Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on the Text -- Preface -- Introduction. Born Again: A New Model of Soviet Selfhood -- I. The Factory of Life -- II. The Art of Crime -- III. The Symphony of Labor -- IV. The Performance of Identity -- V. The Mapping of Utopia -- Epilogue -- List of Figures -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Open Access https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin's Gulag moves beyond the simplistic good/evil paradigm that often accompanies Gulag scholarship. While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism-an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration-the volume also recognizes the various loopholes offered by artistic expression. Perhaps the most infamous project of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, the Belomor construction was riddled by paradox, above all the fact that it created a major waterway that was too shallow for large crafts. Even more significant, and sinister, is that the project won the backing of famous creative luminaries who enthusiastically professed the doctrine of self-fashioning. Belomor complicates our understanding of the Gulag by looking at both prisoner motivation and official response from multiple angles, thereby offering a more expansive vision of the labor camp and its connection to Stalinism.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license:
In English.
9781618116949
10.1515/9781618116949 doi
Labor camps--Soviet Union. Prisoners as artists--Soviet Union. Prisoners--Intellectual life.--Soviet Union Prisoners' writings, Soviet--History and criticism. HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.