Pogulaginė sąmonė ir atžangos dialektika

Abstract

The 20th century is the Age of Darkness ruled by big propaganda, mass revolts, and totalitarian regimes. Many of these sprouted from the absolute ideals of the Enlightenment which in time provided the conditions for a Darkening and a Regression. Eastern Europe and Lithuania will remember this period as the great sunset of civilization marked by civil and class wars, the Holodomor, the Nazi concentration camps, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the deportations and exile, the collective farms and their labor days. In the midst of this process of de-civilization the article focuses on the Gulag and post-Gulag consciousness as it is reflected in human memory, literature, and film. The injuries that de-civilization and its proper part, the Gulag, inflicted on human thinking and imagining, and the consequences of these injuries on our own lives, are analyzed in terms of a dialectic of regression. This dialectic is opposed to a dialectic of progress or development and rather than showing phases of advancement it shows stages of deterioration. It is a thesis of this article that the dialectic of regression is not symmetrical to progress and does not repeat the same stages, only reversing direction, but displays a logic of its own and features peculiarly distinctive circles of Hell.