Legacies: Victims, Morality & Culture

The Uses of Vulnerability: Literature & Ideology in Evgeniia Ginzburg's Memoir of the Gulag

28.04.2008

The Gulag not only physically crushed its victims but also attempted to deprive them of moral languages, by which they could identify the Gulag as evil. Prisoners were pressured and lured into viewing themselves and their fate through the prism of the ideological language of their Communist oppressors. Many witnesses of the Gulag agree that moral resistance against this manipulation usually depended on victims' ability to view the world through moral frameworks, in which their sense of identity was anchored before their imprisonment. In contrast to this widespread tendency, Evgeniia Ginzburg describes in her Gulag memoir how she discovered in Stalin's prisons and camps the inedequacy of her original language of moral identity. But instead of succumbing to the moral manipulation in the Gulag, she managed to transcend her former self and rebuild her moral identity at a higher spiritual level. She did this largely by replacing a Communist ideological prism, through which she used to view herself and others, with a set of terms taken from literature -- its traditional metaphors, themes, motifs, narrative paradigms and characters. But these terms can be ambiguous too. Serving as a source of moral sensitivity on the one hand, they can be a source of moral detachment on the other.
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