Byli li lagerja zapreščennoj temoj? Popytka rekonstrukcii neglasnych pravil igry

Abstract

It is commonplace that prison camps were a forbidden theme for Soviet writers. There exists, however, a number of instances contradicting it – from the explicit reference to Solovki in Aleksandr Tvardovskii continuously reprinted Land of Muravia or the paragraph-long frank depiction of the role of convicts in Soviet industrial construction in Ilia Ehrenburg’s The Second Day to the more implicit mention in Arkadii Gaidar’s The Drummer’s Fate, another book constantly on the market: a whole spectrum of different solutions, a catalog of which still waits to be compiled. Based on the above-mentioned bibliographical findings and on Arlen Blium’s archival research, we can attempt a reconstruction of the unwritten rules of the game. A game with four separate players: writers, censors, readers and authorities whose intentions are the hardest to reconstruct. Given the scope of the repressions, they hardly could think that the public could be kept from knowing of the existence of prison camps. One possible explanation of their choices was the “state of permanent instability” that, according to Hanna Arendt, characterizes totalitarian regimes. On the other hand, from an Orwellian perspective, we could speculate that their ultimate intention was to engage society as a whole in the game, to force people to participate in the generalized lie. Keywords: Soviet censorship, GULag literature, Socialist Realism, White Sea-Baltic canal.