Soviet-Armenian Gulag Literature: At the Crossroads of Ethics and Aesthetics

The article discusses an episode in twentieth-century Soviet-Armenian literature - select works depicting Stalin's labour camps. Reflecting on the works of the Soviet-Armenian writers Gurgen Mahari, Mkrtich Armen, and Vache Sargsyan, it explores camp experience within the context of Soviet state policies. Responding to the policies of Khrushchev's Thaw during the 1950s-1960s, these writers felt they had a 'moral' duty to write the 'objective' truth about Stalin's labour camps, thus encountering the difficulties of representing personal experience artistically. Armen and Mahari, in some of their stories written in the late 1950s, and Sargsyan, in his three-volume novel Akeghdama, written in the 1960s, tried to abstract their lived camp experience to represent it as universal. The writers employed the device of writing about their experience in third person and ended up trapped by their own device. They created a world in which objective conditions and people's lives were separated and opposed to each other. By polarising the terrible conditions of forced life and the good character of the inmates, the writers were unintentionally becoming part of Stalin's political agenda of the 1930s, which simplified the relationship between the individual and the building of socialism, defining it as an act of honour, glory, valour, and heroism. Mahari revised his approach in the mid-1960s; turning himself into a protagonist and portraying exilic life as an endless chain of compulsions and accidents, he showed in a series of works how an exile could survive the forced conditions by transcending them through imagination.