Fictional History and Historical Fiction: Solzhenitsyn and Kis as Exemplars

Abstract

Even a modest familiarity with the literature on Stalin's purges and the rise of the Soviet gulag system is sufficient to convince the reader that it is generally characterized by a rather confusing ambiguity of genre. For instance, many of the memoirs seem so historical, somehow, that they tend to be regarded as something like a substitute for more proper academic historiography.1 Indeed, it is not uncommon to see even works of outright fiction cited as though they were historical accounts.2 Conversely, until the recent rise in serious historiography on the topic, even the best-regarded histories were based largely upon these eyewitness memoirs, and so displayed considerably impressionistic characteristics.3 In short, much of the literature on this subject, whether belles-lettres, personal memoirs, or more or less scholarly secondary accounts, possesses a curious hybrid quality, seeming to be something more than fiction, yet something less than strict historiography. For this reason, the topic offers a useful context in which to consider on a theoretical level the question of just what it is that distinguishes narrative historiography, on the one hand, from narrative fiction which deals with an historical topic, on the other. In the following, I shall present some general observations on this question, with specific reference to two exemplars of this kind of hybrid: Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and Danilo Kig's A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.4