'Our Little Closed-Off Theatrical World': Creativity and Precarity in Gulag Theater Memoirs

• In Event: The Ascent: Modes of Creative, National, and Spiritual Expression in the Gulag

Abstract

Amid the outpouring of Gulag memoir literature from the late 1980s onward, former prisoner artists sought to make sense of a camp theater experience that involved uniquely rewarding creative work in the context of profound suffering and destruction. My analysis of their accounts reveals a community of survivors attempting to reconcile this dissonance by isolating the theater's ethereal "world of creativity", to which artists ascribed sensations of freedom and humanity, from the "hell" of the camps, where artists experienced a dehumanizing captivity. Gulag theater memoirs show their authors grappling with the “gray zone” between victim and collaborator as they struggled to memorialize both the personal tragedies of Stalinist terror and the transcendental power of art.

Author

• Jake A. Robertson, U of Oxford (UK)