| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Leona Toker. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2000. Pp. xv, 333. $39.95.
Leona Toker has embarked upon an ambitious project in terms of both the volume of literature that she covers and the theoretical questions that she poses. Her purpose in giving us this interpretive reading of the Gulag literature is to establish it as a distinctive literary genre and to identify the distinguishing features of this genre. In the process of realizing her aims, she poses important questions about the relationship between fiction and ethics and between artistic and ethical truth, about the nature of testimony and the relationship between individual experience and collective suffering, and about the uncomfortable role of the reader as both a victim and perpetrator of crime.	1
Her introductory chapter has a distinctively ethical tone. She writes: "Opting for a study of atrocities is not a reason for self-congratulation, yet it is an ethically positive act, if only because the victims usually want the world at large to know of their plight" (p. 2). In the context of discussing the overreliance on statistics, she makes the point that for a victim to drop out of statistics altogether is far worse than the transmogrification of personal experience into statistics.	. . .

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