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Shalamov's Testament: Pushkinian Precepts In Kolyma Tales, Andres I. Meraz

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In a letter from 1972, the author of Kolyma Tales and survivor of the gulag Varlam Shalamov, declared “In my prose, I consider myself the inheritor of the Pushkinian tradition <…>.” Indeed, in Kolyma Tales, Shalamov exhibited a studied understanding of Pushkin’s artistic technique. Through his implementation of Pushkinian artistic principles, Shalamov was seeking to restore the poet’s image to what it had been prior to the Soviet Union’s politicized interpretation while simultaneously revealing the truth about life in the labor camps to a readership that could not otherwise fathom what the inmates endured on day-to-day basis. In writing …