In the footsteps of the past. Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing

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Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the context of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing

Master thesis Russian and Eurasian Studies (20 ECTS) Faculty of Humanities

Leiden University

Author: L.M. van de Mortel Date: 30 August 2019

First supervisor: Dr. O.F. Boele Second supervisor: Dr. E.L. Stapert Word count: 22768

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1. Introduction

The first book I read in detention that came to me from outside was And the Wind

Returns, by Vladimir Bukovsky.

The first book that robbed me of two days’ sleep, because I read it cover to cover, several times, was Kolyma tales, by Varlam Shalamov.

Both books were written by Russian prisoners, so-called enemies of the state. Less than a year later, I would find myself in a penal colony near the one in the books: in the Perm region, in the northern Urals.1

This fragment is from the book Riot days (2017) written by Maria Alyokhina. She was one of the members of the Russian protest-art collective Pussy Riot that performed a ‘punk prayer’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February 2012. They wore bright colored dresses and balaclavas and performed the song ‘Mother of God, banish Putin’. She was later arrested, together with two other women of Pussy Riot, and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Riot days is a memoir about her experiences, from the performance to detention and the trial, and later the penal colony.

Penal colonies are in fact prison camps, and Riot days can therefore be regarded as a prison camp memoir. Russia has a long history of prison camp literature, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, to Gulag literature such as Aleksandr Solzhetitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. This history of prison camp literature is a result of Russia’s long history of prison camps: the katorga camp system since the eighteenth century in the Russian Empire, and, the Gulag camps during the Soviet Union. The term Gulag was officially the acronym of the agency that was responsible for the camp system: Glavnoe Upravlenie LAGerei (Main Administration of the Camps) that was established in 1930.

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Later, it came to denote the Soviet camps in general, especially because of its use in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.2

Prison camp literature is something we in general associate with the past: in particular Holocaust literature and Gulag literature. However, Alyokhina’s memoir is a contemporary Russian prison camp memoir, and moreover, in the aforementioned fragment she refers to two Gulag memoirs. What makes this so compelling? It is not that she just refers to the Gulag history and the tradition of Gulag memoir writing, she also connects her story to the stories about the Gulag camps, and she identifies herself with Shalamov, who was in Stalin era Gulag camps, and Bukovsky, who was in a Brezhnev era prison camp. This finding was the starting point of this thesis that focusses on the memoir, and will be about contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs and the way they relate to Gulag memoirs.

1.1 The historical background of the tradition of Gulag memoir writing The number of published Gulag memoirs is relatively small, especially compared to the scale of the repression and the percentage of victims who survived it. Even if you add all the unpublished memoirs that are kept in archives, the number stays relatively small, argues Irina Shcherbakova in ‘Remembering the Gulag . Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’ (2003).3_{Nevertheless, she delimits a periodization of when the memoirs were}

written, in the Stalin and post-Stalin era. In the period from the 1920s to the 1940s only a few testimonies appeared about the Soviet camps. These were only published in the West, since they were the stories of people who succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union. The number of people abroad who had been in the Soviet camps grew larger, also during the Second World War and hereafter. The memoirs written then in the West still did not receive great public attention and had very little resonance in the West, and were rather unknown in the Soviet Union itself. Wide interest in the theme of

2_{Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington:}

Indiana University Press, 2000), 249.

3_{Irina Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former}

Inmates’, in Reflections on the Gulag: With a Documentary Appendix on the Italian Victims of

Repression in the USSR, ed. Elena Dundovich, Francesca Gori, and Emanuela Guercetti

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repression, and thus the camps, both in the Soviet Union and in the West only began in the mid-1950s, thus after Stalin had died in 1953.4

In the first phase, from the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956 to the 22nd

Congress in 1961, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin gave a mass stimulus to people to write about the repression. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin went hand in hand with mass rehabilitations of (former) inmates. Moreover, between 1953 and 1960, the Gulag was dramatically downsized: the prisoner population of the Gulag was 2,5 million when Stalin died, but shrank to approximately 550.000 in 1960 (only people in camps, not including those in prison).5_{Memoirs that were written in this period often emphasize that the}

author wished not to forget the nightmares they had witnessed, but to remember them to be able to tell about them later.6

A new phase began in 1962, with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian title: Odin den’

Ivana Denisovicha) in the journal Novyi Mir. This was not a memoir but a

fiction story, but it’s incredible success motivated people to write about the camps, or to publish what they had already written. The camp theme appeared to be freed from the ban it was under, and also artistic work about the camps circulated among readers, such as poems by Varlam Shalamov and stories by Lidiia Chukovskaia. Unfortunately, after Khrushchev’s removal from power in 1964 the camp theme was banned again. However, the interest in the camp theme stayed and people kept writing during the 1960s. According to Shcherbakova it was even the most fruitful period in Gulag memoirs, since the early period of the repression was still well remembered.7

Another new phase began with again a work of Solzhenitsyn: The

Gulag Archipelago (Russian title: Arkhipelag GULAG) in 1973 in Paris. The

text circulated in samizdat in Russia. It led to a strong response of other victims of repression. People compared his description of the Gulag with their own experiences, and, as Shcherbakova argues, this stimulated people

4_{Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag’, 189.}

5_{Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. Gulag returnees, Crime, and the Fate of}

Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 2.

6_{Shcherbakova, ‘Remembering the Gulag’, 190.} 7_{Ibidem, 191.}

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to write about their own experiences, whether they agreed or disagreed with Solzhenitsyn. In the 1970s, all sorts of Gulag memoirs started to circulate in

samizdat, for example Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind

(Russian title: Krutoi marshchrut), Ol’ga Adamova-Sliozberg’s The way (Russian title: Put’), and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (Russian title:

Kolymskie Rasskazy). These works were often in the same period published

abroad.8

A whole new phase started with the perestroika. In the period 1987-1991 the camp subject ceased to be forbidden, so a public debate started about the Gulag. Also at this time, publication started in Russia of still unpublished Gulag memoirs and memoirs that had previously been published abroad. The euphoria about the ability to finally strive for historical truth caused a flood of material, of which the consequence was that the material was not dealt with critically, which on its turn even caused a romanticisation of former camp inmates.9_{After the fall of the Soviet Union}

in 1991, the interest in the subjects of the camps and repression significantly declined. The initial shock and excitement subsided and gradually gave way to indifference. This was partly caused by an absence of new talented and outstanding memoirs. Also, a sort of taboo had developed to start looking at the material in a critical way, this was regarded as disrespectful seen the background. In this period though the opening of archives related to the repression caused a revival of interest in the camp topic, but the focus therefore lay at the archives.10

Finally, Shcherbakova describes how in the late 1990s the situation stabilized. Memoirs continued to be published by organizations such as

Memorial, or by provincial publishers. Attention for the topic shifted from the

international and national stage to smaller stages of those with a specific interest. This also had the consequence that the former Gulag prisoner lost its romanticized image.11_{From this time one, Gulag memoirs remained}

10_{Ibidem, 194.} 11_{Ibidem, 194.}

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valuable sources for research, but were not anymore read by the wide audiences of people that had been reading them before.

It may seem as if all Gulag memoirs are about the camps as they were under Stalin’s rule. It is very important to note that this is not the case. There are also a few memoirs about post-Stalin camps. In 1967, Anatoly Marchenko’s memoir My Testimony (Russian title: Moi pokazaniia) caused a literary explosion. Circulating in samizdat, it was the first concrete narrative not about the Stalin camps, but about the camps in the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era. In contrast to what was generally believed, there were still great numbers of political prisoners in the forced-labor camps and the prison regime was still near deadly, as Leona Toker argues in Return from the

Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag survivors (2000). Also Eduard Kuznetsovs’ Prison diaries (Russian title: Dnevniki), Vladimir Bukovsky’s How to build a Castle (Russian title: I vozvrashchayutia veter), and Petro G. Grigorenko’s Memoirs (Russian title: V podpolé mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys), describe the

post-Stalin imprisonment. However, Kuznetsov’s memoir is focused on prison instead of the camps, and the memoirs of Bukovsky and Grigorenko are focused on the psychiatric ward. According to Toker, labor camps were less harsh for political prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s than prison, let alone the psychiatric institutions.12_{These were also part of the punitive}

system, and therefore their memoirs also belong to the corpus of Gulag memoirs.

In the end, over the time span of about seventy years, a literary tradition of prison camp memoir writing was established in which people disclosed their experiences in the Gulag. Emerging already in the early years of Stalin’s repression, this way of writing was followed by many other over the years.

1.2 Research objectives

Leona Toker states in Return from the Archipelago. Gulag Survivor’s

narratives (2000) that:

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Now, at the turn of the millennium, Soviet concentration camps are no longer news; political imprisonment has been abolished in the former Soviet Union; and the issue of the Gulag, including the post-glasnost revelations, has passed from the domain of journalists to that of historians.13

However, much has changed in Russia since the year 2000, the year Vladimir Putin became president of the Russian Federation. The system of labor camps has never disappeared from Russia. Russia today still holds prisoners in a network of prison camps, although a prison camp is now called a IK, short for ispravitel’naia koloniia, which can be translated as correctional colony or penal colony. Other facilities include pre-trial prisons (called SIZO), educative labor camps for juveniles, and some regular prisons (also called tyroomi), but the penal colony is the most common type.14

According to Michael P. Roth, following the implementation of new policies in the mid-1990s, much of the Soviet era leftover in the penal system has been abolished, including arbitrary punishment, bans on mail and visitors, head shaving, and physical abuse. Besides, prison officials are by law required to grant religious freedom and protect prisoners who have been threatened with harm.15_{However, in practice this is by no means the case, apart maybe from}

the head shaving. There have been every now and then reports about the terrible conditions in the prison camps, including torture, by independent Russian media.16

During the first phase of my research, I read the following recent works of Russian prison camp literature about the contemporary Russian prison camps. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who spent ten years in prison camps, published Tyuremnye lyudi (2014), a collection of prison camp stories.17_{The Pussy Riot case led to two books: Maria}

Alyokhina’s memoir Riot days (2017) and Nadya Tolokonnikova’s

13_{Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 8.}

14_{Michael P. Roth, Prisons and Prison Systems. A Global Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood}

press, 2006), 231.

15_{Ibidem, 231.}

16_{See for example: https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/05/13/76435-lomka-omsk}

(14 May 2018), and https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/07/20/77222-10-minut-v-klasse-vospitatelnoy-raboty?utm_source=push (20 July 2018).

17_{These prison stories were first published as blogs on the site of Novoe Vremya:}

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autobiographical work How to start a revolution (2016). They both were in prison camps for nearly two years. Ildar Dadin spent over a year in a prison camp and published the memoir Der Schrei des Schweigens. Mein Leben für

die Freiheit in Russland (2018). I also came across a memoir of Oleg Navalny,

the brother of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, Tri s polovinoi. S

arestantskim uvazheniem i bratskim teplom (2018), about his three and a half

years in a prison camp. All of these authors were convicted in what were believed to be politically motivated trials, and they can thus all be regarded as political prisoners.

So, it appears that the phenomenon of prison camp literature has made a reappearance in Russia, the prison camp and political prisoner theme are again highly relevant. Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs go back to the literary tradition of Gulag memoirs and create an analogy between their texts and the narratives about the experiences in the Gulag. In my reading of the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs I will therefore make use of literary theory based on the study of Gulag memoirs. Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs connect their texts to the texts of the past, thereby creating parallels between their texts about the contemporary prison camps and the texts about the Gulag. They deploy the tradition of Gulag memoir writing for their own narratives.

The question this thesis wants to answer is: How do contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs inscribe themselves into the tradition of Gulag memoir writing, and how do they deploy the Gulag history in their contemporary narratives? It is important to note that is not my intention to compare prison camps and their situations. A study like this can get the criticism that on should not treat the contemporary prison camps as equal to the Gulag camps. This thesis, though, looks at narratives about the prison

camps, today and back then, and is thus not a comparative study of the

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1.3 Selection of primary sources

Since the phenomenon of contemporary Russian prison camp literature is a very recent one, there is obviously not yet a big corpus of memoirs, like the corpus of Gulag memoirs. I selected the following two memoirs to be the primary sources of my research:

Maria Alyokhina (2017), Riot days (London: Penguin Books). Alyokhina already had a short introduction, but additionally, she was born in 1988. For her participation in the Pussy Riot performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, she was arrested and sentenced for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ to two years penal colony. She served one year and ten months of her sentence in prison camps IK-28 near Perm and IK-2 near Nizhny Novgorod, and was then released in an amnesty. Riot days was first published in Russian. This was a self-financed small-circulation edition, and can therefore be regarded as a contemporary version of samizdat. She translated it herself, with some help, to English. The English version, except for perhaps a few lines, is identical to the Russian version and can therefore also be seen as ‘original’ but for a different audience, namely abroad. This is why for this thesis I chose to use the English version.

Ildar Dadin (2018), Der Schrei des Schweigens. Mein Leben für die

Freiheit in Russland (Munich: Europa Verlag GmbH). Dadin, born in 1982, is

a Russian human rights activist. In 2015, he was arrested for ‘repeatingly violating the rules of organizing street events’. This was a new article in the Russian criminal code, and Dadin was the first to be convicted under it. He was sentenced to three years penal colony, of which he served one year and two months, in IK-7 (in Karelia) and IK-5 (in Altai krai). He was released a few months after he had smuggled out a letter describing how he was tortured, which was published in Russian media.18_{Der Schrei des}

Schweigens consists of two parts: the first part is Dadin’s memoir, the

second part is a more political background essay of German journalist Birgit Virnich. For this thesis, I used only the first part. Dadin’s memoir was thus published in German in Germany. There is no Russian publication. It is not

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clear from the book whether Dadin wrote it in German himself, or if it was translated for him. The fact that it is published in Germany has to do with journalist Birgit Virnich, who followed Dadin’s case since his arrest. Der

Schrei des Schweigens seeks this way clearly an audience abroad, instead of

in Russia. Perhaps a Russian version will follow in the future, but it is also a possibility that it is too difficult to publish such a narrative presently in Russia.

Both memoirs were thus published abroad, Alyokhina’s also in

samizdat, and this evokes the image of how in the past the Gulag memoirs

were published in the Soviet era. Other contemporary prison camp literature I came across were either not a memoir, or solely oriented to a Russian audience.

1.4 Importance of the research

Not much attention has yet been given to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs. They are a result of the political climate that has been growing more and more repressive under Putin. A parallel development is the growing popularity of Stalin, in the shape of a glorification of his leadership in the Great Patriotic War, feeding patriotic sentiments. In 2018, a poll showed that half of Russia’s youth say they are unaware of Stalinist repressions.19_{In 2019, another poll showed that seventy percent of Russians}

approve of Stalin’s role in Russian history.20_{Hester den Boer quotes in}

Onderdruk door de verlosser. Een zoektocht naar Stalins erfenis in het Rusland van nu (2019) philosopher George Santayana, who formulated that

those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.21_Today’s

Russia is not the Soviet Union. However, certain mechanisms are at work that were also at work under Stalin, such as hysterical accusations in the media of espionage and sabotage, and the growing number of political prisoners, according to Gulag researcher Sergei Prudovsky, arguing that

19

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/10/05/half-russian-youth-say-theyre-unaware-of-stalinist-repressions-poll-a63104, accessed on 25-8-2019.

20

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating-among-russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245, accessed on 25-8-2019.

21_{Hester den Boer, Onderdrukt door de verlosser. Een zoektocht naar Stalins erfenis in het}

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Russians should understand their past in order to recognize symptoms in the present and take action against it.22_{In that regard, the aforementioned}

polls give little hope.

The existence of contemporary ‘new’ prison camp memoirs also gives renewed relevance to the Gulag memoirs, and thus plays a role in the process of remembering. And, if the political climate in Russia stays the same, the world can probably expect more prison camp memoirs to come.

1.5 The structure of this thesis

This thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter looks into the function of the prison camp memoir and which differences and similarities there are between the contemporary prison camp memoirs and the Gulag memoirs. It will discuss the aspects of retrospect, testimony, and bi-functionality. The second chapter focuses on the form of the Gulag memoir. One chapter of Leona Toker’s Return from the Archipelago. Gulag survivors narratives (2000) is devoted to a study of the morphology of Gulag memoirs, distinguishing four common morphological features of the Gulag memoir. These morphological features will be explained, followed by an analysis of whether these morphological aspects are recognizable in the contemporary prison camp memoirs. This chapter thus applies literary structural analysis about Gulag memoirs to contemporary texts, in order to compare them. The third chapter looks at the interconnection of prison camps memoirs, especially how the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs refer to the history of the Gulag and the tradition of Gulag memoir writing. It analyses how the contemporary prison camp memoir writers deploy the past in their narratives about the present.

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2. Retrospect, testimony and bi-functionality in the prison

camp memoir

This chapter will discuss the intentions and functions of prison camp memoirs. What do prison camp memoirs do? They remember, they testify, and they are also a story. This chapter will thus consecutively look at the aspects of retrospect, testimony, and bi-functionality (a combined testimonial and aesthetic function), all with regard to both the Gulag memoirs and the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs. It will thus provide a more thematic background of the prison camp memoir in the Russian context.

2.1 Retrospect

The most obvious aspect of the prison camp memoir is that of retrospect, because memoirs are naturally always written in retrospect. The prison camp memoir is only one category of prison camp literature. Prison camp literature can take various forms, of which the memoir is but one. Other forms include diaries, novels, stories and even poetry. Easily assumed is that prison camp literature is written by the prisoners, but there are also examples of prison camp literature written by guards.23_{There is also a}

distinction between texts written during the imprisonment and text written afterwards, only after being released, and thus in retrospect.

The Russian term lagernaia literatura, meaning prison camp literature, is mostly used to indicate all works that deal with the Gulag camps. Scholars try to distinguish between different sorts of prison camp literature, because there are so many different forms, and ‘Gulag memoirs’ are a category often discussed and researched. Leona Toker argues in the article ‘Towards a poetics of documentary prose’ that memoirs are ‘factographic narratives’ that implies the readers understanding of that the characters are historically identifiable people and that the narratives details relate to actual

23_{Examples are the novel Zona. Zapiski nadziratel’ia (1982) by Sergei Dovlatov and the diary}

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events, locations and realia.24_{These factographic narratives, or}

‘documentary prose’, can be divided into ‘extempore documents’ (diaries, letters, etc.) and ‘retrospect narratives’ (memoirs and autobiographies).25

Here, it seems to be that memoirs are strictly factographic, with no room for fiction. Andrea Gullotta argues that it would be better to speak of Soviet repression literature (literatura sovetskoi repressii) instead of Gulag literature

(lageraia literatura). This Soviet repression literature consists, according to

him, of different sub-genres, such as Gulag memoirs (lagernaia

memuaristika), Gulag poetry (lagernaia poeziia), Soviet repression fiction (khudozhestvennaia proza o sovetskoi repressii), etc.26_{Here also, memoirs}

and fiction are regarded as separate categories.

Of all Gulag literature, Gulag memoirs are probably the most numerous. This can be explained from the fact that it was in general very difficult to write in the Gulag camps, although there are texts written in the camps (such as letters, diaries or poetry). However, most people were not concerned with writing while in the camps. They started writing about what they had lived through when they were released (or had successfully escaped). Then they looked back at all they had been through, and put it on paper for their own interest, and often also for the interest of society.

Now, what exactly is a memoir? A strong definition is given by Chris Baldick, who defined a memoir accordingly:

A narrative recollection of the writer’s earlier experiences, especially those involving unusual people, places, or events. A memoir is commonly distinguished from an autobiography by its greater emphasis on other people or upon events such as war and travel experienced in common with others, and sometimes by its more episodic structure, which does not need to be tied to the personal development of the narrator; however, the terms are often still confounded.27

24_{Leona Toker, ‘Toward a poetics of documentary prose. From the perspective of Gulag}

testimonies’, Poetics today 18:2 (Summer 1997), 191.

25_{Ibidem, 193.}

26_{Andrea Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet context: Remarks on Gulag writings’,}

Autobiografia 1 (2012), 75.

27_{Chris Baldick, The Oxford dictionary of literary terms (4 ed.) (Oxford 2008): ‘memoir’, via}

http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/search?source=%2F10.1093% 2Facref%2F9780198715443.001.0001%2Facref-9780198715443&q=memoir, accessed on 16 January 2019.

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Beth Holmgren writes in The Russian memoir. History and literature (2003) that scholars tentatively agree that in a memoir the author narrates real events he or she has experienced or witnessed, usually foregrounding a subjective perspective and evaluation.28_{The difference with the}

autobiography, another form of ´life writing´, is that the autobiography focuses more upon the self, rather than on notable people and events that the author has encountered.29_{However, Holmgren also quotes Soviet literary}

critic and memoirist Lidiia Ginzburg, who made the important notion that memoirs are not the same as primary documents since they ‘are almost always literature presupposing readers in the future or in the present; they are a kind of plotted structuring of an image of reality and an image of human being.’30_{Memoirs are thus a retrospective image of what one}

remembers of his or her experiences. This image should however come across as real, because of the orientation towards authenticity of documentary prose. Memoirs are, however, more complicated as just truth presenting texts. Holmgren suggests to exert a broad, literary understanding of the memoir, and not to simply see it literally as memories of a certain period. She argues that:

The memoir thus presents a remarkably fluid and affective genre, coincident with and sometimes indiscernible from fiction, autobiography, biography, history and gossip; and capacious enough to combine fictional enhancements with nonfictional authority, confession with observation, personal license with verifiable facts, subversive rumors with celebrity worship. Yet, to intone a recurring feature – the memoir necessarily presumes to record its subject’s different public performances on ‘real’ stages: among family and intimates, in various social and political milieus; in the ‘real’ space and time of history. For the term of reading, the narrator-subject assumes enormous authority as the reader’s descriptive and evaluative guide to these depicted worlds.31

28_{Holmgren, Beth, The Russian memoir. History and literature (Evanston 2003), xi.} 29_{Baldick, Chris, The Oxford dictionary of literary terms (4 ed.) (Oxford 2008):}

´autobiography´, via

http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/view/10.1093/acref/9780198 715443.001.0001/acref-9780198715443-e-109?rskey=LRqk8u&result=3, accessed on 17 January 2019.

30_{Holmgren, The Russian memoir, xii.} 31_{Ibidem, xv.}

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In the case of the prison camp memoir, especially the part of the ‘real space and time of history’ is of importance. They display that the narrator was part of something that has, or in the opinion of the narrator will have, historical importance. The prison camp memoir is very much about the narrator being a part of something bigger, a ‘collective experience’, which in the case of the Gulag memoir is the Gulag camps. Gulag memoirs often have quite strictly demarcated boundaries, and concentrate only on life in the camps, as an ‘other life’ marked by trauma sufferance and death, as Gullotta argues.32

Gulag memoirists thus decide to ignore their normal life, due to the trauma, and thus focus only on this trauma in the span from the arrest to the release in order to heal.33

In the case of the contemporary prison camp memoirs, Alyokhina and Dadin also present a retrospect image of their experiences in prison camps. However, their narratives have not such strict boundaries, and include more details about their life before prison. Alyokhina includes into her narrative a period preceding her arrest, but this period is inextricably linked to her arrest, which leads to her imprisonment. Thus the concept of the camp expands itself to everything related to the camp experience. She also includes multiple fragments of her prison diary in her memoir, thus contrasting her retrospect narrative with fragments from an ‘extempore’ text.

Dadin’s memoir starts with the transport to the penal colony and ends shortly before he was released. He, in contrast to Alyokhina, includes small and larger flashbacks to his detention, his youth, his activist activities in Moscow street protests and at Euromaidan in Kiev. Thus, he gives more biographical details in-between his description of prison camp life.

These biographical details add to their narrative, but they also make visible how prison camp narratives are highly constructed texts. Dadin, in order to intensify his narrative, writes his memoir in the present tense. This is supposed to emphasize the realness of his memoir, that is a retrospect text. However, it makes it appear a little as if he really wants to convince the reader that he remembers everything well.

32_{Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet context’, 82} 33_{Ibidem, 82.}

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2.2 The testimonial function

The two best-known examples of prison camp literature date from the twentieth century, and are written by people who survived either the Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet Gulag camps. The twentieth century has been characterized as follows: ‘‘imprisonment has become “the experience of the century” – or rather the recorded experience, since the “true witnesses” of the century mass murders cannot speak.34

The second aspect about the prison camp memoirs is its testimonial function: the urge of the author to testify about the circumstances in the prison camp. For the author of the memoir, the urge to testify thus overcame the urge to forget all the suffering and trauma. Varlam Shalamov wrote about forgetting:

Я испугался страшной силе человека – желанию и умению забывать. Я увидел, что готов забыть все, вычеркнуть двадцать лет из своей жизни. И каких лет! И когда я это понял, я победил сам себя. Я знал, что я не позволю моей памяти забыть все, что я видел. И я успокоился и заснул.35

Here he expresses his realization that although he may have wanted to forget, his memory will never fail to forget what he experienced in the Gulag.

The memoir has been described as one of the genres (together with the autobiography) of ‘the literature of testimony’. According to Toker, this term can be used in two ways. In the narrower meaning it signifies an ethical urge on the part of the author, who testifies to crimes or atrocities. However, the term can be expanded and therefore be given the meaning of ‘eyewitness accounts, whether or not the author intended to give evidence for or against specific people or institutions.’36_{Memoirs, autobiographies, diaries,}

notebooks, and letters can all be called genres of the literature of testimony. They are not based on historical documents, but constitute them, by ‘documenting’ or ‘testifying’ to what their authors have witnessed.37_Toker

divides these genres in ‘extempore documents’ (diaries, letters, etc.) and

34_{Leona Toker, Return from the archipelago. Narratives of Gulag survivors (Bloomington}

2000), 6.

35_{https://shalamov.ru/library/1/28.html, accessed on 27-8-2019.} 36_{Toker, ‘Towards a poetics of documentary prose’, 192.}

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‘retrospective narratives’ (memoirs and autobiographies). She argues that in Gulag literature, the genre of memoir dominates over that of autobiography, in part because there is the need for material concerning the public domain, so that the testimony might carry sufficient ethical weight.38_{This testimonial}

function of prison camp memoirs can work in different ways. There is a big difference between Holocaust memoirs and Gulag memoirs. The Holocaust memoirs. written by those who survived the Nazi concentration camps, were written when the camps already belonged to the past. They looked back to a period that was closed by the defeat of the Nazi’s and the liberation of the concentration camps. Even after experiencing the most horrendous things, Holocaust survivors were, in the opinion of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, just by the fact that they were able to testify their experiences, not complete witnesses of the Holocaust:

We [the survivors] are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, [...] have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are […] the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.39

Holocaust memoirs have a strong testimonial function in showing the world what was done in the camps. According to Levi, those able to testify in their literature thus had not experienced the terrors that had left the true witnesses either dead or unable to speak (or write). Solzhenitsyn wrote something similar about Gulag testimonies in The Gulag Archipelago (quoted from Young):

All those who drank of this most deeply, who learned the meaning of it most fully, are already in the grave and will not tell us. No one will now ever tell us the most important thing about these camps.40

In contrast to Holocaust memoirs writers, writers of Gulag memoirs wrote about something that did not yet belong to the past. Their memoirs

38_{Toker, ‘Towards a poetics of documentary prose’, 194.}

39_{Primo Levi, The drowned and the saved (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks,}

1988), 70.

40_{Sarah J. Young, ‘Recalling the dead: Repetition, identity, and the witness in Varlam}

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were written about camps that still existed. Even after Stalin’s death, prison camps remained, although on a different scale than under Stalin. The main obstacle to former prisoners to write and publish freely about the camps was the continuation of the repressive Soviet regime. Most Gulag memoirs were published either abroad (tamizdat) or illegally circulated underground (samizdat). So, Gulag memoirists needed to testify to what happened in order to create a ‘counter-discourse’, as Gullotta explains, as to create a ‘real history’ to be set against the ‘ideological history’ prompted by the Party.41

Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, memoirs started to be used as historical documents, because of their testimonial function and the reader’s tendency to perceive memoirs as presenting the ‘truth’. Historians such as Anne Applebaum and Nanci Adler used, among other things, Gulag memoirs for their historical studies of the Gulag. Adler concludes her book

The Gulag survivor (2002) with the statement that the chronicles of victims of

the Gulag ‘can help to serve as a safeguard against any kind of return to that system under any other name.’42_{The testimonial function of prison camp}

memoirs can play an important role in the remembrance of certain histories, although it should always be kept in mind that memoirs are always subjective and shaped narratives.

A lot of Gulag memoir writers, and actually writers of all kinds of Gulag literature, did not have the certainty that their narratives would actually reach people, in order to raise awareness about the camps. Therefore, a lot of Gulag authors ‘wrote for a posthumous future.’43_{For many}

writers of Gulag memoirs the testimonial function (to reveal) has been the main urge to write, but is certainly not the only one. There are plenty of other reasons, such as processing a trauma, self-justification, or to record in order to tell ones relatives or later generations.

The testimonial function is also not restricted to ‘factual’ narratives, like memoirs and autobiographies. Here, Toker’s broader definition of what a testimony is should be applied, namely in the meaning of an eyewitness

41_{Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet context’, 82.}

42_{Nanci Adler, Beyond the Soviet system. The Gulag survivor (New Brunswick 2002), 267.} 43_{Robert Horvath, The legacy of Soviet dissent. Dissidents, democratization and radical}

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account. This can also be expressed in (semi)fictionalized narratives, based on one’s experiences. Varlam Shalamov wrote in an essay titled ‘О прозе´ about what his intentions were with his work Kolyma tales (which consists of semi-fictional, semi-documentary short stories), and how he tried to find a new way of writing after the camp experience. He writes:

В «Колымских рассказах» дело в изображении новых психологических закономерностей, в художественном исследовании страшной темы, а не в форме интонации «информации», не в сборе фактов. Хотя, разумеется, любой факт в «Колымских рассказах» неопровержим.44

He explains how in Kolyma tales he tries to explore the terrible topic of the Gulag in an artistic way. His intention is not simply to present information, but to portray a new psychological reality. He explains that he wanted to show in his work what is new in the behavior and the psychology of a human being made into an animal. For this, it is not necessary to make a difference between a story, a document or a memoir:

Когда меня спрашивают, что я пишу, я отвечаю: я не пишу воспоминаний. Никаких воспоминаний в «Колымских рассказах» нет. Я не пишу и рассказов – вернее, стараюсь написать не рассказ, а то, что было бы не литературой.45

So, he tried to create a new kind of writing, a new sort of prose, a text that would transcend existing concepts and understanding of literature as it was. The emphasis here lies on the fact that there was ‘newness’, literary invention was needed. According to Shalamov, a new kind of prose was required, because by what happened in the Gulag camps. Humankind had exceeded existing ways of cruelty and thus literature did not have an apt form to deal with this topic anymore. For something unparalleled in the past, a new way of writing was needed. This questionplays a big role in debates about Gulag and Holocaust writings and how they should artistically represent the atrocities that took place. As Toker argues:

44_{https://shalamov.ru/library/21/45.html, accessed on 18 June 2019.} 45_{Ibidem, accessed on 18 June 2019.}

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Indeed, since the atrocities of the twentieth century are vastly different from whatever has been represented in the literature of the previous ages, the literature of the Gulag, like the literature of the Holocaust, often highlights the asymmetry of traditional cultural schemata and unprecedented new realities. […] And it is through further literary experiments that the writers who had not been imprisoned attempt to process the unwieldy heritage of labor-camp lore.46

So, Shalamov was looking for a new kind of writing that was not just documenting memories or experiences. Even though he did not want his work to be understood as a document informing readers about life in the camps, all works of prison camp literature have a testimonial measure.

This is also the case in fictional of (semi-)fictionalized narratives. Fiction can be understood as historical testimony if testimony is understood in the broad sense of ‘the word of another providing a source of knowledge’.47

Toker explains that in factographic works such as a memoir, all narrative details are supposed to be referential. In the case of fictional works, referentiality is mainly restricted to the historical and cultural-semiotic aspect of the setting. This means the characters and the plot are understood to be representative rather than to refer to real people and actual events.48

For example, various Gulag narratives published during Krushchev’s thaw were fictional rather than factographic, but the bulk of the audience read them as testimony on “what it was like in the camps”.49_{Shalamov’s Kolyma}

tales is fiction nor non-fiction, but it can be read, among other things, as

presenting how life was in the camps.

Even memoirs can contain a measure of fictionalization, prompted by the ‘retelling’ of one’s story, and in prison camp memoirs it is often impossible to pinpoint a clear boundary between fact and fiction.50

Consequently, the reader plays a role in how prison camp literature, whether fictional or factographic, is being read. The world of the camps is a world only knowable to the ones who have been inside it. Every reader who has not ‘been there’ will read works of prison camp literature (both fictional as

46_{Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 9.} 47_{Ibidem, 123.}

48_{Ibidem, 124.} 49_{Ibidem, 123.} 50_{Ibidem, 124.}

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factographic) as ‘how it was like in the camp’. This means that readers will always take into regard the personal experiences of the author in the camp, even though the work is a novel.

In the case of the two contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs, both works have a strong testimonial function. This can already be explained by the fact that they are among the first to write about the Russian penal colony system that exists today. Dadin makes his testimonial urge very explicit in his prologue, titled Ich muss mich erinnern: ´Ich will das jeder im Land weiß, was ich hier im Straflager IK-7 durchmachen muss. Eigentlich müsste ich alles aufschreiben, um nichts zu vergessen, aber ich habe nicht einmal einen Stift.´51_{The testimonial urge thus already emerged in the}

prison camp. This is also the case in Alyokhina´s narrative, when she writes: ‘I need to understand. The turn my life has taken. My life in prison. Hold on. I have to remember things in the proper order. I need order.52

Contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs share with the Gulag memoirs that they are about a still existing system of prison camps. However, Gulag memoirs are in essence about survival, while the contemporary prison camp memoirs are in essence about endurance and injustice. In the Gulag camps there was a significant possibility to die (even though living and working conditions in Gulag camps varied greatly). This is different in the prison camps in Russia today. However, the contemporary memoirs still present a story about what is going on in the prison camps, a story that is largely unknown to people in Russia as well as abroad. The fact that their memoirs are published abroad and in samizdat probably indicates that it is not easy to publish such stories in Russia.

Alyokhina and Dadin include in their memoirs aspects that would be expected in a prison camp memoirs, such as descriptions of the cells, the food, the cold, and daily routine. About the cold Alyokhina writes:

We wrap ourselves in green coats like sacks with name tags on our chests, tie thin shawls around our heads, crawl out of the barracks and assemble in the prison yard.

51_{Ildar Dadin, Der Schrei des Schweigens. Mein Leben fur die Freiheit in Russland (Munich:}

Europa Verlag, 2018), 8.

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It’s not even dawn yet. There is snow on the ground, and the wind blows up our clothes, no matter how much we wear – and we don’t get to wear much – and we wait. We wait outside for the search to end, about forty minutes.53

They also expose issues that go beyond ‘regular prison experiences’, such as abuse and torture. Alyokhina writes for example about body searches:

In his reply, the head of the colony states that all the body searches carried out are legal. Outside, we’d call these searches a gynaecological exam. In January, I had four of these exams a week, with no medical instruments or an examining table. It was a blatant means of causing pain in revenge for my magazine article describing life in the prison as ‘anti-life’.54

Here, Alyokhina describes her experience a little reserved. Dadin writes in a more explicit way than Alyokhina. For example about how he was tortured:

Und so hange ich weiter an diesen mörderischen Handschelmen. Die Scherzen durchdringen nun meinen ganzen Körper. Ich kann nicht mehr richtig atmen, sämtliche Muskeln in meiner Brust haben sich mittlerweile verkrampft. Ein taubes Gefühl breitet sich von meinen Händen bis in die Unterarme aus, weil sie so angeschwollen sind; die Schultern sind bis zum Zerreisen angespannt. Unter der übergestülpten Schapka erkenne ich durch einen schmalen Schlitz meine Hose und die Unterhose auf dem Boden und versuche, sie unter meine Füße zu schieben, um etwas mehr Halt zu bekommen, aber ich spüre keine Besserung.55

The guards had also had threatened to rape him while hanging there. He also describes how physical torture is combined with psychological torture, such as sleep deprivation by leaving the lights on at all times, playing loud music, and by cold and hunger:

Man nennt N-14 auch die Folterzelle, obwohl hier eigentlich in jeder Zelle gefoltert wird. N-14 ist in einem gesonderten Trakt, sodass die andere Haftlinge nicht hören könne, was dort geschieht. Die Zelle grenzt an die Außenwand des Gebäudes, und die Warter lassen die Außentür immer auf; die Kalte zieht einem in die Knochen. […] in meiner Zelle ist es genauso kalt wie draußen in der Weite Kareliens. Und wenn ich

53_{Alyokhina, Riot days, 123.} 54_{Ibidem, 153.}

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nachts aufwache, wird mir auch nichts mehr warm. Die eisigen Temperaturen wecken immer wieder Selbstmordgedanken, und dann kommt auch noch der Hunger dazu.56

A difference between Alyokhina and Dadin is that Alyokhina leaves more room for interpretation. Although her memoir contains many descriptions of camp life, she leaves a big part to the imagination of the reader. Dadin’s narrative is more ‘closed’, because he explicitly describes his experiences, in order to make sure nothing is missed or misunderstood by the reader.

Where the testimonial function in Gulag memoirs played a role in remembrance and creating a counter discourse, the testimonial function of contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs is mainly about revealing the unseen or the unknown in order to create a change. Alyokhina and Dadin are by their prison camp experience strengthened in their belief they have to actively fight to improve prison conditions in Russia. This becomes clear from their memoirs. Also beneficial for them is that they can make use of the media. Dadin revealed that he was tortured already from within the prison camp. He smuggled letter via his lawyer to his wife, who then published it in the media. Both Alyokhina’s as Dadin’s release was widely reported in the Russian and international press, meaning they immediately had a stage for their story. In the case of the Gulag memoirs, publicity followed (sometimes) after publication. In the case of Alyokhina and Dadin, their stories were in the media already immediately after their arrests. The memoirs were published after their releases, and complement to what was already known. This highlights another difference with the Gulag memoirs, concerning the audience. Given their pioneering work of writing about contemporary prison camps, Alyokhina and Dadin did have the advantage that their cases received so much publicity. This made it easier to publish a memoir about their experiences. For Gulag memoir writers, especially in the early period of Gulag memoir writing, it was difficult to reach a public.

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2.3 The bi-functionality of prison camp memoirs

Prison camp memoirs do not only have a testimonial function. In the context of Gulag texts, Leona Toker has made a strong argument that Gulag memoirs are bifunctional objects, and are objects of testimony as well as of art.57_{According to her, the informational and aesthetic functions of these}

bifunctional objects becomes ‘marked’ at different periods of reception: ‘they can be read as historical documents or publicistic statements and as works of art.’58

In prison camp memoirs, this aesthetic function is always inextricably linked to the testimonial function. Gulag memoirs have been studied for their testimonial function for a long time, also in historical research to the Gulag. By studying Gulag memoirs as literary objects, one goes beyond the topical significance of Gulag narratives. These works have a broader cultural significance, not because of an autonomous aesthetic function, but ‘owing to their residual bi-functionality: their artistic achievement is bound up with their exploration of callousness and their creation of conditions for counteracting it’.59

The contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs also have this double function. Nevertheless, the testimonial function and the aesthetic function do not occur in equal proportions in all prison camp memoirs. This is clearly visible on the basis of the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin. The way Dadin wrote his memoir is quite standard in what one would expect of a prison camp memoir. It is very descriptive. Perhaps the most striking is that he wrote it in the present tense, which gives the effect that his experiences in the prison camp are revivified. Dadin’s memoir is imbued with the testimonial function, emphasizing certain events and how he felt about them, which makes his narrative sometimes a bit repetitive.

Alyokhina’s memoir is very unusual and experimental. Firstly, it is written in very short paragraphs with short titles in bold. Sentences are often very concise. An example from the text, about transportation to the prison camp:

57_{She leaves Gulag prose and drama out of this study for measured reasons, see Toker p. 8.} 58_{Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 7.}

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During the day, you are taken to the toilet twice. Prepare two plastic buckets: one for urine, one for boiling water. There is no food; only boiling water. Have instant Chinese soup with you.

Chinese soup

6 a.m. We load our bags into another autozak, then they pile us in. We ride to SIZO No.2, in the city of Kirov. This is a transfer prison, from which they will soon send us on to destinations unknown.

This is their trick – the unknown, This is their method – to frighten. Their way of showing you are just a body.

I am a body

They transport you . You’re a convict. They laugh at you and ignore your questions about your destination. We are not privy to this information. We are not supposed to know where we’re going, what time it is, or anything that affects us. If you beg, they might tell you the time.

But only if you beg.60

This way of writing makes the text powerful, energetic and sharp. It somehow reminds the reader a bit of the punk songs Pussy Riot performed. Perhaps Alyokhina’s style is (partly) derived from her punk-background. The short paragraphs are alternated with all sorts of fragments, such as quotes, diary fragments, lines of poetry, and statements from the trial. This way, her narrative is almost like a ‘collage’ of her experiences. Fragments from her prison diary, which are printed in cursive, are the most numerous of these included fragments. They form a striking counterpart to ‘main text’ of the small paragraphs, since they have a more contemplating character, and are not as staccato as the main text, but more lyrical. An example of this is:

The days were like snow – they melted away. They stayed in my memory only as dates, as the sound of boots shuffling though the April slush. I was like the iron bars on the

60_{Alyokhina, Riot days, 116.}

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window that trapped our world inside and the wind, damp with drops of water, that lurked in the corners.61

Alyokhina’s memoir is, because of her experimental style, very captivating. In

Riot days the aesthetic function is more foregrounded compared to Dadin’s

memoir, in which the testimonial function is more foregrounded. In the end, both functions are present in their memoirs.

61_{Alyokhina, Riot days, 78.}

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3. The contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs in the

context of the morphology of the Gulag memoir

Gulag memoirs have been widely used for historical research on the Gulag. As the previous chapter made clear, they not just testimonies, but also literary objects. They are gathered under the title ‘memoir’ to separate them from other Gulag literature, such as poetry and autobiographies. The fact that they are memoirs is not the only thing that they have in common. This chapter will discuss the idea of the Gulag memoir as a genre, Leona Toker’s theory of a morphology of the Gulag memoir, and an analysis on to what extent this morphology is also applicable to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs.

3.1 The Gulag memoir as a genre

Andrea Gullotta argues in ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context: Remarks on Gulag Writings’ (2012) that Gulag memoirs should be seen as a sub-genre of Soviet repression literature, as was briefly mentioned in the previous chapter.62_{In his opinion, there is a need to analyze works related to the}

Gulag as artistic works. There are many different kinds of texts, but he starts with the memoirs. He formulates a preliminary definition of the sub-genre of the Gulag memoir, as a group texts that:

 Are written by authors directly affected by Soviet repression

 Have a transitive destination towards a real and undetermined reader  Have a combined (both aesthetic and moral) function

 Share the ‘aboutness’ of the experience of the Gulag  Are stylistically influenced by Soviet repression63

His definition is indeed a preliminary one. It is an idea of a definition, meant as a helping tool or incentive to stimulate the research of Gulag memoirs as

62_{Gullotta, ‘Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context’, 75.} 63_{Ibidem, 79.}

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literary works. The article does not yet specify how the above described characteristics take shape in a text.

Another preliminary idea of what connects Gulag memoirs comes from Irina Shcherbakova. She writes in ‘Remembering the Gulag. Memoirs and Oral Testimonies by Former Inmates’ (2003) that many Gulag reminiscences seem to be alike, as if composed according to a model description of the fate of a man or a woman in a camp. There are exceptions, either by the uniqueness of faith described, or the author’s talent.64_{She writes about this}

resemblance:

Essentially, with the exception of particularly talented texts, which naturally are few, many camp reminiscences are so similar to each other that, if we delete details of geography and period, they seem to merge into a single hypertext – with appendixes, amplifications, continuations and sometimes with the same set of heroes.65

Her article is about both memoirs and oral testimonies. Perhaps because of the latter, it sounds a little simplistic. However, the concept of the hypertext is very interesting. It suggests the existence of a common structure behind all the individual Gulag memoirs.

Gullotta and Shcherbakova preseny ideas on how to research Gulag memoirs as literary works. The literary study of Gulag memoirs is still an undeveloped research field, but there have been people who have started on this. In most cases, however, only a few Gulag memoirs are considered, or they are treated alongside Holocaust memoirs. Or they are researched from a very broad context, such as Bernadette Morand’s Les écrits des prisonniers

politiques (1976). In this work she presents a number of shared themes in

the writings of a great number of political prisoners, among which she includes the Gulag writers Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The only one so far who has really taken on the idea of a genre study of the corpus of Gulag memoirs is Leona Toker. In the introduction of Return

from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), she states:

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It is now ethically possible and, I believe, necessary to consider the writings of former prisoners as artistic works and to analyze not just the testimony that they present but also their formal features.66

She defines Gulag memoirs as ‘memoirs that are centrally concerned with camp experience’.67_{Like for example slave narratives or memoirs of}

disillusioned communists, most of the Gulag memoirs are written by either non-professional writers or by authors whose artistic talents are revealed in these works, which is often their first literary attempt. Toker argues that even in the case of the former, high artistic merit often results from the harmony of the content and the stance: ‘the narrative act seems to be an extension of the author’s life, and that life acquires an aesthetic dimension of its own.'68

Toker uses a broad understanding of the term memoir. She includes works from the 1930s up to the 1980s, written by both men and women. Excluded are autobiographies in which the camp is only one of the components, as in for example Boris Gorbatov’s 1964 autobiography. Included are, by contrast, the memoir of Valentín González (El Campesino:

Life and Death in Soviet Russia, 1952) and Yekaterina Olitskaya (Moi vospominaniia, 1971) even though the bulk of their texts is an account of the

time prior to the camp experience. Toker argues that the camp does occupy a pivotal place in their narrative, since the pre-camp narrative is leading down exactly to the nadir of the camp.69_{She also includes Shalamov’s}

Kolyma Tales, although this is also not strictly a memoir. She thus works

with a broad understanding of the memoir: as a retrospective firsthand account that is centrally concerned with the camp.

3.2 The morphology of the Gulag memoir

Toker devoted a whole chapter of Return from the Archipelago to her theory of a morphology of the Gulag memoir. She argues that because of similarities

66_{Toker, Return from the archipelago, 8.} 67_{Ibidem, 73.}

68_{Ibidem, 73-74.} 69_{Ibidem, 73.}

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in their subject matter and in the writers’ motivation for the narrative act, Gulag memoirs tend to display certain morphological features.70_These

morphological features are derived from a structural analysis of the corpus of Gulag memoirs, focused on morphological aspects. Although she does not mention it, this method is derived from the Soviet literary scholar Vladimir Propp. In 1928, he published Morfologija skazki, which implied the principle of Russian formalism to the study of the narrative structures of Russian folktales. After the English translation was published in 1958 it had a great influence on the study of narrative.

Propp stripped the folktales of their content, and focused exclusively on the abstract form of the text, with particular attention to the events and character types in the tale.71_{He could then expose the syntagm, which is the}

deeper construction, or what is universal to the tale. He distinguished 31 basic functions and seven character types. He concluded that all Russian folktales are created by using an amalgam of these ‘standard ingredients’.72

Toker’s reseach of the Gulag memoir is thus also focused on the structure of the narrative, but in another way, not stripping the narrative from its content. The content plays an important role in her morphology.

Toker’s idea of a morphology is quite in line with Gullotta’s idea of the Gulag memoirs as a literary genre. As the serious first attempt to analyze the entire corpus of Gulag memoirs, Toker’s morphology theory is perhaps not yet completely fully completed. Yet, it offers a good starting point to study Gulag memoirs. More research can only supplement her findings.

The idea of a morphology, or a structure behind the narrative, seems also to be in line with Shcherbakova’s idea about a ‘hypertext’ behind Gulag memoirs. Morphological features also form a structure that is transcending the narrative. The four morphological features Toker distinguishes in the Gulag memoirs are the following73_:

70_{Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 73.}

71_{Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford 2010): ‘Vladimir Propp’’, via}

https://www-oxfordreference- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/view/10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref-9780199532919-e-559, accessed on 14-8-2019/

72_{Ibidem, accessed on 14-8-2019.} 73_{Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 74.}

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1) A tension between the ethical drive and an aesthetic impulse, closely associated with the bi-functionality of Gulag narratives as acts of witness-bearing and as works of art

2) The interconnection of individual and communal concerns 3) The inclusion of specific topoi as morphological variables 4) A modal scheme that can be described in terms of Lent

It is apparent that the morphological features Toker distinguishes are not strictly aesthetic. They form a blend of the testimonial and aesthetic function, just like in the texts these functions can overlap, coexist and complement each other.

3.3 The morphology of the Gulag memoirs applied to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs

Now, there is a reappearance of the prison camp memoir in Russia with the memoirs of Maria Alyokhina and Ildar Dadin, and they create an analogy between their texts and the Gulag memoirs. It is an interesting experiment to see whether the morphological features of the Gulag memoir described by Toker can be found back in the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs.

This part of the chapter will thus extrapolate the idea of a common morphological structure from the Gulag memoirs to the contemporary Russian prison camp memoirs of Maria Alyokhina and Dadin. In the order that Toker describes the morphological features, each time one morphological feature will first be more thoroughly explained, followed by an analysis of if (and if so, how) the morphological feature can be detected in the memoirs of Alyokhina and Dadin. This analysis will tell us more about how the memoirs of now are related to the memoirs of then, at least in form.