The event celebrates the publication of new English translations of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories (NYRB, 2018). In 1966, Shalamov’s manuscript was smuggled from Moscow to New York, where his texts were heavily edited and serialized in a Russian émigré journal for ten years, until they finally came out as a book in London in 1978. The first English translations of Kolyma Tales relied on these early unauthorized editions, depriving Shalamov’s readers on the outer side of the Iron Curtain of the opportunity to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of his prose. Donald Rayfield’s new English translations attempt to fill in this gap. Participants of the panel – Susan Barba (NYRB), Yasha Klots (Hunter College) and Alexandra Sviridova (independent journalist and filmmaker) – will address the historical and contemporary significance of the literary legacy of the Gulag and Shalamov’s oeuvre in particular, and discuss the challenges of translating it into English.
The panel discussion will be followed by a screening of Alexandra Sviridova's documentary Varlam Shalamov: Several of My Lives (1990; 50 min.). Combining archival footage with quotes from Shalamov's prose and poetry, the documentary follows the life and works of the author of Kolyma Tales, the most powerful and merciless voice of the Gulag.
ALEXANDRA SVIRIDOVA worked at the Odessa Film Studio before moving to Moscow in 1972 and graduating from the Moscow Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in 1976. In 1986, she authored the script for One Doll's Story(dir. Boris Ablymin), a film about the doll of Don Quixote made by an inmate in Auschwitz. In 1992-1993, she co-founded, with Artem Borovik, the popular TV show "Top Secret," in which she explored, among other things, the Soviet recent past, including the human rights movement. In 1993, she left Russia and settled in the U.S.. For several years Sviridova worked for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the SHOAH Visual History Foundation and personally recorded nearly 200 video interviews with Holocaust survivors.
SUSAN BARBA is a senior editor with New York Review Books. She has a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University and is the author of a poetry collection, Fair Sun, and co-editor of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and was awarded the Anahit Literary Prize by Columbia University’s Armenian Center.
YASHA KLOTS is assistant professor of Russian at Hunter. He received his doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University and has worked on contemporary Russian poetry, urbanism, immigrant literature and culture, and Gulag narratives (in particular, Shalamov). In 2010, he co-authored an English translation of Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (Northern Illinois UP, 2010) and is now completing a monograph entitled Tamizdat, the Cold War and Contraband Russian Literature, which explores the circulation, first publications and reception of literary manuscripts from the Soviet Union, including Shalamov’s.