Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wyman, Alina

Area of Concentration

Literature, Russian Language and Literature

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of narrative structure, ritual, and substitution in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, analyzing how his documentary prose simultaneously engages with and disrupts folktale conventions. Using Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale as a framework, this study traces how Shalamov adopts key narrative functions such as interdiction, violation, and donor sequences, while subverting their expected resolutions. Instead of restoration of order, Shalamov presents survival as contingent upon acts of substitution, where one life is sacrifi ced for another, and ritualized behaviors become strategies for endurance rather than transcendence. This thesis further expands on Nathaniel Golden’s analysis of the Kolyma Tales. He focuses on narrative techniques like fabula and sujet, point of view, characterization, and setting. His key argument is that Shalamov employs techniques such as estrangement and paradox to depict the Gulag experience, rejecting any notion that suff ering has moral, emotional, or spiritual value. He also emphasizes how Shalamov distances himself from events through "focalizers" and intertextual allusions to Russian literary traditions. My approach, in contrast, is invested in ritual and folktale structures—not just as narrative techniques but as mechanisms of survival, substitution, and identity preservation. Rather than focusing on estrangement or the impossibility of moral lessons, I analyze how certain structures—like Propp’s functions—persist even in a deformed, brutalized manner within the Kolyma Tales. While Shalamov deconstructs the teleological closure typical of folktales, his use of repetition, character archetypes, and ritualistic exchanges suggests that his narratives function not only as acts of negation but also as mechanisms of survival. The "доходяга" ("goner") fi gure, often aligned with the poet or storyteller, embodies this paradox, existing on the threshold between annihilation and persistence through language. This analysis positions Shalamov’s prose within a broader discourse on documentary literature as moral witnessing, revealing how narrative itself becomes a site of both continuity and rupture in the face of historical trauma. This thesis further examines storytelling as a ritual of survival, interrogating the paradox of literary representation in the Gulag: both necessary for historical testimony and fundamentally inadequate to the extremity of suff ering. Through an analysis of "Cherry Brandy" and "Maxim," I argue that storytelling functions as a means of preserving identity beyond the physical annihilation of the body, transforming the "доходяга" ("goner") into a fi gure of narrative endurance. Drawing on Propp’s structuralist model, I situate these texts within a broader folkloric tradition, demonstrating how the substitution of one life for another—whether through ritualized exchange, survival-driven violence, or acts of witnessing—governs Shalamov’s vision of the Gulag. In "Cherry Brandy," the narrator’s act of poetic substitution for Mandelstam refl ects the impossibility of preserving individual voice within a system designed to erase subjectivity. "Maxim," in turn, off ers a counterpoint by depicting language as a force that resurrects the narrator, illustrating the fragile but persistent link between speech and survival. This study ultimately reframes storytelling in the Kolyma Tales as a liminal practice—neither resistance nor acquiescence, but a negotiation between erasure and endurance.

Download

Share

COinS