This talk will be about "Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag", a virtual exhibition on the cultural resistance by the prisoners of the Solovki Prison Camp. The exhibition is hosted on the website of The Hunterian museum to mark the centenary of the October Revolution by focussing on the traumatic events that came as a long-term result of it. After a brief introduction on the exhibition,  Andrea Gullotta will speak about the challenges of exhibiting the Gulag. He will then analyse some study cases, devoting particular attention to the way he decided to exhibit the lives and cultural activities of the prisoners of the camp who would then be sent to exile, thus connecting the talk to the theme of the 101st km.

Andrea Gullotta is lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow. He has also worked for the University of Palermo, the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the University of Padua, where he obtained his Ph.D. He is the author of the monograph Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki 1923-1930. The Paris of the Northern Concentration Camps (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017) and the co-editor of the journal "AvtobiografiЯ", which deals with life-writing and the representation of the self in Russian culture. He is also the curator of the virtual exhibition "Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag", hosted by The Hunterian.

This is a Pushkin Club event and all are welcome.