| Event Name: | The Cruel Fate of Varlam Shalamov |
| Description: | Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (1907-1982) was a poet and prose writer, born in Vologda. He got involved in political opposition to Stalin, which culminated in his arrest: he served a prison sentence in Vishera Camp, Northern Urals, and then worked for industrial and technical journals for just a few short years. He was then arrested again and condemned to five years’ hard labour for ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity’ and his sentence was subsequently extended. He was imprisoned in various camps in Kolyma, Siberia, and it was on the basis of his experiences there - a total of 16 years in the Gulag - that he wrote a series of 150 stories for which he is now best known in the West - the Kolymskie rasskazy (Kolyma Tales), the fruits of some twenty years’ writing. Even when, for a brief period under Khrushchev (known as the ‘Thaw’), the Soviet regime relaxed its iron grip on writers to a limited extent and labour-camp works, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, were published, Shalamov’s Tales had to wait for the glasnost period before they were published in his homeland. Shalamov’s writing is quite different from Solzhenitsyn’s, and in the 1920s he had been close to the Left Front of Art movement and had heard Mayakovsky recite his verse. Solzhenitsyn, whom Shalamov met in 1962, acknowledged ‘with respect that it fell to him -Shalamov-, rather than to me to plumb the depths of brutalization and despair towards which the camp world was dragging us all’. Shalamov was also a prolific poet.
Dr Sarah Young began studying Russian at school and gained a degree in Russian and French at Trinity College, Cambridge, including a year studying in Moscow and Minsk, followed by a brief period translating books on chess theory from Russian. She studied for her Masters at the University of Manchester, going on to study under Professor Malcolm Jones at the University of Nottingham, where she gained a PhD in the narrative of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Sarah taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Toronto, before joining the Russian Department at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in September 2007. She has published on Dostoevsky and is now working on a full-length study of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. She has also translated some of Shalamov’s stories.
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| Type of Event: | Literary Events - Book Launch - Readings |
| Event Agenda: | Talk
The Cruel Fate of Varlam Shalamov
by Dr Sarah Young
GB RUSSIA SOCIETY PROGRAMME
Language: In English
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| Event Location: | PUSHKIN HOUSE |
| Event City: | London |
| Type of Venue: | Cultural Center |
| Station/Stop: | |
| Directions: | The Main Entrance is located on Bloomsbury Way, across the road from the Swedenborg Society building.
The nearest tube stations are Holborn, Tottenham Court Road and Russell Square.
There is a secure public car park in Bloomsbury Square.
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| Event Start Date | 07-Dec-11 |