Renate Lachmann explores the role of literature in forming memory of the Gulag. She deals with a broad variety of works on the Soviet camp system, memoiristic or fictionalized. The study puts emphasis on the multifunctional features of the texts, discussing their literary construction as well as their pragmatic functions such as raising consciousness, bearing witness, or appealing to political change. The book combines, based on key concepts such as “traumascapes” (Nina Tumarkin) or “traumatic realism” (Michael Rothberg), a close reading with historical contextualization of the discussed words.

The study raises the question to what extent the Gulag was known in the Soviet Union as well as outside of it, and makes a strong argument that memory gains an eminent political meaning: an undistorted collective memorialization of the Gulag system is of great importance for democratization in contemporary Russia. Lachmann explains the rise of the forced labor camps in the early Soviet regime and accentuates how revolutionary fervor transforms into totalitarian terror, which in turn gives birth to a penal system that embraces a camp system covering gradually the whole country. In her discussion of the Stalinist purges Lachmann refers to hygiene, but incorrectly states (89) that these repressions were directed against “non-Russian elements” in the “Volkskörper” (body national). This critical remark is not intended to belittle the fact of Russian nationalism in the Soviet Union or the brutal reality for certain nations in the Stalinist State, but the ideological framework in that period was by no means encoded in terms like “Russianness” or “Unrussianness.” Next, the author examines the documentary value of Gulag literature and its depiction of different dimensions of the camp experience. This part of the study deals with the confrontation of the detainees with a completely new and gruesome reality. Special attention is paid to the harsh conditions: forced labor, exhaustion, physical pain, hunger, diseases, and permanent violence, all of which stand in sharp contrast to the intended re-education that the camps should guarantee according to ideology. Lachmann explores the blurred lines between fact and fiction and exposes the hybrid character of the Gulag narratives of different authors such as Karlo Štajner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Julius Margolin, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, Wanda Brońska-Pampuch, and Margarete Buber-Neumann. The author outlines the further development of camp narratives in the context of memorialization of the Gulag by new generations (Vladimir Sorokin), but also in a broad international perspective (Danilo Kiš, Olivier Rolin). In her concluding remarks Lachmann stresses the ethical implications of memory and its signification for contemporary humanism.

The study examines wisely chosen texts and offers varied insights into the horrors of the Soviet camp system. However, occasionally one would expect a more diversified reference to scholarly works—some important contributions such as Dariusz Tolczyk's See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (1999) are altogether missing. Lachmann's study has other shortcomings, too. There is no discussion whether there exists a single memory of the Gulag at all or whether we are rather facing a partitioned, fragmented memory. One should not assume that the Gulag plays the same role in the collective memory of Russia or Poland, for example. And it is doubtful whether notions from ancient rhetoric like ekplexis and enargeia (Cassius Longinus, On the Sublime) can comprehensively explain how Gulag narratives work. These texts are not exclusively written to present things vividly (enargeia) and to enthrall (ekplexis) the reader. Although attractive at first glance, this explanation requires further substantiation and is open to debate. And there are quite a few errors: Solzhenitsyn did not have access to “secret documentary material” (19) while he was writing The Gulag Archipelago (1973); in Darkness at Noon (1940), Arthur Koestler cannot quote from Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (107), as the latter was published not until 1967; Kazimierz Wyka was not an inmate of a camp (57), be it Soviet or German, and Kiš's notion of “grace of form” (447) should not be confounded with some sort of catharsis as a purifying aesthetic experience. A main objection to this study has to do with the author's inclination towards equations between phenomena of the Gulag and features of the Nazi camps. A comparison of the two camp systems might well highlight the peculiarities of each. The discussion of similarities and discrepancies between the Gulag and the Nazi camps needs, however, further elaboration and should be set in a broader context, including the distinctive characteristics of the Soviet and Nazi system in general. To sum up, notwithstanding its impressive scale and scope the study falls short of its ambitious goals.