Emotional experiences of the young man prisoner of OGPU (Krasnodar, 1928)

Experience of the interdisciplinary analysis of individual emotions of the young man who got to an extreme situation in the late 1920s is presented in article. This paper is based on the autobiographical narratives of Georgy Sindarovsky, who wrote it being in a solitary confinement of OGPU. The article is composed in accordance with the theoretical framework of the cultural history of emotions. Author's methodological approach combines Carroll Izard's concept about difficult emotional complexes in critical life situations with research “optics” of cultural history of emotions. The prisoner's emotional range, his features of emotional coding and the nature of the emotional suffering are particularly explored in the article. Sindarovsky's texts are analyzed in the methodological framework of the interpretative approach. The employment of the data coding technique by A. Strauss makes it possible to identify the "axial" category of "loneliness" that enters both texts. The work contains two kinds of Sindarovsky's feelings: emotionally colored autobiographical reminiscences on one side and emotional experiences of prison reality "here and now" on the other. According to Sindarovsky's narratives, his emotions were due to inner intentions of his personality and significant to him external circumstances. At the same time, it remains unclear whether his melancholic reminiscences were due to context of the single cell of the OGPU or he quite authentically reconstructed the set of real experiences during the pre-war period. Sindarovsky appears as sensitive nature, the person with the high level of emotional competence, the native of educated estate who was brought up on “public images of sentiment” (Clifford Geertz).