Gundė Daukšytė

Transcultural dynamics in memory literature of Japanese- and Lithuanian-speaking prisoners of war and political prisoners in the Soviet Union.

Between 1940 and 1958, about 600,000 Japanese and 332,000 Lithuanians were arrested and transported to forced labor camps and exile settlements across the Soviet Union. Despite different circumstances of arrest, many were sent to the same large industrial camp complexes where they experienced the same harsh material conditions. Since 1948 in Japan and 1961 in the Lithuanian diaspora, camp survivors have been publishing memoirs about their experiences. This has produced large bodies of testimonial literature in both languages—about 2,000 in Japanese (estimated in 1994) and about 500 in Lithuanian (estimated in 2003). In fact, there are descriptions of encounters between Japanese and Lithuanians in memoirs in both languages. However, despite surfacing repeatedly in memoirs in many languages, the vast cultural diversity in the enclosed space of the camps remains an underexplored aspect of the Soviet camp system.

The goal of this project is to analyze Japanese, Lithuanian, and English-translated Soviet camp memoirs focusing on how they represent diversity and displacement. These two conditions were conducive to transcultural dynamics in the camps which emerge in memoirs as descriptions of contact, exchange, (mal)adaptation, and conflict. I aim to demonstrate that analyzing Soviet camp memoirs primarily in nationally-bound contexts has overlooked the self-representations of identity questioning, alienation among compatriots, and commonality of experience across nationalities. By taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines history, memory, and literary studies this project will shed new light on the study of Soviet camp memory by shifting the focus from how memory pertains to national identity to how memory of entangled experiences can help us rethink nationally-bound histories and identities.