Between Pluto and Orpheus

GULAG Testimony between Pluto and Orpheus

This chapter centers on the corpus of literary and documentary testimony about the GULAG. As a rule, studies of Holocaust memory deploy the conceptual framework of collective trauma, which makes an indelible mark on the discursive texture of commemoration. This chapter argues that the uncritical use of this analytical model to describe Soviet “camp literature” hampers understanding of its special character. The second perspective I propose embeds textually expressed GULAG memory in the sociocultural context of the late-Soviet space and the unofficial, uncensored culture of the underground,which permits us to correct our understanding of the unique features of the given memorial tradition. Uncovering these intersections and divergences offers insight into the way that widespread camp experience entered the habitus of the late-Soviet underground, while simultaneously revealing how the conditions of underground existence mediated representations of camp experience.

// Engstrőm M., Glanc T., Kukuj I., Lipovetsky M., Smola K. (Eds.) Soviet Underground Culture (1932-1990). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.