Representations of the Gulag in the Romanian Detention Memoirs
Representations of the Gulag in the Romanian Detention Memoirs

Summary/Abstract: The present study is an introduction to the Romanian detention memoirs (a body of works that totals over 100 published volumes published during the next 15 years ensuing the demise of the communist regime in Romania). This essay seeks to contribute a minimal and useful classification of the attempts at testamentary records coming out since 1990. It is premised on the assumption that, if the western reader is well acquainted with this type of literature, the Eastern European reader in general and the Romanian reader in particular, had to catch up with an ethical-moral delay that can be explained politically. The thrust of my argument here is that post-1989, after the fall of communism, readers in Romania experienced an abrupt turn from the hypocritical literature to the literature of infernal truth.

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