About the book: 2024 / One of the main consequences of the Gulag is the loss of familiar humanistic and cultural guidelines, the inconsistency of previous categories of thought and speech with the new circumstances of the catastrophe. Autobiographies, diaries, and stories of survivors strive to translate this physical and psychological experience of suffering into literary language, but time after time they encounter one or another difficulty. Renate Lachmann's book offers a literary analysis of a large corpus of testimonial texts about the Gulag: from Evgenia Ginzburg, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov to Yuli Margolin and Karl Steiner. The camp theme in the works of writers of later generations, in particular Danilo Kis and Olivier Rolin, is also examined. On what formal principles is the poetics of camp writing based? What is the relationship between documentary and artistic in these texts? And what knowledge about man and humanity does this literary tradition seek to reveal to us? In search of answers to these questions, the author offers his reading of well-known camp texts, while giving the floor to the Gulag victims themselves. Renate Lachmann is a Slavist, cultural historian, author of the book “Discourses of the Fantastic”, published by the publishing house “UFO”».