The concept of time in Varlam Shalamov’s Visherskiy antiroman

Shalamov’s Visherskiy antiroman [Vishera: An Anti-novel] has been interpreted by previous researchers as, on the one hand, a peripheral text of the author and, at the same time, his literary failure; on the other hand, as a violating of Bildungsroman generic canon. Our article proposes to analyse Vishera from a different angle, since its consideration as an unconventional or failed Bildungsroman does not effectively explain some formal features of the text, primarily the complicated and multifaceted structure of its artistic time. Published only in 2021, the full text of the “anti-novel” was used as a material for structural analysis involving Shalamov’s concept of “new prose” and his statements about the “negativity” of camp experience. The writer claimed the impossibility of integrating one’s camp experience into the continuity of subject’s biographical narrative. The camp experience ruins this continuity, makes biography discrete, breaks it into separate episodes only connected by the logic of association. This idea caused the artistic structure of Vishera, which is being proved in our research. There are seven time layers in the composition of Vishera: narrator’s life before arrest (1), investigation on him and his sentence in Vishera camp (2), years between his release in 1932 and his second arrest in 1937 (3), years of the Great Terror (4), the narrator’s sentence on Kolyma (5), his return to Moscow after rehabilitation (1950s) (6) and the actual time of narration (late 1970s) (7). The “anti-novel” implicitly contains the entire path that the narrator overcomes between his first arrest and the moment when he creates Vishera. The connection between different stages of this path is not linear, as required by the traditional novel, but discrete and associative. The subject of narration constantly switches between different time layers, “leaps” from one to another, and a reason for such ф “leap” can be either the desire to compare Vishera camp experience with Kolyma, or a random association of the narrator, who, for example, finds similarity between the corridor of Butyrskaya prison and a 1960s action movie. At the same time, the narrator, while distracting himself from the “main” plot (the story of his sentence on Vishera), fills each time layer with a large number of details, providing it with compositional significance. Our analysis of Vishera’s temporal structure showed that for Shalamov it became a way to express the main quality of camp experience - a fundamental inability to integrate into the continuity of subject’s biographical narrative. The disorganization and fragmentariness of temporal structure, the discreteness of the narrative, the lack of a clear plot, the division of the narrative into disparate layers make it possible to convey the “negativity” of camp experience, the fundamental impossibility of its conceptualization and, as a consequence, the inability of its integration into the biographical narrative. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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