The Voice from Gulag – Portraits of Exiled Women in Nutsa Ghoghoberidze’s Short Prose

Abstract

The bloody history of the “Red Terror,” particularly the Great Purge of 1937, was marked by exceptional brutality in Georgia, yet many victims still remain unnamed, especially women. Foreign “Gulag literature” has largely preserved male voices and perspectives, while much of the documentary and artistic material about the camps in Georgia exists thanks to female exiles and women writers. This article examines Waltz on Petschora, a collection of short stories by Nutsa Ghoghoberidze, the first Georgian female film director and the author of a series of prose portraits of exiled women. Her stories represent an attempt to make these silenced voices heard. Ghoghoberidze herself spent ten years in a Gulag camp in the far north, arrested as the wife of an “enemy of the state.” Waltz on Petschora, consisting of six short stories, strives to restore the missing fragments of history and preserve the memory of the women who vanished from the national narrative. It stands as both a form of exposure of the totalitarian regime and a uniquely Georgian counterpart to works such as “The Gulag Archipelago” and “Kolyma Stories” – told from a woman’s perspective.