The other main focus of my current research is Gulag literature,\u00a0\u00a0particularly the short stories of Varlam Shalamov. I’ll write more about him soon, and post some of my work, but first I have a couple of observations to make on the use of the term ‘Gulag’ itself.<\/p>\n
The assimilation of foreign words into a language is frequently a slightly tricky business, so one should probably forgive incorrect usage, but it is very difficult to do so when the perpetrator is supposed to be an expert. Tim Tzouliadis’s book The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags. Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia<\/a><\/em> (Little, Brown, 2008)\u00a0is a case in point. ‘Gulag’ is an acronym standing for ‘\u0413\u043b\u0430\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0435 \u0443\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043b\u0430\u0433\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0439’ (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), which means ‘Main Administration of Camps’. In other words, it refers to the system as a whole, not to individual labour camps, and therefore should not be used in the plural to refer to different camps. An indefinite article is acceptable if ‘Gulag’ is being used metaphorically, as in the article ‘How California Got to be a Bankrupt Gulag<\/a>‘, but unless one is comparing systems in different places, the correct term is ‘The Gulag’. Mr Tzouliadis may have written a very fine book, indeed the fact that he won the Longman \/ History Today 2009 Award<\/a> suggests that he has, but the inclusion of such a basic error in the title gives cause for concern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The other main focus of my current research is Gulag literature,\u00a0\u00a0particularly the short stories of Varlam Shalamov. I’ll write more about him soon, and post some of my work, but first I have a couple of observations to make on the use of the term ‘Gulag’ itself. The assimilation of foreign words into a language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[529,7],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulag","tag-gulag","tag-shalamov"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-1I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}