READING AND WRITING AGAINST DESTRUCTION (original) (raw)
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East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2021
Translation in captivity is nothing new, nor is it restricted to a particular place or historical period. However, this social and cultural phenomenon is marked by a far more frequent occurrence in totalitarian societies. This article examines the practice of literary translation in Soviet labour camps, where, as a result of political repression, Ukrainian scholars, writers, translators, and lexicographers (aka prisoners of conscience) constituted a large part of the incarcerated population. The fact that translation activity thrived behind bars despite brutal and dehumanizing conditions testifies to the phenomenon of cultural resistance and translators' activism, both of which deserve close scholarly attention. This study provides insights into practical, historical, psychological, and philosophical aspects of translation in extreme conditions. It seeks answers to the questions of why prisoners of conscience felt moved to translate, and how they pursued their work in situations of extreme pressure. Through the lens of translation in prison, the article offers a wide perspective on the issues of retranslation, pseudotranslation, translation editing, text selection, and the functions of literary translation. The focus of the paper is on Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s-80s, when a wave of political repressions led to the appearance of a new generation of prisoners of conscience. Case studies of Vasyl' Stus and Ivan Svitlychnyi are discussed, drawing on their letters during the incarceration period and the memoirs of their inmates.
Gabriela Tucan is a junior lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the West University of Timi oara. She has seven years of experience in higher education where she has now become specialised in teaching ESP, academic writing, as well as creative witting. Gabriela Tucan currently holds a PhD title in cognitive poetics, specifically in the cognitive operations necessary for reading and comprehension of E. Hemingway's short stories. Her broader research interests cover cognitive narratology, the properties of conceptual blending, and cultural cognitive theories.
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2021
Translation in captivity is nothing new, nor is it restricted to a particular place or historical period. However, this social and cultural phenomenon is marked by a far more frequent occurrence in totalitarian societies. This article examines the practice of literary translation in Soviet labour camps, where, as a result of political repression, Ukrainian scholars, writers, translators, and lexicographers (aka prisoners of conscience) constituted a large part of the incarcerated population. The fact that translation activity thrived behind bars despite brutal and dehumanizing conditions testifies to the phenomenon of cultural resistance and translators’ activism, both of which deserve close scholarly attention. This study provides insights into practical, historical, psychological, and philosophical aspects of translation in extreme conditions. It seeks answers to the questions of why prisoners of conscience felt moved to translate, and how they pursued their work in situations of ...
Ars Aeterna, 2014
Although the foundations of the Soviet concentration camp system date back to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the amplitude of human suffering in the Gulag would not be known in detail until after 1962, i.e. the year when A. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. But even before the start of World War II, the totalitarian Soviet universe spoke the language of oppression that public opinion in the West constantly refused to acknowledge. This paper tries to recover a neglected corpus of early autobiographical narratives depicting the absurd Soviet concentration system, in the authentic voice of a number of Gulag survivors (G. Kitchin, Tatiana Tchernavin, Vladimir Tchernavin, S. A. Malsagoff, etc.).
LangLit, 2019
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a Physics Professor was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters. He was a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labor camps. But the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle secured for him the role of conscience of the nation Later, his The Gulag Archipelago showed unmatched physical and moral courage in depicting a torrential narrative mixing history, politics, autobiography, documentary, corrosive personal comment and philosophical speculation into one of the most extraordinary epics of 20th-century literature. Gulag was a system of places of confinement where there were many violations of human rights. It is the Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the Soviet Secret Police and is nowadays a vivid symbol of the lawlessness, slave labor and tyranny of the Stalin era. Gulag had a great impact on the minds of those who have undergone imprisonment and also on the thinkers who wanted to eradicate it from its root and make aware the entire humanity its disastrous consequences in the life of Russians. This paper is an attempt to focus on the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Dolgun and also women writers who have dared to write on such issues. Among them are Anna Larina, Evgeniia Ginzburg and others.
Halfway between Memory and History, Gulag Memoirs as a Genre
Slovo, 2017
Abstract: Memoirs offer unique human testaments to historical events. In former the Communist States of Eastern Europe, survivor accounts have a key role in interpreting official data and reconstructing history. The historical details, ethical questions, chronologies, uncontested evidence, records, and recollections, may be contradictory, but testimonials are instrumental in filling the gap that archival materials and history books cannot. This article analyzes a sample of seven Gulag memoirs that recount experiences of imprisonment at the height of the Stalinist repression in Romania, between 1947 and 1964, by looking at the literary conventions employed by the authors in the recounting of their stories. The memoirs were chosen for the broad range of experiences they represent, with particular attention being paid to the gendered experiences of imprisonment. The texts will be approached through the lenses of literary criticism, by analyzing common tropes, motifs, characters, and techniques of narration, elements that make Gulag memoirs a “genre” in its own right. A close reading of the text uncovers not only the gruesome realities of Communist persecution, imprisonment, and torture, but also the prevailing mentalities of that era. Furthermore, the literary components of the texts provide clues that help decode the author’s self, as well as his or hers understanding of history.
Changing Societies & Personalities, 2022
Sergei Parajanov was one of the most innovative directors of postwar Soviet cinema, which made him suspect to the Soviet authorities and eventually led Parajanov to serving a prison sentence. This article discusses how the trauma of Parajanov’s prison experience was reflected in the textual and visual output (letters, drawings and collages) that he created during his imprisonment out of the materials at hand. The study relies on comparative-historical and semiotic methods. Parajanov’s homosexuality made his position in prison precarious and ambiguous. He went through a variety of occupations and laboriously navigated both the prison hierarchy and Soviet penal system’s vigilant control. However, by his own count, Parajanov crafted 800 objects during his imprisonment. The article explores the recurring motives such as the crane hook, halo, and a hunched posture. This imagery is placed in the context of Parajanov’s everyday life in prison and is interpreted in the light of his textual documents from that period.
SOCIAL MEANING OF CULTURE IN A STALINIST PRISON CAMP
The Stalinist prison camp system – popularly known as the Gulag archipelago – existed for a relatively short period (from 1931–1960) and became world famous as a synonym for terror, humiliation and human suffering. This article focuses on the social significance of culture in one of the biggest Stalinist prison camp – Karlag in Central Kazakhstan. The first part of the article gives an overview of the institutions of culture in prison camps and their activities. It also gives an overview of unofficial cultural activities and the consequences of being engaged in the unsanctioned creation of art. In the second part of the paper, the social significance of culture in Stalinist prison camps is discussed. Official and non-official art were not separate and existed in symbiosis: people crossed the border between these spheres. Moreover, the camp administration recognised the material value of art produced in the camp and began to organise the production of pictures or handicrafts in order to sell them outside the camp. Nevertheless, both official and unofficial cultures had a deep social meaning for the people. Producing unsanctioned paintings and other objects of artistry can be seen as an act of resistance, producing sanctioned art helped the artists to create their own social and mental space and distance themselves from the everyday grind of the camp. In general, culture and its institutions in the prison failed to fulfill their original purpose – instead of re-educating and changing inmates, culture helped to maintain human dignity and integrity. Stalinist prison camps are infamous and their existence is now well known all around the world. These camps are correctly associated with inhuman living conditions, suffering, slave labour, humiliation, tragedy, hunger and death. One influential work in disseminating the scenes and images of suffering, which made the abbreviation Gulag famous is the " Archipelago in Gulag " , a book that has been translated into multiple languages (Solženitsõn 1990). However, " The Gulag Archipelago " and several other popular or academic books written about the Stalinist prison camps focus strongly on the injustice and inhuman conditions of this repressive system and touch lightly, if at all, on other aspects of the structure and how the Gulag functioned. The Gulag was a very complex institution and taking a closer look at the nature of the Gulag it is impossible to ignore
SCRIPTA JUDAICA CRACOVIENSIA, VOLUME 18, 2020
The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees' reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors' emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland's Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in-and about-exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in postwar Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and-so it seems-split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.