Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, and an Atomic Poetics of the Unthinkable

Speakers): Dr. Anindita Banerjee, Associate Professor at Cornell University

Primo Levi (1919-1987), a professional chemist and eloquent practitioner of prose and poetry from Turin, never met his contemporary Varlam Shalamov (1909-1982). Yet the Italian who spent eleven months in Auschwitz and the Russian who toiled for seventeen years in Kolyma—the most notorious of the forced labor camps scattered across Siberia that Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn memorably called The Gulag Archipelago—shared a startlingly convergent approach to imagining and writing the horrors of their shared twentieth century. Both preferred minutely distilled, highly compressed short forms over sprawling narrative prose. Though Levi was a trained scientist and Shalamov a law student before their writing careers were interrupted by incarceration, each flouted conventional expectations of camp literature and survivors’ testimonies, baffling critics to this day with their prolific experimentations across the boundaries of genre as well as the distinctions between science and art. As this talk will argue, both eschewed the instruments of mimesis and naturalism as an adequate bridge between their texts and a world in which not just humanity but the category of life itself had been radically redefined. Shalamov’s work, like Levi’s, sought to craft a non-humanist modality of remembering the past and envisioning the future that I identify as an atomic poetics of the unthinkable—and in the process, turned the Gulag into a testing ground, avant la lettre, for a literature of the Anthropocene.  
 
Anindita Banerjee is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and a faculty fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. Her research focuses on technocultural studies, environmental humanities, media studies, and migration studies in Russia, Central Asia, Siberia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin America. Banerjee is the author of We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), which won the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize from the University of California and was widely reviewed in major public venues as well as academic journals in several disciplines. She has edited Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018); South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America, forthcoming from SUNY Press, and Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East, forthcoming from Oxford Peter Lang. She is the co-editor of a Slavic Review special issue on “Geopoetics” (summer 2016) and a Slavic and East European Journal issue on “World Revolution” (fall 2017). Banerjee is a founding co-editor of the book series Studies in Global Science Fiction at Palgrave Macmillan and an editor of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television at Liverpool University Press. Her forthcoming monograph is titled The Chernobyl Effect: Toward an Atomic Imagination for the Anthropocene.