glory, honesty - left us with the meat that we lost during our long fast. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones... only anger was located - the most durable human feeling." Hence the constant quarrels and fights: “A prison quarrel breaks out like a fire in a dry forest.” “When you have lost strength, when you have weakened, you want to fight uncontrollably. This feeling - the enthusiasm of a weakened person - is familiar to every prisoner who has ever gone hungry... There are an infinite number of reasons for a quarrel to arise. The prisoner is irritated by everything: the authorities, the upcoming work, the cold, the heavy tool, and the comrade standing next to him. The prisoner argues with the sky, with a shovel, with a stone and with the living thing that is next to him. The slightest dispute is ready to escalate into a bloody battle.”
Friendship? “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those “difficult” conditions of life that, as fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need brought people together and gave birth to friendship, it means that this need is not extreme and the misfortune is not great. Grief is not acute and deep enough if you can share it with friends. In real need, only one’s own mental and physical strength is learned, the limits of one’s “possibilities,” physical endurance and moral strength are determined.”
Love? “Those who were older did not allow the feeling of love to interfere with the future. Love was too cheap a bet in the camp game."
Nobility? “I thought: I won’t play at being noble, I won’t refuse, I’ll leave, I’ll fly away. Seventeen years of Kolyma are behind me."
The same applies to religiosity: like other high human feelings, it does not arise in the nightmare of a camp. Of course, the camp often becomes the place of the final triumph of faith, its triumph, but for this “it is necessary that its strong foundation be laid when the conditions of life have not yet reached the final limit, beyond which there is nothing human in a person, but only mistrust.” , malice and lies." “When you have to wage a cruel, minute-by-minute struggle for existence, the slightest thought about God, about that life means a weakening of the willpower with which the embittered prisoner clings to this life. But he is unable to tear himself away from this damned life - just like a person struck by an electric current cannot take his hands off a high-voltage wire: to do this, additional strength is needed. Even suicide turns out to require some excess energy, which is absent from the “goons”; sometimes it accidentally falls from the sky in the form of an extra portion of gruel, and only then does a person become capable of committing suicide. Hunger, cold, hated labor, and finally, direct physical impact - beatings - all this revealed “the depths of the human essence - and how vile and insignificant this human essence turned out to be. Under the cane, inventors discovered new things in science, wrote poems and novels. A spark of creative fire can be knocked out with an ordinary stick.”
So, the highest in man is subordinated to the lower, the spiritual - to the material. Moreover, this highest thing itself - speech, thinking - is material, as in the story “Condensed Milk”: “It was not easy to think. For the first time, the materiality of our psyche appeared to me in all its clarity, in all its perceptibility. It was painful to think about. But I had to think." Once upon a time, to find out whether energy was spent on thinking, an experimental person was placed for many days in a calorimeter; It turns out that there is absolutely no need to conduct such painstaking experiments: it is enough to place the inquisitive scientists themselves for many days (or even years) in places not so remote, and they will be convinced from their own experience of the complete and final triumph of materialism, as in the story “The Pursuit of locomotive smoke": "I crawled, trying not to make a single unnecessary thought, thoughts were like movements - energy should not be spent on anything else but scratching, waddle, dragging my own body forward along the winter road," “I saved my strength. The words were pronounced slowly and difficultly - it was like translating from a foreign language. I forgot everything. I’m out of the habit of remembering.”
Brief information about the life and activities of Varlam Shalamov, a Russian prose writer and poet of the Soviet era. The main themes and motives of the poet’s work. The context of life during the creation of "Kolyma Tales". A brief analysis of the story "To the Show."
course work, added 04/18/2013
"Notes from the House of the Dead" by F.M. Dostoevsky as the forerunner of “Kolyma Tales” by V.T. Shalamova. The commonality of plot lines, means of artistic expression and symbols in prose. "Lessons" of hard labor for the intellectual. Changes in Dostoevsky's worldview.
thesis, added 10/22/2012
Prose writer, poet, author of the famous "Kolyma Tales", one of the most amazing artistic documents of the 20th century, which became an indictment of the Soviet totalitarian regime, one of the pioneers of the camp theme.
biography, added 07/10/2003
Creative appearance of A.I. Kuprin the narrator, key themes and problems of the writer’s stories. Commented retelling of the plots of the stories "The Wonderful Doctor" and "Elephant". The moral significance of the works of A.I. Kuprin, their spiritual and educational potential.
course work, added 02/12/2016
Brief biography of G.K. Chesterton - famous English writer, journalist, critic. Study of Chesterton's short stories about Father Brown, moral and religious issues in these stories. The image of the main character, genre features of detective stories.
course work, added 05/20/2011
The meaning of the concept “house” in the folk picture of the world based on folklore. The concept of “house” within the framework of Shalamov’s poetic texts, identifying the features of the author’s picture of the world. Characteristics of the poetry of Varlam Shalamov, the role of nature in the creation of the poem.
thesis, added 03/31/2018
Studying the plot of V. Shalamov’s story “To the Show” and interpreting the motive of the card game in this work. Comparative characteristics of Shalamov’s story with other works of Russian literature and identification of the features of the card game in it.
abstract, added 07/27/2010
Themes, characters, landscape and compositional features of "Northern Tales" by Jack London. Artistic image and speech characteristics of the heroes of “Northern Stories” by D. London. Man as a central component of the narrative of the “Northern Stories” cycle.
course work, added 01/10/2018
Problems of interpretation as a type of aesthetic activity. Development and features of creative reading of a literary work. Cinematic and theatrical interpretations of stories and stories by A. Platonov. Studying the features of the author’s film language.
thesis, added 06/18/2017
The concept of linguistic analysis. Two ways of storytelling. The primary compositional feature of a literary text. Number of words in episodes in the collection of stories by I.S. Turgenev "Notes of a Hunter". Distribution of "Nature" episodes in the beginnings of stories.
The article is posted on a little-known Internet resource in the pdf extension, duplicated here.
The camp is like the Devil, the camp is like the Absolute World Evil.
Poetics of “Kolyma Tales” by V. Shalamov
Having written six artistic and prose cycles of “Kolyma Stories” (1954-1974), Shalamov came to a paradoxical conclusion: “The undescribed, unfulfilled part of my work is huge... and the best Kolyma Stories are all just the surface, precisely because it is clearly described.” (6:58). Imaginary simplicity and accessibility is a misconception about the author’s philosophical prose. Varlam Shalamov is not only a writer who testified to a crime against a person, but he is also a talented writer with a special style, with “a unique rhythm of prose, with innovative novelism, with pervasive paradox, with ambivalent symbolism and brilliant mastery of the word in its semantic, sound form and even in a descriptive configuration” (1:3).
In this regard, the simplicity and clarity of V. T. Shalamov’s words, his style and the terrible world of Kolyma he recreates is indicative, a world, according to M. Zolotonosov, “presented as such, without an artistic lens” (3:183) N. K. Gay notes that a work of art “is not reducible to logically complete interpretations” (1:97)
Exploring the types of verbal images in V. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” such as: LEXICAL (word-image), SUBJECT (detail), CHARACTER (image-character), let us present the WORK AS “IMAGE OF THE WORLD”, because the images of each subsequent level arise on the basis images of previous levels. V.T. Shalamov himself wrote this: “The prose of the future seems to me to be simple prose, where there is no ornateness, with precise language, where only from time to time a new thing appears - seen for the first time - a detail or detail described vividly. The reader should be surprised by these details and believe the whole story” (5:66). The expressiveness and accuracy of everyday relief in the writer’s stories earned him fame as a documentarian of Kolyma. The text contains a lot of such details, for example, the story “The Carpenters,” which talks about the harsh reality of camp life, when prisoners were forced to work even in the most severe frosts. “We had to go to work at any temperature. In addition, the old-timers almost accurately determined the frost without a thermometer: if there is a frosty fog, it means that it is forty degrees below zero outside; if the air comes out with noise when breathing, but it is still not difficult to breathe, it means forty-five degrees; if breathing is noisy and shortness of breath is noticeable - fifty degrees. Above fifty-five degrees - the spit freezes in mid-flight. The spittle had been freezing on the fly for two weeks” (5:23). Thus, one artistic detail “the spit freezes on the fly” speaks volumes: about the inhuman conditions of existence, about the hopelessness and despair of a person who finds himself in the extremely cruel world of the Kolyma camps. Or another story, “Sherry Brandy,” in which the author seems to dispassionately describe the poet’s slow death from hunger: “Life came in and out of him, and he died ... By evening he died.” (5:75) Only at the very end of the work does one eloquent detail appear, when the inventive neighbors write him off two days later in order to receive bread for him as if he were alive “... the dead man raised his hand like a puppet doll” (5:76) This detail further emphasizes the absurdity of human existence in a camp. E. Shklovsky wrote that in “Vishera” the detail had a partly “memory” character, but in “Kolyma Stories” it becomes “block” (7:64). It seems that the absurdity and paradoxicality of what is happening is increasing from page to page. In the story “In the Bath,” the author notes with bitter irony: “The dream of washing in a bath is an impossible dream” (5:80) and at the same time uses details that convincingly speak about this, because after washing everyone is “slippery, dirty, smelly” (5:85).
V. T. Shalamov denied detailed descriptiveness and traditional creation of characters. Instead, there are precisely selected details that create a multidimensional psychological atmosphere that envelops the entire story. Or one or two details given in close-up. Or symbolic details dissolved in the text, presented without intrusive fixation. This is how Garkunov’s red sweater is remembered, on which the blood of the murdered man is not visible (“To the performance”); a blue cloud above the white shiny snow, which hangs after the person trampling the road has moved on (“Across the Snow”); a white pillowcase on a feather pillow, which the doctor crumples with his hands, which gives “physical pleasure” to the narrator, who had neither linen, nor such a pillow, nor a pillowcase (“Domino”); the ending of the story “Single Freeze,” when Dugaev realized that he would be shot, and “regretted that he had worked in vain, that he had suffered this last day in vain.” In Varlam Shalamov, almost every detail is based on either hyperbole, comparison, or grotesquery: “The screams of the guards encouraged us like whips” (“How it started”); “Unheated, damp barracks, where thick ice froze in all the cracks from the inside, as if some huge stearine candle had floated in the corner of the barracks” (“Tatar Mullah and Fresh Air”); “The bodies of people on the bunks seemed like growths, the humps of a tree, a bent board” (“Typhoid Quarantine”); “We followed the tractor tracks as if we were following the tracks of some prehistoric animal” (“Dry rations”).
The world of the Gulag is antagonistic, truth is dialectical, in this context the writer’s use of contrast and opposition becomes one of the leading techniques. This is a way of approaching a difficult truth. The use of contrast in details makes a lasting impression and enhances the effect of the absurdity of what is happening. Thus, in the story “Domino,” tank lieutenant Svechnikov eats the meat of people’s corpses from the morgue, but at the same time he is “a gentle, rosy-cheeked young man” (5:101), the camp horse driver Glebov in another story forgot the name of his wife, and “in his former free life he was professor of philosophy" (6:110), the communist Dutchman Fritz David in the story "Marcel Proust" is sent from home "velvet trousers and a silk scarf" (5:121), and he dies of hunger in these clothes.
The contrast in details becomes an expression of Shalamov’s conviction that a normal person is not able to withstand the hell of the Gulag.
Thus, the artistic detail in “Kolyma Stories”, distinguished by its descriptive brightness, often paradoxical, causes an aesthetic shock, an explosion and once again testifies to the fact that “there is no life and cannot be in camp conditions.”
Israeli researcher Leona Toker wrote about the presence of elements of medieval consciousness in Shalamov’s work. Let's look at how the Devil appears on the pages of Kolyma Tales. Here is an excerpt from the description of a criminal card fight in the story “To the Presentation”: “A brand new deck of cards lay on the pillow, and one of the players patted it with a dirty hand with thin white non-working fingers. The nail of the little finger was of supernatural length... The sleek yellow nail glittered like a precious stone.” (5:129) This physiological oddity also has an everyday intra-camp explanation - just below the narrator adds that such nails were prescribed by the criminal fashion of that time. One might consider this semantic connection to be accidental, but the criminal’s claw, polished to a shine, does not disappear from the pages of the story.
Further, as the action develops, this image is further saturated with elements of fantasy: “Sevochka’s nail drew intricate patterns in the air. The cards then disappeared in his palm, then appeared again...” (5:145). Let's also not forget about the inevitable associations associated with the theme of the card game. A game of cards with the devil as a partner is a “vagrant” plot characteristic of European folklore and often found in literature. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that the cards themselves were the invention of the Devil. At the pre-climax of the story “At the Show,” the enemy of the clawed Sevochka bets and loses “... some kind of Ukrainian towel with roosters, some kind of cigarette case with an embossed portrait of Gogol” (5:147). This direct appeal to the Ukrainian period of Gogol’s work connects “To the Presentation” with “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, saturated with the most incredible devilry. Thus, in one of the stories in this collection, “The Missing Letter,” a Cossack is forced to play cards for his soul with witches and devils. Thus, references to folklore sources and literary works introduce the gambler into the infernal associative series. In the above-mentioned story, diabolism seems to emerge from camp life and appears to the reader as a natural property of the local universe. The devil of the Kolyma stories is an indisputable element of the universe, so not isolated from the environment that his active presence is revealed only at the kinks, at the junctions of metaphors.
“Golden slaughter made healthy people disabled in three weeks: hunger, lack of sleep, long hours of hard work, beatings. New people were included in the brigade, and Moloch chewed” (5:23).
Let us note that the word “Moloch” is used by the narrator not as a proper name, but as a common noun; intonationally it is not isolated from the text in any way, as if it were not a metaphor, but the name of some really existing camp mechanism or institution. Let us recall the work “Moloch” by A. I. Kuprin, where the bloodthirsty creature is written with a capital letter and is used as a proper name. The camp world is identified not only with the domain of the Devil, but also with the Devil himself.
One more important feature should be noted: the camp of “Kolyma Tales” is hell, nothingness, the undivided kingdom of the devil as if in itself - its infernal properties are not directly dependent on the ideology of its creators or the preceding wave of social upheaval. Shalamov does not describe the genesis of the camp system. The camp appears instantly, suddenly, out of nothing, and even with physical memory, even pain in the bones, it is no longer possible to determine “... on which of the winter days the wind changed and everything became too scary...” (5:149). The camp of “Kolyma Stories” is united, whole, eternal, self-sufficient, indestructible - for once we have sailed to these hitherto unknown shores, having plotted their outlines on the map, we are no longer able to erase them either from memory or from the surface of the planet - and combines traditional functions of hell and the devil: passive and active evil principles.
The devil arose in medieval mentality as the personification of the forces of evil. Introducing the image of the devil into “Kolyma Tales,” Shalamov used this medieval metaphor for its intended purpose. He did not simply declare the camp to be evil, but affirmed the fact of the existence of evil, an autonomous evil inherent in human nature. Black-and-white apocalyptic medieval thinking operated with categories with the help of which the author of “Kolyma Tales” could realize and describe “a grandiose spill of evil hitherto unseen in centuries and millennia” (4:182). Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov himself, in one of the program poems, identifies himself with Archpriest Avvakum, whose image has long become in Russian culture both a symbol of the Middle Ages, the archaic, and a symbol of unyielding opposition to evil.
Thus, the camp in the view of Varlam Shalamov is not evil and not even unambiguous unalloyed evil, but the embodiment of Absolute World Evil, that degree of evil, for the reproduction of which it was necessary to evoke the image of the medieval devil on the pages of “Kolyma Tales”, because it could not be described in others categories.
The creative manner of a writer involves a process of spontaneous crystallization of metaphors. The author does not deafen the reader with the statement that the action takes place in hell, but unobtrusively, detail by detail, builds an associative series where the appearance of Dante’s shadow looks natural, even self-evident. Such cumulative meaning formation is one of the supporting characteristics of Shalamov’s artistic style. The narrator accurately describes the details of camp life; each word has a rigid, fixed meaning, as if embedded in the camp context. The sequential listing of documentary details forms a coherent plot. However, the text very quickly enters the stage of oversaturation, when seemingly unrelated and completely independent details begin to form complex, unexpected connections on their own, which in turn form a powerful associative flow parallel to the literal meaning of the text. In this flow, everything: objects, events, connections between them - changes at the very moment of its appearance on the pages of the story, turning into something different, multi-valued, often alien to natural human experience. The “Big Bang effect” (7:64) arises when subtext and associations are continuously formed, when new meanings crystallize, where the formation of galaxies seems involuntary, and the semantic continuum is limited only by the volume of associations possible for the reader-interpreter. V. Shalamov himself set himself very difficult tasks: to return the experienced feeling, but at the same time - not to be at the mercy of the material and the assessments dictated by it, to hear “a thousand truths” (4:182) with the supremacy of one truth of talent.
References
Volkova, E.: Varlam Shalamov: a duel between words and absurdity. In: Questions of Literature 1997, No. 2, p. 3.
Gay, N.: The relationship between fact and idea as a problem of style. In: Theory of literary styles. M., 1978. P. 97.
Zolotonosov, M.: Consequences of Shalamov. In: Shalamovsky collection 1994, No. 1, p. 183.
Timofeev, L.: Poetics of camp prose. In: October 1991, no. 3, p. 182.
Shalamov, V.: Favorites. "ABC-classics", St. Petersburg. 2002. pp. 23, 75, 80, 85, 101, 110, 121, 129, 145, 150.
Shalamov, V.: About my prose. In: New World 1989, No. 12, p. 58, 66.
Shklovsky, E.: Varlam Shalamov. M., 1991. P. 64.
Elena Frolova, Russia, Perm
