Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T23:45:42.711Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov's Kolymskie rasskazy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Sarah J. Young
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

From recurring characters to the retelling of stories, repetition plays a central role in Varlam Shalamov's Kolymskie rasskazy (Kolyma Tales). Sarah J. Young examines how repetition functions in Shalamov's collections of short stories as an indicator of trauma, by foregrounding the tensions created by the erosion of identity in the labor camp and its connection to the gulag survivor/narrator's problematic relationship to memory. At the same time, repetition also becomes a means of drawing the uncomprehending reader into the text to act as witness to that trauma. Comparing Shalamov's mode of testimony to Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the nonsurvivor as the true witness to Auschwitz, drawn from Primo Levi's conception, Young argues that Shalamov's stories bear witness to the trauma of Kolyma and to those who did not survive it, not through a transformation of the writer, but through a reciprocity between writer and reader.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 353 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Varlam, Shalamov, Sobraniesochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 2004-5), 5:155 Google Scholar. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. All translations are my own. Question marks following dates indicate that the year given in the collected works has been deduced by the editor.

2. In the context of Shalamov's stories, the terms character and, to an even greater extent, hero, are problematic, as the convicts (and others) depicted are positioned on the borders of fact and fiction and lack characterization. The greater neutrality of the term figure, denoting physical form without specifying internal constitution, seems generally more appropriate.

3. Jurgenson, Luba, L'expérience concentrationnaire est-elle indicible? (Monaco, 2003), 278–91Google Scholar. Abbreviated forms of the titles of the collections in which stories appear are used in the text: Kolymskie rasskazy (Kolyma Tales)—KR; Levyi bereg (The Left Bank)—LB; Artistlopaty (Artist of the Spade)—AL; Voskreshenie listvennilsy (Resurrection of the Larch)—VL; Perchatka, Hi KR-2 (Glove, or KT-2)—KR-2. Toker, Leona, Return from the Archipelago: Narrativesof Gulag Survivors (Bloomington, 2000), 160–61Google Scholar, gives an excellent account of the publication history of Shalamov's stories and the uncertainty regarding the correct order of the second and diird collections (Levyi beregand Artist lopaty); the now familiar positioning of Artist lopaty as the third collection results from Shalamov changing his mind in die 1970s. For the purposes of my discussion, I refer to the order in which die collections are now published, but my analysis does not depend on them being read in this order.

4. Jurgenson, L'expérience concentrationnaire, 263-76.

5. Boym, Svedana, ‘“Banality of Evil,’ Mimicry, and die Soviet Subject: Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt,” Slavic Review 67', no. 2 (Summer 2008): 346 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. My dianks in particular to Pamela Davidson and Avril Pyman for reminding me of the unreadable quality of Shalamov's stories.

7. Jurgenson, L'expérience concentrationnaire, 263.

8. Boym, “Banality of Evil,” 355-56.

9. Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Patton, Paul (London, 1994), 70–74 Google Scholar.

10. See Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 2d ed. (London, 2002), 64–65 Google Scholar.

11. I use “limit experiences” in the Derridean sense of an experience (for which the Holocaust is the exemplar) diat “radically alter [s] our understanding of what it means to be human and makes it impossible to entertain notions of progress, culture, and even morality.” Durrant, Sam, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, WilsonHarris, and Toni Morrison (Albany, 2004), 3 Google Scholar.

12. For the “involuntary return of the repressed,” see Freud, Sigmund, Beyond thePleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.Strachey, James, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 18:1–64 Google Scholar. For the “deliberate recollection necessary for the production of testimony,” see the essays in Caruth, Cathy, ed., Trauma:Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, 1995)Google Scholar.

13. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 18-19.

14. Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996), 5 Google Scholar.

15. While Boym's analysis focuses on die articulation of the horror of the gulag and the question of ideology and seeks, through reference to Hannah Arendt's conception of the “banality of evil,” to produce a broader framework for reading gulag narratives, my interpretation of the reader's act of witnessing as a form of memorialization for those who did not survive indicates a testimony to a testimony that places the author in a different position in relation to the text and provides one possible resolution to the problem of representation of large-scale trauma.

16. Other forms of repetition are discussed in Volkova, Elena, “Tsel´nost´ i variativnost´knig-tsiklov,” in Esipov, V. V., ed., Shalamovskii sbornik (Vologda, 1997), 2:130–57Google Scholar.

17. Trezise, Thomas, “Unspeakable,” Yale fournal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 39–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers a coherent discussion of the concept of unspeakability in relation to the Holocaust. See also Leak, Andrew N. and Paizis, George, eds., The Holocaust and the Text:Speaking the Unspeakable (Houndmills, Eng., 2000)Google Scholar.

18. Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Rosenthal, Raymond (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

19. Laura Ann Kline, “Novaja Proza: Varlam Šalamov's Kolymskie rasskazy” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1998), 249-65.

20. As Mikhailik notes, the incident is a retelling of Dmitrii Mamin-Sibiriak's 1893 children's story Seraia sheika (Grey Neck). Mikhailik, Elena, “Dostoevsky and Shalamov: Orpheus and Pluto,” Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review 1 (2000): 153 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Serafim's actions, therefore, work on an entirely different level from the mimicry and repetition Boym defines as showing “how ideology is made.” Boym, “Banality of Evil,“ 345.

22. Levi, Primo, Ad. ova incerta, in Opere, ed. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (Turin, 1988), 2:245 Google Scholar, cited in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 101.

23. Boym, “Banality of Evil,” 356.

24. Toker, Leona, “Target Audience, Hurdle Audience, and the General Reader: Varlam Shalamov's Art of Testimony,” Poetics Today 26, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 291 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. For more on the concept of the focalizer, see Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, NarrativeFiction: Contemporary Poetics (London, 1983), 71–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Elena Mikhailik views the lanovskii-Pugachev duplication as a “typifying” process that resembles the approach of socialist realism. Although this is valid, it is perhaps ultimately less fruitful for developing an overarching interpretation of duplication in Shalamov's prose. Mikhailik, Elena, “Varlam Shalamov: V kontekste literatury i istorii,” in Esipov, , ed., Shalamovskii sbornik, 2:117 Google Scholar.

27. Mikhailik, Elena, “Drugoj bereg. ‘Poslednii boi maiora Pugacheva': Problema konteksta,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 28 (1997): 209–22Google Scholar, also notes the significance of the reference to “legend” in the opening paragraph of the story (1:361).

28. Toker, Leona, “A Tale Untold: Varlam Shalamov's ‘A Day Off,'” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 5 Google Scholar, describes similar patterns, emerging in other contexts, as “a kind of Derridean erasure: being something and not being it at the same time.“

29. See Barratt, Glynn, M. S. Lunin: Catholic Decembrist (The Hague, 1976)Google Scholar.

30. As Toker states, Shalamov uses the name-change convention in a number of places “to signal the possibility of other fictionalizing displacements.” Toker, Return fromthe Archipelago, 151.

31. The contention of Boris Lesniak, one of the few Kolymchanewith whom Shalamov maintained contact after his return to Moscow, that the author was unjust in depicting Lunin as an antisemite, does not take into account the possibility that other people's traits may have been incorporated into this figure. Lesniak, , “Moi Shalamov,” Oktiabr', no. 4 (1999): 111–29Google Scholar.

32. Fonseca, Tony, “The Doppelgänger,” in Joshi, S. T., ed., Icons of Horror and theSupernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares (Westport, Conn., 2007), 1:188 Google Scholar. See also Rank, Otto, The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study, trans. Tucker, Harry Jr. (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Chizhevsky, Dmitri, “The Theme of the Double in Dostoevsky,” trans. Wellek, René, in Wellek, René, ed., Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), 112–29Google Scholar; and Bern, A. L., ‘“The Nose’ and ‘The Double,'” trans. Stetson, Peter B., in Meyer, Priscilla and Rudy, Stephen, eds., Dostoevsky and Gogol: Texts and Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1979), 229–48Google Scholar.

33. For a different interpretation of the process of doubling in Shalamov, connecting the (living) narrator to convicts who die, see Jurgenson, L'expérience concentrationnaire, 273-95.

34. See Jameson, Political Unconscious, 111-12.

35. On the development of Soviet subjectivity “within a larger collective and in the service of historical action,” see Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diaryunder Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 349 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The history and significance of the relationship of the individual to the collective in Russia are explored in detail in Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999). While Hellbeck and others are evidendy not dealing with the sort of limit experiences described by Shalamov, die textual and rhetorical basis of fheir analysis (the creation of the New Soviet Man in novels, diaries, and so on), is, as Alexander Etkind suggests, placed under question when confronted widi the concrete reality of the physical and psychological consequences of applying an ideal of perekovka (reforging) to actual human beings in the gulag. See Etkind, Alexander, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?” Kritika: Explorationsin Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 171–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Naiman, Eric, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 307–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Given that beyond its textual incarnations, the project to create the New Soviet Man was largely a failure (Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity,” 177), die living products of that failure—those who returned from die gulag, not reforged but shattered, not to mention those who died in the process—and their textual counterparts represent a model of Soviet subjectivity that requires attention.

36. Golubev, Shalamov's third alter ego, appears in “Kusok miasa” (A Piece of Meat, LB, 1964), and “Akademik” (The Academician, LB, 1961).

37. Eric Lozowy notes that in the version of “Moi protsess” (My Trial, LB, 1960) first published in the west, die first-person narrator is named “Andreev,” but in subsequent versions he is actually called “Shalamov,” while the narrator in “Magiia” (Magic, LB, 1964) changes from “Golubev” to an unnamed “I.” Kline records a change in the manuscript version of “Tifoznyi karantin” (Typhoid Quarantine, KR, 1959) from a first-person narrator to the appearance of Andreev as a third-person character. Lozowy, “Variations hypostatiques: Les Doubles fictionnels de Chalamov,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 42, no. 4 (2000): 464-66; Kline, “Novaja Proza,” 285w31.

38. The other stories featuring Krist are “Pocherk” (Handwriting, AL, 1964), “V bol´nitsu” (To the Hospital, AL, 1964), “Smytaia fotografiia” (A Faded Photograph, VL, 1966), and “Chelovek s parokhoda” (The Man from the Steamship, KR-2, 1962?).

39. In the 1,600 words of “V bol´nitsu” his name appears 70 times, and in the 1,200- word “Pocherk,” it appears 53 times. The naming of the alter ego provides the turning point for the latter story: Krist is sent to write out lists for executions, and when his own file appears in the investigator's hands, he is asked to confirm his name and patronymic (Robert Ivanovich, the only reference to his full name), before the investigator burns the file and saves Krist's life (1:436-37).

40. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 68.

41. See Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3d ed. (Bloomington, 2000), 101–3Google Scholar.

42. Kaganovsky, Lilya, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivityunder Stalin (Pittsburgh, 2008), 174 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. The dominance of the image of “Artist lopaty” may be behind Toker's assertion that Krist is seen mainly in a gradually worsening condition. In fact, as four of the stories depict him working as an orderly or feldsher in a hospital, the balance between deterioration and improvement is roughly even, and it is only in this collection that Krist is depicted as a dokhodiaga. See Toker, Leona, “Kafka's ‘The Hunger Artist´ and Shalamov's ‘The Artist of the Spade': The Discourse of Lent,” in Barabtarlo, Gennady, ed., Cold Fusion: Aspectsof the German Cultural Presence in Russia (New York, 2000), 283 Google Scholar.

44. See Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Lavers, Annette and Smith, Colin (New York, 1968), 36 Google Scholar.

45. Patterson, David, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Lexington, 1992), 106 Google Scholar, interprets a similar process of naming and erasure in Holocaust narratives as denoting authors’ acknowledgment and rejection of the possibility of self-recognition.

46. Lozowy's interpretation of the alter egos of the author—Krist, Golubev, and Andreev—as an ironic Trinity depends on the latter sharing his name widi this father figure. Lozowy, “Variations hypostatiques,” 467-70.

47. The Socialist Revolutionary Party was established in 1901 on a platform of agrarian socialism that grew out of the nineteenth-century populist movement. The SRs were the largest socialist grouping in Russia in 1917, but they split over the October revolution and were suppressed by the Bolsheviks after the civil war. See Perrie, Maureen, The AgrarianPolicy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party, from Its Origins through the Revolution of1905-1907 (Cambridge, Eng., 1976)Google Scholar.

48. Confusing matters further, yet another Andreev—Kolia, a brigade leader, in “Pervaia smert'” (First Death, KR, 1956)—appears before we encounter either of the main figures bearing this name.

49. A similar concentration is apparent in Artist lopaty, but without Golubev.

50. As noted by Mikhailik, “Dostoevsky and Shalamov,” 152wl6.

51. See Boym, “Banality of Evil,” 357-59, for a different interpretation of this incident in “Lida.“

52. On the concept of singularity and continuity, see Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 141-42.

53. See Young, Sarah, “The Convict Unbound: The Body of Identity in Gulag Narratives,“ Gulag Studies 1 (2008): 57–75 Google Scholar.

54. Compare Shalamov's treatment of experience and narration time to Lawrence Langer's conception of duration and chronology, which draws on Jean-Francois Lyotard's politics of forgetting and equally defines a subject that both is and is not that self. Lange, Lawrence L.r, “Memory's Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust Testimonies,” Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York, 1995), 13–24 Google Scholar

55. See Todorov, Tsvetan, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Denner, Arthur and Pollak, Abigail (New York, 1996), 96 Google Scholar, on memory as a moral imperative for survivors.

56. It is significant that in order to focus consistently on this world, the author separates it out into a different collection, Ocherki prestupnogo mira.

57. Tolczyk, Dariusz, “The Uses of Vulnerability: Literature and Ideology in Eugeniia Ginzburg's Memoir of the Gulag,” Literature and History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 56–74 Google Scholar, addresses a different problem; his analysis demonstrates how abandoning Soviet discourse contributes to Ginzburg's reconfiguration of her moral life after arrest, which ultimately enables her to write her memoirs.

58. See Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford, 2004), 15–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a wide-ranging discussion of the problem of reader identification in relation to Holocaust narratives. Leak and Paizis define the problem of representation in Holocaust writings in terms of the gap between knowledge and understanding; see Leak and Paizis, eds., The Holocaust and the Text, 3.

59. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,and History (New York, 1992), 2 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

60. Kline, “Novaja Proza,” 313-15.

61. See Lozowy, Eric, “Les corps de la mémoire: Écriture et corporalité dans l'oeuvre de Chalamov,” Zagadnienia rodzajów literackich/Les Problemes des genres littéraires 43, nos. 1-2 (2000): 99–113 Google Scholar.

62. On this aspect of doubling, see Jurgenson, L'expérience concentrationnaire, 279-91.

63. Amery, Jean, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and ItsRealities, trans. Rosenfeld, Sidney and Rosenfeld, Stella P. (Bloomington, 1980), 9 Google Scholar. For similar descriptions of the dokhodiaga in Kolyma, see Vilenskii, Semen Samuilovich, ed., Dodnes’ liagoteet (Moscow, 2004), 2:270–80Google Scholar.

64. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 98, 83-84.

65. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 34.

66. In Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago). Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Sobraniesochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 2000), 5:9 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

67. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 120. Emphasis added.

68. Ibid., 17.

69. Solzhenitsyn uses the metaphor of the watchtower in Arkhipelag gulag. Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:9. My interpretation suggests a different way in which Shalamov's text “negotiatefs] the space ‘between’ and ‘beyond’ collective and individual” which, according to Boym, provides a means of addressing the incomprehensibility of such traumatic events. Boym, “Banality of Evil,” 362.

70. Freud, Sigmund, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis II),” in The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 12:145–56Google Scholar.

71. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 2.