Author: Varlan Shalamov
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961953
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Book Description
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
Kolyma Tales
Author: Varlan Shalamov
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961953
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Book Description
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961953
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Book Description
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales
Author: Nathaniel Golden
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042011984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
This book analyses eleven of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales from a neo-Formalist perspective. The tales are a testament to Shalamov's seventeen years in Stalin's Gulags, and were written in an attempt to draw attention to this period in Soviet history. Nathaniel Golden has primarily utilised L. M. O'Toole's work Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story as the major basis for analysis, but has incorporated many other Formalist and indeed Structuralist methods. The tales in each chapter are analysed by means of five major Formalist categories: Narrative Structure, Point of View, Fabula and Sujet, Characterisation and Setting. This process highlights many of Shalamov's ideas and motifs in the tales. He frequently uses techniques of estrangement and paradox to augment camp experience, reflecting his belief that there is no moral, emotional or spiritual gain in suffering. He habitually employs a 'focaliser' to tell the tale from a near-death perspective and in consequence distances the author from events. His literary background is prominent within the tales, where he occasionally alludes to earlier Russian authors and their works to indicate the recurring nature of Man's fallibility against the Gulag background. His characters are often simply portrayed yet representative of flawed heroes and the baseness of human beings subjected to an existence in extremis. His settings are minimal, yet form a major part of his message: Man is compared to nature, but nature is powerful and able to regenerate itself, whereas Man's existence is temporary and futile. This book therefore, shows that the Formalist approach is indeed still valid as a literary tool of analysis as well as showing that upon the 50th year of Stalin's death, Varlam Shalamov's time has arrived.
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042011984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
This book analyses eleven of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales from a neo-Formalist perspective. The tales are a testament to Shalamov's seventeen years in Stalin's Gulags, and were written in an attempt to draw attention to this period in Soviet history. Nathaniel Golden has primarily utilised L. M. O'Toole's work Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story as the major basis for analysis, but has incorporated many other Formalist and indeed Structuralist methods. The tales in each chapter are analysed by means of five major Formalist categories: Narrative Structure, Point of View, Fabula and Sujet, Characterisation and Setting. This process highlights many of Shalamov's ideas and motifs in the tales. He frequently uses techniques of estrangement and paradox to augment camp experience, reflecting his belief that there is no moral, emotional or spiritual gain in suffering. He habitually employs a 'focaliser' to tell the tale from a near-death perspective and in consequence distances the author from events. His literary background is prominent within the tales, where he occasionally alludes to earlier Russian authors and their works to indicate the recurring nature of Man's fallibility against the Gulag background. His characters are often simply portrayed yet representative of flawed heroes and the baseness of human beings subjected to an existence in extremis. His settings are minimal, yet form a major part of his message: Man is compared to nature, but nature is powerful and able to regenerate itself, whereas Man's existence is temporary and futile. This book therefore, shows that the Formalist approach is indeed still valid as a literary tool of analysis as well as showing that upon the 50th year of Stalin's death, Varlam Shalamov's time has arrived.
Condensed Milk
Author: Varlam Shalamov
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0718196465
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 12
Book Description
Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance - a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0718196465
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 12
Book Description
Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance - a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.
GRAPHITE
Author: A S J Wells
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1836286767
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
The lives of seemingly ordinary people intertwine in GRAPHITE, a modern contemporary saga, when a man saves the life of a toddler. Whilst waiting for the bus, Maurice meets and chats with Arnold, a bin man. He decides to walk home and ends up saving toddler, Charlie, from being hit by a car. He is accused of attempted kidnap and is sent to prison. Terry, his lawyer, looks for the driver, but his investigation gets complicated, involving the Met police and an International Crime Organisation led by Masood. Sean, a priest, is forced on sabbatical for his outcry during Maurice’s arrest. He travels to Malaga and befriends Miguel, a gay man. In hospital he falls in love with Maria, a nurse. Will love or the church decide his future? Birdie, a Met Sergeant, known as the Ice Maiden, and Ivor, a Met detective and flirt, help Terry seek the car driver and a mole in their office. She visits her brother, Terry’s assistant, and is attacked by local thug. GRAPHITE is a gripping crime and psychological duology with humour that will keep readers hooked until the very end.
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1836286767
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
The lives of seemingly ordinary people intertwine in GRAPHITE, a modern contemporary saga, when a man saves the life of a toddler. Whilst waiting for the bus, Maurice meets and chats with Arnold, a bin man. He decides to walk home and ends up saving toddler, Charlie, from being hit by a car. He is accused of attempted kidnap and is sent to prison. Terry, his lawyer, looks for the driver, but his investigation gets complicated, involving the Met police and an International Crime Organisation led by Masood. Sean, a priest, is forced on sabbatical for his outcry during Maurice’s arrest. He travels to Malaga and befriends Miguel, a gay man. In hospital he falls in love with Maria, a nurse. Will love or the church decide his future? Birdie, a Met Sergeant, known as the Ice Maiden, and Ivor, a Met detective and flirt, help Terry seek the car driver and a mole in their office. She visits her brother, Terry’s assistant, and is attacked by local thug. GRAPHITE is a gripping crime and psychological duology with humour that will keep readers hooked until the very end.
Lost Time
Author: Jozef Czapski
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.
Sofia Petrovna
Author: Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810111509
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810111509
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.
Shock Therapy
Author: Varlam Shalamov
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0718196457
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 19
Book Description
Merzlakov, once a robust stable-hand, now fights hunger, pain and exhaustion after a year and a half at a labour camp. An enormous man given little food, he sees the larger men dying first, their bodies conquered by starvation. In his desperation for survival, he begins a yearlong struggle of pain and injury. It ends with the inscrutable and punctilious Dr Peter Ivanovich. In a curious mix of empathy and haunting objectivity, this short story describes a snapshot of life in a Russian labour-camp. Written after Varlam Shalamov's own experiences at a gulag, it is one episode in the many that make up Kolyma Tales.
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0718196457
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 19
Book Description
Merzlakov, once a robust stable-hand, now fights hunger, pain and exhaustion after a year and a half at a labour camp. An enormous man given little food, he sees the larger men dying first, their bodies conquered by starvation. In his desperation for survival, he begins a yearlong struggle of pain and injury. It ends with the inscrutable and punctilious Dr Peter Ivanovich. In a curious mix of empathy and haunting objectivity, this short story describes a snapshot of life in a Russian labour-camp. Written after Varlam Shalamov's own experiences at a gulag, it is one episode in the many that make up Kolyma Tales.
Kolyma Stories
Author: Varlam Shalamov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 769
Book Description
A masterpiece of 20th-century Russian literature—now in its first complete English translation “One of the greatest Russian writers of short stories” chronicles life in a Soviet gulag, drawing on his own years in a USSR prison camp and laying bare the perils of totalitarianism (Financial Times). Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen years that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second to appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin’s death in 1953. His stories are at once the biography of a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and a literary work of unparalleled creative power, insight, and conviction.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 769
Book Description
A masterpiece of 20th-century Russian literature—now in its first complete English translation “One of the greatest Russian writers of short stories” chronicles life in a Soviet gulag, drawing on his own years in a USSR prison camp and laying bare the perils of totalitarianism (Financial Times). Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen years that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second to appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin’s death in 1953. His stories are at once the biography of a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and a literary work of unparalleled creative power, insight, and conviction.
The Gulag in Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900446848X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov are two of the best-known Gulag writers. After a short period of personal acquaintance, their lives and views on literature took different paths. Solzhenitsyn did not see a literary program in Shalamov’s works, which he describes as “a result of exhaustion after years of hard labour in the camp”. By understanding the text as a “result”, Solzhenitsyn critically touched on a concept of evidence, which Shalamov several times emphasized as important to his own works. According to Shalamov, instead of the text being a re-presentation, it should be an extract from or substitute for the real or the factual, by which his Gulag experience became present once again. Concepts such as “document”, “thing” and “fact” became important for Shalamov’s self-identification as a modernist. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn, viewing his own task as one of restoring historical experiences of the Russian people and trying “to explain the slow course of history and what sort of one it has been”, assumed the dual role of writer and historian, which inevitably raises the question of what characterizes the borders between fact and fiction in his works. It also raises question about dichotomies of historical and fictional truth. Contributors: Andrea Gullotta, Fabian Heffermehl, Luba Jurgenson, Irina Karlsohn, Josefina Lundblad-Janjić, Elena Mikhailik, Michael A. Nicholson, Irina Sandomirskaja, Ulrich Schmid, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Leona Toker.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900446848X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov are two of the best-known Gulag writers. After a short period of personal acquaintance, their lives and views on literature took different paths. Solzhenitsyn did not see a literary program in Shalamov’s works, which he describes as “a result of exhaustion after years of hard labour in the camp”. By understanding the text as a “result”, Solzhenitsyn critically touched on a concept of evidence, which Shalamov several times emphasized as important to his own works. According to Shalamov, instead of the text being a re-presentation, it should be an extract from or substitute for the real or the factual, by which his Gulag experience became present once again. Concepts such as “document”, “thing” and “fact” became important for Shalamov’s self-identification as a modernist. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn, viewing his own task as one of restoring historical experiences of the Russian people and trying “to explain the slow course of history and what sort of one it has been”, assumed the dual role of writer and historian, which inevitably raises the question of what characterizes the borders between fact and fiction in his works. It also raises question about dichotomies of historical and fictional truth. Contributors: Andrea Gullotta, Fabian Heffermehl, Luba Jurgenson, Irina Karlsohn, Josefina Lundblad-Janjić, Elena Mikhailik, Michael A. Nicholson, Irina Sandomirskaja, Ulrich Schmid, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Leona Toker.
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia
Author: Anthony Austin, Paul Hollander, Aleksandr Nikolaevich I͡Akovlev
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300087608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
He unhesitatingly names those individuals who bear responsibility for these catastrophic deaths, bringing into sharper focus than ever before the facts, the perpetrators, and the events of the Soviet Union's years of terror."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300087608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
He unhesitatingly names those individuals who bear responsibility for these catastrophic deaths, bringing into sharper focus than ever before the facts, the perpetrators, and the events of the Soviet Union's years of terror."--BOOK JACKET.