Russian literature. A short introduction

the reader following the prisoners on their journey through the wastes of the far North. It was also a metaphor for the act of writing about untouched material, about retrieving narrative from silence:

How do you stamp out a path on fresh snow?

In front walks a man, sweating and swearing, hardly able to move his

legs, sinking every minute into the brittle deep snow. [ . . . ]

Five or six men follow after, along the narrow and treacherous trail. They

walk alongside the track not in it. [ . . . ]

Every one of them, no matter how small and weak he is, must stand on a

piece of fresh snow, not in someone else’s tracks. It’s only readers, not

writers, who ride on tractors and horses.

If Shalamov drew his readers’ attention to the problems of narrative right at the outset of his text, Solzhenitsyn’s novels The First Circle (1978) and Cancer Ward, began, quite traditionally, ‘in the middle of things’ without preamble. But they too were in literary terms heterogeneous. The citation in Cancer Ward of Tolstoy’s late story ‘What People Live By’ (1881), a tale in which an angel comes to live with a poor cobbler and his wife, emphasized that the novel was not merely a representation of a hospital as metaphor for Soviet society, but also a text preoccupied with the miraculous in the mundane (an insight fundamental to understanding the novel’s extraordinary last chapter). One of the inset narratives in The First Circle, ‘Prince Igor’, was an illustration of creativity in extremity, a tale told for the joy of the telling, precisely because it did not bear direct or oblique relation to ‘real life’. And One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), with its refrain, ‘How can a well-fed man understand the hungry?’ drew attention, like Shalamov’s preface to Kolyma Tales, to the fact that representing horror was impossible. The more ‘true’ a narrative, the less likely it was to communicate with its anticipated audience. Such utterances were more than merely a rhetorical strategy aimed at shaming the ‘well-fed’ into attentive silence. They also questioned the function of literature at a time when any utterance might leave only ‘the stamp of “good-night” on lips/that