FEATURES OF NARRATIVE IN VARLAM SHALAMOV’S STORIES (BASED ON THE STORIES “THE LEFT BANK OF THE RIVER”)

Abstract

The article analyzes a narrative structure in Varlam Shalamov’s collection of stories “The Left Bank of the River”. The researchers look at narration features from the prism of syntax conceptions, whose foundations lay in crucial works by Viktor Vinogradov and Evgeniya Ivanchikova. Varlam Shalamov’s narrative has been researched by a number of Russian and foreign literary scholars, yet this work is the first attempt to analyze the author’s narrative in terms of syntax. In the analysis, syntactically similar components of fiction texts are identified and organized into groups of homogeneous compositional-syntactic forms. These forms are proved to have an important role in organizing the narrative; in the depiction and representation of the characters’ psychological conditions; in emphasizing certain content points; and in organizing the united compositional structure of each text as well as the whole cycle of stories. The relationship between semantic aspects and syntax is also covered. A particularly interesting correlation between certain themes (such as war, repressions, murder, etc) and the sentence and paragraph syntactic structure came to light over the course of the investigation.