Novaja proza: Varlam Salamov's Kolymskie rasskazy.

Abstract

This dissertation, entitled Novaja proza: Varlam Salamov's Kolymskie rasskazy, examines the life and prose works of Russian camp writer Varlam Salamov (1907-1982). Salamov's approach to the literary text, expressed in his credo Novaja proza, demands the writer's first-hand knowledge of his material on ethical grounds, but ultimately blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. The first part of this dissertation is an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the writer's biography, and to construct a chronology of the events which form the basis of his stories. I also investigate the reasons for Salamov' s creation of myths about his life, and the development of the world-view that he presents in his literature. In the second part of my dissertation I examine the spatio-temporal plane which plays an important role in Salamov's modernist work. Using Gerard Genette's and Boris Uspenskij's narrative theories, I demonstrate that although there is an expectation of chronological ordering in the stories, they are in fact anachronic and achronic. The temporal plane is further disrupted by the unstable narrative temporal perspective, which freely moves back and forth between the perspectives of prisoner and survivor. I argue that poetic structure, rather than chronology, is the source of cohesion in the text, and that the stories in the cycles function like poetry with themes and variations. Applying Jurij Lotman's theory of space I demonstrate that whereas traditionally in literary texts spatial parameters emphasize important semantic differences, Salamov collapses these differences, thereby creating a closed spatial system. Finally, I argue that the narrator generally adopts the constricted psychological perspective of a prisoner, which consequently limits his spatial perspective, and that the instability of the narrator's spatial perspective creates fragmentation in the spatial plane of the text. I thus demonstrate that Salamov's works represent an expansion of the modernist concerns of early twentieth-century Russian literature in the post-Stalinist era, making Salamov an important link to the past, as well as a forerunner to the post-modern writing of the late Soviet period.