Strange Planet: Camp Stories (Chudnaya planeta. Lagernye rasskazy)

The book of Georgy Georgievich Demidov (1908-1987) includes selected stories about the lives of prisoners in the GULAG. Demidov himself was a prisoner of the Kolyma camps: in 1938, the young physicist was arrested and spent fourteen years in Kolyma. Georgy Demidov was an outstanding physicist, a student of Lev Landau. From the late 1950s, after his release, he began writing stories about repression and camp life in Kolyma, which gradually started to circulate in samizdat. The author's works only reached a wider audience in the 2000s.

Demidov is referred to as a writer of the Tolstoyan school: he is meticulous and precise, and his texts can be perceived as historical sources. They allow for the study of not only camp life and customs but also the feelings and emotions of people enduring hell. At the same time, a distinctive feature of Demidov the writer is his ability to see the uplifting traits in any person.