Writing Resistance – the blog

Welcome to the Writing Resistance blog. I’ll use this to highlight material on Shlissel´burg Fortress and its revolutionary inmates as I add it to the website. It will also be a space for me to discuss questions I didn’t have room for in the book – including some translation issues – and to develop new ideas.

At present there are four texts by prisoners on the site, all in Russian: Petr Polivanov’s ‘Otryvki iz pisem byvshevgo shlissel’burzhtsa‘; two texts by Mikhail Popov, ‘Mechti o svobode‘ and ‘K biografiiu Ippolita Myshkina‘; and Shlissel’burzhets L. F. Ianovich, which includes Janavičius’s letters from exile in Srednekolymsk and details of his trial as well as his unfinished memoir. Although my intention generally is to include images from the books I upload, in the case of Janavičius’s memoir I have not done so, as the image quality of the Google books copy is very poor. I have however included captions to indicate where in the text the images are placed and their subject matter. Not only is the digital copy of this book rather low quality, but the typesetting of the original text was among the worst I have ever encountered. I have rectified as many errors as I found, but have no doubt missed some. Corrections are welcome.