Historiography and Russian Prison Literature
The Foucauldian interpretation of history is fundamentally reliant on power structures. Historiography is at the disposal of the powerful to formulate a ‘truth’ that renews their right to rule. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish explores the ways in which power dynamics have installed and continue to cultivate incarceration practices which deny the experience of prisoners: “Can one write such a history against the background of a history of bodies when such systems of punishment claim to have only the secret souls of criminals as their objective?” (Foucault 25). Foucault argues that the history of the prison system is inextricable from the people whom it harms—a history which denies the personhood of the incarcerated, too, creates and perpetuates harm. The existence of the penal system itself is contingent upon the flow of a narrative which dehumanizes the incarcerated: “No doubt it is as if the ‘history-remembering’ of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns and deeds had long been linked to a modality of power” (Foucault 161). The "modality of power," of course, relies on the creation and perpetuation of manipulated history, history which claims to raise itself to objectivity but is still immersed, invisibly and perniciously, in the subjective. The creation of history (the subjective, physical forms which it occupies, not its place as objective reality) is inseparable from the prolongation of certain modes of power which dictate its “remembering." Historiography becomes a tool through which power is legitimized and the freedom of the oppressed is justifiably revoked. The tradition of prison literature has thus been established to rectify this problem—the survival of narratives returns political autonomy to those who are denied it by remembering their experiences. Foucault writes of the power of the biography, which “establishes the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and even outside it” (Foucault 252). The biography (or autobiography) is a radical concept for Foucault because it constructs a reality which affirms and values the humanity and experiences of the incarcerated.
The importance of this canon (specifically the auto/biographical element) has been recognized from its genesis. The Life of Avvakum recounts Avvakum’s persecution and imprisonment by the powerful Orthodox church, as well as his determination to defend his beliefs. He sanctifies these struggles, believing them to bring him closer to God and the actualization of God’s will. We can find value simply in the presence (or the truth) of his narrative alone, its celebration of determination and agency in the face of oppression, “for the falling away of Truth is repudiation of self, for Truth is connatural; for if Truth is connatural, the falling away of truth is repudiation of the connatural” (Avvakum 37). It is clear from Avvakum’s narrative that ‘Truth’ is, contextually, better defined as the belief in God. However, Avvakum’s experience itself is a celebration of personal volition (in his narrative, an extension of God’s volition) and the triumph of truth’s survival through the dissemination of the narrative. “The falling away of Truth," or the destruction of personal narratives through which the truth survives, is a rejection of the individual self and the national self—to tell only the partial story is to permit falsehoods through which disunity arises.
The preservation of the truth, of the ‘whole’ is similarly confirmed by Dostoevsky in Notes from a Dead House. The narrative is powerful in its commitment to returning the humanity to inmates of a labor camp by telling their stories—not only the stories of their crimes, but of their convictions, personalities, and quirks. The experience of prison is constructed not by the physical barriers it has, but by the construction of a new world with unique social customs and dynamics—the creation of a community of sorts.
The formation of community in prison is explored by Vera Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which recounts her unending loyalty to her comrades and their role in her mental survival. Life still continues inside of the cage, as is so eloquently paralleled by Figner with the flourishing of the prison garden, which her peers have kept with the utmost care. Ginzburg’s narrative Journey into the Whirlwind remembers the writing of Vera Figner, which provides her with immense comfort in a terrifying situation. Similarly, she is motivated by an intense desire to survive and write, to “remember all these things in the hope of recounting them to honest people and true Communists, such as I was sure would listen to me one day” (417), to sustain the tradition of Russian prison narratives as a vessel through which determination can inspire change in the face of oppressive forces. In all of these cases, Russian prison literature rebels against the forces which constrict its authors to create a channel of narratives that pass down values of strength and determination to future activists.
While these narratives provide this very thing for activists, they are shunned by the history of the powerful for the same reason. Arendt’s discussion of historiography primarily affirms Foucault’s conception of its role as the force which constricts; manipulated by the powerful, history becomes a medium of propaganda dissemination by totalitarian regimes. The sanctity of history and the madness of the mass dissolve “the difference between truth and falsehood…[which] become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition” (Arendt 333). Historiography is beholden to its creator, who often holds the power to distort it. The audience for this distortion is the mass. The role of the mass is critical in the acceptance of historical revisionism for the sake of totalitarian movements—once the mob begins to police itself, totalitarianism is able to flourish, born from the dissemination of a mangled history that engrains itself in the mass. The construction of history must be understood to be two sided: the construction of the past and the construction of the present in the future. The movement, aided by the dissemination of propaganda and the fury of the mass, desired itself “access to history even at the price of destruction” (Arendt 332). Historiography only allows memorialization for those events which demand it.
The right to memorialization, the value placed of marginalized narratives—these issues cannot be relegated to the past because of their role in the formation of history, the discourse of the past. They are still inherently connected to the present day, the foundation of a pernicious historiography which seeks only to uplift the powerful. Never Remember by Masha Gessen expresses the power inherent in the construction of history by telling of the difficulty undertaken in the construction of physical history—a memorial. Russia’s conception of the atrocities committed by the USSR is confused because the Terror did not draw distinctions—‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ are unidentifiable when a perpetrator, a day later, may himself become the victim. When the line between oppressor and oppressed blurs, memory is obfuscated, and the event is rendered ahistorical—outside of time. No one is to blame because there were no oppressors and no victims. Gessen writes, “terror connotes an active perpetrator: the criminal state itself. Repressions seem to have happened of their own accord, like a force of nature that swept through, leaving a ravaged country in its wake” (Gessen 52). Gessen describes the structural obfuscation of history as ‘cacophony’: “The cacophony creates a sense of moral neutrality. There is no story-of an occupation, an Other, a mistake-because there can be no such story. But what is history without a story?” (Gessen 107). Because history is a human invention, history itself is utterly human: it is the story. The construction of actual history necessitates the subjectivity narratives provide.
The antidote to this societal problem is already in existence—one need not look further than the narratives which have already been, and which continue to be written, detailing the history of marginalized experience. These narratives post a threat to “the more general, more fluid, but also more determinant history… a whole domain of knowledge, a whole type of power” (Foucault 185). General history, objective history—this is the history we revere. That acclaim forms the basis of the determinism of which Foucault writes. The creation and propagation of history beyond the most basic empirical claims that does not identify itself as subjective is the element responsible for societal divides. Reading prison literature reminds us of the fullness of history that we lack when room is not made for the ‘Other’ which tells itself not through statistics and treaties, but through personhood and subjectivity.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace, 1985.
Avvakum, Archpriest. Archpriest Avvakum: The Life Written by Himself. Michigan Slavic Publications, University of Michigan, 1979.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 2015.
Dovlatov, Sergei. The Zone. Alma Classics, 2013.
Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Northern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1979.
Gessen, Masha, and Misha Friedman. Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia. Columbia Global Reports, 2018.
Ginzburg, Evgenia Semenovna. Journey into the Whirlwind. Harcourt, Brace, 1967.
