Ishihara Yoshirō
Ishihara Yoshirō
“My Best Self Did Not Return”
Chapter 5 considers a third group: long-term internees who were designated “war criminals”—those convicted of “counterrevolutionary” offenses against Soviet law and usually sentenced to prison terms of twenty-five years. Highly disparate in makeup, they ranged from senior officers and intelligence operatives to low-level Russian-language experts and disgraced “democratic movement” activists. The focus is on Ishihara Yoshirō, a poet and analyst of the gulag, whose experience both recapitulates that of the first two groups of returnees, but extends far beyond it. As a “twenty-five-year man,” it is argued, Ishihara was more liminal, more estranged; he wrote amid a psychological tension and with concerns that decisively marked him off from those who had returned earlier.
Keywords: Ishihara Yoshirō, poetry, Soviet law, gulag, counterrevolution
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