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Заголовок: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Antrekot на 05/14/05 в 22:11:42 When I fell to the very bottom I heard a tap from below. In Varlam Shalamov's story "The Funeral Oration" two political prisoners heaving stone in a Kolyma goldmine compare their lot to that of the Decembrists sent to the Siberian mines more than a century ago. "I told Fedyakhin about the quotas the Decembrists were assigned at Nerchinsk according to the "Memories of Maria Volkonskaya", - three poods(1) of ore per worker. - And how much would our quota weight, Vasilii Petrovich? - Fedyakhin asked. I did a calculation - it was about eight hundred poods. - Well, Vasilii Petrovich, look how the quotas have gone up..."(2) If one was to choose a single quotation that defines Shalamov's manifold relationship with Dostoevsky it will probably be this one, the passage where Dostoevsky's name is not even mentioned. And yet it neatly captures the nature of the distance between the "House of the Dead", "Crime and Punishment" and "Brothers Karamazov", and the "Kolyma Tales". The production quotas have been increased 266.666666666(6) times. This radical change in the limits of human experience sets the framework within which Shalamov sees Dostoevsky's philosophical ideas and creative devices. Here I would like to say that in my opinion the whole scope of Shalamov's Dostoevsky connections couldn't be covered within the boundaries of a single article or even a series of articles. Therefore the aim of this paper is to define several interesting aspects of the problem and tentatively suggest the ways, along which those aspects might be explored. When beginning the Kolyma Tales Varlam Shalamov have set for himself two ambitious tasks: a) to create a comprehensive literary rendition of the prison camp reality; b) to create a new medium, capable of projecting the author's experience upon the consciousness of the reader, thus endowing a literary text with an authentic intensity of the real world(3). Within the limits of conventional literature both those tasks were by definition impossible. Joseph Brodsky has one commented that the true witness of death has to be its victim. Consequently any account of a death must be either untrue or incomplete for the narration would have to end before the life ceases. Moreover, if there was a way to describe death from a viewpoint of one experiencing it, it would, nevertheless, remain incomprehensible, for the narrator and his still living addressees would have no common language, no common reference points. Thus death cannot be fully shared or even represented. And if that is true for a normal individual death, it must still hold true for the wholesale destruction and degradation that was a prison camp, where inmates (at least in Shalamov's personal view) became completely divorced from humanity long before their physical death occurred. So in order to reproduce his object - the prison camp universe - properly, Shalamov had to find a way to convert the language of an abyss into the language of the living, to establish a translation protocol that would work within the text, making it essentially bilingual. As to the creation of the reality-analogue prose, that task seemed no less daunting. In order to maintain a sensorial load comparable to that of real life Shalamov had to construct a text of an extraordinary semantic density. Yet such a text would not have been viable as a message carrier, for once the semantic volume reaches a certain saturation point, connections and associations begin to originate spontaneously, often without author's will or knowledge. Once begun, the process would go like an avalanche, generating the ever-increasing number of possible meanings and tearing the fabric of text apart. So both Shalamov's chosen theme and his declared literary approach presented him with nearly unsurmountable obstacles. Yet Shalamov was not exactly sailing in uncharted waters. For within Russian culture there already existed a tradition of exploring both the boundaries of a human soul and the boundaries of text. In creating his 'New Prose' (the name Shalamov coined for his literary experiment) Shalamov could not have ignored that tradition. (Actually, the label 'New Prose' in itself implies a well-developed and complex relationship with the 'Old Prose'.) And in doing so Shalamov had to define his position towards one of the most powerful and influential voice of that tradition - Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The author who made generations of readers to confront the abyss of the everyday life could not have failed to impact on the author who wrote about the everyday life of an abyss. And indeed Shalamov's notebooks show that he took a singular interest in Dostoevsky. The only other figure that had a similar importance for Shalamov was Boris Pasternak. Shalamov was highly aware of both the minutiae of Dostoevsky's biography (4) and Dostoevsky's artistic devices, and regarded Dostoevsky not as a "classic" but as an extremely relevant contemporary writer. "Dostoyevsky is a writer of two world wars and revolutions."5 Moreover, there is some evidence that he perceived Dostoevsky as a tangible social force capable of shaping the first reality. "Who knows, perhaps Dostoevsky checked the world revolution with his "Crime and Punishment", "The Devils", "Brothers Karamazov", "Notes from Underground", with his passion of a writer."(6) (Here I would like to note that for Shalamov, a member of the Trotskyist opposition and an avowed admirer of the socialist-revolutionary party, prevention of the world revolution was not necessarily a good thing.) Shalamov quotes Dostoevsky as an example of artistic honesty "... art knows only one truth. It is a truth of the talent. That is why our eternal companions are Dostoevsky and Leskov."(7) Shalamov defines Dostoevsky as "a genius"(8). The first bell rings when we discover that Shalamov devoted several pages of his working notebooks to the extensive biographical and artistic comparison of Dostoevsky and Esenin. The choice seems surprising but even more surprising is Shalamov's conclusion that the affinity between the authors is unmistakable and that, despite the impressive difference in the sheer scale of their talents, Esenin was not a parody on Dostoevsky but rather a much-diminished modern copy of him. That comparison is unflattering in itself, but it becomes positively insulting when one remembers that in the "Kolyma Tales" Esenin exists solely as a favourite poet of the professional criminals, whom Shalamov sees as a physical embodiment of evil. (In the short story "On Tick" Esenin's poetry is used as a kind of a criminal ID.) The existence of such comparisons permits us to suggest that Shalamov's attitude to Dostoevsky was rather ambiguous. In fact, Shalamov's list of grievances where Dostoevsky is concerned is quite impressive. He accuses Dostoevsky of not knowing his subject well enough (e.g. mistaking ordinary people who have committed crimes for career criminals in the "House of the Dead"), questions Dostoevsky's judgement, defines his attitude as "superstition without end or limit"(9), and launches a broadside attack on Dostoevsky's preferred genre - the novel. Moreover, when called a "successor of the traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky", Shalamov reacted with indignation, disclaiming even a possibility of a relationship. However, if we consider the poetics of the Kolyma Tales, we shall see that Shalamov's authorial "genome" carries many sequences of Dostoevsky's code. At a glance the Kolyma Tales in their uninvolved unhurried puantilistic precision - a sketch, another sketch, an episode, no judgements made - seems to have no connection with the feverish verbose world of Dostoevsky. Yet if we think about the space of the "Kolyma Tales" - crammed, limited and claustrophobic at the semantic centre, and offering glimpses of freedom and unlimited distance at the periphery; the time of the "Kolyma Tales" - personal, dispersed, discontinued; the invasive sound structure; the endless repetitions; the warped, off-key grammar used to enforce the feeling of spontaneity; the non-linear unpredictable plot (10) - we realise that all those features also pertain to the poetics of Dostoevsky's prose.(11) Apart from their immediate functional purpose, those devices also send out a subliminal message of wrongness, difficulty, hostility, both defining the nature of the object described and forcing the reader to interact with the text on a more immediate personal level. In the article devoted to Dostoevsky's early story "Mr. Proharchin" V.Toporov writes: "The typical statements about Dostoevsky's "cruelty" or "ruthlessness" usually made by those who are afraid to leave the voluntary "prison" of their unauthentic existence, by those who would not and could not pass through fear (Angst) to the freedom of choice, are to a significant extent based not on the "terrible" subjects of Dostoevsky's text but on their compulsiveness in relation to the reader, who is deprived of comfort and private inertia as well as the right to quit the game when it turns dangerous and approaches the "forbidden limits of nature"."(12) So Dostoevsky arranges the structural and semantic elements of his text to impose upon the reader a mental and emotional state that would have resulted from the participation in a similar real-life situation. A. Sinyavskii maintains that one of the most interesting features of the "Kolyma Tales" is its coercive power, the ability of the writer to make the process of reading as all-encompassing and inexorable as the prison camp experience itself - and thus bring the reader a step closer to that experience. "In contrast to other literary works, in the "Kolyma Tales" the reader is equated not with the author..., but with an inmate. With a man locked within the limits of a story. There is no choice. You have to read those short tales one after another, to carry that log or a stone-filled wheelbarrow without respite... He [Shalamov] leaves us no way out. It seems that he is as ruthless to his readers as life was ruthless to him, to the people he depicts. As Kolyma was. That's where a feeling of authenticity, of the text being adequate to the plot comes from." (13) Like Dostoevsky, Shalamov attempts to make his text into a functional double of an unbearable reality. Locked in within the stifling limited space, deprived of all the ordinary protections literature usually offers, the reader has no recourse left but to confront the text on the immediate level as he would do with the events of the physical reality. This is the kind of raw involvement both authors need to propel their texts on. Up to this point the literary techniques employed by Shalamov have been similar to those of Dostoevsky both in structure and in purpose. Yet now we begin to notice a slight shift, a discrepancy. a) Both Dostoevsky and Shalamov seek to wean their reader from a passive distanced role of a recipient. Dostoevsky achieves the reader's involvement, not only by coercion but also by invitation. V. Toporov notes that the core meanings of Dostoevsky's prose stay unformulated, unfinished, intentionally set to be reinvented at every reading. Shalamov does exactly the opposite. In his texts the seemingly unrelated details, once being placed together, start forming semantic chains that ultimately cover every possible meaning of every word or word combination within the text. As a result, every single text unit contains a potential avalanche of equally possible interpretations among which the reader is forced to choose so as not to drown in them. This difference in artistic approach reveals a rift in the attitudes. Both authors are describing inherently chaotic systems. In Dostoevsky's case - as Bakhtin has shown - the very choice of an adventure novel as a genre defines the world of his prose as indeterminate and unpredictable, the almost immediate subversion of this genre only adds to the chaotic capacity of the text, where the word "suddenly" often dominates the narration. In Shalamov's world of the prison camps the cause-and-effect chain is irrevocably broken and any action can cause almost any consequence - within the limits of inevitable death. Dostoevsky uses chaos in attempt at higher harmony. He sees it as a transitory state that will be subsumed once perfection is achieved. Shalamov's choice of portraying chaos through chaos (apart from being a brilliant tactical decision that made destructive centrifugal semantic forces work for the text and not against it) denotes an acknowledgment that chaos does exist and should be included into every equation - otherwise the equation would not last. Chaos exists and so does a prison camp - once having reached those previously unknown shores, once having mapped their outlines, it is impossible to wipe them off either memory or the planetary surface. b) Both Dostoevsky and Shalamov imbue their texts with the constant presence of God. In the "Kolyma Tales" Christian symbolism permeates the prison camp routine. One of the protagonists (a recognisable "double" of the author) has a surname Krist that in Russian is associated with both Christ and the cross. Another is called Golubev - 'the dove". Quite often the titles of Shalamov's stories (e.g. "Apostle Paul", "The Evening Prayer", "The Cross", "The Unconverted") refer the reader to the New Testament. No less often the motif structure of Shalamov's stories would unobtrusively demonstrate the sacrilegious, profane nature of the prison camp reality.(14) And here we encounter yet another divergence point. In Dostoevsky faith is a matter of personal decision. One is able chose between faith and atheism, between Christ and the devil and even - as Dostoevsky had once suggested - between Christ and truth. In the "Kolyma Tales" God and the Devil, while rarely mentioned personally, are nevertheless presented as an organic part of the universe - no less and no more real than the morning temperature of 50 below zero Centigrade, murderous colonel Garanin or that lonely island of physical salvation - the hospital with the meaningful name "The Left Bank" (of rivers Styx or Acheron, presumably). In Shalamov's world existence of God and the Devil is not a matter of personal choice and thus the question of belief becomes irrelevant. And the question of personal faith is dispatched with the same finality. In the story "The Unconverted" (whose title speaks for itself) the half-starved narrator concludes "the possibility of 'religion as a way out' was too incidental and too unearthly".(15) According to Shalamov religion can not serve as a universal fulcrum in the world where the very problem of free will that had plagued theologists for centuries is easily solved on a purely physiological level. "It was that portion of gruel that my partner needed to dare to die - sometimes one has to hurry to retain the death will."(16) Shalamov demonstrates that faith - or ethics, or culture, or any other prop coming from within the human soul - is not enough to sustain a personality in the world where "spit freezes in midair" and "the guards shoot without warning". Like Dostoevsky, Shalamov acknowledges the presence of God in everything. Unlike Dostoevsky, he would not talk to Him. In his book of memoirs, "The Fourth Vologda", Shalamov claims that throughout his entire prison camp odyssey he had never ever turned to God for salvation or solace. Presented with a choice between Christ and truth Shalamov chooses truth (as he perceives it), for he had seen that ungrounded faith leads to degradation and death. c) Both Dostoevsky and Shalamov portray their respective worlds as something opposed to the normal flow of events. In his ground-breaking book on Dostoevsky's poetics Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that Dostoevsky's choice of adventure novel as his preferred medium was motivated by his need to provide a structure where almost any twist of the plot was possible and to provide a hero unburdened by the social and cultural restrictions. Dostoevsky needed a genre where princes could mix with merchants and illegitimate sons could kill their fathers without straining readers' credibility. He needed to upset all the ingrained hierarchical structures. He needed a world where a human being could communicate with another human being bypassing the society. And so he ended up with a carnival. And once again the poetics of the "Kolyma Tales" seems to echo that device of Dostoevsky. Shalamov describes a world where every convention is unstable. It is a world where one can kill a man by giving him extra food ("The Stillness"), save him by clapping him with a new prison sentence ("My Trial") or radically improve his health by cutting out his perfectly healthy appendix ("A Piece of Meat"). It is a world where a humble chambermaid wields enormous influence ("Aunty Polya") and an all-powerful colonel is brought low by the very system he served ("How Has it All Began?"), a world where living bodies fall apart and the dead stay forever unaffected by rot, preserved by permafrost. Shalamov actually enforces that sense of topsy-turwyness by throwing into the pot some very recognisable literary quotations - and then subverting them. The story "A Duck" is a Kolyma version of the famous sentimental "Grey Neck" by Mamin-Sibiryak. The story "Pain" is a prison camp Guignol rendition of "Syrano de Bergerac". And the story "On Tick" (it describes the death of a 'political' inmate whose life became a stake in a card game between two career criminals) begins with a phrase: "They were playing cards at Naumov's, a mine horse driver.", playing havoc with the sancta sanctorum, the untouchable "Queen of Spades" by Pushkin. And Shalamov goes even further by attacking his own text, travestying his own plots and undermining his own statements. That attack is multiplied thousandfold by the generative system of the "Kolyma Tales". In the world of the "Kolyma Tales" every message is repeatedly subverted, nothing is stable, nothing is safe. One can easily describe such a world as a kind of carnival. Yet this carnival is different from one described by Bakhtin. It is a carnival where nothing is renewed. It is the Black Death without Bocaccio. It's a final destruction that offers no hope of resurrection. "...who would find out whether it was a minute or a day, a year or a century that we needed to return to our former bodies - we never even expected to return to our former souls. And of course we never did. Nobody did."(17) In the Bakhtinian terms we might be speaking of one of the carnival sub-versions, the dance macabre, with the Death leading the way. Or rather of a dance macabre as seen by one of the characters on the painting. Here we come to a major rift between the poetics of Dostoevsky and Shalamov. Dostoevsky's carnival is both a self-sufficient world and a literary device that permits the author to turn a novel into a fair of viewpoints. It is both a product and a vessel of polyphony. The main body of Russian prison camp literature it seems has adopted Dostoevsky's heteroglossia as a form of discourse, making the "other" and his/her "alien" word an integral part of their poetics. It is not so with the "Kolyma Tales". Unlike Ginsburg in whose memoirs "everybody talks" (18), unlike Solzhenitsyn, whose authorial voice is often drowned under the weight of many voices of the "GULAG Archipelago", Shalamov presents the reader with an unfaceted view. Behind the thin gauze of characterisation one can always hear a single powerful voice. And it is not exactly the voice of the author. In the first story of the cycle - "Through the Snow" - Shalamov makes it clearly understood that the narrator and the author of the "Kolyma Tales" are one and the same. And yet, having defined his supreme narrative position, Shalamov proceeds establishing himself as a semi-inanimate object. Shalamov's meticulous description of deteriorating body and soul imperceptibly persuades the reader that the half-starved, half-frozen and probably already dead narrator of the "Kolyma Tales" does not possess enough strength to provide anything but bare facts. Shalamov sets himself not as an Orpheus, who ventured to Hell and came back, but as a Pluto (19), an integral part of the netherworld, describing his habitat in its own terms. Within the universe Shalamov creates memories of the prison camp are by definition impersonal, for the inmates do not retain enough of their personalities to taint the account. There is no room left for the "other", for that other is also being consumed. There is no room for the "self" as well. And the void left by a personality is filled by the automatic reactions dictated by the habitat. Shalamov uses every structure in the "Kolyma Tales" - be it a religion, a social system, a quotation from a classic or a human body - as a probe. By the type and extent of damage done to the probe by the alien environment one can judge the nature of that environment. So at the end of the day the only true narrative voice in the "Kolyma Tales" is the voice of the prison camp itself. Yet that monophonic text is based on Dostoevsky's premises. All the social and cultural characteristics of the characters are stripped away, all the barriers are removed and people mix in combinations even the professedly egalitarian Soviet society might be surprised at. "There were some other people in the work gang that huddled in their rags, they all were equally dirty and hungry, with the same gleam in their eyes. Who were they? Generals? Heroes of the Spanish Civil war? Russian writers? Collective farmers from Volokolamsk?"(20) Shalamov takes up where Dostoevsky finishes. He establishes the "man to man" line of communication that bypasses all "artificial" barriers. He presents us human beings meeting in infinity (for, in the absence of continuous time, the prison camp universe is perceived as eternal) in the final moment of crisis, in the face of imminent death. The request Shatov had made from Stavrogin is realised to the letter. Most of the Shalamov's characters have achieved a status of an untainted "human voice". Only to demonstrate that there is nothing human in this voice any more. Only to show that one can not use it for any kind of communication. Between the people on the same level of disintegration no exchange is needed - for they basically are presented as a single composite personality. The use of "we" instead of "I" is very typical of the "Kolyma Tales". As for people existing in different strata, the semantic barrier between the layers is so great that it effectively prevents communication. In the story June Shalamov off-handedly displays a failed communication attempt concerning such a vital subject as the Second World War (the action takes place in June 1941 - a few days after Germany invaded Russia). "- Listen,- said Stupnitsky,- the Germans have bombed Sebastopol, Kiev, Odessa.- Andreev listened politely. The announcement sounded like the news about a war in Paraguay or Bolivia. What had Andreev to do with it? Stupnitsky is well-fed, he is a foreman, he is warm - that's why he's interested in matters like war."(21) The carnival that for Dostoevsky was a potent literary device and a philosophical statement for Shalamov is a part of an unbearable reality of the daily prison camp routine. The reality that was to be escaped from at any cost. In the "Kolyma Tales" Shalamov demonstrates that the only possible way to resist this disintegrating pull of the carnival (if only for a time) was to root one's identity in some social function that exists outside the prison camp universe. To become a Paramedic, an Engineer, a Soldier, a Writer, a persona whose actions are strictly prescribed by the social expectations and professional code and not dictated by the environment or personal preference.(22) I.e. to do exactly the opposite of what Dostoevsky wanted to achieve. Dostoevsky tried to strip human soul of all its protections in order to understand its nature. Shalamov believes that without those protections the soul simply can not exist. Within the bounds of the "Kolyma Tales" that soul is not immortal - actually it is one of the first things to fall apart, and when it dies, it dies irrevocably ("we never even expected to return to our former souls"). Dostoevsky asked to be judged by his ideals. Shalamov does just that. He takes Dostoevsky's ideals and one by one dismantles them by demonstrating their inability to contend with the prison camp universe. For Shalamov every appeal to the man's "nature" is negated by the simple fact that "human brain can not function in severe frost." Thus we can conclude that if we consider the poetics of the "Kolyma Tales" along those basic lines we shall see that Shalamov, while employing an impressive set of devices from Dostoevsky's arsenal, chose to reject, subvert or undermine their underlying ideas. Why? If we consider the relationship between the poetics of Dostoevsky's prose and that of the "Kolyma Tales" not on the atomic, but on the quantum level, we shall see a slight difference in orientation. Dostoevsky's text reaches up - towards heaven. Shalamov's text also builds up - from the bedrock layer of the prison camps. This difference between "to" and "from" is very descriptive. Dostoevsky strives to embody an ideal. Shalamov seeks to hammer into his audience the basic facts of the human nature - as he sees it. Despite all the outward similarities the "Kolyma Tales" is not a menippea in Bakhtinian terms. The menippea is supposed to test people and ideas in an attempt to answer the "ultimate questions". Dostoevsky needed indeterminism and polyphony to provide his protagonists with choices. Shalamov has no need to create a testing ground. He already has one. He also has no need to actually stage a test. That has also been taken care of by the system that for decades has been testing millions of human beings to destruction. Shalamov's challenge is quite different from that of Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was looking for answers. Shalamov knew he has found them. Once again it is a choice between Christ and truth. It is a bitter bill Shalamov presents not to Dostoevsky only, but to Russian humanistic literature as a whole. "The nineteenth century was afraid to look into those abysses, those chasms, those voids that had opened to the twentieth century."(23) He accuses Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of preaching a myth about the human nature, a myth that led too many people to rely on something that was not there. According to Shalamov the blind faith in the innate human virtues, the grand messianic idea of the whole people being transported to a higher plane by virtue of their suffering ("Who have been naught now shall be all."), the anthropomorphic desire to harmonise history and the determination to treat evil as a transitory social phenomenon were the poison gifts Russian humanistic tradition left to the twentieth century. Shalamov postulated that the total disregard for human life and identity stemmed directly from the nineteenth century idea of the human apotheosis and awaiting exalted destiny. The world of Dostoevsky, where Petya Verkhovsnsky was the worst evil imaginable and even the devil himself yearned for humanity, was - in Shalamov's opinion - an integral part of that myth. "In our days Dostoevsky would not have repeated that phrase about the God-bearing people."(24), wrote Shalamov, knowing that phrase - or rather one of its interpretations - to be one of the causes of his personal fate. Shalamov was of the opinion that in a vastly changed contemporary world "after Hiroshima, after the self-service [crematoria] of Aushwitz and after Serpantinnaja in Kolyma, after wars and revolutions..."25 the very nature of literature had to change. He though that literature could not afford staying literature - the price of error just went too high. He felt that the writer's duty was to become a Pluto. Literature had to become life, for in Shalamov view that was the only way to both create harmony and avoid the trap of what was later dubbed "the grand narrative". Shalamov sought to dispel everything that does not have grounds in the human nature - for he was convinced that otherwise no one would ever learn how to live on a barren frozen land that lies at 15 centimetres deep in every - or almost every human soul. Dostoevsky and Shalamov were confronting very similar philosophical and artistic tasks. Yet Shalamov was unable to accept not only Dostoevsky's answers, but even his questions. For the production quotas have changed since 1849. 1 A pood is an ancient Russian weight measure, about 16,38 kg. 2 Shalamov, V., 1992, Колымские рассказы в двух томах, p. 354 (my translation) 3 Shalamov maintains that the aim of an artistic work is "the resurrection of life". Please see Shalamov 1996a, On Prose. 4 For example in one of his notebooks Shalamov remarks that one of Dostoevsky's ancestors was a secretary to Prince Kurbsky. 5 Shalamov, V., 1997, Из записных книжек (From the notebooks), Шаламовский сборник, Vol 2, Vologda: Grifon, p. 45 6 Ibid, p. 32 (my translation) 7 Shalamov, V., 1996b, Поэт изнутри (A Poet from within), Несколько моих жизней..., Moscow: Respublika, p. 438 (my translation) 8 Shalamov, V., 1997, Из записных книжек (From the notebooks), Шаламовский сборник, Vol 2, Vologda: Grifon, p. 11 (my translation) 9 Ibid, p. 37 (my translation) 10 Regarding the major characteristics of the poetics of the Kolyma Tales please see Toker 1989, Zolotonosov 1994, Timofeev 1991, Sinyavsky 1994, Mikhailik 1995, Volkova 1997, Mikhailik 1997, Mikhailik 1998. Of course, we by no means claim to cover every single instance of structural or semantic correlation, we are merely pointing out several most obvious ones. 11 Shalamov was extremely interested in literary theory and criticism. As a student he was an admirer of OPOYAZ and attended Osip Brik workshops. There is evidence indicating that Shalamov read Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Works (1929 edition) short after his release from Vishera prison camps in 1932. Varlam Shalamov possessed an eidetic visual memory and therefore he could not have failed to notice the resemblance between some of his artistic devices and those of Dostoevsky. 12 Toporov, V., 1995, Миф, ритуал, образ, символю (Myth. Ritual, image, symbol: a study in the mythological field: selected works), Moscow: Progress, Kultura, p. 171 (my translation) 13 Sinyavsky, A., 1994, Срез материала (Section of material), Шаламовский сборник, Vol 1, Vologda: Poligrafist, p. 227 (my translation) 14 This topic has been extensively discussed in Toker 1989 and in Mikhailik 1997. 15 Shalamov, V., 1992, Колымские рассказы в двух томах, p.: 225 (my translation) 16 Ibid, p. 110 (my translation) 17 Ibid, p. 406 (my translation) 18 "As in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which, for Bakhtin, is a quintessentially heteroglot polyphonic novel, everybody talks in Ginzburg volumes..."(Toker 1989: 1999) 19 This comparison belongs to Shalamov himself. 20 Shalamov, V., 1992, Колымские рассказы в двух томах, p. 396 (my translation) 21 Ibid, p. 488 (my translation) 22 Please see Mikhailik 1998, Другой берег. 23 1996: 339 24 Shalamov in Shreider, Yu., 1989, Варлам Шаламов о литературе (Varlam Shalamov on literature), Вопросы литературы v 5, p. 243 (my translation) 25 Ibid, p. 242 (my translation) |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Anchan на 05/15/05 в 03:29:24 Антрекот, прочитала, продралась. Отлично написано, огромное спасибо! Очень порадовал отсыл к началу статьи в последней фразе. По существу сказать нечего, текст воспринимается, как качественный учебный материал. Подумалось. Не знаю, попадались ли вам иллюстрации Эрнста Неизвестного к "Преступлению и наказанию", после которых до меня дошло, что текст романа - полифония, что все герои - суть один Раскольников под разными личинами. Я тут попыталась представить, как Неизвестный мог бы проиллюстрировать Шаламова. Ой... |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Ципор на 05/15/05 в 07:57:00 on 05/15/05 в 03:29:24, Anchan wrote:
А можно подробнее? То есть, пояснить хотя бы на примере нескольких героев? |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Anchan на 05/15/05 в 14:37:09 Ой, Ципор, дело было давно. Сходу вспоминается примерно такая цепочка. Что Раскольников и Порфирий - две стороны одной медали, это понятно - слишком уж хорошо Порфирий понимает психологию Раскольникова - сам такой. Только перешел на сторону закона. Свидригайлов - тот же Раскольников, но у которого нет выхода через любовь. Того полюбили и тем спасли, этого с негодованием отвергли. Остается только в реку. Мармеладов - тот же Раскольников, но он слишком слаб и обременен семьей, поэтому он и не попадает, как Раскольников, "между крестом и топором". Там нет дилеммы, там только крест, который надо нести, по возможности безропотно, ибо нефиг. А окажись Раскольников в женской шкуре? И тут два варианта - любовь-гордыня и любовь-жалость, других по Достоевскому на Руси не бывает. Либо миллион в огонь и плащи в грязь, либо она за ним поедет в Сибирь, как жены декабристов... Примерно в таком аскепте. Один литературовед как-то сказал, что Достоевский в своих романах "крутит собственный гороскоп"... Еще раз говорю - это все разборы полетов чуть ли не пятнадцатилетней давности, роман давно не перечитывался, если что - пардон за беспардонность с героями. И вообще, при чем тут я - спрашивайте Антрекота, "он у нас обаятельный". Мда, надо бы Бахтина надыбать - там кажись в ту же сторону размышления, только на несколько порядков грамотней... |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Antrekot на 05/15/05 в 15:29:06 Анчан, это старый доклад, потом его опубликовали в Dostoevsky review. Поэтому он немножко политкорректный. Они там кое-что изъяли. В частности, мечту Шаламова забить в братскую могилу Толстого и Достоевского осиновый кол. :) С уважением, Антрекот |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Anchan на 05/15/05 в 21:16:52 Антрекот - воистину, воистину, ну их нафиг, эти призраки, которые до сих пор ходят по Европе... гуманисты хреновы... |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Zamkompomorde на 05/15/05 в 23:15:56 Выходит,Шаламов намекал,что сии почтенные классики-нечисть,злобно дремлющая до поры в склепе,а в нужный момент выползающая убивать и пить кровушку,а тако же всячески развращать граждан.:) Да,Логинов должон локти кусать:не довелось ему так наехать на Льва Николаича.:) |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Zamkompomorde на 05/15/05 в 23:30:33 Спасибо,Антрекот.Очень интересная статья.Кстати,а как англоязычные литературоведы отнеслись к высказыванию Шаламова?Кто-то же наверняка ознакомился. |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Лапочка на 05/17/05 в 23:24:01 Интересная статья, спасибо. А не является ли само существование "Колымских рассказов", сам факт наличия некоего В. Шаламова в рядах живых, опровержением его утверждения о "wholesale destruction and degradation that was a prison camp, where inmates (at least in Shalamov's personal view) became completely divorced from humanity long before their physical death occurred"? К тому же место, где у людей есть время на Есенина, на полный ад как-то не тянет. На мой невежественный вкус. |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Emigrant на 05/18/05 в 02:47:50 on 05/17/05 в 23:24:01, Лапочка wrote:
На мой взгляд -- нет, не является. Дело в том, что разброс человеческого материала, который попадает в такие механизмы довольно большой, тем больше, чем больше людей в них ввергается. Соответственно, есть вероятность, что будут исключения, даже если механизм ломает людей с эффективностью 99.99%. А цели немедленного и поголовного убийства заключенных у лагерей и не было -- кто бы тогда работал? |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Antrekot на 05/18/05 в 04:42:02 Шаламов, если Вы его читали и помните - выжил случайно. Ему новый срок навесили - и тем, как ни забавно, спасли. Потому что он уже был не КРТД, а СОЭ. Слово "троцкист" пропало, а с ним и предписание использовать _только_ на тяжелых работах. Он попал на фельдшерские курсы. Пролетел между жерновов. А Есенина _в лагере_ читали уголовники. С уважением, Антрекот |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Лапочка на 05/18/05 в 04:50:45 on 05/18/05 в 04:42:02, Antrekot wrote:
И? |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Antrekot на 05/18/05 в 06:27:13 Лапочка, уголовники в лагерях были на особом положении. "Социально близкие". Они обычно не работали. И обычно не голодали. С уважением, Антрекот |
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Заголовок: Re: DOSTOEVSKY AND SHALAMOV: ORPHEUS AND PLUTO Прислано пользователем Лапочка на 05/18/05 в 06:51:18 Понятно. Маразм какой-то. |
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