Filtered Through: Raimond Kaugver's Gulag Memories in Letters and Literature

• In Event: Literary Discoveries: Manuscripts, Letters, Real Human Beings

Abstract

Misery or distress can be well described only by the one who, standing in the midst of it, has still been able to remain an attentive bystander. Personally experienced humiliation and misery cannot be pressed in any creative mold, it is a too embarrassing and shameful thing.
Raimond Kaugver, 4 August 1948

Raimond Kaugver (1926–1992), the most successful author of Soviet popular literature, has dealt with his Gulag experiences in Vorkuta prison camp in many of his novels whose history of writing and publication is extremely diverse and complicated. He had been able to hint about his Gulag experiences in Soviet times in his Forty Candles (1966), provoking a political scandal. He published the first extensive account of them in 1989 in the collection of short stories Letters From the Camp, but left unpublished a major novel, Northern Lights (2010), written at the beginning of 1950s in the first months after the liberation from the camp. In addition to these diverging accounts, his letters from 1947–1949 have recently become available for research; they offer yet another take on his experiences. Comparative reading of these materials gives valuable insight into how the articulation of camp experiences changes depending on the genre and historical context and enables the study of a whole range of political, historical and cultural filters.

Short Bio

Eneken Laanes is Senior Research Fellow at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis and the Head of Cultural Theory at Tallinn University. She is also the coordinator (with Hanna Meretoja) of the Nordic network of Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics.
She is the author of Unresolved Dialogues: Memory and Subjectivity in the Post-Soviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian, 2009) and the editor of Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (2015). Her research interests include trauma theory, transnational memory, post-socialist memory cultures in Eastern Europe, contemporary world literature, transnational literature and multilingualism.

Author

• Eneken Laanes, Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences/Tallinn University