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Leona Toker , Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors
The article focuses on the Estonian novels depicting Soviet prison camps in the 1940s and 1950s. For a long time the Soviet prison camp theme was not publicly discussed in Estonia due to political reasons. Texts dealing with prison camps could appear in print only outside the Soviet Union. The most notable of these are the novels by Arved Viirlaid. The Estonian prison camp novels can be seen as “the literature of testimony”, to use the term by Leona Toker. Dramatic historical events are written down to record the events and to show the inhumane nature of the Soviet society. These records of the dramatic past follow certain patterns and create certain self- and heteroimages that are analysed in the article. The goal is to map themes, motifs and characteristics in such novels, concentrating on various taboos and rules in the prison camp environment. A prison camp is a closed territory within a closed territory; prison camps can be seen as small models of the Soviet society. Prison camp novels provide a detailed view of the environment of the prison camp, its inhabitants and activities. The lives of prisoners whirl around labour and food. The crucial thing is to survive, which often leads to moral decline, e.g. stealing or cheating. However, there are certain lines Estonians do not cross, e.g. cannibalism or homosexual relationships with superiors. Estonians are always depicted as political prisoners (not common criminals) and heterosexuals, while Russians are portrayed mainly as criminals and often also as homosexuals.
This study examines a facet of Gulag history that only in recent years has become a topic for scholarly examination, the experiences of children whose parents were arrested or who ended up themselves in the camps. It first considers the situation of those who were true “children of the Gulag,” born either in prison or in the camps. Second, the paper examines the children who were left behind when their parents and relatives were arrested in the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. Those left behind without anyone willing or able to take them in ended up in orphanages, or found themselves on their own, having to grow up quickly and cope with adult situations and responsibilities. Thirdly, the study focuses on young persons who themselves ended up in the Gulag, either due to their connections with arrested family members, or due to actions in their own right which fell afoul of Stalinist “legality,” and consider the ways in which their youth shaped their experience of the Gulag and their strategies for survival. The effects of a Gulag childhood were profound both for individuals and for Soviet society as a whole. Millions of children’s lives were torn apart by the Stalinist terror; they not only lost loved ones and friends, but they also faced social stigmatization, political and economic marginalization, and compromised opportunities for upward mobility and security. For some whose parents were rehabilitated, this brought a degree of normalcy, and they felt that the state had redeemed itself and their families. But for others it contributed to a process of alienation that ended up in political dissidence and emigration. Any history of post-Stalinist society must take into consideration the fact that the Gulag did not just affect those who served time in the camps and colonies, but also the children they left behind. Further studies are needed to determine to what extent the experiences of children of the Gulag informed social patterns during the last decades of the Soviet regime, and in particular, responses to Gorbachev’s efforts at reform.
In July 2009, Oleg Dorman’s eight-hour documentary Word for Word was roadcast in five episodes on prime-time Russian television. Lilianna ungina (1920–1998), a translator and a witness to the purges of the Stalin period, tells her life story in front of the camera. There is no dramatization, only Lungina talking and occasional pictorial illustrations accompanying the narrative. The screening was a most unexpected success, and a book containing Lungina’s narrative soon became a bestseller. This achievement is perplexing in several ways. What in this plain and unobtrusive film managed to spellbind the Russian television audience, sated as it is with glamour and sensation? How come a simple life story that contributes little new information on the period in question became a major media event? Moreover, Lungina’s narrative is permeated with episodes, referred to as truthful descriptions of actual events, but to which she obviously was not an eyewitness. How come that she willingly puts her own credibility at risk, seemingly without fear of being accused of false testimony? I will argue that the question of subjectivity is crucial to understanding the cultural signification of this autobiographical narrative, as instanced in the film and the book.1 I will show how the narrative constructs a reliable subject position, taking recourse in normative conceptions of gendered identity.
?o writer illustrates the complex and continually shifting critical location of the returned exile more thoroughly than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many have read the history of the twentieth century in Solzhenitsyn’s literary and biographical trajectory, and indeed, regard him as a figure who changed the course ofthat history through the publication of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic? and The Gulag Archipelag?. While such a reading accords Solzhenitsyn a place of honor few writers can hope to achieve, it also complicates an understanding of much of the work he produced in exile and after his return to Russia. Solzhenitsyn wrote in the faith that literature can effect monumental change. But if it is difficult to evaluate Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic works outside of the extraordinary conditions that produced them, it is equally difficult for many readers to reconcile the urgency he brought to his current projects with the reformed post-Soviet climate in which he wrote. The characterization of Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s last great writer is illustrative of this conflict of reception, for it confers a timeless prestige at the same time it relegates the writer and his work to modes of evaluation, self-presentation, and writing that are associated with the past.
Focusing on the correlation between humans and dogs in traditional belief systems and cultural productions, this book shows that the dog incorporates various often-paradoxical meanings moral, social and philosophical. This study contributes to the unfolding cultural history of human-animal relations across cultures. © 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.. All rights reserved.
Information about the early history of concentration camps can shed light on the meaning of Stephen Dedalus's reference to "concentration camps sung by Mr. Swinburne" in the library episode of Joyce's Ulysses. Having made their way into the text, external references enter an array of relationships with other narrative details of the novel. The semiological model of literary analysis can help us in balancing attention to the properties of the text and to contextual information, in choosing the relevant data for analysis, avoiding detours in pedagogical practice, and remaining alert to the ways in which the text refracts historical realities and provides a comment on them. The comment of Ulysses on concentration camps has a prophetic quality.
Narratives of survival illustrate a number of converging theoretical issues of importance for life-history writing. On the one hand, personal memory strives for connection with shared structures of thought: little stories seek to attach themselves to big stories. On the other hand, nation building shapes personal memory to serve its political grand narratives. In the interstitial space room must be found for the articulation of the experience of little individuals.
This article focuses on a fruitful line of research that has so far been largely neglected, namely literary production within the Soviet prisons and camps. After a few considerations on the state of research on lagernaja literatura, the article delves deep into the history of the press in the Soviet places of detention, depicting the ideological and historical context that made such publications possible. A description of its features, followed by the presentation of a few poetical compositions found in certain Gulag publications, aims to show the academic community a number of samples of the literary texts that were published within the camps. The article is based on a few unpublished archival documents.
The 1930s saw a dramatic escalation in the size and scope of the Soviet Union’s system of penal labour camps, the Gulag. Through analyses of memoir and other sources, the experiences of the Gulag’s prisoners at this time have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly investigation. Yet the guards who watched over these prisoners have received considerably less attention.
Newspapers printed for the VOKhR guards in the mid-1930s offer some information on their readers’ everyday duties and their status, both inside the Gulag and as citizens of the USSR. Publications taken from one particularly large camp responsible for the construction of the Baikal-Amur railway (BAMlag) depict guards as self-disciplined, industrious soldiers engaged in a war for economic and social development. But the specific dynamics and changing circumstances of the Soviet penal system at this time created an unusual contrast between newspapers printed for the guards and those printed for the prisoners of BAMlag. While the criticism levelled at prisoners by their own newspaper was often mitigated by a rehabilitative discourse, the guards were judged as full members of Soviet society, often harshly. However, the precise implications of this were rendered ambiguous by the indeterminate position of the Gulag itself at this point in Soviet history.
Representations of the experiences of past and present Russian prisoners' women relatives in Russia are explored. The annals of Russian national history glorify the handful of wives who voluntarily chose to share Siberian exile with their husbands who were punished for the anti-monarchist uprising in December 1825. A survey of images of prisoners' wives demonstrates how Russian cultural mythology has promoted a powerful, stereotypical image of the 'Decembrist wife' as the epitome of marital love, devotion and personal sacrifice. On the basis of various historic, literary, documentary and Internet sources, as well as interviews with current Russian prisoners' women relatives, the formation, articulation and enduring vitality of the 'Decembrist wife' discourse in Russia is examined.
Although the foundations of the Soviet concentration camp system date back to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the amplitude of human suffering in the Gulag would not be known in detail until after 1962, i.e. the year when A. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. But even before the start of World War II, the totalitarian Soviet universe spoke the language of oppression that public opinion in the West constantly refused to acknowledge. This paper tries to recover a neglected corpus of early autobiographical narratives depicting the absurd Soviet concentration system, in the authentic voice of a number of Gulag survivors (G. Kitchin, Tatiana Tchernavin, Vladimir Tchernavin, S. A. Malsagoff, etc.).
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With the onset of the Cold War and a new nuclear world order, Soviet physicists found themselves at the nexus of scientific research and weapons development. This article investigates the subjectivity of these physicists as an issue of masculinity. Influenced by Connell's models of subordinated, complicit, and hegemonic masculinity, the article finds that the stories nuclear physicists tell about their research in the 1950s are inconsistent and shifting, with the narrators simultaneously remembering unfreedom and privilege. They tell of being conscripted to military work against their will but then enjoying (and deserving) the resulting power, all while maintaining strong homosocial networks in the laboratory predicated on excluding women. Evidence from personal narratives provides unique insight into these multiple masculinities and the way the authors position themselves as (masculinized) Cold War subjects.
Taking its cue from the combination of life-size and miniature re-enactment that takes place in living history settings, this paper explores human play with scale, focusing in particular on what happens when historical and fantasy figures are made to dwell in miniature landscapes. I discuss relations between modellers and the miniatures that they display in dioramas or manipulate in war games, drawing on multi-sited fieldwork leading up to a small-scale exhibition I organised in Aberdeen in 2008. Taking issue with a discourse of disenchantment in modernity, which has led to a renewed interest in embodied human presence in a material world, I argue that the pleasure that modellers derive from miniature landscaping is a quintessentially contemporary pleasure that owes as much to contact and immersion in materials as to a distancing and abstracting from the miniature terrain through different forms of measurement and layers of representation. This interplay between closeness and distance is brought into sharper focus through discussion with an artist who has made playful use of railway modelling materials in his artwork.
Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects. During perestroika women's prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the era's emphasis on exposure, negation, and systematic critique, to challenge gender roles. Both supporters and opponents of women's literature now directly addressed its relation to gender instead of using byt as a euphemism. From 1991 to 2001 women's prose solidified its status as a recognized part of Russian high literature. Liudmila Ulitskaia and Svetlana Vasilenko employed a transhistorical temporality that was based on the family and offered an indirect critique of history through representation of women's byt. Critics debated the relationship between women's writing, feminism, and the new divide between elite and popular literature. Depictions of byt in the work of Ulitskaia imply that the everyday is an artistic resource in its own right as well as a conduit to higher meaning.
For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin's reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses.’ The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities – as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family.
Sources were the obvious problem. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers, there was practically no reliable evidence about the private sphere of family life. For ordinary people in the Soviet Union, for the tens of millions who suffered from repression, their family history was a forbidden zone of memory – something they would never talk or write about.
This article addresses that difficulty by exploring the results of a large-scale project of historical recovery. With three teams of researchers from various towns in Russia, I have been recovering the family archives of ordinary Russians who lived through the years of Stalin's rule. In all, we collected approximately 250 family archives which had been in private homes across Russia, even more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest relatives, who were able to explain the context of these private documents and place them in the family's unspoken history. The interviews explore how families reacted to the various pressures of the Soviet regime. How did they preserve their traditions and beliefs, and pass them down to children, if they were in conflict with the public values of the Soviet system? How did living in a system ruled by terror affect intimate relationhips? How could human feelings and emotions retain their force in the moral vacuum of the Stalinist regime? What were the strategies for survival, the silences, the lies, the friendships and betrayals, the moral compromises and accommodations that shaped millions of lives?
Nineteenth and twentieth-century criticism has found Book IV of Gulliver's Travels a hard nut to crack. Wayne Booth aptly described the critical stalemate in 1961:
The debate about where Swift stands in the fourth book . . . is apparently as much alive today as it ever was—not because Swift has left any doubt about the presence of irony but because it is very hard to know how much distance there is between Gulliver and Swift and precisely which of the traveler's enthusiasms for the Houyhnhnms is excessive. Whatever Swift's satirical point, it is neither sufficiently commonplace nor sufficiently simple to be easily deciphered. Does he agree with Gulliver that "these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues" (chap, viii), or is Swift attacking, behind Gulliver's back, the "absurd creatures" who, in their cold rationalism, "represent the deistic presumption that man has no need of the specifically Christian virtues?" As Professor Sherburn says, it is unlikely "that there will ever be unanimous agreement as to what Swift is doing in . . . Gulliver's fourth voyage."1 . . .
Unless there has been some permanent loss of clues to meanings which were clear to Swift's contemporaries, we must conclude either that Swift's norms are too complex or that the relations between Gulliver's opinions are too complicated.
Even if we conclude that the fourth book has been left to some degree indecipherable, we may, of course, go along with the current fashion and praise Swift for his ambiguities rather than condemn him for his inconclusiveness. But whichever side we fall on, we should be quite clear that the ambiguity we accept will be paid for by a loss of satiric force.
Behind the puzzle thus set out lies a certain strategy of reading, a certain set of assumptions concerning what would count as a satisfactory way of reading Book IV The central presumption of that strategy is that Gulliver's Travels is part a political satire, and part moral fable. On either account, it belongs to a class of fiction whose object is to present, in indirect and amusing ways, a case for the political or moral views of their author. The business of criticism with such a work, especially one originating in the forgotten political quarrels of a remote age, is, therefore, to strip away the ironies and obliquities of the fiction to reveal the true lineaments of the authorial mind lurking beneath. Evidently, if the ironies are so intricate and the contemporary references so obscure that no clear moral or political stance can be assigned to the author, that enterprise must end in frustration.
That, on the whole, as Booth says, has been the fate of attempts to "decipher Swift's satirical point." Either one takes Swift to approve of the Houyhnhnms or to disapprove of them. The trouble is that either choice appears to leave the critic with the task of explaining away an irritating little collection of passages inconsistent with it. Four hundred and fifty years of Protestantism and two hundred of Romanticism have conditioned the least attentive reader to sympathise with a great deal of what Gulliver says about the awfulness of European civilisation as contrasted with the Stoic austerity of Houyhnhnm existence. On the other hand, only the least attentive reader can ignore the fact that at certain points the noble Houyhnhnms display feet of clay with which they can only have been provided by the malign and inscrutable Dean.
Following the latter clues, some twentieth-century critics, including Kathleen Williams, Irvin Ehrenpreis, and John Traugott, have detected irony in Swift's presentation of the Houyhnhnms. For them, therefore, a gap opens between Gulliver's unfettered Houyhnhnm-worship and a more disabused view presumably held by Swift. But how disabused? All three postulate a Swift who goes at least half of the way with Gulliver, one who holds that the world of the Houyhnhnms represents a genuine Utopia, a genuine ideal for rational beings but who doubts whether it is an ideal which human beings, complex and imperfectly rational creatures as they are, can usefully endeavour to emulate. Thus Williams:
Like all...
In post-Soviet studies there has been a consistent tendency to look at the contemporary political and cultural situation in Russia in terms of the failure of democratic revolution as well as the rise of authoritarianism. On account of this tendency, nostalgia for the Soviet past has become one of the most popular topics in current research. Thus, for example, many shows and films and a lot of popular music thrive on the nostalgic veneration of the Soviet era. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, despite its common association with an older generation of retired workers, is increasingly becoming popular among young people. According to a nationwide poll of the country's most celebrated Russians conducted by the state television channel, Rossiia 1, in 2008, Stalin was voted Russia's third most popular historical figure. Furthermore, in October 2009, a Russian court held a hearing in a libel case brought by Stalin's grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili over a newspaper story published in Novaya gazeta that said Stalin had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens. The libel case was dismissed, of course, yet the very fact of its occurrence is highly symptomatic of the overall grotesqueness of the current state of the collective memory of the Soviet legacy. There are, however, certain positive signs, such as President Medvedev's appointment of Mikhail Fedotov in October 2010 as a presidential adviser and the chairman of the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation. Fedotov in turn proposed the de-Stalinization of the public conscience as the most urgent issue to work on in the council.
Russia's nostalgic clinging to the "Soviet Golden Age," associated primarily with its imperial politics commanding international respect and the state's protection of each and every citizen, is commonly explained by its extremely difficult transition to a market economy that resulted in a drastic impoverishment of the population as well as an unprecedented rise in criminal activity. Yet the emphasis on an economic explanation of Soviet nostalgia obfuscates the fact that the old regime has never been properly tried. Despite the commonplace comparison between Stalinism and Nazism (or the gulag and Auschwitz), the former never had its own Nuremberg and therefore has never been officially declared "criminal." Secret archives have only been partially declassified and only for a short period of time, just as the lustration bill proposed by Galina Staravoitova in 1992 has never been seriously discussed. This has allowed former Communists to continue to hold key government posts.
Unlike in Eastern Europe, where the transition to democracy was accompanied by a legally framed decommunization (although not without its own difficulties and contradictions), in Russia post-Communist nostalgia is largely rooted in a legal inability to put the old regime on trial. While the 1992 trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation could be considered as such an ambitious attempt, a trial that was first lauded as "the trial of the century" and compared to the Nuremberg trial, it was later condemned as a "bureaucratic farce" that failed to acknowledge the "collective trauma of the past." Even though "Russian society seemed to expect . . . from the Constitutional Court a Russian Nuremberg process with a resulting decommunization (similar to the German denazification)," the 1992 CPSU trial turned out to be everything that the Nuremberg trial was not, since after the president's banning of the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was established as its prime successor, thanks to the court's final decision. Given that this trial has remained the only judicial proceeding in Russia with regard to its Soviet past and therefore served as a historical and political "barrier between the new beginning and the old tyranny," its outcome has had a constitutive and continuous influence on how Soviet history is remembered. Partly televised live and extensively covered by the press, the CPSU trial, which began on 6 July 1992 and lasted for almost five months, produced an impressive archive—five solid volumes of transcripts—and a rather substantial body of scholarship in legal studies. Interpretations of the trial ranged from its being hailed as a "judicial victory . . . that made it...
The phantastic in Danilo Kiš's poetics—somewhat analogous to Dostoevsky's concept—refers to a bizarre, paranoid reality. In A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča) that reality is the Great Terror of the late 1930s, in The Hourglass (Peščanik) it is the massacre on the Danube in Novi Sad in 1942, perpetrated by Hungarian fascists, and the death of Kiš's father in Auschwitz. Though this reality is to be represented by authentic stories rather than fiction, the authentic in his prose texts does intertwine with the phantastic, not an irrealistic phantastic that projects alternative worlds, but a phantastic "documentation" of catastrophe. The phantastic is legitimized by authenticity and vice versa.1
Consequently, the documents presented in Kiš's novels are, as in Borges's Ficciones, factual as well as fictitious. In his ethical poetics, however, or "po-ethics," as he calls it, Kiš distances himself from the ludic erudition of Borges's fictive documents.2 While Borges uses fictive documents in order to denounce the contingency of facts and to disclose the possibility/impossibility of other worlds governed by strange, paralogical order systems, Kiš insists on the fatefulness of documents that are dictated by facts.
Despite his criticism, Kiš recapitulates Borges's playful erudition, yet in a paradoxical way. The subject of the story "The Book of Kings and Fools" from The Encyclopedia of the Dead (Enciklopedija mrtvih), The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a document not of Kiš's literary invention. Nonetheless, the intricate history of its genesis, or rather the true story that Kiš unfolds of the falsification, mystification, plagiarism, and re-writing of this scandalous text, reminds the reader of Borges's pseudo-documents. The narration of the eccentric fate of the text (in whose negative career political systems participated along with historical persons), of the transformation of a French satire on Napoleon III into a pamphlet by Russian religious fanatics about a Jewish world conspiracy and the imminent appearance of the Anti-Christ, definitely resembles fiction. Kiš's focus is on the text's fatal-plot3 character, as well as its similarity to a fake text, and its unlikely (improbable) "intertextuality." Paradoxically, when Kiš uses not real documents but invented ones, there appears to be no trace of simulation, feigning, or improbability. For Kiš, the fictive text actually documents the core of reality. Or rather: the very fictivity of fictive documents leads into the core of fact. By means of the fictive document the author tries to come to terms with the real document, trying to control its incredibility (or rather phantasticality). The fictive document substitutes the real one, the real document being less credible and more phantastic than the fictive one. (Or again, paradoxically, it is the fictive document that lays bare documentarity and at the same time demonstrates that credibility, probability can be feigned.) Kiš believes that phantasy can equal the document as far as its persuasive power is concerned.
Kiš was familiar with Russian postrevolutionary literary concepts and with the debates concerning the document that lay at the center of the so-called antiliterary literature of facts, literatura fakta.4 The avant-garde documentarism of the 1920s Russian literature was meant to establish a countermodel to bourgeois belles lettres; it revolted against a fictional plot, the constellation of invented persons, mimetic strategies, the narrator as mediator, and the concept of authorship. The antiliterary program favored the biographical interview, reports of all sorts, travelogues, memoirs, etc. Viktor Shklovsky, one of the theorists of the poetic mechanisms of the plot,5 coined the term vnesiuzhetnaia proza(Shklovskii 1929: 222-26)—"prose outside the plot"—or rather, "plotless prose." Yet the intended effect of non-literariness (and plotlessness) could not be achieved. Authorship, stylistics, and the narrative returned. As was the case with the early interpreters of photography who believed that nature itself entered the photograph without the mediation of the human eye or hand, the "factographers'" idea that reality would represent itself, authorlessly, proved to be a false assumption. The plot, the composition of the sjuzhet (siuzhetoslozhenie), was renewed by devices such as montage and concatenation (stseplenie). Shklovsky borrowed this narratological term from Leo...
Vladimir Nabokov disputed the idea that literature imitates life and proposed the reverse: life imitates literature. Yet the connection between life and literature is an oscillating process, further complicated when a memoir, a would-be mimetic representation of a life, is an imitation of other literary texts, literature imitating literature. The case of Vladimir Pecherin is an example of the play of the manifold links between literature, life, and life-writing.
In 1836, Vladimir Sergeevich Pecherin (1807-1885), a young professor of Greek at Moscow University, a gifted poet and translator, loved by his students and colleagues, suddenly abandoned a promising career and fled Russia, never to return. He had spent two years studying philosophy in Berlin, as one of a small group of students from St. Petersburg University sent by the Russian government to prepare for their academic careers. Each student owed twelve years of service as a professor in exchange for the funding; Pecherin left the country after teaching just one semester. At that time, he was twenty nine; the remaining forty nine years of his life were spent abroad, first in France, then in England, and finally, in Ireland. During the first four years after his departure, Pecherin wandered through Western Europe, where he mingled with various revolutionary circles. Then, in 1840, he unexpectedly converted to Catholicism. Shortly afterwards he took a tonsure and entered the Redemptorist Order as a monk. His bond with Russia, however, was not cut for good. In the 1860s and the 1870s he corresponded with friends and relatives in Russia. Autobiographical sketches included in his letters eventually became the core of the book Apologia pro vita mea (Mémoires d'outre-tombe) compiled and given this title by the editors many years after his death.1
Pecherin's epistles to Russia invert the genre of narratives of conversion2: they are a repentant story of the patterns of his devotion to illusory ideals such as Socialism, Hegelianism, and Romanticism, as well as Catholicism and religion in general. Glaring contradictions between the ideas expressed in his Russian correspondence and the reality of his long life within the Catholic Church puzzle everyone who studies Pecherin and his time, In an attempt to find a "partial answer" to the mystery of Pecherin's dual personality, I turn to an analysis of his writings within the historical and psychological context of his relations with the Apologia's addressees.
Like many young idealists of his generation, born in the glorious years of Russia's victory over Napoleon and coming of age around the time of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, Pecherin spent his early adult years under the stale and oppressive regime of Nicholas I. Ideas and ideals that had nourished their youth poorly prepared them for the bureaucratic functioning of the Russian Empire. The skepticism and rationalism of Voltaire and Rousseau, eagerly embraced by their fathers, began to lose their grip on the imagination of the young Russian Romantics who discovered Schiller, George Sand, and, later, Hugo, Schiller, in particular, infused the consciousness and imagination of several generations of Russian intellectuals. Despite his exceptional biography, Pecherin was a representative of that idealistic generation, one whose conflicts fully expressed its Zeitgeist.
When Pecherin began to study Hegel he discovered a more extreme idealism than he had previously encountered. Hegel's system cast the entire world as a great process, a gradual development from inanimate matter to progressively higher levels of human consciousness that eventually attained the Absolute —a plenitude of existence that encompassed both God and the universe. Pecherin's first biographer, M, Gershenzon, observed that young people of Pecherin's generation profoundly believed that "such a synthesis could actually be found if one got to the source and drank from it" (2000: 401).3 Just a few years after Hegel's death, the spring of knowledge was still gushing in Germany, at least for Pecherin. At that time, Pecherin was not interested in the Church or in religious mysticism; however, he was longing for the Absolute, for the ideal of universal happiness that would be worth fighting for. He saw the West as a Promised Land, the only place where he could fully realize his potential...
And the second day my mother came with my brother and my sister and they brought food because we didn't have anything, and she kept on shouting “Sofi, Sofi, Sofi” … there was an entire convoy, many wagons, and they had those small kind of windows like for animals … and she kept yelling,… “Sofi, Sofi, Misi, Misi” … a military man was there, at the door, and I pleaded with the officer “Please, let our mother give me some food because we have nothing” and he opened the door a tiny bit so we could pull the sack with everything through … and the next day they took us … they took us … they said they were taking us to Siberia but they took us to Donbass, and there, in Donbass, they put us in a camp.
T WO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda . One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).
De nos jours en Russie, parmi les diverses interprétations du passé soviétique, une portion de la population tend à réactualiser la mise en valeur des réalisations technologiques, scientifiques et politiques du régime stalinien. Dans cette optique, l’histoire des répressions est préférablement mise de côté ou son importance minimisée. L’oubli est une menace constante pour les survivants des répressions mais plusieurs espèrent, malgré la diminution de l’intérêt manifesté par le public, obtenir une place dans le récit historique collectif. Certaines victimes font face à l’oubli et cherchent à donner un sens à leur expérience tragique par le biais de la narration. Lorsque ces dernières disparaissent, ce sont parfois leurs descendants qui poursuivent le travail de mémoire. La fille d’un intellectuel kazakh réprimé dans les années 1930, Larissa Kouderina, tente de rétablir la vérité sur le passé de sa famille. Elle souhaite également, dans une perspective plus vaste, faire reconnaître l’histoire de tout un groupe d’intellectuels kazakhs du début du XXe siècle. Pour réaliser ses objectifs, elle a d’abord publié les mémoires de sa mère ainsi qu’un essai qu’elle a rédigé sur l’histoire de son père et de la « première intelligentsia » à laquelle il appartenait. Depuis, elle prépare et espère un jour ouvrir un petit musée dédié à cette dernière. Ses publications et son musée constituent, dans ma perspective de recherche, les composantes d’un projet de commémoration. Ce projet est en quelque sorte une mission qu’elle s’est donnée, qui donne sens à sa vie et qui contribue à la construction de son identité. Dans cet article, j’observe comment les discours de l’histoire et de la mémoire sont conjugués à l’intérieur de son projet et comment elle s’est constituée en porte-parole non seulement de sa famille mais aussi d’une génération intellectuelle.
The article offers an explanation of Varlam Shalamov's negative attitude to the samizdat in the 1970s, particularly puzzling in view of the samizdat's role in making him unofficially famous in the 1960s. It explains the change in Shalamov's views by his struggle for authorial control of the accuracy, structure, and accessibility of his work. Lack of such control was, in a sense, an extension of the Gulag prisoners' inability, despite their best-laid plans, to rule their own fate—a theme explored in Shalamov's story “A Piece of Meat.” One of Shalamov's last acts in the struggle for the control of the fate of his works was his 1972 letter to Literaturnaia gazeta protesting against the piecemeal publication of his work in foreign journals. Contemporaries tended to read that document as a recantation letter renouncing Kolyma Tales ; as a result, Shalamov's status was transformed into that of a fallen idol. Yet if one reads the letter with close attention to its composite language, in which current clichés combine with the lexis of the twenties, as well as in the context of Shalamov's predicament in the 1970s (when a work that had appeared in the samizdat had practically no chance of getting into the official press), one may see a message about the importance of Kolyma Tales hidden in plain view. Ultimately, however, it was the samizdat dissemination that, more than anything else, ensured the preservation and the early as well as the future impact of Shalamov's Gulag prose.
Criterios Igual que la segunda, esta tercera version del corpus razonado sigue, en sus grandes lineas, los criterios de seleccion de la primera, publicada en los Cahiers de civilisation espagnole contemporaine (CCEC), a ella remito al lector. Asi mismo, excusare repetir aqui sus motivaciones y objetivos: siguen siendo los entonces expuestos e igual ocurre con algunas de las bases teoricas y metodologicas en que se apoya. Tampoco reiterare, a partir de cuadros estadisticos, el analisis llevado...
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