"Solovki Gulag literature": Towards a New Understanding of Gulag Literature

Some thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the theme of the Gulag is one of the Leitmotifs of Russian literature. However, Gulag literature has to date been astonishingly under-analysed. There is an evident lack in the assessment of Gulag literature as a united body of texts, and an almost complete lack of attention by scholars towards the text published within the Soviet concentration camps. This talk is based on a monograph devoted to the literary text produced within the Solovki prison camp, which aims to shed new light on Gulag literature by analysing the texts written within the camps putting them in connection to the socio-cultural context of the camp and the historical-literary context of the 1920s.