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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

For many in the West, the Gulag served as the most demonstrative proof of the Soviet state’s totalitarian essence and reliance on repressive violence. Soviet discourses, on the other hand, presented forced labor camps as redemptive institutions designed to reintegrate prisoners into society. Where on this continuum to place the many Gulag prisoners who wrote about the edifying and potentially liberatory aspects of camp life? Solzhenitsyn was not alone among former inmates to describe the “ascent” he experienced amidst the death and cruelty of the camps. This panel grapples with this counterintuitive and unsettling discursive phenomenon: how could creative, national, and spiritual expression--or even freedom--coexist with the repressive and deadly realities of the Gulag? Each paper addresses prisoners who wrestled with the tension between creation and devastation, and whose writings present the camps as incubators for new political and creative commitments.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Papers

• 'A Rose-Colored Light': Reanimating in Search of Lost Time in a Soviet Prison Camp - Monika Zaleska, CUNY Graduate Center

• 'Our Little Closed-Off Theatrical World': Creativity and Precarity in Gulag Theater Memoirs - Jake A. Robertson, U of Oxford (UK)

Discussant

• Golfo Alexopoulos, U of South Florida