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Poetics Today 24.1 (2003) 146-147



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Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. xv + 333 pp.

Leona Toker's Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors is a landmark in the study of twentieth-century Russian prose. The first book devoted to narratives of gulag survivors from the late 1920s to the 1990s, it analyzes their dual status as historical testimony and works of art.

Against the backdrop of the history of the gulag, Toker examines the ethical and personal concerns of the different waves of camp prose in the context of the contemporary political conditions. She then provides a systematic outline of the principal elements of gulag memoirs as a genre, many of which are shared by gulag fiction. These elements include tensions between ethical and aesthetic impulses; the interconnectedness of individual/communal concerns; and the use of the Lenten mode and specific topoi, namely: (1) arrest, (2) "end-of-the-term fatigue," (3) dignity, (4) escape, (5) the role of chance in survival, (6) "Room 101," (7) the camps as a microcosm of society as a whole, (8) place rather than time as an organizational principle, and (9) the "pulsation method": the alternation of atrocities [End Page 146] with "moments of reprieve." In subsequent chapters she traces the use and transformation of these elements in various works of camp prose.

Toker also discusses the question of factography and fiction in the corpus. Reflecting their authors' need to testify to the atrocities they had witnessed, earlier works, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, are often factographic pieces, which expose and protest the hidden network of Soviet prisons and camps. Solzhenitsyn's First Circle and Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales are both analyzed as "veridical fiction," which "bespeaks the real through the production of an illusion" (141). As a work of fiction, The First Circle is not a referential but a replicating model, one that presents typical camp characters and events; nonetheless it also functions as an important work of historical testimony. Kolyma Tales, however, straddle the line between factography and fiction: they are referential with respect to characters and plot, but their referentiality lacks the "singulative component" and confuses the boundary between the individual and common experiences.

The concluding chapter is devoted to works in which the camps are present but not central to the main plot. Some of these narratives deal with the gulag as "Room 101 taboo"; others present both the "zone" (the camps) and the "larger zone" (the USSR) allegorically, through dystopian satire and the grotesque, which frequently involves the realization of somatic metaphors.

Although the camps are no longer a reality to be documented and protested in contemporary Russian literature, they are an inalienable part of the Soviet legacy with which many writers feel compelled to struggle. The historical details, ethical questions, and semiotic and linguistic codes of camp prose, along with references to landmark works by gulag writers, are often woven into the fabric of literary works whose plots do not relate directly to the gulag. Toker's book is thus invaluable not only to the study of gulag literature, but to a deeper understanding of late- and post-Soviet prose as well.



Laura Kline
Wayne State

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