The day will pass away: the diary of a Gulag prison guard, 1935-1936

"Originally written in a couple of humble exercise books, which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, this remarkable diary is one of the few first-person accounts to survive the sprawling Soviet prison system.At the back of these exercise books there is a blur...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Čistjakov, Ivan -1941 (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Tait, Arch (ÜbersetzerIn)
Format: Buch
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: New York Pegasus Books 2017
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Inhaltsverzeichnis
Zusammenfassung:"Originally written in a couple of humble exercise books, which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, this remarkable diary is one of the few first-person accounts to survive the sprawling Soviet prison system.At the back of these exercise books there is a blurred snapshot and a note, "Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38. Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941." This is all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp.Who was this lost man? How did he end up in the gulag? Though a guard, he is a type of prisoner, too. We learn that he is a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia. In this diary, Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, he narrates it. He is a sharp-eyed witness and a sympathetic, humane, and broken man.From stumblingly poetic musings on the bitter landscape of the taiga to matter-of-fact grumbles about the inefficiency of his stove, from accounts of the brutal conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is an astonishing record--a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia, and modern Europe"--Google Books
Beschreibung:Translated from Russian
"First published in 2014 by Corpus Publishers, Moscow." -- copyright page
"Introduction and notes by Irina Shcherbakova"--jacket
Beschreibung:xxxiv, 249 pages Illustrationen
ISBN:9781681774602