Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading
ISBN: 9780253043542
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature ; Slavic Studies ; Jewish Studies;

A literary scholar examines survival narratives from Russian and German concentration camps, shedding new light on testimony in the face of evil.



In this illuminating study, Leona Toker demonstrates how Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, especially how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker's analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer's experience in a form where fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. Toker also views these texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression.



Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker also provides context for references to potentially obscure historical events and shows how they form new meaning in the text.

Leona Toker is Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is author of Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission and Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors .