The prison camp theme in Russian literature as reworked by Lev Razgon and Sergei Dovlatov

Russian literature, reflecting Russian and Soviet history, has depicted prisons and labor camps for decades. After the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, dozens of works on the GULAG appeared in both Russian and English. Though only a few were published in the Soviet Union due to a crackdown after the initial publishing freedom under Khrushchev, interest in the prison theme continued until the late 1970's in the West.; This waning interest in memoirs, testimonials, and fictional works on the GULAG precipitated changes in the way writers arranged their narratives and positioned them vis-a-vis the existing tradition of prison writing. Two writers in particular, Lev Razgon and Sergei Dovlatov, created works on prison and the camps which attempt to move away from the oversaturated Russian prison memoir and forge a new connection with the reader.; Lev Razgon's Nepridumamioe, published in the U.S. as True Stories, is a collection of short narrative pieces. The stories, which are presented as true accounts, are mediated by Razgon as the narrator. His persona, which I term the solicitous narrator, attempts to continually forestall reader objection and doubt to his text by engaging in a dialogue through digressions, comments, explanations, and affirmations. All these techniques are designed to prove the text accurate, relevant, and a valuable contribution to the tradition of Russian prison writing.; Sergei Dovlatov's Zona, translated as The Zone , represents an alternative approach to the oversaturated tradition. The book consists of narrative pieces joined by letters from Dovlatov to his eventual publisher The letters explicitly spell out Dovlatov's philosophy of his book and his attitude towards the criminal camps in which he served as a guard. Instead of a traditional memoir, Dovlatov creates a text in which the central character, Boris Alikhanov, gradually converges with the narrator. Through Alikhanov's impressions of the world in which he works, we see his (and, by extension, Dovlatov's) development as a writer. The emphasis throughout the book is on the personalities and qualities of the people in the camp, not on their often shocking actions or crimes.