{"id":160,"date":"2009-10-03T16:48:11","date_gmt":"2009-10-03T15:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/?p=160"},"modified":"2010-02-28T13:23:04","modified_gmt":"2010-02-28T12:23:04","slug":"gulag-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/2009\/10\/03\/gulag-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Gulag art"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I am usually pleased by events which raise the public profile of the Gulag, I am distinctly less comfortable with its use for anti-Russian\/anti-Soviet propaganda by neoconservative American think-tanks who have failed to notice that the Cold War ended twenty years ago, as in the case of the \u00a0Heritage Foundation’s current exhibition of Nikolai Getman’s Gulag art<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The whole of Getman’s Gulag Collection<\/a> can be found on the website of the Jamestown Foundation, which was founded in 1984 to support the activities of Soviet dissidents and has been accused of being anti-Russian<\/a>.\u00a0This may have been Getman\u2019s choice, but for me this sort of presentation, which places the art in the service of a dubious and outdated policy agenda, undermines its relevance and diminishes its impact. Unfortunately, the same sort of approach has hindered the development of a sensible critical discourse on the literature of the Gulag, much of which appeared in translation in the sixties and seventies and was subject to vague, journalistic reporting that focused on fulminating against the evils of the Soviet empire and celebrating the triumph of the human spirit represented by the survivors\u2019 writings, rather than actually interrogating the texts in an intelligent way. Solzhenitsyn\u2019s Gulag works suffered particularly from this tendency, and their reputation, sadly, has never really recovered, while Shalamov, who didn\u2019t fit into the dissident mould, was largely ignored as a result, and again, this had a long standing impact on his reception.<\/p>\n

Refuting the Jamestown Foundation\u2019s claim that Getman\u2019s art is the only visual record of the Gulag, the website of\u00a0Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya\u2019s<\/a> extraordinary and evocative illustrations of her twelve years in the Gulag allows the pictures to speak for themselves. Only the introductory section of the website so far been translated into English (one hopes that ultimately the whole site will be translated), but the Kersnovskaya Foundation has made a number of images available under a Creative Commons License<\/a> via Wikipedia<\/a>, including this one of women huddled together in a bathhouse, ‘Banya on cold stone floor: even the guard in the fur coat didn’t look too warm’:<\/p>\n

\"Kersnovskaya,<\/a>

Kersnovskaya, Banya on cold stone floor<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I am usually pleased by events which raise the public profile of the Gulag, I am distinctly less comfortable with its use for anti-Russian\/anti-Soviet propaganda by neoconservative American think-tanks who have failed to notice that the Cold War ended twenty years ago, as in the case of the \u00a0Heritage Foundation’s current exhibition of Nikolai […]<\/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":[13,16,529,15,17,7,14,32],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulag","tag-art","tag-getman","tag-gulag","tag-kersnovskaya","tag-neoconservatives","tag-shalamov","tag-solzhenitsyn","tag-women"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-2A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","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=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":612,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}