Last week I participated in a workshop titled ‘Punishment as a Crime? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Prison Experience in Russian Culture’, at Uppsala University’s Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies. The programme, which is available here, was notable for its wide range of papers and approaches. The imperial, soviet and post-soviet periods were all covered, and [...]
All posts tagged Gulag
Russian prison experience
Posted by Sarah Young on August 22, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/08/22/russian-prison-experience/
Four short links: Gulag
A number of Gulag sites have come or returned to my attention recently, so this is a quick round-up of the best (for reasons I won’t go into, I’m rather short of time at the moment and the longer posts I’m trying to write are somewhat behind schedule). I’ve not included the virtual museums I [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on July 13, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/07/13/four-short-links-gulag/
Varlam Shalamov and the art of defecation
With apologies to any readers of a sensitive disposition, this is an important subject. Pretty much every Gulag narrative makes mention of the primitive toilet facilities and prison cells and camps – the ubiquitous and foul-smelling parasha (slop bucket) and arrangements for its emptying – and there are plenty of references to feelings of shame [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 7, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/06/07/varlam-shalamov-and-the-art-of-defecation/
Dostoevsky and the Gulag
I’ve started work on a paper on the depiction of criminals in labour camp writing for a workshop later this summer, and as Dostoevsky is one of my starting points, this has led me to revisit the broader question of the role of recurrent references to him in Gulag literature. This post is not intended [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 6, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/05/06/dostoevsky-and-the-gulag/
BASEES 2012 highlights
I was quite busy with committee business during the BASEES conference, but did manage to attend a few panels, and want to pick out a few highlights from what everyone I spoke to agreed was a very stimulating and enjoyable weekend. A Monday morning panel on Gulag literature may not be everybody’s idea of fun, [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 2, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/04/02/basees-2012-highlights/
Four short links: Soviet design
The promised posts on Herzen are still in preparation, but in the meantime, a few recent features on Soviet design have reminded me that their poster art wasn’t an isolated phenomenon (incidentally, good sites for Soviet posters keep cropping up – I found this French one after I published my four short links post). Favourite [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on October 9, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/10/09/four-short-links-soviet-design/
Gulag Voices: two books
This year has seen the publication of two books titled Gulag Voices: an anthology of memoirs edited by Anne Applebaum, and a collection of oral histories by Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck, so this seems like a good opportunity to look at both of them. I had previously read all but one of the extracts [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on September 5, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/09/05/gulag-voices-two-books/
Judging books by their covers
As part of some work on Vasily Grossman (about which more anon), I’ve been catching up with my reading on Gulag history. Stephen Cohen’s The Victims Return finally arrived at the library, so I went to get it out. The first thing that struck me was how similar its cover was to another recent book on Gulag [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on August 29, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/29/judging-books-by-covers/
Doroshevich on Sakhalin
I had other plans yesterday, but was feeling far too tired and depressed to concentrate on the writing I was supposed to be doing. So, to take my mind off present-day violent criminality at home, I started thinking about violent criminality more than a hundred years ago on the other side of the world… I recently [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on August 10, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/10/doroshevich-on-sakhalin/
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
My article, ‘Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy,’ has been published in the latest issue of Slavic Review (vol. 70. 2, 2011, pp. 353-72). In this article, I examine different types of repetition in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, from the repeated narration of the same incident in different tales, to [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 4, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/04/repetition-repetition-repetition/