Abstract
How might the unthinkable, whether as a historical fact or as an unpredictable future, be articulated in literary language? Can states and scales of non-human elements proffer a pathway for art when humanism alone proves insufficient? How might the physical sciences be transformed into storytelling for collective survival? Turning to the above questions for defining the relationship between literature and science, this chapter juxtaposes the work of two writers who simultaneously undertook, in vastly different contexts yet in surprisingly similar ways, the task of confronting the horrors of their shared twentieth century through the inhuman continuum of matter and energy: the Italian chemist Primo Levi (1919–1987), best known for his testimonies of the Holocaust, and Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), who bore eloquent witness to the Kolyma Tales of the Soviet Gulag.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
23 April 2022
∎∎∎
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Boym, Svetlana. 2008. Banality of Evil, Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt. Slavic Review 67 (2): 342–363.
Bruno, Andy. 2016. The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buell, Lawrence. 1998. Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24 (3): 639–665.
Caruth, Cathy. 2010. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222.
Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gessen, Masha, and Misha Friedman. 2018. Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulag in Putin’s Russia. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hellebust, Rolf. 2003. Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hosking, Geoffrey. 1980. The Ultimate Circle of the Stalinist Inferno. New Universities Quarterly 34 (2): 161–168.
Josephson, Paul. 2005. Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Program from Stalin to Today. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press.
Larson, K. Maya. 2015. ‘To Rassheplennoe Iadro’: From Lucretian Swerve to Sundered Core in Shalamov’s Atomnaia poema. MA thesis, University of Oregon.
Levi, Primo. 1959. If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf. New York, NY: Orion.
———. 1964. The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head.
———. 1984. The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York, NY: Schocken.
Magavern, Sam. 2009. Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey. London: Palgrave.
Morton, Timothy. 2016. Radiation as Hyperobject. In The Nuclear Culture Sourcebook, ed. Ele Carpenter, 169–173. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Knopf.
Shalamov, Varlam. 1934. Nauka i khudozhestvennaia literatura. Front nauki i tekhniki 12: 84–91.
———. 1994. Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad. London: Penguin.
———. 2013. Koe-chto o moikh stikhakh. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5: 95–111. Moscow: Terra.
———. 2013. O proze. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5: 114–156. Moscow: Terra.
———. 2013. O novoi proze. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5: 157–159. Moscow: Terra.
———. 2013. Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 6: 7–76. Moscow: Terra.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 2003. The Gulag Archipelago. London: Harvill.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Banerjee, A. (2020). Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48243-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48244-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)