'New Prose' and Fantastic Realism: Shalamov’s and Sinyavsky’s Solutions to Socialist Realism

• In Event: Varlam Shalamov, His Times and Contemporaries

Abstract

The paper examines the literary relationships between Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Sinyavsky, who since the nineteen-fifties and throughout the sixties were preoccupied with finding their own “solutions” to the problem of Socialist Realism imposed by the Soviet literary establishment. Based on their biographies and creative orientations as prose writers and literary essayists, it will discuss Sinyavsky’s method of Fantastic Realism and that of Shalamov’s “new prose” as two distinct ways of circumventing the official dictates of “Soviet literature” vis-à-vis the historical and socio-political context(s), in which the two writers worked.

Author

• Yasha Klots, Hunter College, CUNY