Varlam Shalamov. Rilke and Drozhzhin

In the publication V.T. Shalamov’s notes of the early 1970s about the meeting of the famous Austrian poet R.M. Rilke with the peasant poet S.D. Drozhzhin are introduced into academic study for the first time. The meeting took place in 1900 during Rilke’s second trip to Russia. The notes preserved in Shalamov’s archives represent preliminary observations for the future essay, which remained unfinished. The introductory article traces the history of Shalamov’s acquaintance with Rilke’s work and reconstructs Rilke’s image as perceived by Shalamov in the context of his biography and work. It also reconstructs, on the basis of letters and notebooks, the stages of an unrealized plan related to the theme of “Rilke and Drozhzhin”, suggested to Shalamov by B.L. Pasternak, but read by him in the subjective optics of the poet, who considered his main achievement “understanding of nature”. This subjective optics, which distinguishes Shalamov’s text from all subsequent interpretations of this historical and literary plot, is manifested especially clearly in the correlation of the figures of Rilke and Drozhzhin with Soviet writers who were Shalamov’s contemporaries (Tvardovsky, Dzhambul, Stalsky, etc.). The new archival material makes it possible to supplement the picture of the Soviet “Rilkeana” and to expand the understanding of Shalamov’s range of interests.

AGAINST EPISTEMOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES: ON THE VALUE OF FORMING BODILY KNOWLEDGE

The article reveals such concepts as “metis,” “body techniques,” “practical skill,” “kinesthetic intelligence,” and “movement skill.” These concepts are united by the fact that the accumulation of knowledge is presented as a largely unconscious process in which muscles play the same role as the brain. The essence of these concepts can be expressed in the term “bodily knowledge,” which contrasts itself in the epistemological sense with codified practical knowledge, instructions, and rules – techne. Bodily knowledge is based on movements and muscle sensations. Russian physiologist I.M. Sechenov called this sensation “dark,” pointing out that such sensations are almost impossible to comprehend, describe, and analyze. However, such feelings cannot be entirely opposed to thought. This “smart skill,” as poet and writer Varlam Shalamov called it, can be considered a separate type of cognition. This article is an attempt to comprehensively discuss the concept of “body knowledge.”

Dostoievski și literatura Gulagului

This paper aims to describe and analyze the references and allusions made by the authors who write about the Soviet Gulag to Dostoevsky and to his text written after his imprisonment in the tsarist prison in Omsk, The House of the Dead (1860- 1862). Starting from the premise that The House of the Dead has a special status as it is a text that makes the transition from the classical and vaguely defined genre of prison literature (i.e. literature written in prison or related – however not always explicitly – to the prison experience) to that of testimonial literature (i.e. literature related to a traumatic experience of a collective nature that is able to testify on behalf of those who remain to suffer in prisons or concentration camps), I will emphasize the testimonial character of Dostoevsky’s writing. Subsequently, I will analyze how the authors who write about their experiences in the Soviet camps (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, A World Apart, Julius Margolin, Journey into the Land of Zeks and Back, Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, Within the Whirlwind, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago) relate to Dostoevsky’s text. At first, the references to Dostoevsky highlight the continuity between the two repressive systems: the tsarist katorga and the Soviet Gulag (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński). Later, however, the differences between them become apparent, as the Gulag writers all highlight in their writing the extent and intensity of the suffering experienced by those who lived through the hell of the repressions in the Gulag. In this way, they enter in an ironic and polemical dialogue with the nineteenth-century Russian writer. In the end, this polemical separation from Dostoevsky shows how the Gulag writers abandon the messianic and humanistic innocence of the nineteenth-century prison literature in the context of the totalitarian and repressive system of the twentieth century.

Unknown Parabolas

This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not only Podoroga’s interest in mimesis, but also his own capacity for mimetic openness. It begins autobiographically, recounting Podoroga’s lecture on Andrei Platonov’s “Eunuch of the Soul” at a conference at Duke University in 1990. I discuss Podoroga’s description of the “unknown parabolas” that characterize the experience of reading Platonov. In this understanding, reading pulls us through a parabola away from and then back to ourselves according to a path created by the form of the text itself. Hearing Podoroga speak that day alerted me to a shared interest in the affective power of reading, but it also described my own experience of hearing Podoroga: I was taken out of myself and returned through an “unknown parabola” to a different self, set on a new trajectory, one that happily brought me into the orbit of his sector at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. The second half of the essay shifts to a consideration of Podoroga’s reading of Varlam Shalamov (who Podoroga turns to in his remarkable book about the Gulag and Auschwitz, The Time After (Время после. Освенцим и ГУЛАГ: мыслить абсолютное зло). For Shalamov (what Podoroga calls) “catastrophic space” produces a specific, somewhat surprising desire to be like trees. The life and death of trees become reference points, a way of being that brings Shalamov into another world, an alternative to the camps. In writing about this desire to be like trees after the fact, Shalamov gives readers a figure for apprehending the weird, inapprehensible, catastrophic space of the camps. In his persistent fascination with tree existence, Shalamov takes his place in a long arboreal counter-tradition preoccupied with being or becoming like trees. This relation to trees is not interested in categorizing or mastery. Instead, it is animistic, an imaginative mimetic understanding traveling along the paths of similarity and which, even in its apparent impossibility, itself creates unknown parabolas for him and for us.

Literary Testimonies and Fictional Experiences

This article discusses the role of Gulag literature in connection to testimony, literature and historical documentation. Drawing on the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt, the article examines the difficulty of witnesses being believed in the absence of evidence. In particular, the article focuses on the vulnerability of the Gulag authors, due to the ongoing Soviet repression at the time of their writing. It examines the interplay between the repression and the literature that exposed it. The article contends that the fictionalization of Gulag literature enabled the authors to go further in challenging Soviet repression. Focusing on the fictional accounts written by Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it argues that the fictionalized Gulag literature makes the experience of the camp universe possible to imagine for those outside, allowing readers to believe in an experience that otherwise seems incredible.