Kolyma Tales

Kolyma Tales
Author: Varlan Shalamov
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1994-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141961953

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

Return from the Archipelago

Return from the Archipelago
Author: Leona Toker
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253337870

Comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors' memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives -- arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation -- Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into prisoners' experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written.

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps
Author: Leona Toker
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0253043549

A literary scholar examines survival narratives from Russian and German concentration camps, shedding new light on testimony in the face of evil. In this illuminating study, Leona Toker demonstrates how Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, especially how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker’s analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience in a form where fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. Toker also views these texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker also provides context for references to potentially obscure historical events and shows how they form new meaning in the text.

Man Is Wolf to Man

Man Is Wolf to Man
Author: Janusz Bardach
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1999-09-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780520221529

Originally published in hardcover in 1998.

Gulag Boss

Gulag Boss
Author: Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2012-11-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 019993486X

This is the memoir of Fyodor Mochulsky, a man who spent several years in the administration of the Soviet Gulag, including six years supervising the construction of a railroad in the Arctic. It is the first memoir in English from an NKVD (KGB) employee, and recounts his experiences inside the Soviet system of terror and how he came to deal with the logistical and ethical challenges he faced. This book provides a unique perspective on the organization of evil and the thinking of all the apparently ordinary people who help run systems of terror.

Gulag

Gulag
Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 738
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307426122

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

Gulag Fiction

Gulag Fiction
Author: Polly Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2024-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350250406

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide

Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide
Author: Manuela Consonni
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2023-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110771381

Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.

Apricot Jam

Apricot Jam
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1582438463

After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories. These groundbreaking stories— interconnected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as "binary"—join Solzhenitsyn's already available work as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century. With Soviet and post–Soviet life as their focus, they weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In "The Upcoming Generation," a professor promotes a dull but proletarian student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In "Nastenka," two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives—until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both. The most eloquent and acclaimed opponent of government oppression, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and his work continues to receive international acclaim. Available for the first time in English, Apricot Jam: And Other Stories is a striking example of Solzhenitsyn's singular style and only further solidifies his place as a true literary giant/