Разрешенный Гулаг:   Как Официальные Советские Поэты Писали О Лагерях?    (The Allowed Gulag:   How Did Official Soviet Poets Write About the Forced Labor Camps?)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the ways how the experience of imprisonment in the Gulag was reflected in lyrics of Soviet poets who were not disillusioned with the Soviet regime and built a career in official literature. In the texts of the eleven studied authors the controversial intention to conceal and simultaneously express the traumatic past gives origin to a special poetics of innuendos, omissions, historical projections and parapraxis. The article analyzes in detail the features of this poetics. Special attention is paid to parapraxis – cases when the terrifying meaning is expressed in spite of the author’s will.

Keywords: official Soviet literature, Soviet poets, GULAG, forced labor camps, traumatic experience, poems about the GULAG