Since the beginning of October the American scholar of Slavic Studies, Dr. Yakov Klots from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (USA), has been working in the team led by Professor Susanne Schattenberg at the University of Bremen’s Center for East European Research. Klots has been awarded a research grant for senior researchers by the Humboldt Foundation for his work on the Russian writer Warlam Schalamow. The grant means that he can continue his research up to 2016 at a university of his own choice. “I settled on the University of Bremen because the Center for East European Research here has a unique collection of documents concerning the literary life of Russian writers who emigrated to Europe and the USA”, Klots explains. “You wouldn’t be able to find such excellent research resources anywhere else in the world”.
Yakov Klots is currently working on a book about how the work of the Russian writer Warlam Schalamow was appropriated. Schalamov spent his whole life retelling his experiences in a Soviet gulag. He spent 17 years in the dreaded North Russian Kolyma region. His works are therefore read in conjunction with Alexander Solschenizyn and other gulag authors. Schalamow, though, stood rather in the shadow of Nobel prizewinner Solschenizyn. It wasn’t until shortly before his death in 1982 that Schalamow received significant public acclaim in the form of the Freedom Prize awarded by the French P.E.N. club.
Schalamow shaped a new literary genre
One reason why Schalamow was so late to receive recognition in the West was that he detached himself from the simplistic categories of resistance and dissidence that were so prevalent in the Cold War era. Yakov Klots goes on to explain, “For me, Schalamow’s appeal doesn’t lie in dissidence, but rather in his literary style and the new genre in which he wrote – the so-called ‘new prose‘“. Klots was already investigating the Russian emigration when he stumbled upon Schalamow‘s first publication in a New York emigrants’ newspaper. He was astonished to see how massively the editors had intervened in Schalamow‘s manuscripts to ensure they met with their readers’ expectations. For these people, who had emigrated from the Soviet Union shortly after 1917, the way Schalamow wrote about the Soviet penal camps was totally incomprehensible. Moreover, his conflicts with Solschenizyn also significantly affected the way he was appropriated in the West. As Yakov Klots is quick to point out, “It was not solely a matter of ‘who had suffered the most’, but rather one of the fundamentally different literary form, genre, and style in which they wrote.”
The Cold War from a new perspective
An important line of research for Yakov Klots, therefore, are the reactions of Russian emigrant writers and western critics to the ideological, cultural, and linguistic factors that influenced the way his work was appropriated in the West. While the first wave of emigrant writers who had left the country immediately after 1917 tended to treat, Schalamow’s “Kolymskie tetrad” [Tales form Kolyma] simply as memoires, the authors of the third wave of emigration saw Schalamow’s writings as works of modern literature: Now the emigration is grasped as a literary, linguistic, and ideological magnifying glass that opens up new perspectives on the Cold War era.
About the person
Yakov Klots was awarded a doctorate in Russian literature by Yale University in 2011. He taught at Yale University and Williams College before accepting a post as Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta USA)
If you would like to have more information on this topic, please contact:
University of Bremen
Center for East European Research
Dr. Ulrike Huhn
Phone: +49 421 218-69611
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