I’m currently working on a book chapter about the body in labour camp narratives. This was actually pretty much the starting point for my current research, so I’m in part revisiting an article published in Gulag Studies in 2008 on the Gulag body and self-mutilation. More recently, I’ve been thinking about the representation of different […]
All posts in category Gulag
Assessing sources: Russian criminal tattoos
Posted by Sarah Young on March 6, 2017
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2017/03/06/assessing-sources-russian-criminal-tattoos/
Reading Gulag propaganda
As regular readers will know, I am currently working on a book manuscript on the Russian tradition of prison and exile writing, from the tsarist era to the present day. This is a subject that generally focuses, with good reason, on the victims’ perspective, and many people will disagree with the idea of including Stalinist […]
Posted by Sarah Young on November 9, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/11/09/reading-gulag-propaganda/
Historical memory of the Gulag (3): Contested memory
The failure to establish a central memorial to the victims of the Gulag mentioned in my previous post is part of a problem of contested memory that has been apparent since the demise of the Soviet Union but has escalated in the last decade or so. As Arseny Roginsky’s eloquent essay The Embrace of Stalinism shows, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on September 17, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/09/17/historical-memory-of-the-gulag-3-contested-memory/
Historical memory of the Gulag (2): Memorials, maps and other memory projects
Since the final years of the Soviet Union, memorializing the victims of the political repressions – in itself a curious formulation that indicates some of the problems associated with this subject – has remained a significant and, to a large extent, unresolved question. Historical memory projects can obviously have all sorts of different aims: the […]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 23, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/06/23/historical-memory-of-the-gulag-2-memorials-maps-and-other-memory-projects/
Historical memory of the Gulag (1): Memory books
I’ve been thinking about historical memory of the Gulag and the Stalinist repressions recently whilst working on my book, and have decided to put together a few posts of links relating to the subject. This is partly from my own need to organize the material coherently, and partly because an up-to-date list would, I hope, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 1, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/05/01/historical-memory-of-the-gulag-1-memory-books/
Katorga and exile illustrated
Whilst planning a section of my chapter on pre-revolutionary works on Siberian prison and exile, I’ve been considering the role of images as well as the words, as many of the books I’ve been reading – at least most of those published after around 1880 in the UK and the States, and after around 1900 […]
Posted by Sarah Young on August 13, 2014
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2014/08/13/katorga-and-exile-illustrated/
Convicts and serfs: two books on Russian penal reform
I’m currently reading and re-reading material for a chapter of my book on narratives of prison, exile and hard labour, and have a few thoughts to put in order in relation to two books on Russian penal reform: Bruce F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia 1863-1917 (DeKalb: North Illinois University Press, 1996) Abby […]
Posted by Sarah Young on August 1, 2014
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2014/08/01/convicts-and-serfs-two-books-on-russian-penal-reform/
No worse than English prisons…
My work on nineteenth-century narratives about Russian imprisonment and exile has not only led me to read the classics that established the genre, notably Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, but has also necessitated ploughing through many less celebrated works by both travellers and former prisoners and exiles. (See my previous post […]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 16, 2014
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2014/04/16/no-worse-than-english-prisons/
The Gulag fantastic?
I have just finished teaching a new cross-cultural course, Tales of the Unexpected, with my colleague Peter Zusi. A whistle-stop tour through the fantastic and supernatural from the Grimm brothers to H. P. Lovecraft, the course has been great fun, but beyond the appearance of Gogol (his Ukrainian folktale ‘Vii’) and Dostoevsky (the classic work […]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 7, 2014
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2014/04/07/the-gulag-fantastic/