'Belief in an Open Wound': Reading the Story-Documents of Varlam Shalamov

• In Event: Diary, Document, Testimony: From Shalamov’s Stories to Ukrainian War Diaries

Abstract

Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories continue to create problems for interpretation: they are self-consciously literary, even as they represent the author’s attempts to write “that which would not be literature” (“On Prose”). My paper will examine aspects of this contradiction through a close reading of “The Lawyers’ Plot” (composed in 1962), which he described as “a memoir in which every letter is documentary,” though the autobiographical protagonist bears the fictional name Andreev. Generally speaking, I interpret Shalamov as a Benjaminian storyteller, as a framework for my reading of “The Lawyers’ Plot” as a skazka-document. Shalamov employs the fairytale mode in part to avoid the didacticism and psychologism of the classic Russian novel. He also claimed that “The Lawyers’ Plot” stands out because everything in it was new to literature. In his statement “On Prose,” he writes that “Novelty itself, truthfulness, exactitude […] makes one believe in the story, in everything else, not as one believes in information, but as one believes in an open wound.” Just how do his attempts to enlist his reader’s belief relate to his stories’ combination of novelty, precision, truthfulness, and the open wound?

Author

• Emily Stetson Van Buskirk, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey