Hope and protest on the peripheries: the voices and meanings of children in gulag narratives

Recent scholarship on Gulag narratives challenges the traditional focus on survivors by highlighting marginalized voices, including children who rarely appear or testify due to death or repression. This study examines how children are represented in texts by survivors Varlam Shalamov, Georgii Demidov, Hava Volovich, and Eugenia Ginzburg, alongside counterpoints from Ginzburg’s children: Vasilii Aksenov’s novel The Burn and Antonina Aksenova’s oral history interview. These works explore spatial tensions between survivor narratives and the voices of children. Representations of children serve to project loss, protest the camp system, and are placed on the peripheries of camp and camp narratives.