Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors (review)

REVIEWS to a cultural criticism that does not move (I deliberately avoid the word, progress, even placed in scare quotes) because it has not agreed on basic terms ofanalysis. Harries makes only one ad-hoc definition, thus indulging in the device much less often than Burt, but since that definition is the book's key analytic concept, Harries's use of"the what-I-call definition" is hardly less significant or confusing. To begin with, he clearly chooses to ground his argument on the ad-hoc term, scare quote, because it puns on the conventional contemporary use ofthe term and on his subject matter—reenchantment, the supernatural, ghosts, and witches. Conventionally , as Harries notes, a scare quote is "a word or phrase put in skeptical quotation marks" so as to indicate simultaneously a writer's acknowledgment ofand distance from that word or phrase (5). While content with the criterion that a scare quote at once acknowledges and distances, Harries's version acknowledges more than it distances: it refers to specific types of borrowed material, having to do with the supernatural, and suggests that its authors "use, rewrite, and are influenced by their supernatural sources" (6). Never mind that Shakespeare is not such a source, but do note that in the key passages Harries addresses, neither Marx nor Keynes puts his allusion to Shakespeare in quotation marks, as would the contemporary user of a scare quote (80, 145, 147), and neither makes an unmistakable reference to the allusion's source, which, along with quotation marks, distinguishes for Harries, as formost readers, the quotation fromthe allusion (14n.). The drive for the punning, winning title arguably creates unnecessary confusion and obfuscation for the argument and the reader, who keeps seeing these references to Shakespeare as allusions. It is a drive Harries seemingly cannot resist, for he gives the title, "Smells Like World Spirit: Allusion, Revision, Farce," to a section in the chapter on Marx (57). Unlike the allusion to Nirvana's huge hit in Burt's book—"Smells Like Queen Spirit "—which makes sense given the subject matter of Unspeakable ShaXXXpeares, Harries's allusion to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" appears wildly misplaced in both chapter and book. Perhaps dead Kurt Cobain has something to tell us about dead Hegel and dead Marx, but I doubt it. More likely is that the allusion to the dead rock star constitutes what Harries calls a scare quote, an allusion to the supernatural that occurs when writers encounter "blind spots in their analyses ofcritical moments in European history" (6). Ifso, Harries's own scare quote brilliantly suggests the limits ofa methodology that produces evocative readings like his own. Sharon O'DairUniversity ofAlabama LEONA TOKER. Return from the Archipelago. Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000. xv + 333 pp. One of the most valuable contributions Leona Toker's book makes to our awareness oftwentieth-century literature is its insightful account ofhow a distinct genre she labels the "Gulag narrative" arose, evolved, and was conditioned by parallel developments in the world ofSoviet politics. The frame is provided by the history ofthe labor camps themselves, which she surveys in her first chapter. Not a Russian invention (that credit goes to Spanish troops in Cuba in 1 896 and British ones in South Africa in 1900) concentration camps were nonetheless deployed as a form ofpolitical control as early as 1918, by Lenin. They assumed definitive form under Stalin, when they disappeared from public view but came perversely to reflect the Stalinist system being erected above ground. There were waves ofrelative relaxaVcH . 26 (2002): 164 THE COMPAKATIST tion—when Beria replaced Yezhov in 1939, and especially after Stalin's death in 1953—but the camps themselves and the peculiar dire experience they offered remained to the end ofthe Soviet era. Since this took place in Russia, a literature of the camps followed with alacrity, at least in the case of survivors. Toker's erudition and industry in recovering this corpus—notjust the unavoidable examples ofSolzhenitsyn and Shalamov but also works from as early as the 1920s, published out ofexigency in places like China and Finland—is remarkable. Equally impressive is her eye for the evolutionary stages, formal variety, and other...