Zajatcem ve své vlasti – Razgon Lev (2020)

The memoirs of L. E. Razgon titled Captive in His Own Country belong to the classics of so-called camp literature. The presented selection contains twelve stories, the central theme of which is the depiction of the atmosphere before arrest, time spent in prisons, transport, and life in the GULAG camps. The author masterfully intertwines the perspective of his own experience with the stories of specific individuals affected by mass arrests and terror, as well as with the stories of those who actively participated in this state-organized machinery. Reflections on the mechanisms of power, oppression, and the elimination of victims can be compared to the works of the classics of the genre – A. I. Solzhenitsyn and V. Shalamov. The Russian writer and human rights defender Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon (1908–1999) was arrested by Soviet authorities in April 1938 and two months later was sentenced to five years of corrective labor. He was released in 1943, but soon came the second wave of arrests: in 1950 he was imprisoned again, this time for 'anti-Soviet agitation' with a ten-year sentence. After an early release in 1955, he returned to work as an editor and author of children's books. His first autobiographical stories with camp themes began to be published only in the late 1980s. After the social thaw in the USSR, he politically...