Ramaz Kobidze – “From Prison to Prison”- about the "Stalinist Cohort"

Documentary prose with a direct description of the author's contemporaneous epoch-making problems, historical-political events or the development of public thought is always the subject of the reader's interest. Although for works of the documentary genre, to some extent, the subjectivism of the narrator is not foreign, at least its main dignity is the real beginnings.The book of memoirs "From Prison to Prison" by Ramaz Kobidze, one of the victims of the "Stalinist cohort" is very interesting.The author of the book pays special attention to the necessity of documentary prose before recollection. He considered it obligatory not only for writers, but also for state figures, to keep the last few years for the production of documentary-type works, namely memoirs. In his view, if a statesman did not leave a documentary-type work to his descendants, it would always be a cause of unrest, strife, and sometimes even civil war.From the title, a very interesting documentary based on Ramaz Kobidze's "From Prison to Prison" memoirs prepares the reader to get acquainted with and understand the work of the "Stalinist cohort", the victim of which was the author of the work as a member of the "Secret Anti-Soviet Youth Organization".In addition to the specific facts of political persecution in the Book of Memoirs, which not infrequently took place not only in the life of the writer, but also in the lives of his friends and relatives, they also provide you with inspiring images of cruelty and disorder typical of the Stalinist regime.Ramaz Kobidze's book of memoirs "From Prison to Prison" is an extremely interesting source for studying not a single important event of Soviet existence. It contains a number of cases of ideological pressure typical of the Stalinist regime, which zombified a large part of the intellectual community at the time, made them worthy representatives of the "Stalinist cohort." And they destroyed a large part of the Georgian intelligentsia, but the "Soviet generation intelligentsia" was trained, raised and handed over the future of the country.

Coercion and Coerciveness in the Politics of Cold-War Ukraine and Taiwan

The present study is devoted to an examination of the prison memoirs by the Ukrainian writer, Mykhaylo Osadchy (1936–1994) and the Taiwanese writer Tsai Tehpen (b. 1925) from the perspective of coercion. Osadchy was a member of the Sixtiers, a group of young Ukrainian intellectuals who brought about cultural renaissance in post-Stalin Ukraine. Their writings marked a strong reaction against Moscow’s policy of great-power chauvinism at the onset of the regime change that marked the end of Khrushchev’s liberalizing campaign. Osadchy was one of the victims of the subsequent wave of arrests of dissidents in the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, in 1965. His memoir, Cataract (1971) is a powerfully evocative response to trumped-up charges of subversion, anti-Soviet agitation and bourgeois nationalism, and a riveting description of life in a Mordovian labor camp, a work that posed a strong attack on official Soviet culture.

‘Close confinement tells very much upon a man’: Prison Memoirs, Insanity and the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Prison

This article explores prisoners’ observations of mental illness in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British prisons, recorded in memoirs published following their release. The discipline of separate confinement was lauded for its potential to improve prisoners’ minds, inducing reflection and reform, when it was introduced in the 1840s, but in practice led to high levels of mental breakdown. In order to maintain the integrity of the prison system, the prison authorities played down incidences of insanity, while prison chaplains lauded the beneficent influence of cellular isolation. In contrast, as this article demonstrates, prisoners’ memoirs offer insights into the prevalence of mental illness in prison, and its poor management, as well as inmates’ efforts to manage mental distress. As the prison system became more closed, uniform and penal after the 1860s, the volume of such publications increased. Oscar Wilde’s evocative prison writings have attracted considerable attention, but he was only one of many prison authors criticizing the penal system and decrying the damage it inflicted on the mind. Exploration of prison memoirs, it is argued, enhances our understanding of experiences of mental disorder in the underexplored context of the prison, highlighting the prisoners’ voice, agency and advocacy of reform.

After the ‘Years of Lead’ in Morocco: Performing the Memory

During the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ in Morocco (1956–1999), state-sponsored violence was embedded not only in assaults on the bodies of victims, but also in their affective and psychological well-being. This occurred to such an extent that many attempts at the narrativization of violence via testimonials and prison memoirs fail to convey the trauma experienced in Moroccan secret prisons. In the present article Khalid Amine is concerned with the fragility of testimony as a performative act, in which the obligation of voicing pain and trauma is in tension with the impossibility of its telling. After the hearing sessions organized by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) in 2004, another narrative turn has emerged in Moroccan theatre and in other artistic forms whereby reenactments of prison memoirs, testimonials, and other registers of repressed personal archives are employed onstage as a means of breaching the walls between the personal and political. Khalid Amine is Professor of Performance Studies, Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco. He is co-author with Marvin Carlson of The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (2012).