Abstract

Narrative history and narrative fiction can be thought of as opposite ends of a single theoretical continuum. Much of the literature on Stalin's purges and the rise of the Soviet gulag system, however, seems to be something more than fiction, yet less than strict historiography. There are five criteria which ease the difficulty in determining whether a given work is history or fiction: the qualitative degrees of truth, the scope of the work, the purpose of the work, the relationship of the author to his or her subject, and the relationship of the reader to the narrative. In some cases the nature of historical events combines with the peculiar capabilities of narrative description to blur the distinction between reality and invention, and places constraints upon the historian's choice of narrative genre. Two hybrids are used as exemplars of works that are both historical and fictive: Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Danilo Kis's A Tomb for Boris Davidovich