Writing Life: Varlam Shalamov, Biography and Poetics

• Applicant: Dr. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 275412919

The objective of the proposed research project is the publication of a monograph on the Russian author Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982). Shalamov, who only in the last couple decades has gained an international audience, ranks among the most unconventional voices in 20th-century literature, and his role in academic debates around the world about writing ‘after Auschwitz’ and ‘after the Gulag’ ought not to be overlooked. Be that as it may, there is to date no comprehensive, scholarly presentation of his body of work (not even in Russia) that comes close to conveying the complex interconnections between his biography and poetics, while also taking into account various cultural-historical conditions in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. The project is specifically concerned with examining how Shalamov’s body of work relates to the problem of narrating human life after Auschwitz and after the Gulag. For a long time research on Shalamov’s writing has concentrated predominantly on the poetics of his major work, Kolyma Tales, while his other prose texts, poetry, and unfinished prose sketches remain relatively untouched. The limited number of biographical representations have tended to remain within the framework of reconstructing the timeline of his life and works but prove unsatisfactory when it comes to analyzing the relevant literary and/or cultural-historical contexts. In terms of method, the proposed project will integrate multiple research perspectives, including philological and biographical approaches as well as ones from literary studies and cultural history. We anticipate the development of innovative ideas (with ramifications beyond just the study of Shalamov as an individual and his literary work) in pursuit of our main course of inquiry on the relationship between poetics and biography. These ideas will, in turn, contribute to theoretical concerns in the fields of literary studies and cultural science, for example, memory, remembrance, writing after Auschwitz and the Gulag, body memory and literature, the aftermath of the literary avant-garde, or the history of literary dissidence in the Soviet Union. In terms of the complex relationship between life and writing after the Gulag, we take up Shalamov’s use of literary form as an example that helps to analyze his oeuvre and his aesthetic explorations from the 1920s/1930s to the 1970s in conjuncture with his extremely fragmented life and the socio-cultural context of the Soviet Union. In the proposed monograph, these caesuras constitute the conceptual point of departure from which the various stages of Shalamov’s intellectual biography are then reconstructed with the poetics of his literary texts as the foundation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants