Mary Page talks with Andrea Gullotta, lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow. Andrea is an expert on the history of the Gulag and president of Memorial Italia (http://www.memorialitalia.it/) – an Italian NGO inspired by, but not affiliated to, the International Memorial Society in Moscow. He has closely followed developments around Memorial in Moscow and also Yury Dmitriev, formerly head of the branch of Memorial in Karelia, currently serving 15 years in prison on charges of making pornographic images of his foster daughter that his colleagues and many observers consider to be baseless and politically motivated to discredit his work as a historian of the Gulag. He is the author of Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki 1923-1930: The Paris of the Northern Concentration Camps (Cambridge: Legenda, 2018), creator of the virtual exhibition, Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag (The Hunterian), and editor in chief of AvtobiografiЯ. Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture (http://www.avtobiografija.com). His latest writing includes the article ‘”I Feel, I Know, I Am Immortal”: Literary Works in the Newspapers of Soviet Prisons and Camps in the 1920s’, published in the journal Russian Literature and a contribution to The Gulag in Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, edited by F. Heffermehl and I. Karlsohn entitled ‘More than a Cat: Reflections on Shalamov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s Writings through the Perspective of Trauma Studies.’ The video can be viewed below or on our YouTube channel.
