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Smykovskaya Tatyana E.,
Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor,
Professor of the Russian Language and Literature Department
Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University
e-mail: tarkatova@yahoo.com
This article is devoted to a unique artistic phenomenon, literary mystification, which emerged in the Gulag in 1940s. In 1943, two prisoners in the Svobodlag camp, Iakov Kharon and Yurii Veinert, invented a sixteenth-century French poet whom they called Guillaume du Ventre. The prisoners not only designed a biography for this nonexistent figure but also composed one hundred sonnets that he had supposedly penned. They brought out the first forty sonnets in a handwritten collection of verse, using engineering blueprints instead of paper. Forty years later Aleksei Simonov, a close friend of the Kharon family, published a book entitled The Sinister Songs of Guillaume du Ventre (1989). It included the mythical lyrical poet’s productions as well as a detailed commentary by one of his inventors. The article analyzes the sonnets as a peculiar part of the “secret literature” of the Gulag, whose organizing principle was Aesopian poetics. The methods and tropes of this literature aim at actualizing the eternal themes and images of world culture (freedom, love, artistic creativity), which even under the unbearable conditions of prison life function as reminders of humanity’s highest calling.
Keywords: Guillaume du Ventre, Gulag, mystification, sonnet, “secret literature”, Aesopian poetcics
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