engleski

The Vow to Testify: On the Gulag and Intertextual Economy (Karlo Štajner, Varlam Shalamov, Danilo Kiš)

Departing from “aesthetics of unrepresentability” of testimonial literature and implied “belatedness and collapse of witnessing” (G. Agamben, Sh. Felman, D. Laub), the paper engages in economic foundations of literature by offering possible interpretation of symbolical meanings of economic metaphors in Štajner’s memoirs Seven Thousand Days in Siberia and Shalamov’s story Lend-Lease, and in illuminating different aspects of intercultural exchange between Štajner’s memoirs and Kiš’s “pseudo-factual” fiction A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. What is testimony and can it be – considering the nature of the one who testifies and the language in which he testifies – “valid, ” “valuable, ” “useful, ” to use the language of economy? Can we think about Kiš’s literary appropriation of Štajner’s memoirs as an outlet for reclaiming the voice not only of Štajner, but also of Kiš’s father, who perished in Auschwitz? What are the uses of economic hypothesis in literary scholarship?

economy, GULAG, witness, testimony, Štajner, Shalamov, Kiš, (post)memory

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