Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi

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.