Entre a atemporalidade e as descontinuidades do cárcere: representação e crítica social em Recordações da casa dos mortos e A pequena prisão

Abstract

The proposed study has as main objective to carry out a social criticism of a total institution, taking as a research field a comparative study between two literary works, written at different times and countries, that deal with the experience in the prison scope. Such analysis is proposed to demonstrate the incarcerations and discontinuities of the prison, from the 19th century to the 21st century. The works chosen for the research are Memoirs from the House of the Dead, published in Russia in 1862, as a novel, written by Fiódor Dostoiévski, and The Small Prison, published in 2017 in Brazil, as a testimonial report, written by Igor Mendes. From this analysis, it is possible to demonstrate the importance of the works, at literary, historical and social levels, and to show how their reading can cause a social criticism about the prison. For this, a study of the literary, historical and social aspects of the works is done, concomitantly with the issues of penalization and imprisonment in the times when the narratives took place. As the works are placed in different genres, it is necessary to discuss the peculiarities of each of the categories - novel and testimonial report, the historical changes in the valuation of literary categorizations, and about the idea of truth brought in the writings, owing to the different linguistic elements used by each genre. After these discussions, a comparative analysis is perform between the works studied, striving for the search about the similarities and discontinuities of the prison presented in the stories, as both are told from the prison space and show the difficulties and singularities of institutional imprisonment, allowing us to observe since structural issues, which do not seem to change in time and space, such as discontinuities, alterations, presented in the two stories, for example, of changes in punitive instruments. In view of the interdisciplinary nature of the theme, theoreticians of literature, history, philosophy and psychoanalysis were used.