Notes on Contributors
Andrea Gullotta
is lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow. He has also worked for the University of Palermo, the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the University of Padua, where he obtained his Ph.D. He is co-editor of the journal AvtobiografiЯ (www.avtobiografija.com), which deals with life-writing and the representation of the self in Russian culture; and the author of Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki 1923–1930: The Paris of the Northern Concentration Camps (Cambridge: 2018).
Fabian Heffermehl
(University of Oslo / Humboldt University of Berlin) is a Berlin-based illustrator and researcher of Russian literature. His research is financed by the Norwegian Research Council and the EU Commission (MSCA). Within the frame of his current project “Imprint and tactility as cultural techniques in Russian modernism,” he has written an article on Shalamov: “Нерукотворность и проблема мнемотехники Гулага” (Wiener slawistischer Almanach, 76, 2015), published in English in Journal of Icon Studies: https://www.museumofrussianicons.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Apr_2016_Heffermehl_Fabian_The_Icon_and_the_Hand_Journal_article.pdf.
Luba Jurgenson
is professor at the Department of Slavic Studies of Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV, and has responsibility for the research seminar “Narrative, Fiction, History,” under the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage of EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). The editor of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories in French (Verdier, 2003), she is also an editor-in-chief of the journal Memory at Stake, dedicated to the study of memories of historical violence in the world; further, she is the director of the series The Uses of Memory (Paris, Petra) and Pustiaki (Russian literature, Lagrasse, Verdier); the author of monographs, including Creating and Tyranny (Cabris, Sulliver, 2009); Is the concentration camp experience unutterable? (Monaco, Le Rocher, 2003); and the editor of many collective works.
Irina Karlsohn
is Senior Lecturer of Russian language and literature at Dalarna University, Sweden. Her ongoing research examines various aspects of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s conception of history. Other research interests include 19th and 20th-century Russian literature and Russian intellectual history. Her book V poiskakh Rusi nevidimoi. Kitezhskaia legenda v russkoi kulture 1843–1940 was published in 2011. Most recently, she has contributed the chapter “From Expansion to Seclusion and Back Again: Boris Mezhuev’s Isolationism and Its Roots in Solzhenitsyn and Tsymbursky” in Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives (Brill, 2019).
Josefina Lundblad-Janjić
lecturer in Russian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, holds degrees in Slavic studies from universities in Sweden (BA), Russia (MA), and the USA (PhD). Her special field is Russian narratives of incarceration and exile. She has published articles on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House and is an expert on his usage of folklore collected in his Siberian Notebook. However, her main interest is Varlam Shalamov; she has published several articles on various aspects of his prose, dramaturgy, and poetry since 2009. She is currently preparing a monograph, Shalamov’s Late Style, which explores his final creative decade against a complex cultural, historical, and personal background.
Elena Mikhailik
is a lecturer and tutor at the School of International Studies, University of New South Wales, and University of Macquarie. She specializes in Russian prison camp literature, Varlam Shalamov in particular, and in the poetics, rhetoric and cultural anthropology of the early to mid-20th century Soviet Union. Recent publications include “Odin? Den’? Ivana Denisovicha? Ili Reforma iazyka” [One? Day? in the Life? of Ivan Denisovich? Or a Language Reform] NLO/New Literary Observer, 2014, 2, no. 126; “Le chat qui a semé la zizanie entre Soljenitsyne et Chalamov” [The cat that has sown the discord between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov], Mémoires en Jeu/Memories at Stake 1 (September 2016); (with Aleksandra Arkhipova) “Opasnye znaki i sovetskie veshchi” [Dangerous Signs and Soviet Things], NLO/New Literary Observer (2017) 1, no. 143; Nezakonnaia kometa. Varlam Shalamov: opyt medlennogo chteniia (NLO, 2018).
Michael A. Nicholson
is Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford, and is its Dean of Degrees. Having studied Modern Languages at Manchester, Erlangen-Nürnberg and Oxford Universities, he taught at Essex and Lancaster before spending 25 years as Fellow in Russian at University College, Oxford. He wrote his DPhil on Solzhenitsyn in the late 1960s, and was a regular participant in the Shalamov Readings in Vologda from the early 1990s. These two authors have remained the principal subject of his publications, of which the best-known are the article “Ivan Denisovich: Myths of Origin” (2003) and the co-edited volume Solzhenitsyn in Exile (Stanford, 1985).
Irina Sandomirskaia
is professor at the School of Culture and Education and Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden. Her main research interests are Soviet history and culture, philosophy of language, and critical theory. Her books include (with Natalia Kozlova) “Ja tak khochu nazvat’ kino:” Naivnoe pis’mo. Opyt lingvo-sotsiologicheskogo chteniia [“That’s What I’d Call Cinema:” Naı̈ve Writing. An Essay in Linguo-Sociological Reading] (Moscow: Gnozis, 1996); Kniga o rodine: opyt analiza diskursivnykh praktik [A Book about the Motherland: Analyzing Discursive Practices], Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Vol. 50, 2001; (co-editor/contributor) In Search of an Order: Mutual Representations in Sweden and Russia during the Early Age of Reason, Södertörn Academic Studies 19, 2003; Blokada v slove: ocherki kriticheskoi teorii i biopolitiki iazyka. Moscow: NLO, 2013 (awarded the Andrei Bely Prize 2013). Her articles have appeared in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Studies in East European Thought, Slavic Review, and in several edited volumes.
Ulrich Schmid
is professor of Russian Studies at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His research interests include nationalism, popular culture and the media in Eastern Europe. Having studied German and Slavic literature at the University of Zürich, Heidelberg, and Leningrad, he has held academic positions in Basel, Bern, and Bochum, and been a visiting researcher at Harvard and the University of Oslo. Publications: Technologies of the Soul. The Production of Truth in Contemporary Russian Culture (2015), Sword, Eagle and Cross: The Aesthetics of the Nationalist Discourse in Interwar Poland (2013), Tolstoi as a Theological Thinker and a Critic of the Church (2013, with Martin George, Jens Herlth, Christian Münch), Lev Tolstoi (2010), Literary Theories of the 20th Century (2010), Russian Media Theories (2005), Russian Religious Philosophers of the 20th Century (2003), The Designed Self. Russian Autobiographies between Avvakum and Herzen (2000). His paper on the non-reception of Varlam Shalamov in Western cultures “Ne-literatura bez morali. Pochemu ne chitali Varlama Shalamova,” http://shalamov.ru/research/61/4.html (Nicht-Literatur ohne Moral. Warum Varlam Šalamov nicht gelesen wurde), was published in Osteuropa 6/2007.
Franziska Thun-Hohenstein
Researcher at Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin. Current project: Das Leben schreiben. Warlam Schalamow. Biographie und Poetik. Previous monographs: (together with Giorgi Maisuradze) “Sonniges Georgien”: Figurationen des Nationalen im Sowjetimperium (Berlin: 2015); Gebrochene Linien: Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Berlin: 2014). She is the editor of the German editions of Shalamov’s writings and the author of numerous articles, including “Trauer trotz Triumph: Zum Phänomen einer ‘Optimistischen Tragödie’”, in Trauerspiel und Tragödie, eds. Claude Haas, Daniel Weidner (2014); “‘Wanderer’ wider Willen im Sowjetimperium: Evfrosinija Kersnovskaja,” in Erzählte Mobilität im östlichen Europa. (Post-)Imperiale Räume zwischen Erfahrung und Imagination, eds. Thomas Grob, Boris Previšic, Andrea Zink (Tübingen: 2014); “Varlam Šalamovs Arbeit an einer Poetik der Operativität. Teil 1,” in Evidenz und Zeugenschaft. Für Renate Lachmann, eds. Susanne Frank, Schamma Schahadat, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 69 (2012), published in Russian in Varlam Shalamov v kontekste mirovoi literatury i sovetskoi istorii, ed. Sergei Solov’ev, (Moscow: 2013; “Überleben und Schreiben: Varlam Šalamov, Aleksandr Solženicyn, Jorge Semprun,” in: Überleben. Historische und aktuelle Konstellationen, ed. Falko Schmieder (Munich: 2011).
Leona Toker
is Professor Emerita in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading, and numerous articles on English, American, and Russian literature. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994) and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H. M. Daleski (1996) as well as of Knowledge and Pain (2012). The founder and editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, a semiannual academic periodical published by Johns Hopkins University Press, she is currently working on a new book on Nabokov.