Authors

Andrea Gullotta¹;  ¹ University of Palermo, Italy

Discussion

Ever since the 1920s, prisoners released from Soviet camps were forced to stay away from the main cities of the USSR. Upon release, quite often they remained in the surrounding areas of the camps, or in the so-called 101-st kilometer. Suspended in a situation characterised by economical, phisyical and emotional instability, those prisoners who had a literary career would often take advantage of the possibility of having at their disposal pen and paper to write prose, poetry, memoirs and to take stock of their experience of repression. It is in this period of his life that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote his first written texts; Varlam Shalamov wrote some of his most important poems soon after release, and so did other authors who went throught the Soviet camps, such as Vladimir Kemetskii (Sveshnikov), who wrote his last poems before being arrested again and sentenced.This paper aims to analyse a range of texts written in the periphery by authors confined after their release from the camps in different periods of Soviet history with the aim of identifying common literary strategies and topoi inspired by the unstable condition of post-release confinement. The main objective of this research is to highlight the existence of an ideal, virtual literary community comprised of former prisoners who shared the same literary strategies.