Trauma and Self in the Soviet Context: Remarks on Gulag Writings

Abstract

The present paper is a first reflection on the ideal approaches to study the corpus of lagernaia memuaristika. The author proposes the novel concept of ‘Soviet repression literature’ as a new key concept to study the whole corpus of literature related to Soviet repression under a genre perspective. In this context, the author stretches the peculiarities of Gulag memoirs in relation to the corpus of Soviet repression literature, and underlines how trauma studies and autobiographical studies might help assessing the corpus.