(Hi-)Stories of the Gulag: Fiction and Reality

381 Pages·2016·3.429 MB·English, German

by  Karoline Thaidigsmann (editor)

felicitas
akademie-
fischer von weikersthal konferenzen
karoline thaidigsmann
(Eds.)
(Hi-) Stories
of the Gulag
Fiction and Reality
21
Universitätsverlag
winter
Heidelberg
akademiekonferenzen
Band 21

(Hi-)Stories
of the Gulag
Fiction and Reality
Edited by
felicitas fischer von weikersthal
karoline thaidigsmann
im Auftrag der
Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Akademie des Landes Baden-Württemberg
Universitätsverlag
winter
Heidelberg
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Contents
Introduction
Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Karoline Thaidigsmann .............................. 9

Competing Realities: Statistics, Memoirs and the History of the Gulag

Die Gulag-Statistiken im Spiegel von Archivmaterialien und Memoiren
Galina Ivanova .............................................................................................. 21
“Dramatological”TraumaintheGulag. Malingering,
Self-Inflicted Injuries and the Prisoner-Patient
Dan Healey .................................................................................................... 37
Music in the Recollections of Political Gulag Prisoners
Friedrich Geiger............................................................................................. 63
Appearance and Reality. Nazi Germany and Gulag-Memoirs
Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal ................................................................... 75
„AufdemWegnachvorne.Polithäftlingesindwir“.Politische
Gefangenschaft, transnationale Netzwerke und Identitätskonstruktionen
Andersdenkender in der Sowjetunion der 1960er bis 1980er Jahre
Manuela Putz ............................................................................................... 101
TheSolovetskiIslandsandButovoastwo“RussianGolgothas”.
New Martyrdom as a Means to Understand Soviet Repression
ZuzannaBogumił .......................................................................................... 133

Fiction and Reality: Literary Testimonies Between Document and
Fictionalization

Erschöpft und usurpiert. Plädoyer für ein erweitertes Konzept
von Gulag-Literatur
Anne Hartmann ........................................................................................... 159
Gulag Poetry. An Almost Unexplored Field of Research
Andrea Gullotta ........................................................................................... 175
RereadingVarlamShalamov’sStoriesJune and May.
Four Kinds of Knowledge
Leona Toker ................................................................................................ 193
Disconcerting Concision. Laconism as Principle of Text Organization –
Leo Lipski (Dzieńinoc) and Lev Konson (Kratkie povesti)
Alfred Gall .................................................................................................. 205
Fiktive Wirklichkeiten – wirkliche Fiktionen. Gustaw Herling-Grudzińskis
Innyświat undWłodzimierzOdojewskisZabezpieczanieśladów
Łukasz Neca ................................................................................................ 219
DocumentorFiction?KarloŠtajnerandDaniloKiš
Renate Lachmann ........................................................................................ 237

Inventing the Gulag: Approaches in Contemporary Literature,
Music and Film

Visitors to the Gulag. Soviet Forced Labor in Contemporary Western
Fiction for Adult and Young Readers
Karoline Thaidigsmann ................................................................................ 255
“FromRussiawithBlood”. Stalinist Repression and the Gulag in
Contemporary Crime Fiction
Nina A. Frieß ............................................................................................... 281
Die filmische Darstellung von Körperlichkeit in extremen Situationen
Oksana Bulgakowa ....................................................................................... 303
Der Soldat als Befreier? Zur Stalinismus-Kritik in der Serie
PoslednijbojmajoraPugačeva
Irina Gradinari ............................................................................................ 323
Russkijšanson. Geschichte(n) aus dem Gulag oder populäre
Verklärung der Historie?
Inna Klause .................................................................................................. 353

Notes on Contributors ................................................................................... 371
Index ............................................................................................................ 375
Introduction

Let’s hope that by the next commemoration in ten years time, in 2015, the ex-
perience of the Gulag will have become integrated into our collective European
memory. Let’s hope that alongside the books by Primo Levi, Imre Kertész or
David Rousset will also stand Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. This would
mean that we were no longer paralyzed on the one side […].1
Ten years after Jorge Semprún gave his often cited speech on the occasion of the
60th anniversary of the liberation of the prisoners of Buchenwald concentration
camp one can still hardly claim that the one-sided paralysis of European memory
has been cured. The imbalance between the Holocaust and the Gulag regarding
their presence within European memory has not yet been rectified. However,
during the past decade the Gulag has undoubtedly become more visible. New
translations of testimonial literature, an increased interest in research into the
subject, and various initiatives to make the history of the Gulag accessible to a
broader public have contributed to this growing visibility. Moreover, popular
culture both in Russia and in the West has discovered and embraced the Soviet
forced labor camps. Yet, the growing interest in the subject along with the
passing away of the eyewitnesses raises the question ofwhich‘stories’ from, and
about, the Gulag are in fact shaping our current understanding of the Soviet
forced labor camps.
Alongside the historical sciences, the Gulag has now made its way into other
academic disciplines becoming, within the last few years, a reputable subject for
researchers from cultural and literary studies, film studies, and musicology. The
research done in these fields expands our knowledge of the Gulag and the
traumatic experiences of its prisoners; it puts its finger on neglected aspects and
strives for a more distinct picture of the Soviet forced labor system, which
includes the counterbalancing of one-sided approaches to the subject. To give
just one example of basic significance: the formerly marginalized perspective of
criminal prisoners has been gaining more attention lately, thus challenging the
long-standing privileging of the dissident point of view in Western scholarship.
Moreover, critical research, conducted primarily outside of Russia, but partly
also within Russia, is opposing attempts of the Russian government to margi-
nalize the repressive character of the Soviet forced labor system and to control

1 Jorge Semprún: Buchenwaldbefreiung.Niemandwirdmehrsagenkönnen„Ja,sowar
es“, in: Die Zeit 16 (2005). http://www.zeit.de/2005/16/BefreiungBuchenw_. Trans-
lation by the editors.
10 Fischer von Weikersthal/Thaidigsmann
how the Gulag has been interpreted and commemorated.2 However, critical re-
search reaches only a limited readership, while “the bookshops [in Russia] are
overflowing with quasi-historical and popular literature, which openly or in a
covert way rehabilitates the regime, Stalin himself, his comrades-in-arms and
particularly the security organs. It is not easy […] to orient oneself in these
murky waters.”3
Likewise, the fact that the Gulag has found its way into popular culture
complicates the critical evaluation of Gulag history and the establishment of a
serious culture of remembrance. Within the last few years, movies and TV series
have been picking up on the topic. The romanticizing genre of criminals’ songs
has been undergoing a revival in Russia, and in the West the literary genre of
Gulag-related thrillers has made its way onto the bestseller lists. Yet, the shifting
of the Gulag to ‘new’ media and popular genres has potential to foster ambi-
valence. Movies, TV series, and popular literature reach large audiences, ones
that are otherwise unlikely to have encountered the subject. Thus, on the one
hand, popular media might take over functions of education and memorization
that educational institutions fail or refuse to fulfill,4 while, on the other hand, it is
the mass media that often enough deprives Gulag history of its complexity and
spreads simplified, if not falsified, versions of history, sacrificing fact for fiction.
The uniform iconography to be found on book covers of many publications
devoted to the subject points to a schematizing perspective on the Gulag, reduc-
ing it to only a few elements: a white background arousing the impression of
Siberia’s infinite space and rough climate, barbed wire standing for the
prisoners’ captivity, and red letters indicating blood and millionfold deaths.
The potential for ambivalence present in popular depictions of the Gulag
points to a pivotal difference in the handling of the Gulag versus the Holocaust.
From the very beginning, in the West, the depiction and commemoration of the
Holocaust has been accompanied by discussions on the aesthetic and ethical

2 Only lately, these attempts reached a new peak, when Russian state organs threatened
to shut down Perm 36. As the only authentically preserved post-Stalinist camp on the
territory of the former Soviet Union, it has been open to the public since 1994. Run by
the non-profit organization Memorial the Museum of the History of Political Re-
pression‘Perm- 36’ has become a site of critical engagement with the Soviet past. In
2014 the local authorities took over legal and financial control of the museum and
dismissed its director along with most of the other staff.
3 Irina Scherbakowa: 1917/1937 und das heutige Russland, in: Aus Politik und
Zeitgeschichte (ApuZ) 44-45 (2007), pp. 21-26, at p. 26. Translation by the editors.
4 A paradoxical example is Nikolai Dostal’sTV series about the life and writing of the
Gulag prisoner Varlam Shalamov, the broadcasting of which coincided with the
elimination of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales from the list of compulsory reading in
Russian schools. Cf. Walter Mayr: Das Ende des Experiments. Macht der Mythen, in:
Der Spiegel, 4 (2007) (18.12.2007), pp. 132-136, at p. 135. http://www.spiegel.de/
spiegel/spiegelspecialgeschichte/d-54841334.html.
Introduction 11
propriety of forms of commemoration. Even though the criteria for what is re-
garded as an adequate or an acceptable representation of the Holocaust has been
subject to major changes over the last decades, the discourse about the appro-
priateness of Holocaust representations has itself not abated. In Western coun-
tries, but even more so in Russia, where these questions, with regard to both the
Holocaust and the Gulag, have never entered public debate, a similar public dis-
course about the Gulag is still missing. Such phenomena as the use of a Gulag
camp as the dramatic backdrop for a Muppets’ musical comedy film (Muppets
Most Wanted, 2014), the Moscow night club Zona, with its ‘Gulag-style’ fur-
niture and its ‘prisonwards’welcoming guests at the entrance, or the name of the
Irish band Gulag Orchestra, with its seemingly subversive, but in fact meaning-
less, reference to the Soviet forced labor system are but a few blatant examples
of a calculated, or at best thoughtless, misuse of the Gulag topic.
All the different presentations of the Gulag – in literature, film, and exhi-
bitions (both virtual and analog) as well as in academic research – compete in
narrating and interpreting its history and associated experiences and, in doing so,
reflect different degrees of fictitiousness. For most of these depictions a central
point of reference is found in the memories of former Gulag-prisoners, which,
for decades, were the only sources of knowledge available on the Soviet forced
labor camps. The scholar Marianne Hirsch describes memory studies as an inter-
disciplinary, if not ‘post-disciplinary’, field of research par excellence.5 This
holds particularly true for Gulag studies. In order to gain a complex understand-
ing of the Soviet forced labor camp system, its organization and aims, the trau-
mas it evoked, and the different ways in which it has been represented and com-
memorated, it is indispensable to unite the expertise of different academic
disciplines.
It was the aim of the conference (Hi-)Stories of the Gulag. Fiction and Real-
ity, held in March 2012 in Heidelberg, Germany, to explore many, and partially
contentious, ways of examining, depicting, and commemorating the Gulag. The
conference brought together experts from various research disciplines to discuss
the validity, significance, and impact of existing narratives about the history of
the Gulag and the prisoners’ experiences there – i.e. Gulag (hi)stories – on the
public perception of the Soviet forced labor camp system. This volume contains
revised versions of most of the papers presented at the conference, giving broad
insight into the myriad perspectives on the Gulag and media representations
thereof. Without claiming comprehensiveness, the volume is meant to provide
new impetuses for joint-disciplinary research on the Soviet forced labor camps.
This volume is divided into three sections, each of which takes a different
approach to examining the inherent relationships between reality and fiction and

5 Cf. Marianne Hirsch: The Generation of Postmemory, in: Poetics Today 29 (spring
2008) 1, p. 108.