Lecture/Talk: Varlam Shalamov – Prose & Poetry

Venue: London (UK)
Period: May 29, 2012

The Pushkin House in London organizes a lecture on Varlam Shalamov’s prose and poetry. Shalamov has been described as the Russian Primo Levi. The son of a priest and a schoolteacher, he was first arrested in 1929, for helping to print and distribute copies of Lenin's suppressed 'Testament', a letter sharply critical of Stalin.  He was sentenced to three years in a camp in the Urals. In 1937, he was rearrested, convicted of "counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities" and sent to Kolyma, the vast network of labour camps in the north-east of Siberia. He remained there until 1953. In 1956 he returned to Moscow.  By then he had already began work on the Kolyma Tales, his long collection of stories about life in the Gulag.
The Kolyma Tales is generally recognised in Russia as the greatest of all works of literature about the Gulag.  The stories have a documentary-like quality that is reminiscent of Hemingway; astonishingly, this is fused with a formal, sometimes almost mathematical perfection more reminiscent of Borges.  What has gone strangely recognised is that Shalamov's poetry, his Kolyma Notebooks, is no less fine than his prose. Boris Pasternak greatly admired Shalamov's poetry, as did many other of his contemporaries - but during the last few decades it has been neglected.

During the lecture Robert Chandler will read some of his translations of Shalamov's poems, which will also be read in Russian.  Sarah Young, who has written numerous articles on Shalamov and Russian labour camp literature and who is also currently translating some of the Kolyma Tales, will talk about the similarities and differences between Shalamov's poetry and his prose.

Tickets: £7, conc. £5

Pushkin House
address: 5A Bloomsbury Square
London WC1A 2TA, United Kingdom
tel.: 0044.(0).20.7269.9770
fax: 0044.(0).20.3116.0151