Classic Forced Labor Camp Prose in Contemporary Russian Literature

Introduction. In the classic sense, forced labor camp prose includes fiction and documentary texts created by immediate participants of the events described (Stalin’s purges of the 1920s–1950s), and thus being usually autobiographical by nature. The bulk of such prose works were created in the 1950s–1970s by such writers as A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, E. Ginsburg, Yu. Dombrovsky, A. Zhigulin, etc. Goals. The paper attempts an analysis of features inherent to manifestations of the forced labor camp theme in contemporary Russian fiction, and relates such texts to existing visions of such prose. Results. As is evident, there can be no camp prose — in the mentioned sense — in 21st-century Russian literature but the sociocultural trauma experienced by individuals (and communities) proves so deep and fundamental for their consciousness and subconsciousness that it persists in Russian literary discourse to date. Family memories, archival documents, search for identity, keen interest in national and regional history, official and social mythology give birth to various author’s strategies of addressing this sensitive issue and working with it. These yield narratives that greatly vary in authors’ ideological and aesthetic viewpoints and give rise to enormous — and sometimes violent — controversy in contemporary cultural environment

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Ideology · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Russian literature · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Subconscious · Viewpoints · Vision · Visual arts · Anthropology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Philosophy · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia · Soviet and Russian History