“A Window on the Past”
Re-reading the Camp Literature
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Camp literature has been marginalised: Society in Russia is fully preoccupied with the present, and for the West, the sensation value of revelations about the Gulag was exhausted long ago. To prevent the loss of memory, it is necessary to read the camp anew, for Soviet civilisation is not to be grasped without its darker side. Beyond the established canon of memoirs, there is a literature to discover which is multifaceted and reacts idiosyncratically to the camp as a form of existence and thinking.
(Osteuropa 6/2007, pp. 55–80)