“Gender and the Gulag: Women’s Camp Writing”

“Gender and the Gulag: Women’s Camp Writing”

Lecture by gender researcher and philologist Anya Kuznetsova

The experience of the Gulag has become a lacuna in collective memory, a void ideologically shaped by the Soviet regime’s efforts to smooth over an inconvenient past.
It is no surprise that the testimonies of former prisoners remain the primary and most accessible sources of knowledge about the camps.
However, even the vast artistic exploration of Solzhenitsyn or the stylistic precision of Shalamov can hardly be called representative when it comes to women’s experiences in the Gulag.

This is largely due to the “male gaze”: male authors often depict romantic relationships, coercion into sexual contact, pregnancy, and childbirth — reducing women’s experiences to physiology and their relationships with men, while denying them full subjectivity.

Avoiding this distortion, we will turn to memoirs written by women who survived the Gulag.
By examining these texts not only through the lens of literary theory and history, but also through interdisciplinary frameworks such as trauma and gender studies, we will confront several key questions:
Is “memory” a document or a work of literature?
What does the term “women’s writing” mean in this context?
How is the voice and subjectivity constructed in women’s camp prose?

We will attempt to answer these and other questions and outline the narrative and stylistic strategies used by the authors of women’s camp memoirs.