Existential Anthropology after Varlam Shalamov

In article it is shown that the philosophical anthropology undergoes the radical conceptual shift caused by the tragic experience of the 20th century. The existential anthropology envisages a special type of communication in “boundary situations” (K. Jaspers) when people reveal themselves in their “authenticity” and the routine forms of adaptation to reality are depreciated. The “existential communication” demonstrates the essence of a person as the center of reasonable, healthy, and good will to life. However, the “philosophical belief” in such essence is called into question if the living conditions in a “boundary situation” go beyond the limits of humanity. The conditions of “terrestrial hell,” described by Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Stories, are of that kind. The experience of the Kolyma penal servitude, interpreted through Shalamov’s art perception, showed that the philosophical anthropology is false and trustless if its concepts are built on the base of apriorism or are brought to the sphere of the transcendental. The philosophical anthropology in Shalamov’s “camp prose” is not an abstract conceptual design but a part and continuation of a vital context, from which the vital destiny of the writer cannot be separated. In the ontological bases of this philosophy, there is no place for eternal and invariable “human essence,” elevating the personality to the top of being hierarchy. The “Kolyma hell” does not divide existence and essence of the personality and does not oppose them, it establishes between them a special connection. The essence reveals itself just when the hell devastates it. The essence meets the reality at the last boundary of resistance to hell. Shalamov’s anthropology places reflection on the personality inside a “boundary situation” but notabove it. If this experience is acquired, the philosophical anthropology will not be the same as before. The reality of terrestrial hell will be its touchstone.

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