Literature of testimony between oblivion and deliberate omission

Abstract

Prison camp texts constitute a very important stratum of 20th-c. literature. On their way to the reader, they overcome the barriers of fear and reluctance to immerse oneself into a complex and traumatic narrative, a recurrent risk of oblivion, and repeated suppression by censorship — on behalf of the authorities and educational institutions as well as society in general. Russian and Polish literature about gulags not only shares the same trauma and publication destiny, but also common topics, methods, and approaches to describing the unutterable experience. Two writers that embody this process — Herling-Grudziński and Shalamov — never met in person, but succeeded in conveying essential messages to the reader about the destructive and corrupting effect of a prison camp, the senselessness of forced labour, and the dehumanization and degradation of a person trapped in such an environment. The literary dialogue between the two authors contains a powerful system of reference for the study of 20th-c. Polish and Russian prison camp prose.