Collects the writings of a diverse group of people who survived imprisonment in the Gulag, recounting their experiences and relationships, and offering insight into the psychological aspects of life in the camps.

Comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors' memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives -- arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation -- Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into prisoners' experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written.

In July 2003 young Englishman Tig Hague was on a routine business trip to Moscow when he was arrested at the airport. Within hours he was accused of a major crime. Next, he was tried and transported hundreds of miles to the remote, forsaken wastes of Mordovia.And prison camp Zone 22. Sentenced to spend the next four years there, every day was a struggle against disease, freezing temperatures, malnutrition, the unpredictable, sometimes terrifying behaviour of the camp guards and his fellow prisoners.But, most of all, it was a fight to ensure his own psychological survival. Only the thought of his girlfriend Lucy, fighting Russia's corrupt and labyrinthine legal system, kept Tig sane - and gave him a reason to see each day to its end. The English Prisoner is an extraordinary story of endurance, as one man - plucked from his normal, everyday life - is forced to reach deep inside himself to survive life in one of the bleakest outposts in the world: Russia's vast and unforgiving 'forgotten zone'.

An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself. "Beautiful and original...a resonant and symbolical story of nine doomed men who dream of an earthly paradise as the world winds down around them." —Newsweek

Can't figure it out." Ultimately Topolski escapes into Iran to join the Polish 2nd Corps which is being formed there to fight the Germans . . . but that's another story.

When Tig hague kissed goodbye to his girlfriend Lucy, he was already thinking of his return. The couple were going house-hunting, looking for their first home together. Tig was only going to be away for a few days on a routine business trip - the annual highlight of an otherwise unglamourous job working on the Russian desk of a London bank. But just hours later something went wrong at Moscow airport. Very wrong. Misunderstanding a request from customs for a backhander to speed his progress into the country, Tig was pulled to one side to have his bag searched. A deliberate inconvenience, he thought. But Tig's world was about to implode with dizzying, terrifying speed. A tiny lump of hashish, nothing more than detritus from a recent stag weekend, was discovered in the pocket of an old pair of jeans. Too small to warrant anything more than a slapped wrist back home, he hadn't even known it was there. Tig was in Moscow's notorious Piet Central jail by nightfall - and that was just a stepping stone on his way to prison camp Zone 22 in the bleak, remote wastes of Mordovia. He wouldn't be returning home for years. Zone 22is the shocking story of a young Englishman's struggle to survive the brutal, corrupt, almost medieval conditions of a prison camp in Putin's Russia - a gripping contemporary story in the tradition of Papillionand Midnight Express.