Patricio Guzmán Campos the Recorder of the Life in Chile
The Unavoidable Solitude. Varlam Shalamov and the Theoretical Heritage
The shadow of Solzhenitsyn, who is well known or even a star in the West, still hides the oeuvre of Varlam Shalamov, the representative of Gulag literature overgrowing him. The importance of him can be compared of Gogol, Platonov and Bely. Shalamov, until the end of his life, insisted on the ethos of the Trotskyist opposition of the 1920s and the revolutionary message of the Russian intelligentsia on the "unity of words and act" – not matching anti-Stalinism with anti-Soviet theories.
The “Liberation Theology” of Varlam Shalamov
The theoretical roots of the oeuvre of Shalamov go back to the some kind of "liberation theology" of the renewal movement in the Orthodox Church developed after 1917 under the leadership of Metropolitan Vvedensky, which movement was ardently supported by his father Tikhon Sahalamov. The "Living Church" movement accepted the moral justice of the October Revolution, which it would like to actively introduce in actual life by the church. According to its adherents "communism is identical to the Gospel but was written in atheistic letters". In the 1930s the Stalinist State, after its Thermidorian turn, rather collaborated with the black-hundredist clergymen, which accepted its dictatorship.
Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn
Resignation, “Better not to Know”, Being Busy Bees. Variations on Withdrawal
It is understandable if someone dos what causes her pleasure. Nevertheless, our pleasures and gratifications, on a shorter or longer term, might threaten our existence. This analysis tries to examine this conflict from many angles.