Fragmented Lives – Chronicles of the Gulag (Václav Havel) - Softcover

Rossi, Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8024637006 ISBN 13: 9788024637006

Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2019

Synopsis

In Fragmented Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life--from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil servants, and party apparatchiks. Featuring Rossi's original illustrations and written in a tone as sharp and dry as that of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, Rossi's vignettes are also filled with surprising humor. A former agent in the Spanish Civil War and a lifelong Communist, Rossi never considered himself a victim. Instead, in the manner of Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and Margaret Buber-Neumann, he sought to share and transmute his experience within the living hell of the Gulag. In so doing, he gives voice to the inmates whose lives were shattered by one of the most corrupt and repressive regimes of the twentieth century. An impassioned reminder to always question one's beliefs, to have the courage to give up one's illusions at the risk of one's life, Fragments of Life lays bare, with acute observations and biting wit, the falsity of the Soviet utopia that transformed Rossi's home into a "huge Potemkin village, a farcical sham dissimulating oceans of mud and blood."

About this title

About the Author

A liaison agent during the Spanish Civil War, French-Polish author Jacques Rossi (1909-2004) was imprisoned in the Gulag from 1937 to 1956. He is the author of a comprehensive and monumental dictionary on the Soviet Union, The Gulag Handbook. Marie-Cecile Antonelli-Speed is a translator, linguistics student, and friend of Jacques Rossi.

Edition details

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8024637006
• ISBN 13: 9788024637006
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160