The diary of a gulag prison guard
Chistiakov, Ivan2017
Book
Ivan Chistyakov was sent to the Gulag in 1937, where he worked at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp for over a year. Life at the Gulag was anathema to Chistyakov, a cultured Muscovite with a nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, and an amateur painter and poet. He recorded its horrors with an unmatchable immediacy, documenting a world where petty rivalries put lives at risk, prisoners hacked off their fingers to bet in card games, railway sleepers were burned for firewood and Siberian winds froze the lather on the soap. From his stumbling poetic musings on the bitter landscape to his matter-of-fact grumbles about his stove, from accounts of the conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is unique a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia.
Main title:
The diary of a gulag prison guard / Ivan Chistayakov ; with an introduction and notes by Irina Shcherbakova ; translated from the Russian by Arch Tait.
Author:
Chistiakov, Ivan, authorShcherbakova, I. I. (Irina I.), writer of supplementary textual contentTait, A. L., translator
Edition:
Paperback edition.
Imprint:
London : Granta, 2017.©2016.
Collation:
xxxiv, 250 pages : illustrations, facsimiles ; 20 cm.
Notes:
Originally published in Russian: Moscow : Corpus Publishers, 2014. First published in English: Great Britain : Granta, 2016.Includes bibliographical references.Translated from Russian.
ISBN:
9781783782574 (paperback)9781783782581 (ebook)
Dewey class:
365.45095709043365.45
Language:
EnglishRussian
Subject:
BRN:
450862