One of the most intriguing aspects of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is connections between the stories. These take a large variety of forms. Within the six collections, there are clusters of stories that are linked in different ways: by chronology (‘The Lawyers’ Plot’ and ‘Typhoid Quarantine’; ‘June’ and ‘May; ‘Chasing Engine Steam’ and ‘The Train’), location (such […]
All posts tagged Shalamov
Shalamov: connections
Posted by Sarah Young on March 18, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/03/18/shalamov-connections/
Making and using concordances
I’ve been using digital concordances to analyse word frequency in literary texts for quite some time. While I was working on my PhD thesis, on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in the late nineties, I regularly used the Petrozavodsk State University on-line Dostoevsky concordance, as mentioned in a previous post. The site was pretty new at the time, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 27, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/02/27/making-and-using-concordances/
Shalamov.ru
I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about this site, to which I’m a pretty frequent visitor. Shalamov.ru was launched in December 2008 and has grown amazingly quickly over the last year and a bit. It’s become one of the best resources on an individual writer that I’ve come across. It contains electronic […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 23, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/02/23/shalamov-ru/
Shalamov’s titles
One tends to spend a lot of time focusing on the first and final sentences of Shalamov’s stories, because the author did attribute particular importance to them. But recently, I’ve also been thinking about his titles. Consisting largely of one or two words, most of them are strikingly commonplace. Some, such as ‘The Parcel’, ‘Rain’, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on January 7, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/01/07/shalamovs-titles/
The problem with Solzhenitsyn
Not entirely in the festive spirit, I’ve been reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Invisible Allies (trans. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson; London: Harvill, 1997) with my usual set of mixed feelings. He’s not the greatest writer the world has ever seen, but he is very readable. Last time I read The Gulag Archipelago in full, I couldn’t […]
Posted by Sarah Young on December 31, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/12/31/the-problem-with-solzhenitsyn/
Fairytale and reality in Gulag narratives
The fairytale metaphor is a recurring feature a large number of Gulag narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, and it stands out because most of these texts are otherwise determinedly unmetaphoric. Amid the stark language habitually used to narrate the experience of the Gulag, aimed at depicting the harshness of reality, there are recurring images of […]
Posted by Sarah Young on December 21, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/12/21/fairytale-and-reality-in-gulag-narratives/
Varlam Shalamov on Literary Encyclopedia
Just a quick note to say that my article on Shalamov is now available on the Literary Encyclopedia, a rather good and steadily growing on-line resource. It’s subscription only, which is a real pity, because I think there are plenty of people outside universities who would find the site useful and interesting. Academics, particularly in […]
Posted by Sarah Young on November 28, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/11/28/varlam-shalamov-on-literary-encyclopedia/
My work (3)
The articles and papers section (see list on the right), has a new addition, Shalamov’s symbolism, which I presented at a conference a couple of years ago. This is an on-going piece of work and ultimately it will form the basis of one of the chapters of my book on Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. Anyway, it […]
Posted by Sarah Young on November 1, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/11/01/my-work-3/
Gulag art
While I am usually pleased by events which raise the public profile of the Gulag, I am distinctly less comfortable with its use for anti-Russian/anti-Soviet propaganda by neoconservative American think-tanks who have failed to notice that the Cold War ended twenty years ago, as in the case of the Heritage Foundation’s current exhibition of Nikolai […]
Posted by Sarah Young on October 3, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/10/03/gulag-art/
My work (2)
I’ve added another piece of my research, this time a paper I delivered earlier this year as part a Gogol’ bicentenary panel at the BASEES annual conference. The paper was a bit of a departure from my current preoccupations, but the idea arose while I was teaching my final-year undergraduate course on Modern Russian Prose […]
Posted by Sarah Young on September 13, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/09/13/my-work-2/