Poetry of the Gulag: Problems and Prospects for Future Research. Part II

Abstract

The present survey develops a basis for an extensive study of poetry written by the victims of political repressions in the whole area of segregation in the Soviet Union: preliminary and transit prisons, pre-Stalinist, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist forced labor camps and prisons, Gulag, and the so called specposelenija (settlements in confinement). The research relies on the evidence drawn from the already published as well as hitherto unknown archive materials related to the period between 1918 and 1956. The author of the article proposes a detailed systematization of the corpus of the poetry, based on historical and typological criteria that complement her previous research on the subject. The aim of the article is to encourage and help further studies in this area. Based on the evidence provided by the first and second degree sources, the essays demonstrates the effectivity of the proposed methodology, which is entirely based on the key-concept of the so called “Zone poetry” as a literary track of testimony of political repression which was synchronical with the imprisonment experience in the USSR.

Keywords

• Gulag Poetry
• literary testimony
• Lager poetry
• Soviet repressions
• poetry and testimony
• Zone poetry
• poetry and prisony
• poetry of political prisoners.