"A Mind Purified by Suffering": Evgenia Ginzburg’s "Whirlwind" Memoirs 9798887191713

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“A MIND PURIFIED BY SUFFERING” EVGENIA GINZBURG’S “WHIRLWIND” MEMOIRS

The Real Twentieth Century

Series Editor: Thomas Seifrid (University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

Editorial Board: Stephen Blackwell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Jonathan Bolton (Harvard University) Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern University) Nancy Condee (Pittsburgh University) Caryl Emerson (Princeton University) Robert English (University of Southern California) Beth Holmgren (Duke University) Mikhail Iampolskii (New York University) Galin Tihanov (Manchester University) Ronald Vroon (University of California, Los Angeles) Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya (Florida State University)

“A MIND PURIFIED BY SUFFERING” EVGENIA GINZBURG’S “WHIRLWIND” MEMOIRS E d ited by O l g a M . Co o ke

BOSTON 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cooke, Olga Muller, editor. Title: “A mind purified by suffering”: Evgenia Ginzburg’s “Whirlwind” memoirs / edited by Olga M. Cooke. Other titles: Real twentieth century. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2023. | Series: Real twentieth century | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023001385 (print) | LCCN 2023001386 (ebook) | ISBN 9798887191706 (hardback) | ISBN 9798887191713 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9798887191720 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ginzburg, Evgen͡iia. Krutoĭ marshrut. | Political prisoners’ writings, Russian. | Women political prisoners--Soviet Union-Biography. | Internment camps--Soviet Union. | Political atrocities--Soviet Union. | Autobiographical memory--Soviet Union. Classification: LCC DK268.G47 M56 2023 (print) | LCC DK268.G47 (ebook) | DDC 365/.45092--dc23/eng/20230126 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001385 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001386 Copyright © 2023 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 9798887191706 (hardback) ISBN 9798887191713 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9798887191720 (epub) Book design by Kryon Publishing Services Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Dedicated to the Memory of Vasily Aksenov

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword Barbara Heldt

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Introduction Olga M. Cooke

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Contributors

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1. A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg Dariusz Tołczyk

1

2. Mimetic Resistance in Evgenia Ginzburg’s Krutoi marshrut19 Natasha Kolchevska 3. A Communist Woman in the Gulag: Gender, Ideology, and Limit-Experience in Ginzburg and Budzyńska Anna Artwińska 4. My Son, My Self: Reevaluating a Culture of Vulnerability Kathryn Duda 5. Vasily Aksenov and Evgenia Ginzburg in Magadan: Reconceiving Soviet Authorship through the Gulag Experience Ann Komaromi 6. The Survival of the Sublime in a Universe of Malice: Testimonies by Evgenia Ginzburg and Other Gulag Writers Rimma Volynska

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  7. “Up to Their Old Tricks Again? Taking Mothers from Their Children?” Evgenia Ginzburg as a Mother in the Stalinist Gulag  Elaine MacKinnon

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  8. Ethics, Play, and Poetry in the Interval: Evgenia Ginzburg’s Struggle to Survive in the Whirlwind Oana Popescu-Sandu

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  9. A Winter Coat for Vasya: The Evgenia Ginzburg-Vasily Aksenov Correspondence (1948–1976) Rimma Volynska

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10. Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Krutoi marshrut149 Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova 11. Interview with Vasily Aksenov Rimma Volynska and Olga M. Cooke

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Photographs

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Index

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Acknowledgments This collection of work on Evgenia Ginzburg would never have been written without the generous support of her son, Vasily Aksenov. It first began in his apartment in Moscow in 2004 when, along with his wife, Maya, Aksenov generously devoted three or four hours to dialogue about his mother in honor of the centennial of her birth. As he recalls, the interview was so intense that the tape recorder couldn’t bear it and broke down!1 Yet, instead of turning us away, he graciously offered to spend four more hours with us the very next day so that we could rerecord the entire interview. This time we double-checked the device to make sure it worked. Aksenov’s unwavering love for his mother seeps into virtually every conversation. He is not shy about claiming that his reunion with her in Magadan, after a twelve-year separation, was the most important event in his life. The interview that is republished and translated here reveals a son who shares with his mother not only the legacy of her experience in the Gulag, but, even more importantly, her love of literature. As he attests, Evgenia Ginzburg was endowed with an extraordinary ability to transcend her century’s cruelty and injustice. Whether she attributed her survival to miracles or luck or the intercession of Dr. Anton Walter, her third husband, as Aksenov suggests, one thing is certain: her voice could never be extinguished. At one point in Aksenov’s memoir he recalls his surprise when a group of twelve-to-thirteen-year-old American students from a prep school sought to meet him to discuss his mother’s memoir: It turned out that Journey into the Whirlwind was their main reading text of the year. They wanted to show me photographs taken during a special exhibit organized on the contents of my mother’s book. One of the photographs showed a huge map of the Soviet Union with particular emphasis on the Magadan area, tracing the “route” described by my mother. I was overcome with emotion thinking about what would compel this group of upper middle-class privileged kids, what would compel them to take to heart the fate of a single Soviet woman and her family,

1 Vasily Aksenov, “Po motivam Ginzburg,” in “Evgenia Ginzburg: A Centennial Celebration 1904-2004,” ed. Olga M. Cooke, special issue, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 39, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 7.

Acknowledgments

caught in the midst of Stalinist repressions. Nonetheless, they burned with curiosity and genuine compassion. They wanted to hear all kinds of details from me: how did the camp look, who were the guards, how were survivors able to survive? It became quite clear to me that Evgenia Ginzburg became, perhaps for the rest of their lives, a “cult figure,” the very embodiment of the author and hero who experienced this “road to Calvary.”2 A project of this nature involves many individuals, and every writer in this volume feels a deep connection to their contribution. Many of our contributors have published essays and studies on Ginzburg in other venues; there was a strong wish, then, to see this project come to fruition. I thank everyone for participating in this project, especially Rimma Volynska, with whom I’ve shared various “Ginzburg projects” over the years, such as co-conducting the interview with Aksenov and co-editing Gulag Studies. A special note of thanks also goes to Dariusz Tolczyk, author of See No Evil and other works on the Gulag, and Natasha Kolchevska, author of many studies on Ginzburg. Both Dariusz and Natasha have offered encouragement over the years. A person to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude as the inspiration, not only for Ginzburg studies, but for women’s studies as a whole, is Barbara Heldt. Finally, the most generous of all my advocates is Brett Cooke, my husband, who has been the best source of support throughout this project, which began as a roundtable on Ginzburg’s memoirs, then a special issue, and finally found its culmination in this collection. Anna Artwinska’s article was originally published in Anna Artwinska and Anja Tippner, eds., Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement and Survival: Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). It is republished here with the permission of the publisher. I would also like to thank the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for granting me a Glasscock Publication Support Grant for this collection. I would like to give special thanks to all the devoted individuals at Academic Studies Press. Many years ago, Igor Nemirovsky agreed to publish the Ginzburg collection I’d long dreamed about, and it is to his credit that this volume is now a reality. Thomas Seifrid, editor of the series, The Real Twentieth Century, encouraged this project at every turn. The anonymous reviewers provided our contributors with great suggestions for improving their essays. Finally, a heartfelt note of thanks goes to Kate Yanduganova, Kira Nemirovsky, and Stuart Allen at ASP.

2 Ibid.

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Foreword Barbara Heldt

Landmark books written by women have not only deeply affected their own times, but have made their mark on the future of both their own countries and the larger world. I have only to mention two other examples: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852) and, in Evgenia Ginzburg’s own decade, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Only the Bible sold more copies worldwide during the nineteenth century than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel’s message of redemption through Christian love makes it perhaps unfashionable today, but one has only to reread the novel to see that the horrific treatment meted out to slaves by the entire chain of masters, traders, and other exploiters—and especially the breaking up of families otherwise living peacefully organized lives and then crowded into cabins on one plantation bound together in recognized family units—was an evil supported by the dark side of a creed which divided people by race. The separation of mothers and children is the most poignant of these realities in both Stowe and Ginzburg. In the present collection, one of those children—himself later becoming a famous writer—tells the story from his point of view. Rachel Carson’s research in environmental science documented the damage caused by pesticides, and their regulation has yet to catch up with her vision. Nor will we ever catch up with the damage caused by the evil that was— and which still persists today—the enslavement of humans by other humans. Genocide, most efficiently unleashed by the Nazis, is currently practiced by the nation that, more than any other, won the war against Nazism, even as it was pursuing its own policy of killing according to class or the rearrest, in alphabetical order, that Ginzburg experienced. Russia’s constructs of class and its punishment of disloyalty to state nationalism are again threatening the country’s neighbors and the world. War without reason has erupted once more. The weaponization of environmental degradation is proceeding apace in Ukraine. As for the entire world’s diminishing ability to breathe, there is little mention of human overpopulation as the chief cause, because the privileging of humanity is sacred to believers and unbelievers alike.

Foreword

Lest we think that these issues are not historically entwined, consider the fact that in 1929 Stalin joined up with Ford to cooperate on building and supervising a car plant in Gorky to produce Model T autos. Ford made thirty million dollars on the deal. In the 1930s, one hundred thousand cars a year were built in Gorky under a different name. Ignoring Ford’s argument that prosperity would follow individual ownership, the Soviets used the cars mainly for official transport. One of them picked up Ginzburg’s four-year-old son, Vasily Aksenov, to take him from his home to the orphanage where he spent the beginning of the long years separated from his mother—a “child of the arrested.” Life on a plantation in Kentucky and life in the Gulag—who can describe such horrors and to what human good can they be contrasted? In the writings of these great women—Stowe, Carson, Ginzburg—moments of human decency emerge, secular miracles. Reading their work and, in the case of some of my generation of Russianists, meeting the survivors and their adult children, has been an unexpected privilege. All the contributors to this volume are generously sharing their research on Eugenia Ginzburg to open the window further onto her life and work. The importance of Ginzburg, what makes her work stand out from other memoirs of the Soviet Gulag, lies in the fact that her recollections have been untempered by time or by any change in the character of the author after her ordeal. Her view undistorted by bitterness, she is able to see clearly, even in volume two when hope of publication in her lifetime seems impossible. Her youthful ideals remain untouched by any hope for the future of her country and, even more, from any loss of faith in its peculiarly hypocritical and lethal ideology. She understands, and remains true to, her own self. And, unexpectedly, in her work she was able to be a writer of the unwritable.

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Introduction Olga M. Cooke

The twentieth century is more homeless still, It’s gloomy life more terrible; (And even blacker and with vaster reach Than Lucifer’s wing). —Alexander Blok, “Retribution”3

Evgenia Ginzburg begins her memoir Journey into the Whirlwind with what is now considered a classic first sentence: “The year 1937 really began, for all intents and purposes, in 1934.”4 Emphasizing Sergei Kirov’s assassination, the calamitous event which anticipated the purges of 1936-1937, Ginzburg catapults the reader into what would become a two-year journey from the moment she was warned of impending arrest to the actual day on which it took place. When she was finally arrested on February 15, 1937, she was thirty-two, the wife of Pavel Aksenov—a senior member of the Kazan Regional Party Committee, soon to be arrested himself—the mother of two boys, stepmother of Aksenov’s daughter, and an active university lecturer and journalist. Ginzburg would eventually spend a total of eighteen years in the Gulag and exile. Ginzburg’s fate was to be born “under Lucifer’s wing” (pod sen′iu Lutsifera), the title (borrowed from a line in Alexander Blok’s poem “Retribution”) she chose for the first draft of the memoir she wrote between 1959 and 1962. While Ginzburg’s original title embraced the ravages of living under the diabolical shadow of Stalinism, Blok presciently captured the apocalyptic hue of a century

3 4

Aleksandr Blok, «Двадцатый век . . . Еще бездомней, / Еще страшнее жизни мгла / (Еще чернее и огромней / Тень Люциферова крыла,» “Vozmezdie,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1960), 305—translation mine. Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pub., 1995), 3. This is part one of Ginzburg’s memoirs. Part two is Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pub., 1981). Henceforth, citations will be followed by part and page numbers in parentheses, using these standard English translations of Ginzburg’s Krutoi marshrut (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1990). Both parts will also be called the “whirlwind” memoirs.

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more “terrible and gloomy” than the nineteenth. In her epilogue to the second volume of the “whirlwind” memoirs, Ginzburg explains that she never intended to publish her confessional first draft: “My own internal censor had not yet gone into action, since it did not occur to me that there could be any question of publication. I simply wrote because I had to” (2.418). Fearing a return to a period of arrests and more Gulags, Ginzburg burned Under Lucifer’s Wing. She wrote: “This first version, written in a state of anguished lucidity which occurs after the loss of people close to you, was full of my most secret thoughts, which I had entrusted to no one but now committed to paper” (2.418). Nevertheless, she embarked almost immediately on her “whirlwind” memoirs Krutoi marshrut.5 In 1962, she felt that the “longed-for, hoped-for time had now at last come when I could speak out, when my truthful testimony would help those who genuinely wanted to avoid a repetition of our nation’s shameful and dreadful past” (2.418-419). Emboldened by the Twenty-Second Party Congress and the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ginzburg submitted her manuscript to the two most popular “thick” journals Iunost′ (Youth) and Novyi mir (New world). Instead of using Blok’s subversive lines of poetry from “Retribution,” she chose a new epigraph from Evgeny Yevtushenko’s “Heirs of Stalin”: “And so I appeal to our government:/ double it, treble it, the guard on this grave.”6 Her “Chronicle of the Time of the Cult of the Personality,” the subtitle to her memoirs which did not appear in any of the translations, was meant as a direct indictment of Stalin.7 Although most of the editors of Novyi mir approved of her manuscript, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor in chief, rejected it. Roy Medvedev claims that the only time he argued with Tvardovsky about literature was when his friend rejected Ginzburg’s manuscript.8

5 The title Krutoi marshrut when translated literally also connotes a long and winding road, replete with pitfalls and abrupt turns. It can also be called a “Precipitous Itinerary.” Leona Toker proposed either “steep route” or “tough marching” as literal translations of the title, conveying a “steep march,” which leads “to a clarity of vision and a rejection of false innocence.” See her Return from the Archipelago (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 52. 6 «И я обращаюсь к правительству нашему с просьбой: / удвоить, утроить и у этой плиты караул.» Evgenia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1990) 4. 7 Although this subtitle does appear in the 1990 Russian edition of the memoir, it did not appear in the 1985 US edition, published by Possev. 8 Roy Medvedev, “Meetings and Conversations with Alexander Tvardovsky,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 4 (Fall 1989), 621. Medvedev also faulted Tvardovsky for reading only the first chapters of Ginzburg’s book. Ginzburg maintains that she interpreted Tvardovsky’s rejection as partially motivated by his antisemitism, but Medvedev denied

Introduction

It is at this point that her manuscript embarked on a five-year odyssey in samizdat. Medvedev admits to circulating the manuscript himself around Moscow and Leningrad. Applauding her testimony, as Ginzburg’s epilogue attests, were Ilya Ehrenburg, Konstantin Paustovsky, Veniamin Kaverin, Kornei Chukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Vera Panova, to mention a few. Tvardovsky, however, was adamantly critical of her manuscript. Ginzburg was told that he said the following: “She only noticed that there was something wrong when they started jailing Communists. She thought it quite natural when they were exterminating the Russian peasantry” (2.421). As for the rejection by Boris Polevoi, the editor in chief of Iunost′, she was told that the manuscript was forwarded for safekeeping in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, where a cover note read: “It might serve as material for the history of the Party” (2.422).9 While her first volume was serialized in the Russian émigré journal Grani (Facets) in 1967, Mondadori published it in Italy the same year. Translations into many languages soon followed. Ginzburg denied knowing about the samizdat copies circulating within Russia, as well as the copies smuggled abroad, upon which the foreign publications (the so-called tamizdat) depended.10 The author admitted that her internal censor, her impulse to curb the urge to indict, was motivated by the desire to publish in her native land. Thus, Ginzburg ends her first volume calling herself a “rank and file Communist,” one ever grateful that “the great Leninist truths have prevailed” (1.331).11 It took another twelve years for the sequel to appear posthumously. In 1988-1989 the Latvian journal Daugava serialized the memoirs in their entirety. And, finally, in 1989 the memoirs appeared in the Soviet Union for the first time in book form. Volume one traces the chaos of mass arrests, mock trials, solitary confinement, and long interrogations. These consisted of the dreaded “conveyor,” a form of assembly line torture in which the prisoner was forced to undergo days of grueling interrogations without sleep and food, with the interrogators working in shifts. All this was followed by the train journey through Siberia, transit camps, and arrival in Kolyma. Volume two covers the end of her “journey” in Kolyma. It

Tvardovsky was antisemitic, even though other “offended writers” made the same observation. Ibid., 622. 9 See also Kathryn Duda’s essay in this collection, which elaborates on the unpublished correspondence between Ginzburg and Polevoi. 10 Kathryn Duda discusses Ginzburg’s denials in her “My Son, My Self: Reevaluating a Culture of Vulnerability” in this volume. 11 In the English translation this quote appears in the “Epilogue.” In actuality, Ginzburg writes these words in her introduction.

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bears few traces of self-censorship, for not only does she indict her Party, she holds every Russian guilty, including herself, especially in the often cited chapter “Mea culpa,” about which more will be said below. Unlike the first volume, in which Ginzburg was willing, “for the sake of publication, [to] reach people at last” (2.419), volume two is a record of Ginzburg’s “spiritual evolution, the gradual transformation of a naïve young Communist idealist into someone who has tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (2.423). As Barbara Heldt observes, Ginzburg’s second volume is “fiercer, more revealing of intimate emotion, as the act of writing without hope of publication in her own country pushed each writer further into the region of the self.”12 Born in Moscow, December 20, 1904, Ginzburg was five in 1909 when she moved to Kazan with her parents, Solomon and Rebecca Ginzburg. She graduated from the University of Kazan with a degree in history. At first she worked as a teacher, then she became an assistant researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at the Eastern-Pedagogical Institute, as well as at Tatar Communist University. As a member of the Communist Party since 1932, Ginzburg taught history and Marxism-Leninism in Kazan colleges. At the same time, she also worked as a journalist for the local newspaper Red Tataria. The immediate Aksenov family consisted of five members: it included Alyosha, the son of Ginzburg’s first husband, Dmitry Fedorov; Vasily Aksenov, the future famous writer, the son of Ginzburg’s second husband, Pavel Aksenov; and Maya, Aksenov’s daughter from his first marriage. When Ginzburg sensed that she might be arrested, Pavel Aksenov consoled her by implying that the Party would have to put everyone in jail if it were to arrest a loyal Communist like herself. Family and friends suggested avenues of escape: her mother-in-law begged her to hide in the country and her friend, Dr. Dikovitsky, recommended they both go to live “with the raggle-taggle Gypsies” (1.23). Ginzburg would later regret that she didn’t heed their advice in her zealous efforts to prove her innocence: “I must honestly confess that my way of defending myself, by fervent protestations of innocence and loyalty [. . .] was the most absurd of any I could have chosen. Yes, Grandmother was right” (1.24). Ginzburg was charged and convicted for “counter-revolutionary Trotskyite terrorism,” and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.13 12 Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 153. The change in Ginzburg’s attitude and voice between volumes 1 and 2 is touched upon in several essays in this collection—those by Kathryn Duda, Anna Artwińska, and Ann Komaromi. 13 See Aleksei Litvin, “Dva dela Evgenii Ginzburg,” in Zapret na zhizn′ (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo, 1993), 75-86.

Introduction

Ironically, she wasn’t charged for anything she said, but for what she didn’t say: she had refused to denounce her friend and colleague, Professor Elvov, as a “purveyor of Trotskyite contraband” (1.9). From August 1937 to July 1939, Ginzburg was held in the famous Korovniki Prison in Yaroslavl, the first year of which was spent in complete solitary confinement. The prison was soon inundated with prisoners, and Ginzburg was joined by Julia Karepova, who became her lifelong friend, even after rehabilitation. After her sentence was changed to forced labor, Ginzburg was transported to Vladivostok. In this transit camp, female prisoners laid eyes on their male counterparts for the first time in two years; Ginzburg recollects sexual encounters between prisoners as “violent cases of love at first sight” (1.346). Because love “was linked to death,” she adds, “I have never in my life seen more sublimely unselfish love than that which was shown in those fleeting romances between strangers” (1.346). Ever the romantic, Ginzburg even believed the propaganda rumors spread in Vladivostok that their journey on to Kolyma would represent an improvement in their lot: “A man of initiative, even if he were a prisoner, need never go under, and [. . .] the most wretched invalid was quickly restored to health thanks to bountiful stocks of reindeer meat, red caviar, and cod-liver oil” (1.349). Within days Ginzburg was deathly ill and nearly perished on the steamship SS Dzhurma on the Sea of Okhotsk.14 The second volume begins in 1940, shortly after Ginzburg arrived in Elgen, a strict-regime women’s camp in Kolyma. She describes the remainder of her sentence, her time in a children’s shelter, tree-felling, poultry work, transfers from camp to camp, her love affair with Anton Walter, her eventual release, rearrest, and life in Magadan; she concludes with her rehabilitation in 1955. Throughout, Ginzburg refrains from dwelling on her misfortune; instead, she sees small miracles that conspire to keep her alive throughout her ordeal. Early in her memoir, the author underlines the role of luck in her life: Later, I was to learn what a lucky number I had drawn in the political lottery. My investigation was over by April, before the Veverses and Tsarevskys were authorized not only to curse and threaten their victims but to use physical torture. (1.69) 14 It is on Dzhurma that Ginzburg is introduced to a new contingent of convicts: “murderers, sadists, and experts at every kind of sexual perversion” (1.357). Along with Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, Ginzburg describes the terror of common criminals as “the law of the jungle.” For Ginzburg, learning to cope with such prisoners represented “not a prison, or a camp, but a psychiatric clinic,” for these criminals “delighted to find that the ‘enemies of the people’ were creatures more despised and outcast than they . . .” (1.354).

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Being over thirty, having her own teeth, and not wearing glasses also constituted “luck” (1.150). As the years dragged on, “miracles” became more frequent.15 In a chapter entitled “Salvation from Heaven,” Dr. Petukhov, for example, declares “I’ll save you!” (1.415) after recalling that he had met Ginzburg’s son Alyosha in Leningrad: Petukhov promptly transfers her to a children’s shelter. Upon release from camp, in 1947 Ginzburg’s decided to stay in Magadan and wait for her “jolly saint,” Anton Walter, who would become her third husband. Walter, an ethnic German from the Crimea region, remained a prisoner when her sentence was completed. His talent as a homeopathic doctor was valued by camp officials. Another small miracle occurred when Walter made his way across one hundred kilometers of frozen taiga to Ginzburg’s room in a prison hospital. But they were discovered by the head of the camp, Dr. Volkova, ‘’the She-Wolf of Belichye,’’ which resulted in Ginzburg’s transportation to a deadly punishment camp, Izvestkovaya. Walter miraculously managed to get her ‘’exchanged’’ for a stove repairman, and her life was saved. Whenever death felt near, “each time something intervened, something at first sight accidental, but which was really a manifestation of that Supreme Good which, in spite of everything, rules the world . . .” (1.411). Throughout, it seems to Ginzburg that luck, miracles, and the intercession of human angels of mercy accompany her trials: “You can survive anything!” In 1947, Ginzburg managed to convince the powers-that-be to allow her son to live with her. The “Queen of Kolyma,” Alexandra Gridasova, the wife of the commander of Dalstroi,16 out of pity for Ginzburg’s maternal anxieties, sought permission for Aksenov to join his mother in Magadan. Rearrested in 1949 and moved to a prison called “Vaskov’s House,” as described in volume 2, she was released a month later, with a sentence of perpetual exile in Kolyma.17 As a kindergarten teacher upon release, she would soon adopt three-year-old Antonina, an orphan from Magadan.18 After marrying Walter, and achieving rehabilitation in 1955, the family decided to live in Lvov, where Walter could

15 Although born Jewish, Ginzburg never practiced Judaism. She became religious only after her marriage to Anton Walter, a German Catholic. Many passages in her memoirs convey a pantheistic worldview. However, under the influence of Walter’s zealous Christianity, Ginzburg adopted a holistic spirituality, merging Catholicism with Orthodoxy. She even received last rites from an Orthodox priest. For a detailed description of Ginzburg’s funeral, see Kopelev’s and Orlova’s memoir in this collection. 16 Dalstroi represented the Far Northern Construction complex, which formed Kolyma. 17 See “Interview with Aksenov” for a detailed description of Ginzburg’s second arrest. Ginzburg also devotes several chapters to this event in her second volume. 18 Antonina Axenova’s Ginzburg archive is located at the University of Notre Dame.

Introduction

practice his Catholic faith. This lasted only a short time: Walter died in 1959. Ginzburg lived ten years in Lvov before moving to Moscow. She even fell in love again in Lvov.19 Before she died of cancer in 1977, Ginzburg composed an unpublished memoir called “A Girl from Kolyma in Paris” (Kolymchanka v Parizhe), based on her tour of France where she went for a PEN Club reception in her honor, accompanied by her son. She is buried in Kuzminsky Cemetery in Moscow. Ginzburg’s literary career began shortly after her rehabilitation. She published stories, sketches, and reviews based on her experiences as a teacher, journalist, and activist. This Is the Way It Began (Tak nachinalos′), a novella published in 1963, describes her life as a teacher in Kazan. The autobiographical approach continues in her subsequent stories, published in Iunost′ between 1963 and 1965. “Unified Labor” (Edinaia trudovaia) covers the period of the 1920s and what it was like to be a child of the revolution undergoing an education in the new Soviet Union. “Students of the 1920s” (Studenty dvadtsatykh godov) chronicles the postrevolutionary “sky’s the limit” thinking characteristic of the time, depicting the human pitfalls of Communist ideology based on class warfare. A hint of the type of documentary narrative present in her memoirs appears in her novella The Youth (Iunosha) about Aleksandr Ginzburg (no relation to the author), the commissar who was executed during the purges. As we learn in Lev Kopelev’s and Raisa Orlova’s memoirs included in the present volume, Ginzburg started writing her memoirs “in the beginning of the summer in 1959 in the Carpathian Mountains. In the forest, on a stump, in a school notebook. Anton, Tonya, and I were there. But already in the prison and in the camp I started to compose separate chapters. I memorized them by heart, like poems.” In numerous critical works covering prison camp literature, Ginzburg’s name is ranked with two other great talents who survived the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. For some, her memoirs even outrank those mentioned above. Edward Crankshaw, for instance, claims that Solzhenitsyn “came to write as an outsider in a positive fury of alienation. Eugenia Ginzburg is the voice of humanity itself. Her character commanded a combination of qualities which stamps every detail of her story with a sort of radiance.”20 For Roy Medvedev, Krutoi marshrut occupied the “first place in the literature about Stalin’s tyranny.”21 In her vast panorama of suffering, Ginzburg succeeded in

19 See Kopelev’s and Orlova’s memoir in this volume. 20 Edward Crankshaw, Putting up with the Russians (New York: Viking, 1984), 262. 21 Medvedev, “Meetings and Conversations with Aleksandr Tvardovsky,” 620.

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transforming, according to Edward J. Brown, “the rude facts of history into artistic structures.”22 Her strategies of survival entailed her need to “bear witness”23 and traced the “continual forging of links with other human beings”24; her experiences “are portrayed with a vividness and a lifelike dialogue that have an artistic power above and beyond [her] historical accurate testimony”25—the achievement of her memoirs is the transformation of testimony into a masterpiece. Catriona Kelly observes that the book is not only a record of external experience; it also depicts the prison camp as the site for a psychological transformation like that described in Bildungsroman: the neophyte attains political understanding, as well as a broader social experience, in the crucible of relations between women who share a prison cell or camp barracks.26 Yet for Heinrich Böll, who befriended her, the principal question in reading Ginzburg’s “whirlwind” memoirs was “How, in God’s name, how in the world did this woman [. . .] manage to come out alive?”27 Scholars of Russian women’s autobiographies have tended to refrain from dwelling on the aesthetic qualities of such literature, treating testimonials and memoirs like Ginzburg’s in terms of “acting to name the silenced.”28 Beth Holmgren places twentieth century figures such as Ginzburg, Maria Ioffe, and others in the tradition of memoirs written by female revolutionaries; these evolved into oppositional writing.29 She sees them as a more or less “covert platform for different philosophical,

22 Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature since the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 287-89. 23 Terence De Pres identifies this as one of the principal goals of survivors’ writings: “To bear witness is the goal of the survivor’s struggle.” See his The Survivor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 32. 24 Barbara S. Heldt, “Evgeniia Ginzburg,” in Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, ed. Harry B. Weber (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press, 1977-1993), 165. 25 Wolfgang Kasack, “Evgeniia S. Ginzburg,” in Dictionary of Russian Literature since 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 121-22. 26 Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820-1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 368. 27 See his introduction to Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (2.viii—italics Böll’s). 28 Beth Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 25. 29 See Beth Holmgren’s “For the Good of the Cause: Russian Women’s Autobiography in the Twentieth Century,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1994), 127-148.

Introduction

political and social agendas”: autobiographies by writers such as Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Lydia Chukovskaya, and by extension Ginzburg “were produced to inform and enlighten.”30 According to Barbara Heldt, the “memoirs are a continual initiation into the deepening horrors of a changed situation for a Communist who had been accustomed to the rewards and responsibilities of what had seemed to be a position of trust.”31 Yet more than a testament intended to “inform and enlighten,” as Beth Holmgren argues, more than a “touchstone”32 of the dissident movement, Ginzburg’s chronicle represents an artistic response to the question: “[D] oes our disappearance from life mean nothing to anyone?” (1.227). While many strategies of survival were employed, such as nurturing bonds of sisterhood, establishing ways of communicating, and preserving her dignity at all costs, none of Ginzburg’s strategies compare with her reliance on literature and her memory of literary classics as benchmarks of a tradition in which she was an active participant. Ginzburg traces a landscape replete with “the spirituality of the Russian intelligentsia, which my generation accepted as a secret gift from the thinkers and poets of the beginning of the century who had themselves been the target of our critical shafts” (2.100).33 Not only did Ginzburg invest her testimony with strategies for physically surviving imprisonment, forced labor camps, and exile from 1937-1955, but she based her survival on the continuity of tradition and resurrecting cultural memory.

30 Ibid. 31 Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, 155. 32 According to Andrey Siniavsky every prisoner of the Gulag, by virtue of the Gulag experience, participated automatically in the dissident movement. “The Soviet camps and prisons exerted the greatest influence on the dissident movement. . . . In every house these returnees appeared . . . even if they couldn’t be an active ideological force, they served as a touchstone for Soviet dissidents. It is not by chance that in dissident literature memoirs about camps and prisons past and present occupy a central place.” See his Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: Arcade, 1988), 235. According to Vasily Aksenov, the genre of prison camp literature constitutes one of the greatest contributions to Russian letters in the twentieth century. See his interview with John Glad in Conversations in Exile, ed. John Glad (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 33 Tsvetan Todorov called this strategy of survival “the life of the mind,” insofar as it allows the mind “to cast off its immediate and practical preoccupations, turns to the contemplation of beauty, and in doing so becomes beautiful itself.” See his Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 92. Emphasizing simple moral virtues, such as dignity, caring, and cultivation of the life of the mind, Todorov cites Ginzburg frequently and maintains that it is possible to take the extreme experience of the camps as a basis from which to reflect on moral life, “not because moral life was superior in the camps but because it was more visible and thus more telling there.” Ibid., 43.

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Thus, her physical survival did not constitute her greatest triumph. Instead, Ginzburg developed her mental life for sustenance; in the process, after reciting poetry that she knew by heart, she began to compose poetry herself. The author’s poetry permeates the first volume and is juxtaposed with memorized lines from Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilev, and Boris Pasternak. She states: “Poetry, at least, they could not take away from me! They had taken my dress, my shoes and stockings, and my comb, they had left me half naked and freezing, but this it was not in their power to take away, it was and remained mine. And I should survive even this dungeon” (1.221). Ginzburg’s memoirs are distinguished not only by the sheer amount of literary and other artistic allusions strewn throughout, but also by a bittersweet urge to be part of a great pantheon of literary artists. What makes her memoir all the more remarkable is that, often bereft of books, she depended on her prodigious memory to sustain her. Thus, all the immortal visitors who accompanied Ginzburg through her remarkable pilgrimage—be they Dante, Pushkin, Blok, Gumilev, Mandelshtam, Dickens, Michelangelo, Tiutchev, Tolstoy, or Pasternak—attested to her resistance to disappearing from life. She cites them to express her profound belief that she could, according to Horace’s famous words, “not wholly die.”34 In “Exegi Monumentum,” Pushkin prophesied that his reputation would outlast the tsars; Ginzburg erected a monument in her “whirlwind” memoirs that stands higher than any monument to Soviet leaders. Her memory works not merely to provide a method of coping, or to create an avenue of mental escape, but to resist oblivion. Some critics cite Ginzburg’s many literary associations as instances of her “inner freedom.”35 As Natasha Kolchevska observes, Ginzburg’s literary models, which were “rooted in a unified notion of humanistic, Russian/European culture,”36 went beyond mere citation. Heinrich Böll insisted that for Ginzburg “poems become symbols of recognition, not in the sense of a mechanical code but in their totality” (2.ix). According to Dariusz Tołczyk, Ginzburg’s “immersion in the language of literature not only ethically sensitizes her to other human beings by constantly

34 See my “‘I Shall Not Wholly Die’: Literary Memory in Evgenia Ginzburg’s ‘Whirlwind’ Memoirs,” in American Contributions to the 16th International Congress of Slavists, Belgrade, 2018, vol. 2, Literature, ed. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), 37-47. 35 Grigori Svirski, A History of Post-War Soviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposition, trans. and ed. Robert Dessaix and Michael Ulman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 194. 36 Natasha Kolchevska “The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag,” in The Russian Memoir. History and Literature, ed. Beth Holmgren (Evanston, IL: 2003), 155.

Introduction

challenging reductive ideological terms, but also enables her to take possession of the world symbolically through aesthetic means.”37 There is also the time when reciting poetry by heart brought a small dividend. While she was being transported by train to Kolyma, like manna from heaven, Ginzburg’s ability to recite long passages from, say, Eugene Onegin or Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma) resulted in an extra mouthful of water from someone else’s mug. This, in Ginzburg’s typically humorous mode, was depicted as a reward for “service to the community” (1.292). Upon hearing her recitations, a guard refused to believe she was reciting from memory. Thus, he challenged her by threatening: “If you can go on for half an hour without a break, O.K., otherwise, it’s irons for you, all the way to Vladivostok!” (1.295). Half an hour later, the triumphant Ginzburg wins the wager, completely vindicated when it is clear that her only offence becomes her phenomenal memory and regaling her cohorts with long extended passages from Pushkin, pulsing her poetic rhythms in tune with the churning of the train’s wheels. Again and again, the prison camp experience is filtered through Ginzburg’s memory, calling to mind a complex Proustian juxtaposition of temporal states. Just as in Proust’s Swann’s Way, where memory is a catalyst for reflections on earlier times, so Ginzburg’s memory overcomes misery, particularly when children come to mind. Ginzburg wishes to have at least five children, “so as to leave as much of myself behind as possible” (1.223). Yet she left as much of herself behind in the literary personages evoked, as they lived in her, and in the grandson to whom she dedicated the memoir; but, for Ginzburg, her major monument was her children. Upon reuniting in Magadan with her son, Vasily, she discovers that poetry served to heal their twelve-year separation, as they realize their favorite poets constituted their spiritual family: I found myself catching my breath with joyful astonishment when that very first night he started to recite from memory the very poems that had been my constant companions during my fight for survival in the camps. Like me, he, too, found in poetry a bulwark against the inhumanity of the real world. Poetry was for him a form of resistance. (2.266-267)

37 Dariusz Tolczyk, “The Uses of Vulnerability: Literature and Ideology in Evgenia Ginzburg’s Memoir of the Gulag,” Literature and History 14, no. 1 (2005): 61.

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Ginzburg’s memoir represents a generic hybrid: it combines a documentary style with a host of literary allusions and an ability to use disarming stylistic devices, the most notable of which is irony. Irony dominates in the choice of chapter titles and punctuates the ends of chapters. “Narrative compression, ironic detail and hushed, tense dialogue” are among the most significant artistic features of Ginzburg’s art, according to Barbara Heldt.38 Hers is not simply narration of her personal life, but a composition that entails literary techniques of characterization, tone, voice, and symbol, not unlike those of fiction. In other words, Ginzburg’s text bears great similarities to the novel. According to Vasily Aksenov, the reason novelistic elements kept appearing in his mother’s works was that “life was so much more horrible than any imagined novels. Writers are usually in search of some moving plots,” he said, “but these plots constantly surrounded my mother and Anton Yakovlevich, and there was no need to conjure them up. They simply existed.”39 Moved by Ginzburg’s talent as a “novelist,” Heinrich Böll attributed her work to the genre of “an autobiographical novel” (2.viii). Ginzburg counterbalances the incongruity of certain situations with understatement in a unique generic blend of documentary, autobiographical, and fictional modes. The lines “penal servitude, what bliss” from Pasternak’s narrative poem “Lieutenant Schmidt,” for example, ironize the prisoner’s privileged perspective, which finds profound spiritual sustenance in confined quarters: “Sitting in a cell, you don’t chase after the phantoms of worldly success . . . You can be wholly concerned with the highest problems of existence, and you approach them with a mind purified by suffering” (1.163). Thus, the experience of confinement forces one to choose between safeguarding one’s spiritual freedom and surrendering to physical slavery; the experience becomes a moral barometer. For Ginzburg, it is a marvel that Pasternak, without ever having experienced prison, could capture the meaning of blissful imprisonment: “If only he could know how much his poem helped me to endure, and to make sense of prison, of my sentence, of the murderers with frozen fish eyes” (1.140). Scholars have also identified romantic love as a significant survival strategy in Ginzburg, insofar as, perhaps more than any other author of Gulag literature, she experienced an authentic love story with Anton Walter in the camps, and relates its blossoming with extraordinary candor.40 Ginzburg describes the 38 Heldt, “Evgenia S. Ginzburg,” 166. 39 See “Interview with Vasily Aksenov” in this collection. 40 Leona Toker calls Ginzburg’s love story a “linchpin of the movie based on her book Within the Whirlwind.” See her Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual

Introduction

extraordinary circumstances of their courtship and its extraordinary tones: when Walter sent her a love letter, he wrote it in Latin to avoid detection by others. Walter’s words “Amor mea, mea vita, mea spes” mean “My love, my life, my hope.” In response, Ginzburg composed a humorous poem, conjuring up an imaginary walk through Rome.41 For her son, Aksenov, “That love, it was truly a romantic love; it was her one and only defense against all those camp monsters and camp guards.”42 In preparation for writing about Anton Walter, Ginzburg devotes an entire chapter to more typical, debased sexual encounters in the camp and to reflections about love: Love, as seen by Hamsun, that “golden glow in the blood?” I would maintain that it did sometimes put in an appearance among us. However heatedly our rigorists [. . .] denied the possibility of pure love in Kolyma, love there was. It sometimes visited our huts unrecognized by the bystanders, humiliated, abashed, and defiled; but for all that it was love, true love—that very same “breeze amid the sweetbrier.” (2.15) According to Orlando Figes, “The unifying theme of Ginzburg’s memoirs is regeneration through love. . . . Ginzburg explains her survival in the camps as a matter of her faith in human beings; the flashes of humanity she evokes in others, and which help her to survive, are a response to her faith in people.”43 Many critics have also commented on the factors that help Ginzburg’s memoirs pass the test of time. Is it her humanity? Her ability to rise from the ashes, never compromising her integrity, or, according to Barbara Heldt, the “links forged between the innocent women of the camps?”44 According to Van

Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 64. Toker is referring here to the 2009 film version of Ginzburg’s memoirs Within the Whirlwind, directed by Marleen Gorris. Instead of treating Ginzburg’s memoirs comprehensively, Gorris covers the highpoints of Ginzburg’s incarceration episodically, while focusing extensively on her relationship with Walter. 41 Alexander Zholkovsky analyzes Ginzburg’s chapter “Paradise under the Microscope” as a work of literature, so fraught with literary conventions that it can be excerpted as a short story. See his “Before and After ‘After the Ball’” in his Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 42 See “Interview with Vasily Aksenov” in this collection. 43 Orlando Figes, “Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 65 (Spring 2008): 128. 44 Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 156. Even when Ginzburg sarcastically recounts the “crime” she committed that was “unprecedented in the history of the camp” (2.89), she does so out of an outrage over all the women’s deaths which she witnessed. In the process of stealing an

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Lin, the single most important aspect of Ginzburg’s art is her “humanism.”45 Andrei Gavrilov suggests that it may be Ginzburg’s capacity for self-reflection, not sparing herself or justifying herself, to the point where she takes the blame for the crimes of the Gulag.46 Indeed, in the chapter “Mea culpa” Ginzburg writes: When you can’t sleep, the knowledge that you did not directly take part in the murders and betrayals is no consolation. After all, the assassin is not only he who struck the blow, but whoever supported evil, no matter how: by thoughtless repetition of dangerous political theories, by silently raising his right hand; by faint-heartedly writing half-truths. Mea culpa . . . and it occurs to me more and more frequently that even eighteen years of hell on earth is insufficient for the guilt. (1.53) As Leona Toker notes, “eventually Ginzburg accepts her ordeal as a punishment for not having resisted evil in her happier days.”47 Never a stranger to the reversals of fortune that beset the Gulag inmate, Ginzburg learned a lesson while she was still in permanent exile in Magadan, working as a teacher just before her rehabilitation in 1955. She found herself in the position of teaching KGB commandants, the very officers who imprisoned her. As one commandant walked her home, she reminded him that on the next day his office would be stamping her documents. The new post-Stalinist Soviet society accommodated such paradoxes: Ginzburg was still the commandant’s prisoner, while she was also his teacher. As Adam Hochschild comments, shortly after the country started recovering from Stalinism, the roles between executioner and victim were suddenly shifting: “She is still his prisoner—out on probation, in effect—but she is also his teacher. He is still her jailor, but tonight he is also her protector from street criminals. No longer are they victim

incriminating note, Ginzburg knew full well that she could be caught. Thus, after catching Ginzburg, Zimmerman punishes her for the “vice” of saving others, sending Ginzburg to Izvestkovaya, an even worse camp than Elgen. 45 Van Lin, “Krutoi marshrut Evgenii Ginzburg v kontekste lagernoi prozy,” Uspekhi sovremennoi nauki i obrazovaniia 2, no. 7 (2016). 46 Andrei Gavrilov, “Alfavit inakomysliia: Ginzburg,” Radio Liberty, Prague, Sept. 1, 2019— radio broadcast. 47 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 53. Anna Artwińska also addresses the guilt of “true believers” in this collection.

Introduction

and executioner, witch and persecutor. They are each, partly, tentatively, transformed into something else.”48 What may have broken a spirit less strong turns into a test of endurance for the author. Eschewing abstractions and moralizations, Ginzburg is not interested in overdramatizing the horror. The narrative is lifted by the author’s courage, her reliance on human decency, and the determination not to cave in to barbarism. Ginzburg, like Solzhenitsyn, describes scenes of inhumanity, and yet her accounts are characterized by understatement. Moreover, unlike Solzhenitsyn, she does not permit her co-prisoners the luxury of philosophizing about life: her persona is too busy maintaining a sense of continuity. The women prisoners refrain from calling attention to themselves, but rather exemplify perseverance and steadfastness, underscored by the ties forged between them. Just as Solzhenitsyn revealed that unions of friendship in the camps made the prisoners’ lives bearable, sometimes even preferable to life in the “Larger Zone,” so does Ginzburg describe the rare sisterhood that develops among women. More than their male counterparts, women in prison strive to survive for the sake of their children, left often to the care of other family members or in orphanages. Few episodes are more poignant than the vignettes depicting her longing for her sons, or her gift for nursing fellow patients back to health, or her spiritual dependence on memorized Russian classics. Ginzburg remains true throughout to the age-old ideal of woman as a long-suffering and resilient creature. She embodies the features of the selfless heroine found in Russian literature, one who must endure without lapsing into self-pity. Volume 2 ends on a note about the restoration of the human spirit, as Ginzburg looks for her momentarily lost rehabilitation document. As she discovers it in her bodice, next to her heart, she notices the well-nourished pigeons around her and a stream of people who convey a oneness with the universe: “I was about to join them. I would merge with the general stream. Could I really do that? I was just like everyone!” (2.415). All of the essays in this collection, written by leading Ginzburg scholars, address Ginzburg’s “whirlwind” memoirs through various vantage points, while situating her experience in the universal context of the Gulag universe. In his article “A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg” Dariusz Tołczyk traces the long genealogy of writers who employed the theme of prison as an opportunity for spiritual ascent. Tracing this theme back to the autobiographies of Archpriest Avvakum and

48 Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 286.

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Benvenuto Cellini, and continuing with Romantic writers such as Schiller, Hugo, and Dumas, followed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Tołczyk shows how Ginzburg’s transformative new self resisted the Soviet ideology of “reforging” (perekovka). Romantic literary images of imprisonment carry an ethical as well as aesthetic imperative through the metaphor of purgatory, predicated on Ginzburg’s “admission of the inadequacies of her former self, [her] admission of guilt and [her] acceptance of punishment.” Tołczyk examines the chapter entitled “Mea culpa,” concluding that “[t]his extraordinary confession of guilt for uncommitted crimes by a victim of Kolyma (formerly a “naive Communist idealist”) is one of the Gulag’s foremost literary documents of moral courage and magnanimity.” Some of the other commentators also focus on this evidently crucial chapter. To this day, there are those who question Ginzburg’s status as dissident, as Natasha Kolchevska writes in her article. Even though over the years ample evidence has demonstrated Ginzburg’s reluctance in the first volume to blame the Party, we all know now that her greatest desire was to see her first volume in print on Russian soil. By the time she finished her second volume, publication in the USSR was no longer possible. Thus, she was freer to engage in a more truthful discourse. How else can one explain the radically different voice that concludes volume two? Kolchevska argues that Ginzburg remains “an inside critic” of her society, but at the same time one who wishes to be a functioning person within the system. Kolchevska utilizes a strategy Sergei Oushakine calls mimetic resistance, which “exploit[s] already present rhetorical devices elaborated within the dominant symbolic structure of state socialism.” Ultimately, though Ginzburg relied on given symbolic systems, she succeeded in distancing herself from the dominant order. Anna Artwińska compares Ginzburg to the Polish survivor of the Gulag, Celina Budzyńska, the author of Shreds of a Family Saga. Both writers reveal the degree to which their guilt helped mold the very system that brought about their downfall. Perhaps it is because of this that they write not only about their suffering, but also about the fact that they did nothing to prevent it. Among the similarities of their respective prewar backgrounds, Artwińska focuses on each author’s earlier membership in the Communist Party. Both Ginzburg and Budzyńska emerged from Party activism, and Artwińska reveals their respective journeys as a path to transcendence. While Budzyńska stresses the difficulties associated with justifying her choices, Ginzburg structures her own narration as

Introduction

a coming-of-age story; she emphasizes the evolution of her own views and her transformation.49 Kathryn Duda sheds light on the actual history of Ginzburg’s memoirs, by devoting much attention to Pavel Aksenov, a figure often ignored because Ginzburg thought he was dead. She divorced him officially in 1951. Focusing on the memoirs as a seminal text that helped shape both Western and Soviet understanding of Stalin’s terror, Duda utilizes unpublished archival documents, such as correspondence with Ginzburg’s former husband, manuscripts housed in Germany and Moscow’s RGALI, and the Antonina Aksenova collection at the University of Notre Dame. Proving that Ginzburg’s memoirs, as an example of cultural humanism, triumphed over Stalinism, Duda shows how the second volume became a story of rebirth and renewed family life. Ginzburg’s moral education is not the only strategy of her survival, but the kind of person she becomes holds an interest in its own right. Duda notes that “in the second volume, Ginzburg’s survival as a story of rebirth extends beyond the narration of domestic ethics; she addresses the challenge of how one should witness this kind of survival and deploys the family trope to construct a community of readers.” In “Vasily Aksenov and Evgenia Ginzburg in Magadan: Re-Conceiving Soviet Authorship through the Gulag Experience,” Ann Komaromi analyzes the many-layered connections between Ginzburg’s memoir and her son’s novel The Burn. She discusses the mutual interdependence between mother and son. Komaromi focuses on the year 1949, because this marked the time that Ginzburg was reunited with Aksenov in Magadan. Aksenov himself has admitted in various contexts that the pivotal moment of his life occurred precisely during his two years in Magadan. Told through a series of flashbacks, Aksenov’s novel recapitulates that pivotal experience, especially the scene in which Tolya (the protagonist based on Aksenov himself) witnesses the second arrest of his mother. Ginzburg wrote in memoiristic form and Aksenov in the mode of experimental fiction, yet their voices converge at the juncture where emotion

49 In his article on Ginzburg, Dariusz Tołczyk reminds us that “what distinguishes Ginzburg’s testimony from many other Gulag testimonies by Communists is that, under the extreme circumstances of prisons and camps, she does not rush back to the security of her moral identity as a Bolshevik. On the contrary, in Stalin’s prison (the worst possible place for moral self-doubt), when her vulnerability, both physical and moral, is at its highest, she recognizes Bolshevik moral discourse as deficient and so allows her old identity, anchored in this discourse, to fall apart.” See his “Uses of Vulnerability: Literature and Ideology in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Memoir of the Gulag,” Literature and History 14, no. 1 (May 1, 2005): 62.

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meets memory. The article shows that Aksenov’s gift to his post-Stalinist generation is a conversion of the trauma of Stalinist violence “into the energy necessary to facilitate a renewal of values of the Soviet intelligentsia for the future.” Rimma Volynska reads Ginzburg’s and other survivors’ testimonies through the prism of Viktor Frankl’s search for accepting suffering as a challenge to give meaning to life. Ginzburg’s coping mechanism throughout her ordeal entailed involvement in the world and a will to find meaning in virtually everything and everyone she touched.50 One is reminded of Edward Crankshaw’s suggestion that the voice of Ginzburg’s humanity “stamps every detail of her story with a sort of radiance.”51 Volynska’s application of Frankl’s theory of logotherapy to Ginzburg and other survivors, such as Lev Razgon, is especially apt, particularly in light of the psychological health that Ginzburg succeeded in preserving. Even writers such as Elena Glinka and Khava Volovich, who endured particularly harsh experiences and have given harrowing graphic depictions of violence in Stalin’s camps, also exemplify what Frankl might see as spiritual health in the glasnost′ era. Ginzburg’s greatest tragedy upon arrest was being separated from her children. Alesha was ten when his mother was arrested. Because he perished during the siege of Leningrad, Ginzburg never saw him again. Vasya was four; he was held in an orphanage for six months before his uncle found him. Elaine MacKinnon tackles two issues in her essay, which are inextricably intertwined: Ginzburg’s role as a mother and her gendered identity. Motherhood amplified and exacerbated the anxieties of imprisonment recounted in both volumes of her “whirlwind” memoirs; yet it also inspired her to reach out to fellow prisoners, to connect with others suffering similar sorrows, and to find new outlets for nurturing and protecting children and younger prisoners. MacKinnon reveals Ginzburg’s obsession with losing Alesha, and her attempts to fill that vacuum by reuniting with Vasily Aksenov in Magadanand adopting three-yearold Antonina. Oana Popescu-Sandu explores the notion of an “ethical interval,” a point in one’s life when ethics actually begins. When ethical choices are placed before one, the rules to which one was subordinated before may cease to apply. Popescu-Sandu draws upon the Romanian thinker Andrei Pleşu’s philosophy, with additional references to Levinas, Kristeva, Todorov, and Huizinga. Utilizing the latter’s Homo Ludens, Popescu-Sandu argues that Ginzburg manipulated

50 Witness the “life of the mind” strategy of survival à la Tzvetan Todorov, discussed above. 51 Crankshaw, Putting up with the Russians, 262.

Introduction

her memory playfully in a deliberate attempt at subverting the powers-that-be. Indeed, she provides a new reading of Ginzburg’s brilliant oral performance of reciting all of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, in which she triumphs over the skeptical guard, who assumes she must be reading from a book. In her humorous essay, “A Winter Coat for Vasya,” Rimma Volynska treats the 1948-1976 correspondence between Ginzburg and Aksenov. In addition to this correspondence, Aksenov’s ubiquitous winter coat first appears in Ginzburg’s memories of Magadan, then in several of Aksenov’s stories. In a tour de force of detective sleuthing, Volynska connects the correspondence with Ginzburg’s obsession and dissatisfaction with her son’s attraction to Western fashion, clearly stemming from his stiliaga interests.52 The importance of Magadan for Aksenov cannot be overstated, insofar as the city represented the foundation of his intellectual growth. During the two years that he lived in Magadan, surrounded by former prisoners, who spoke their minds, Aksenov considered the city the “freest city in all of the Soviet Union.” Volynska reveals the connection between Aksenov’s description of the hated winter coat with Akaky Akakievich’s famous “Overcoat,” reminding the reader of the actual Gogolian dimension of Aksenov’s own artistry. Lev Kopelev’s and Raisa Orlova’s intimate memoir “Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Krutoi marshrut,” here abridged, provides a window into Ginzburg’s post-Gulag life. Their memoir is drawn from a collection entitled We Lived in Moscow. Kopelev and Orlova use a “stream-of-conversation” technique, in which the thoughts of each pick up from where the other left off. Having met Solzhenitsyn in a sharashka (secret research institutions, operating within the Gulag system) after he was arrested in East Germany, Kopelev served as the model for Solzhenitsyn’s Rubin in The First Circle. Kopelev and Orlova were Soviet dissidents and members of the human rights movement in Soviet Russia. They met Ginzburg for the first time in Lvov. Significant in this memoir about Ginzburg are insights into Ginzburg’s final years; these include life in Lvov after Walter’s death, cancer treatments, as well as her memorable trip to Paris with Aksenov, when she was honored by the Pen Club. Both friends recount Ginzburg’s overwhelming capacity for life-affirmation. Kopelev writes: “She was born for happiness. To be happy and give the gift of happiness. In order to love and be loved. To raise sons. To write poetry and prose. To teach students. To teach the marvelous. [. . .] But always and everywhere she remained her own

52 The stiliaga phenomenon was associated with the counter-culture of the Soviet 1960s. Aksenov’s taste in fashion favored Western clothing.

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person. Always and everywhere she was a real person, a real woman. [. . .] So she each time rose above her miseries, worked, brought joy to others, and knew herself how to be joyful.” Finally, the interview with Vasily Aksenov provides a rare aesthetic appreciation of his mother’s talent as a writer. Aksenov was Ginzburg’s first serious reader and editor. He notes that his mother’s memoirs represented [t]he most amazing brightness. What I derive from it is not the horror, but its brightness. I find it surprising myself that no matter what she wrote, I read it and recall it with a smile; I recall how she talked about it, how she committed all that to paper. For me this is a source of light, and I would say it was like charging a battery. And I recognize that the book she wrote is a work of colossal significance; and the very fact that the book avoids horror and defilement constitutes its very strength. With humor, Aksenov discusses his mother’s propensities for resorting to “small tricks” (khitrosti), to cajole, win people over, subvert, sometimes even to fib. As it turns out, her reentry into the Party constituted a “small trick” as well. When asked whether he thought it necessary for Ginzburg to rejoin the Communist Party after her rehabilitation, Aksenov emphasizes that, although his mother despised the Party, she rejoined in order to survive. In utter amazement that in her youth she was carried away by Communist idealism, she wondered to her son: “How could I have been so foolish to believe in this absurdity.” Endowed with an ability to pull people into her orbit, she manifested charisma and a magnificent capacity for celebrating life, even when her only residence in permanent exile constituted a tiny barrack shared with Antonina and Julia Karepova. Aksenov recalls how a former prisoner, Dr. Umansky, “would walk through the whole town to Zhenya’s through the worst blizzard, through the frost,” to make sure he would not miss one of Ginzburg’s literary salons. Aksenov, ultimately, felt that his mother “got the most brilliant moments of reward, that is real worldly happiness: artistic charms of youth, powerful feelings of love, religious inspiration and finding God, loyal friendships, completed books and even triumphs.”53

53 Vasily Aksenov, “Kazhdyi mig, svobodnyi ot stradaniia,” Dnevnik klevety (Moscow, 2014), 54.

Contributors Anna Artwińska is professor of Slavic literature and culture and chair of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She received her PhD from the University of Posen, Poland (“Poetry in the Service of Politics: The Case of Adam Mickiewicz in Communist Poland  and Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Communist Germany”). Her main research interests are memories of communism in Slavic literatures; postcatastrophic representations of the Shoah in Polish and Czech literature; the concept of generation; auto/biographical writing; and gender and postcolonial studies. Her recent publications include Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival: Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective (De Gruyter, 2019; edited with Anja Tippner); Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (Routledge, 2020; edited with Agnieszka Mrozik); The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetics of Postcatastrophic Narration (Routledge 2021; edited with Anja Tippner). Olga M. Cooke is associate professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. She is the editor of Andrey Bely’s Petersburg: A Centennial Celebration (Academic Studies Press, 2017). She also edits the journal Gulag Studies. In addition to her publications on Bely, Russian symbolism, and Gulag literature, she has written, and translated, a collection of poetry titled After Plattling (Berkeley, 1996). She is currently completing a book called “The Most Interesting Man in Russia”: Andrey Bely’s Life in Letters. Kathryn Duda is assistant professor and director of Russian studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Mercyhurst University. She primarily teaches Russian language and contemporary Russia. Her research interests include Soviet youth culture, Gulag survival, and self-writing. Her current project focuses on intergenerational dialogue in Soviet youth periodicals. Barbara Heldt is best known for her pioneering work in Russian feminist studies. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature was published by Indiana University Press in 1987. Koz’ma Prutkov: The Art of Parody (Mouton)

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appeared in 1972. Her translation of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life has gone into three editions, most recently with Columbia University Press (2019). She had a long teaching career in the US and Canada and continues to enjoy retirement. Natasha Kolchevska is professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. She is the translator and editor of Sofia Kovalevskaya’s novel Nihilist Girl (MLA, 2002). She has also written numerous articles on Evgenia Ginzburg and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s autobiographical writing. Ann Komaromi is associate professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (Northwestern University Press, 2015) and Soviet Samizdat: Imaging a New Society (Northern Illinois University Press, 2022), and the editor of Yuli Kosharovsky’s We Are Jews Again (Syracuse University Press, 2017), a history of Jewish activism in the USSR. Since 2015, Kosharovsky has edited the “Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat” at the University of Toronto Libraries. She is currently working with Michael Beizer on a book about unofficial Jewish life in Leningrad. Elaine MacKinnon is professor of Russian and European history and teaches in the Department of Art, History and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia. She most recently translated and edited Ludmilla Miklashevskaya’s memoir Gender and Survival in Soviet Russia: A Life in the Shadow of Stalin’s Terror (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). She is the author of The Forgotten Victims: Childhood and the Soviet Gulag, 1929-1953 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); co-author and editor, with Aran MacKinnon, of Places of Encounter, Time, Place and Connectivity in World History, vols. 1 and 2 (Routledge, 2012); and translator and editor of V. A. Kozlov’s Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the USSR (Routledge, 2002). She has written articles for various scholarly journals on motherhood and survival in the Stalinist Gulag and Soviet intellectual and political history, and has also published a number of translations. Oana Popescu-Sandu is associate professor at the University of Southern Indiana. Her current work analyzes identity and immigration, translation, and translingualism in English-language literature by Eastern European transnational authors after 1989. Some of her recent publications include

Contributors

Cultures of Mobility and Alterity: Crossing the Balkans and Beyond (University of Liverpool Press, 2022; edited with Yana Hashamova and Sunnie RuckerChang). She recently published “New Cold War Nostalgia in Recent US Cultural Productions: Retro and Irony in the Transnational Postsocialist World” (Comparative Literary Studies 59, no. 3 [2022]) and the chapter “Seeing through Discursive Screens in Matei Vişniec’s The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War” in Theatres of War: Contemporary Perspectives (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021; edited by Lauri Ramey). Dariusz Tołczyk is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia. He is the author of See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (Yale University Press, 1999) and Gułag w oczach Zachodu [The gulag under Western eyes] (Prószyński, 2009). He also co-edited Poland’s Transformation: A Work in Progress (Transaction Publishers, 2003; with Markek Jan Chodakiewicz and Dariusz Tołczyk) and the special issue “Katyń: 75 Years On” (Eastern European Politics and Societies 29, no. 4 [2015]). His articles and essays have appeared in English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Portuguese in Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, Literature and History, Gulag Studies, The New Criterion, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Arcana, Znak, Więź, Tygodnik Powszechny, Przegląd Wschodni, Plus-Minus, Krytyka (Kiev), Dicta & Contradicta, and elsewhere. His book Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes under Western Eyes is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. It probes Western dismissals, denials, rationalizations, and justifications of Soviet crimes from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. Rimma Volynska holds a PhD in Slavic from Brown University. Her most recent teaching appointments were at the University of Toronto and York University. Her work on Russian and Polish literature includes “Literary AvantGardism in the Works of Bruno Jasienski” (Brown University Dissertations, 1988); “Czeslaw Milosz: an Annotated International Bibliography” (Michigan Slavic Publications, 1988); “Russian Women Writers: Aleksandra Kollontai” (Garland Publishing, 1999); and “The Mannequin Ball—Bruno Jasienski’s Socialist Grotesquerie” (Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, nos. 1-2 [1995]). Volynska is particularly passionate about her research on Gulag literature. In 2000, she published “Ploughing the Fields: Soviet Prison Camp Stories” and co-edited and translated Meyer Galler’s Stories (University of California Press); in 2008, she published “Beyond Wrath: The Gulag Prose of Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon” (Gulag Studies, 2008).

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A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg Dariusz Tołczyk

On February 15, 1937, Evgenia Ginzburg, a Communist Party activist and lecturer on Marxism-Leninism in Kazan, was arrested by the NKVD. The fabricated charge pinned on her was that of “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist terrorism”—a routine formulation liberally used by the operatives of Stalin’s Great Terror. Although she faced the possibility of the death penalty, Ginzburg was sentenced to ten years of solitary incarceration—a verdict to which she responded with almost ecstatic relief. After 730 days spent in various prisons, she was transported to serve the rest of her sentence in the penal labor camps of Kolyma. She survived her sentence only to be arrested again in 1949, two years after her release.1 This time she was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in a confined settlement in Magadan, the capital of the Kolyma region. It was not until 1955, two years after Stalin’s death and eighteen years after her initial arrest, that she was allowed to leave Kolyma. Soon after, she embarked on a project that aimed at fulfilling the desire which, in her own words, “was the main object of [her] life throughout those eighteen years” (2.417). This was the same desire which the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi describes as an

1 This fate was not uncommon among Stalin’s victims: for instance, Ariadna Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva’s daughter, and Olga Adamova-Sliozberg were re-arrested the same year, 1949; Varlam Shalamov, the author of The Kolyma Tales, was re-sentenced twice while in the camp. 1949 was the year of a minor wave of terror, when, among other things, many released prisoners were arrested and sentenced to perpetual exile.

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“immediate and violent impulse, . . . competing with other elementary needs, that is, the “need [of camp prisoners] to tell . . . [their] story to ‘the rest,’ to make ‘the rest’ participate in it.”2 The result was Ginzburg’s Gulag memoir Krutoi marshrut. She submitted the first volume of the book for publication in the Soviet Union during the short period in the early 1960s when, following the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the theme of the Gulag was allowed, briefly and on a selective basis, into Soviet public discourse. But her work was rejected by each of the two Soviet literary journals to which she turned. Novyi mir had just published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the journal’s editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, hoped to be able to print a “softened” version of The First Circle. Rather than publish Ginzburg’s book, Boris Polevoi’s Yunost’ chose to put out Yurii Pilyar’s politically safer novel about the Gulag Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi [People remain people]. Rejected by Soviet publishers, Ginzburg’s manuscript circulated in samizdat and, in 1967, was published abroad. In her later years—now with no more hope of publishing in the Soviet Union—she wrote the second volume of the memoir, which came out posthumously in Milan in 1979. “The collection of material for this book began from the moment when I first crossed the threshold of the NKVD’s Inner Prison in Kazan,” she writes, referring to the whole memoir in the epilogue to its second volume. “All those years [in prisons and camps] I had no opportunity to write anything down, to prepare any preliminary sketches for a future book. All that I have set down has been written from memory” (2.417-18). But memory, in order to be transformed into autobiography, must pass through a filter of narrative priorities—a hierarchy of themes, motifs, and paradigms set by the author in her attempt to establish and define a unique, personal connection between her present and former states of consciousness. In the epilogue to the second volume of Krutoi marshrut, Ginzburg reflects on what she views as the central theme organizing the “material” of her memory of the Gulag. She refers to her experience of prisons and camps in terms of the story of “the heroine’s spiritual evolution, the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who has tested unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2.423). “It is this cruel journey of the soul,” Ginzburg writes, “and not just the chronology of my sufferings that I want to bring home to the reader” (2.423). Thus, Ginzburg’s

2 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1971), 9.

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

reader is invited to view her harrowing testimony as a story of spiritual transformation and ascent, of which the Gulag becomes a catalyst. Ginzburg is by no means unique in viewing Stalin’s prisons and camps in these terms. In the chapter of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) entitled “Voskhozhdenie” [The ascent], Solzhenitsyn writes: It has been known for many centuries that prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being. The examples are innumerable—such as that of Silvio Pellico. . . . In our country they always mention Dostoevsky in this respect. And what about Pisarev? . . . These transformations always proceed in the direction of deepening the soul. Ibsen wrote: “From lack of oxygen even the conscience will wither.” By no means! It is not by any means so simple! In fact, it is the opposite.3 Several pages later, Solzhenitsyn adds: “I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: Bless you, prison!”4 Both Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn place their testimonies in the context of a literary tradition that associates imprisonment and oppression with spiritual ascent. Dating back to the martyrological literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages, this tradition found its peculiarly Russian autobiographical expression as early as the seventeenth-century Zhitie of the archpriest Avvakum. By the time Avvakum, a leader of the Old Believers imprisoned under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, wrote his autobiography, in which he views himself as a martyr, the humanist literature of the West had developed secular versions of prison as moral and spiritual initiation. Benvenuto Cellini, in the chapter of his Vita entitled “In Lode di detta prigione,” describes his imprisonment in terms of spiritual illumination. Similarly, Richard Lovelace praises prison as a special place, which, by virtue of its bodily confinement, enables one to develop the power of one’s mind and so achieve inner freedom. Stone Walls do not a Prison make, Nor Iron bars a Cage . . . ...........................

3 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2 vols., trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 2:604. Solzhenitsyn quotes Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. 4 Ibid., 616.

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Tryumph in your Bonds and Paines, And daunce to th’ Musick of your Chaines.5 But it was not until Romanticism in both the West and Russia that this notion of prison as a site of inner liberation and spiritual initiation became a central figure commanding the literary imagination. “The link between enclosure and inner freedom is at the heart of the Romantic sensibility,” Victor Brombert comments in his book The Romantic Prison.6 Schiller’s Mary Stuart, Stendhal’s Fabrice in La Chartreuse de Parme, Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon, Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, Gustaw-Konrad in Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve, part three), and Alexandre Dumas’s Dantes in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo are only a few examples of the Romantic literary prisoners who became prominent models of imagination, both in literature and life. Russian realist literature inherited this Romantic model along with Russia’s own cultural themes of prison—the Decembrists, the katorga (penal labor) of both political and criminal convicts, life in Siberian exile, and so on. The heroine of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Maslova, a victim of social injustice, experiences spiritual ascent when forced into the utmost misery in katorga and so does Pierre Bezukhov in French captivity in War and Peace. For Dostoevsky’s Mitya Karamazov, being sentenced to penal labor (for a crime he contemplated, but did not actually commit) becomes an unexpected blessing: in prison, he experiences the birth of a new man from within an old man. Like many Romantic themes, the influence of the theme of prison as spiritual ascent reached beyond literature and into life itself. Silvio Pellico, whom Solzhenitsyn mentions as a model for his own treatment of his prison experience, was a Milanese activist imprisoned by Metternich’s regime in the Spielberg, the infamous political prison of the Habsburg Empire. His prison memoir Le Mie Prigioni, published in 1833, enjoyed instant popularity, and was published five times in French translations alone within a year of its publication.7 It is the inscription which Pellico admits he wrote on his prison wall, “Benedico la prigione,” that, repeated by Solzhenitsyn—“Blagoslovenie tebe, tiur′ma!” (Bless you, prison)—became one of the most memorable sentences of The Gulag Archipelago.

5 Richard Lovelace, The Poems of Richard Lovelace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 79. 6 Victor Brombert, The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 4. 7 Ibid., 14. Pellico’s memoir appeared in Russian in 1836 and Solzhenitsyn quotes this edition in The Gulag Archipelago. See Silvio Pellico, Moi temnitsy (St. Petersburg, 1836).

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

Solzhenitsyn, of course, was not the first prisoner-writer who viewed his own prison experience through the model of Pellico. In Gustave Geffroy’s novelized biography of Louis Auguste Blanqui, for instance, the famous revolutionary and his fellow prisoners are shown experiencing their own incarceration as a reenactment of Pellico’s Romantic myth of the blessed prison. By the time Blanqui served his sentence in the Mont Saint-Michel fortress, in the late nineteenth century, the Romantic image of prison as spiritual initiation was already a stable element of the cultural imagination in both the West and Russia. Victor Brombert comments: “[I]n its mythical dimension, the carceral imagery implies the presence of a threshold, the possibility of a passage, an initiation—a passage from the inside to the beyond, from isolation to communion, from punishment and suffering to redemption.”8 Both Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn invite their readers to view the human condition in the Soviet dungeons in the context of this Romantic tradition. But to understand their works about the Gulag (along with the writings of many other survivors) as simple extensions of this tradition in a specifically twentiethcentury setting would mean missing a crucial point. The relationship between the Romantic image of prison and Gulag literature is more complex. In order to illuminate this relationship, we should first note a distinction central to the literary tradition associating prison with spiritual ascent. Speaking of the prison experience in terms of a spiritual ascent, authors employ, in fact, two different traditional paradigms of such ascent. In the first, the “old man” must die in order for the “new man” to be born. Reminiscent of the symbolism of baptism as well as of the Eleusinian Mysteries, this formula echoes the archaic initiation rites of various kinds and cultures. Mircea Eliade writes: Everywhere one meets with mysteries of initiation, and everywhere, even in the most archaic societies, they include the symbolism of a death and new birth. . . . The death of the neophyte signifies a regression to the embryonic state. . . . As for the symbolism of the mystical rebirth, it presents itself in many forms. The candidates are given new names which for the future are to be their real names. . . . In the bush, they generally learn a new language, or at least a secret vocabulary known

8 Brombert, The Romantic Prison, 6-7. On metaphors, motifs, tropes, and topoi of prisonrelated literature, see Monika Fludernik, Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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only to the initiates. Thus, we see, at an initiation everything begins anew. Incipit vita nova.9 In rituals of death and new birth, the grave, in which the old life ends, is at the same time the womb, in which the new life begins. Both the grave and the womb share a common characteristic as forms of confinement. Literary descriptions of incarceration as spiritual resurrection often build upon this analogy, linking the theme of prison to (as Hugh McLean puts it) “any form of encircling, immuring, confinement, beginning with that warm, dark, very constricted place from which we all emerged into this world” and ending with “another cooler place of confinement [which] awaits us at the other end of the journey.”10 The theme of resurrection and initiation reverses the end and the beginning: the grave becomes the womb. In part three of Adam Mickiewicz’s Romantic drama Dziady, the hero named Gustaw, a Polish poet in a Russian prison, writes his own epitaph on a wall of his cell: “GUSTAVUS OBIIT M.D.CCC.XXIII CALENDIS NOVEMBRIS.” On the opposite wall, he writes his new “birth certificate” (with his name changed): “HIC NATUS EST CONRADUS, M.D.CCC.XXIII CALENDIS NOVEMBRIS.”11 In Romantic fashion, the death of the old man, Gustaw, and the birth of the new one, Konrad, is accomplished in the depths of the dungeon. But alongside this paradigm of incarceration as spiritual ascent (discarding one’s old and imperfect self in order to be born anew) there has always existed a different but equally prominent paradigm: the point is not to discard the old identity in order to achieve a new and higher one but, on the contrary, to preserve and strengthen the old identity. In this paradigm, which dates back to martyrological models of antiquity, the protagonist is assumed to be already enlightened and initiated into higher spiritual consciousness. Prison and unjust suffering (including death) constitute a test of the protagonist’s integrity and his faith in the higher truth revealed to him. In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates openly chooses death instead of compromising his beliefs.12 “Count it

  9 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Harvill, 1960), 197-99. 10 Hugh McLean, “Walls and Wire: Notes on the Prison Theme in Russian Literature,” in Slavic Linguistics and Poetics: Studies for Edward Stankiewicz on His 60th Birthday, ed. Kenneth E. Naylor, Howard Aronson, Gill Darden, and Alexander Schenker (Columbus: Slavica, 1980), 255. 11 Adam Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve (part 3), in Polish Romantic Drama: Three Plays in English Translation, ed. and trans. Harold B. Segel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 82. 12 Plato, Apology of Socrates, 20, 32D.

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

the worst disgrace to prefer survival to honor,” Juvenal writes, “and, for the sake of life, to lose the point of living.”13 In Jewish and Christian martyrological traditions, the central condition of the spiritual ascent of the martyr is his refusal to renounce his religious identity and thus reverse his initiation. In 2 Maccabees, Eleazar and the Jewish mother with her seven sons elect martyrdom by refusing to compromise their allegiance to Jewish law.14 The Christian term martyr means, in Greek, a witness—someone who already knows the truth: the truth has already reshaped them and they are expected to preserve and confirm it at all costs. Clement of Alexandria and Origen write that Christian martyrdom should not be understood as a “‘simple’ sacrifice of the martyr’s life for Christ, but also as the martyr’s ultimate living testimony to the truth of Christ’s doctrine.”15 According to this model, one achieves a higher spiritual plane by resisting the pressure or temptation of abandoning one’s true moral and spiritual identity. One transcends oneself by remaining oneself and not changing under duress. In order to understand the relationship between Gulag survivor literature and these paradigms of spiritual ascent traditionally associated with the themes of imprisonment and suffering, we must bear in mind that, in its efforts to morally legitimize the Gulag, the Bolshevik regime strove to appropriate both of these paradigms. The notion of incarceration as a positive transformation— the death of the old man and the birth of the new one—was precisely the ideological foundation of the Gulag (or at least of the official discourse which the Soviet authorities spun around the Gulag). In this discourse, the Gulag was presented as an opportunity, given by the Bolshevik regime to people of weak “class consciousness,” to abandon their corrupt identities and be born again as new “truly Soviet” citizens and proletarians. In Maksim Gorky’s 1929 reportage from the Solovki camp, one of the classic texts representing the Bolshevik appropriation of the theme of prison as symbolic death and resurrection, the author describes the prisoners: “[T]he psyche of people thrown into anarchy by their past is thoroughly transformed. . . . If they talk about themselves in the past they now refer to themselves in the past as to some strangers.”16 The 13 “Summum crede nefas animam praefere pudori / et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas” (Iuvenalis, Saturae, 8.83-84). The English translation quoted from Juvenal, The Satires, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 73. 14 2 Maccabees 6:19-17, 42. 15 Maciej Bielawski OSB, “Zdziwione spojrzenie: O męczeństwie w świetle teologii i faktów,” Znak 540, no. 5 (2000). See Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis; and Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom. 16 Maksim Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952), 17:231, 210.

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notion of perekovka (the reforging of man)—the central metaphor of the Stalinist discourse of the Gulag—was, in fact, a distant echo of the medieval metal symbolism of initiation popularized by Romantic literature and art.17 Of course, the Gulag was not the first penitentiary system to appropriate the tradition of prison experience as inner transformation by setting its own terms of this transformation. In fact, the very idea of prison as “penitence,” championed by Leon Faucher in his 1838 book De la Reforme des prisons, for instance, practically defined the treatment of the prison theme in the dominant modern Western legal discourse.18 What differentiated the Bolshevik application of this discourse from most of its Western liberal counterparts was, however, the ideological redefinition (in the radical tradition of the French Revolution) of the notion of guilt and innocence. Following the French example, the Bolsheviks found a practical application for the notion of “revolutionary justice” by turning penal servitude from a form of penitence for proven crimes into a powerful institution of social engineering, a tool of mass terror, and a major pool of slave labor for the economy. As a result, in the real Gulag, unlike in the one existing in Stalinist propaganda, the chief transformation projected onto the prisoner was not spiritual ascent but degradation, both spiritual and physical, under the brutal impact of hunger, violence, and exploitation. In this situation, the central drama presented in survivors’ literature of the Gulag is the prisoner’s struggle against this negative transformation (dehumanization and ideological brainwashing) imposed by the oppressive system. At the same time, the central drama of the author-witness of the Gulag is his struggle to demystify the Gulag by exposing and unravelling the false discourse of spiritual ascent surrounding it. The claim that prison provides an opportunity for the beneficial transformation of the prisoner makes moral sense only when the prisoner’s guilt is evident—his old corrupt self appears then as a cocoon preventing the new self from being born. Therefore the old self must be discarded. But it is precisely the innocence of the victim that constitutes the moral basis for the literary testimony of Gulag survivors. The primary paradigm of spiritual ascent in the survivor literature is that of resisting the negative transformation, withstanding the moral test, and protecting the old self from degradation.

17 See Rolf Hellebust, “Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body,” Slavic Review 46, no. 3 (Fall 1997). 18 Faucher points to the monastic tradition of voluntary penitence as a model for the modern state “penitentiary” system. See Leon Faucher, De la Reforme des prisons (Paris: Agne, 1838), 180. Michel Foucault examines this connection in his Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 125.

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

The spiritual ascent, if it occurs, is more often than not portrayed as a result of the successful defense of one’s old self. For example, in The First Circle (1968), Solzhenitsyn refers to the inner transformation of his porte parole, Nerzhin, as the “forging of the soul”—a direct echo of the Stalinist metaphor.19 But the meaning of the metaphor is different here. In Stalinist discourse, the prefix pere- (re-) in perekovka (reforging) means that the new man must be formed as a result of the old man’s destruction. Solzhenitsyn, like many other writers of the Gulag experience, subverts this paradigm. The “new man” is born in the Gulag as a result of the “old man’s” struggle to remain himself against the overwhelming pressures. This struggle can purify and strengthen him to the point of making him a new person. During the post-Stalinist thaw, the Soviet regime significantly readjusted its efforts to appropriate the image of the Gulag as a site of spiritual ascent. Trying to dissociate itself from the Stalinist past, the Soviet leadership began using the theme of the Gulag as a factor additionally legitimizing, in moral terms, the Communist Party’s claim to power instead of compromising it. Khrushchev’s regime constructed a new official discourse of the Gulag, which focused on the Bolshevik victims of Stalin’s purges in order to present a generalizing image of the party as a victim but not perpetrator of Stalinist crimes. The point of this new discourse was to show the “real Soviet people, true Communists,” who (as Boris Diakov writes in a fashion typical of the time) “in difficult circumstances . . . were faithful to the Party ideals. . . . They painfully experienced violations of the law, but they nevertheless preserved faith in the inevitable victory of Lenin’s truth and Lenin’s ways of life. Their faith triumphed, thanks to the efforts of the Party” (my italics).20 So, in the thaw, the Stalinist rhetoric of perekovka, which portrayed the Gulag as a locus of the death of the old man and the birth of the new one, was replaced in official Soviet discourse by a new paradigm presenting spiritual ascent in the Gulag as a result of the resistance of “true Communists” to forced transformation. According to this discourse, the Gulag and the purges did not change “true

19 Nerzhin says, “Dushu zhe vykovyvaet sebe kazhdyi sam, god ot godu” (Everyone forges his soul on his own, year after year), in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1990), 509. Thomas P. Whitney’s English translation of this sentence is not entirely faithful to the original. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 398. On the treatment of the official discourse of perekovka in Solzhenitsyn’s novel see Dariusz Tołczyk, “The Anxiety of a Witness: Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and the Rhetoric of Initiation,” The Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars 29 (1999). 20 Boris Diakov, “Povest′ o perezhitom,” Oktiabr′, no. 7 (1964): 49.

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Communists.” On the contrary, these experiences made them (and their party) even more what they had been before their arrest. In their uncorrupt souls, the golden age of “Lenin’s truth and Lenin’s ways of life” survived the trials and tribulations of the “cult of personality.” For Soviet camp survivors who, like Ginzburg, made the writing of the testimony to the Gulag their mission, the thaw presented a situation both inspiring and ambiguous. On the one hand, the topic of the Gulag emerged, for the first time since the 1937 purges, from total obscurity. The Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961 officially called writers to further explore it. “It seemed to me,” Ginzburg writes, “that the longed-for, hoped-for time had now come when I could speak out” (2.418). But, on the other hand, it was clear that in order to “speak out” in the USSR about the Gulag, one had to make at least a plausible appearance of speaking within the limits of the official discourse. Determined not to let this opportunity go, Ginzburg accepted these ambiguous rules and entered a risky game with the regime. She writes: I had assigned myself a specific aim: to offer the manuscript to the major journals. Perhaps to Yunost . . . . Or—you never know your luck—even to Novyi Mir, which by that time had already published Ivan Denisovich. Alas, together with my hopes of publication the missing inner editor came into being. He carped at every paragraph: “You won’t get that past the censor.” I started looking for more streamlined formulations, and not infrequently spoiled passages that had come out well, comforting myself with the thought that, after all, a sentence or so was not much sacrifice for the sake of publication, of reaching people at last. (2.419) The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 and the official discussion which followed it in the Soviet press showed to many writers, critics, and readers that writing about the Gulag while playing a game of deception with the authorities was, indeed, possible. Solzhenitsyn’s work, owing to the ambiguously apolitical perspective of its central character, the Russian peasant prisoner, Shukhov, was widely interpreted in Soviet public discourse as literary proof that, as the critic Viacheslav Pallon argued, “people remained people in the camps for the very reason that they were Soviet in their hearts.”21

21 V. Pallon, “Zdravstvuite, kavtorang!” Izvestiia, January 15, 1964.

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

If Solzhenitsyn’s story of a Russian peasant’s struggle to preserve his human dignity in the camp could be officially championed for what it was not—an alleged “reinforcing of the Leninist way of life”22—so could a story of the “transformation of a naive young Communist idealist” perhaps pass by the political watchdogs as one more praise of the “victory” of Communist “faith.” In order to achieve this goal, a special literary strategy had to be designed. Ginzburg’s autobiographical narrative begins with a portrayal of the “naive young Communist idealist,” the young Zhenya (Evgenia) Ginzburg, on December 1, 1934, the day she learned of Kirov’s murder in Leningrad (the event triggering the onset of the Great Terror). On the opening page of her memoir, Ginzburg recalls the state of mind of her autobiographical protagonist, I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I must say in all honesty that, had I been ordered to die for the Party—not once but three times—that very night, in that snowy winter dawn, I would have obeyed without the slightest hesitation. I had not a shadow of a doubt of the rightness of the Party line. Only Stalin—I suppose instinctively—I could not bring myself to idolize, as it was already becoming the fashion to do. But if I felt this vague disquiet about him, I carefully concealed it even from myself. (1.4) On the previous page, in the introduction written from the vantage point of the author looking back at her own story, Ginzburg writes: All that this book describes is over and done with. . . . How wonderful that . . . the great Leninist truths have again come into their own in our country and Party! . . . Here, then, is the story of an ordinary Communist woman during the period of the “personality cult” (1.417-18) The beginning of the narrative and the author’s introduction present the two chronological poles of the inner “journey” (marshrut) suggested in the title— its points of departure and arrival. In light of both statements (juxtaposed on

22 Leonid Il′ichev, “Sily tvorcheskoi molodezhi—na sluzhbu velikim idealam,” Literaturnaia gazeta, January 10, 1963. On the official Soviet reception of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, see Dariusz Tołczyk, See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chapter 5, “A Sliver in the Throat of Power.”

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the opening pages of the book), these two points appear as, in fact, not two but one point. The author, a “Communist idealist” “without a shadow of a doubt of the rightness of the Party line,” seems to remain just this despite her eighteenyear ordeal in the Gulag; her spiritual journey through the horrors of Kolyma seems to end exactly where it had begun. This frame, projected on the narrative by the introduction, reflects the official Khrushchevian rhetoric presenting the Gulag as the Bolshevik party’s test of faith, which the “true Communists” passed with flying colors. The heroine, initiated in her youth to the “Leninist truth,” has successfully resisted the negative transformation in the Gulag, and has emerged from this experience strengthened and unchanged (even her suppressed doubts about Stalin’s character proved right in the light of the party’s new rhetoric criticizing “the personality cult”). The main problem with this interpretation is that the interpretative paradigm suggested by the introduction (the politically appropriated version of a Romantic/martyrological paradigm) stands conspicuously at odds with the narrative itself. The stark contrast between the formulaic officialese of the introduction and the linguistic sensitivity displayed in the narrative additionally underscores this discrepancy. While the introduction repeats the official rhetoric of the Gulag as an opportunity for the Communist individual’s resistance to negative transformation, the narrative develops around the other traditional paradigm of spiritual ascent in prison—that of death and new birth. In Ginzburg’s story, the old faith and the old self must die, in order for the new person to be born. It was not until the second volume, written without hope for publication and, therefore, without the “inner editor,” that this death of a “Communist idealist” in the protagonist-author is directly referred to as leading to her spiritual rebirth. But this direction is already present in the first volume. It is conveyed here by an orchestration of themes and motifs which subverts the official paradigm set by the introduction. In the first volume of Krutoi marshrut, Ginzburg consistently employs motifs of death, the other world, and rebirth as metaphors of her experience in Stalin’s prisons and camps. She refers to her life before imprisonment as the “old life” (1.35) or as her “former existence which came to an end in February 1937” (1.24). Description of objects and situations is often endowed with symbolic meanings evoking the key motif of the descent to the nether world. For example, when the official investigation of Zhenya is completed and she is about to be transferred from the Kazan prison to Moscow, the guards give her back the watch, which had been confiscated at the moment of her arrest. “It had not been wound since the fifteenth of February,” Ginzburg writes, “and still showed two o’clock on that memorable day—the day on which my life ended.

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

Everything since then had been only my wandering, after death, through hell. Or could it be purgatory?” (1.100). A watch that stopped at the time of her arrest symbolically represents her imprisonment as a descent from the temporal reality of the living into the timeless domain of the dead, where, as Byron writes in his description of prison in The Prisoner of Chillon, “There were no stars—no earth—no time.”23 But her question—whether this nether world is, in fact, hell or purgatory—is indirectly answered within the symbolic context of the watch. Getting back her watch in prison places her in an ambiguous realm, which is simultaneously temporal and timeless. Time exists in neither heaven nor hell. The only place which belongs to the other (eternal) world but which is temporary (in which time exists) is purgatory. The difference between purgatory and hell is that hell is a state of eternal death, from which there is no resurrection. Unlike the symbolic furnace of initiation, where ore is transformed into metal, the infernal flame is sterile: no “new person” emerges from it. The metaphor of hell versus purgatory sets crucial terms around which the central theme of the heroine’s transformation develops in Krutoi marshrut. Just before and immediately after Zhenya’s imprisonment, she is asked by her party superiors (now her oppressors) to prove her unconditional faith in the party by incriminating herself and other people. She refuses. This key moment corresponds in Ginzburg’s narrative with two side-stories, each of them introducing a “Communist idealist” in circumstances similar to Zhenya’s. Their stories present alternative variants of Zhenya’s own fate. The differences are slight but, at the same time, significant enough to illuminate where the main difference between hell and purgatory lies in the world presented in Ginzburg’s memoir. The first story is of Pitkovskaya, a woman who, just like Zhenya, is a Bolshevik true believer without “the shadow of a doubt in the rightness of the party line.” Her husband, Bolshevik activist Dontsov, happened to vote against Stalin once in 1927. For this reason, Pitkovskaya (who “loved him dearly, tenderly”) “ruthlessly condemned his past. Even to her five-year-old son she tried to explain in simple words how gravely his father has sinned” (1.17). Dontsov was finally arrested in 1935. “When the NKVD came in the middle of the night to arrest her husband . . . ,” Ginzburg writes,

23 Lord Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon, l. 245, in The Works of Lord Byron, 13 vols. (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 4:23. The motif of a stopped watch was used as a symbol of death in Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady. See Adam Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve (part three), in Polish Romantic Drama: Three Plays in English Translation, ed. and trans. Harold B. Segel (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997), 154.

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she carried on in a manner worthy of a Greek tragedy. Needless to say, she was heartbroken for her beloved husband, the father of her child, but she suppressed her feelings. “So he lied to me,” she exclaimed dramatically. “So he really was against the Party all the time!” With an amused grin, the men from the NKVD said: “Better get his things together.” But she refused to do this for an enemy of the Party, and when her husband went to his sleeping child’s cot to kiss him goodbye, she barred his way: “My child has no father!” Then, shaking the policemen fervently by the hand, she swore to them that her son would be brought up a loyal servant of the Party. (1.17-18) Ginzburg then comments on Pitkovskaya’s behavior: “All this she told me herself, and I do not for a moment believe that there was the least calculation or hypocrisy in her actions. Absurd as they seemed, they were prompted by what she genuinely felt in her naive soul, utterly devoted to the ideals of her militant youth” (1.18). After her husband’s arrest, Pitkovskaya, condemned by the party for her “lack of vigilance” (that is, not informing on her husband for his “crimes”), is expelled from the party but not arrested—a situation that places her in limbo, where her self-imposed guilt cannot be redeemed. Not arrested, she cannot even “repent” for her guilt and be “born again” in the Gulag. As a result of this unredeemable guilt before the party, she commits suicide. In her suicide note, Pitkovskaya “blamed nobody, treated the whole thing as a misunderstanding, and begged to be remembered as a Communist” (1.19). In the other story, Evgenia Podolskaya, another Communist idealist, is arrested by the NKVD and asked to fulfill an important party mission. The mission was to sign a number of statements about subversive doings of a certain counter-revolutionary group, to which, for the sake of plausibility, she would confess that she belonged. . . . All they needed her signature for was to give the case a certain legal weight. Besides, there were top-level considerations of the sort an ordinary Party member didn’t need to know if she were really willing to perform a dangerous task. . . . Finally they stuck a pen in her hand and she began to sign. (1.185-86)

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

Sometime later, having fulfilled her party mission, Podolskaya is told by an NKVD officer that the whole thing was a success and thanks to her testimony about twenty people were sentenced to death. “And now, my dear,” the officer goes on, “you’re going to be shot” (1.186). Shocked, Podolskaya attempts to open her veins in the prison cell. Her suicide attempt is prevented, but she promises to keep trying until successful. The characters of Pitkovskaya and Podolskaya clearly show that the paradigm of unshakable ideological faith, which in the official discourse of the thaw spells redemption, in Ginzburg’s narrative suggests its opposite—a trap without a way out or, to use once again the Romantic image, the grave which cannot become the womb. But Zhenya, placed in a situation similar to that of Pitkovskaya and Podolskaya, refuses to cooperate. Her Bolshevik faith shows its limits as she allows her personal moral judgment to stand between her and the party. As the “naive young Communist idealist” withers in her, Zhenya departs on an inner journey, from which she is to emerge a new person. Her progress on this journey is measured by the growing distance between the moral discourse of the party and her new sense of self and the other, developed in prisons and camps. In the chapter whose Russian title “Butyrskoe kreshchenie” (The baptism at Butyrki) evokes once again the death-and-rebirth symbolism of initiation, Ginzburg describes her arrival from Kazan to Moscow’s Butyrki prison. On arrival, Zhenya and other women prisoners are stripped and searched. All their possessions are taken away. Nakedness and the confiscation of personal belongings, which symbolize one’s parting with all attributes of life, represent the human condition at both birth and death. As the prisoners stand naked in the shower room, a young woman approaches Zhenya: “’Excuse me, but are you a Party member? You look like one—it seems a funny thing to ask here, but I must know. You are? Well, I belong to the Komsomol, my name is Katya Shirokova, and I’m eighteen years old. I need some advice” (1.144). Stripped of her clothes, deprived of her possessions, and thrown into a crowd of unknown women, Katya Shirokova reflects Zhenya’s own vulnerabilities. Like Zhenya, Katya experiences a confusion between party discourse, which has so far organized her own relationship with the world, and her experience, which seems to contradict the terms of this discourse. This confusion takes the form of a moral dilemma. Katya addresses Zhenya: “You see that German woman over there has hidden some gold things in her hair and I can’t decide whether I ought to tell the wardress. I don’t like to give her away, it’s disgusting, but on the

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other hand this is a Soviet prison and for all I know she may be a real class enemy.” “What about you and me, Katya? Are we?” “Oh, of course it’s a mistake about us. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Anyway, they’re sure to let us out. But meanwhile it is terribly hard to know what to do, especially about her.” . . . “So you want a directive, Katya, do you?” “Well, it’s difficult, you know, she’s a German and . . .” “Listen to me. Since we’re all naked in every sense of the word, I think you should be guided by the instinct which is generally known as conscience. And I imagine yours tells you that it would be a dirty trick to give the woman away.” (1.144-45) What Zhenya reveals to her junior party comrade is that only by abandoning the ethics of “class warfare” set by the party can one ascend to a truly humane ethical world, where one’s ethical obligation is to concrete human beings and no longer to ideological abstractions. Naked, both physically and symbolically, the prisoners are vulnerable yet simultaneously freed from the entanglements and constraints of their former lives. They are recognizable only as humans and no longer definable by their political and social status. By acknowledging this symbolic nakedness—the death of the old self—one enters a world in which resurrection is possible. This world proved inaccessible for Pitkovskaya and Podolskaya, trapped by the ethical terms projected by the party rhetoric. A crucial force enabling Zhenya to transcend the moral identity she has been assigned by the ideological language of the party and develop a new sense of self comes largely from her attachment to literature. Romantic literary images of imprisonment as spiritual ascent play a dual role in Ginzburg’s memoir. They provide the author with a paradigm around which the “material” of memory is turned into a narrative, but they also provide the protagonist with a prism through which she confronts and tries to shape her experience. Zhenya’s own ordeal becomes for her a reenactment of literary models from Nekrasov’s Russian Women, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and many other classic works. Even on the way to her own trial, which she expects to end quickly with a death sentence, she does not abandon this mode of self-stylization. She insists on dressing up to look like Charlotte Corday, or Madame Desmoulins, or Mary Queen of Scots. In the solitary cell of the Yaroslavl prison, in near total isolation, the only link available to Zhenya to connect her to life and the human world is through literary language and the imaginary world generated by it. “[W]hat

A Cruel Journey of the Soul: The Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg

was left? Poetry . . . only poetry . . . my own and other people’s,” Ginzburg writes. “After dinner was my time for Pushkin. I gave myself a lecture about him, then recited all I could remember of his poems. Like a chrysalis transformed into a butterfly, my memory, cut off from all outside impressions, suddenly blossomed. Wonderful!” (1.198). The metamorphosis of a chrysalis into a butterfly (psyche) is an ancient symbol of spiritual initiation and resurrection.24 In it, the soul is liberated from its bodily prison and, endowed with wings, transcends its old material form of existence. Zhenya’s words echo those of Byron’s representation of Torquatto Tasso, one of the most famous literary prisoners in Romantic literature: For I have battled with my agony, And made me wings wherewith to overfly The narrow surface of my dungeon wall.25 Byron’s Tasso speaks of the spiritual ascent accomplished in the dungeon thanks to the aesthetic power of poetry. But Ginzburg places this Romantic motif of the aesthetic redemption in the ethical domain represented by the central metaphor organizing her story—purgatory. The world projected by this metaphor is one of guilt and repentance. In purgatory, a person’s transformation and ascent is predicated on their admission of the inadequacies of their former self—the admission of guilt and acceptance of the punishment. Zhenya’s journey through purgatory is a gradual process. There is no definitive climactic illumination. The death of the old person and the birth of the new one is refracted in a long series of events, scenes, and motifs. But in the chapter, whose title “Mea Culpa” refers to the Latin Church formula by which the penitent admits guilt during confession, this paradigm of purgatory finds its direct expression. Looking back on her eighteen years in Stalin’s captivity, Ginzburg writes: When you can’t sleep, the knowledge that you did not directly take part in the murders and betrayals is no consolation. After all, the assassin is not only he who struck the blow, but whoever supported evil, no matter how: by thoughtless repetition of dangerous political theories; by silently raising his right hand; by faint-heartedly writing half-truths. Mea culpa . . . and it 24 See Dorothea Forstner, Die Welt der christlichen Symbole (Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag, 1966). 25 Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon. Cited in Brombert, The Romantic Prison, 6.

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occurs to me more and more frequently that eighteen years of hell on earth is insufficient expiation for the guilt. (2.153) This extraordinary confession of guilt for uncommitted crimes by a victim of Kolyma (formerly a “naive Communist idealist”) is one of the Gulag’s foremost literary documents of moral courage and magnanimity. It is also a document of moral victory achieved by a human being who took the risk of experiencing the Gulag in terms of a spiritual journey and who was determined to abandon her old self out of a moral imperative, with no assurance as to where this daring act might lead her. Ginzburg’s indictment of Bolshevik ideology as a source of evil could not have been admitted by the Soviet public discourse of the thaw without damaging it. In 1966, Boris Polevoi, the editor of Iunost′, where Ginzburg submitted the first volume of Krutoi marshrut, said to her: “Surely, you didn’t seriously hope that we would publish it?” (2.422). Indeed, Polevoi proved to be a sensitive reader of Evgenia Ginzburg. The spiritual transformation of the protagonist in Krutoi marshrut suggests that moral exploration of the Gulag is bound to be ineffectual if pursued in terms of the Bolshevik ethics, which generated the Gulag in the first place. Instead of following the Khrushchevian party line and showing how the ethical legacy of Leninism motivated the Communist idealist to successfully resist negative transformation in the Gulag, Ginzburg provided one of the most devastating moral indictments of this legacy. The core of this indictment lies in Ginzburg’s observation that in Leninism the notions of guilt and remorse are applicable only to the profane, that is, those not properly initiated into the Communist domain of truth. For those truly faithful to Leninist ethics, such as Pitkovskaya and Podolskaya, the paradigm of rebirth is no longer accessible. Thus, Ginzburg presents Leninist ethics as a moral trap, which destroys, among others, those “Communist idealists” who try to protect their moral identities constructed in the language of these ethics. To allow Ginzburg’s work into Soviet public discourse would mean to admit the possibility, the necessity, of speaking about Soviet Communism in a moral language external to it. The fact that Ginzburg’s autobiographical story of a Communist morally transcending her ideological confines could not be given entry into Soviet public discourse only confirmed her indictment of the official ideological framework: there was no purgatory for Leninism. Incapable of genuine remorse and self-examination, it demonstrated all too clearly its own incapability of resurrection.

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Mimetic Resistance in Evgenia Ginzburg’s Krutoi marshrut Natasha Kolchevska

As scholars engage in dialog/voices with other eras through the legacy of fiction, memoirs, diaries and letters, one of the challenges that presents itself is how to decipher the relationship between an author as a free and autonomous producer of a text and his or her “entrapment” within a system where meaning has already been fixed. . . . If literary works are derivative of cultural discourses, they also serve as the venues through which their authors refract and transform the experience of their particular cultural discourse. Thus the historical and cultural “entrapment” of the author within a particular system of signification does not necessarily exclude the possibility of creative self-expression through that same system.1 According to Liudmilla Alexeyeva, Evgenia Ginzburg’s Gulag memoir Krutoi marshrut was among the most popular samizdat works of the l960s and 1970s.2

1 Anna Krylova, “In Their Own Words? Soviet Women Writers and the Search for Self,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele M. Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 243. For another view of this question, see Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,”Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 71-96. 2 Liudmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. C. Pearce and J. Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 327. See also Adele M. Barker, “The Persistence of Memory: Women’s Prose since the Sixties,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele M. Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 278; and Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering

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In the West, her memoir has been widely praised, translated, taught in courses, and analyzed from multiple perspectives—cultural, literary, and historical. The 1988 staging of a play based on the memoir was regarded as one of the keystone events in Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ about the Soviet Union’s bedeviled past.3 And yet readers, particularly in the Soviet Union and Russia, have questioned the characterization of Ginzburg as a dissident at all. Some have argued that she was a privileged insider caught in the Purges rather than a true dissident; and that, while criticizing specific atrocities committed by the system, she remained a true believer in Marxist-Leninist ideology, if not its Stalinist (mis)appropriations, even when the crimes committed by that ideology deprived her of her own career, freedom, and loved ones. At most, as one émigré reader described her, she was a “reluctant dissident” who, in 1962, even after the revelations of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Communist Party Congresses, ended the first part of Krutoi marshrut with the hopeful comment that “the great Leninist truths have come into their own in our country and Party!”(1.417).4 That Krutoi marshrut has been read in different ways by different readers should come as no surprise: it is a rich and complex narrative that lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Memoirs of the Gulag by both men and women are plentiful, yet only a relatively small number have reached beyond the domain of oral history and carved out a niche in Soviet Russian historical or cultural memory.5 The

Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 69. Ginzburg’s memoir was published as Krutoi marshrnt: Khronika vremen kul′ta lichnosti, vol. 1 (Munich: Possev, 1967); vol. 2. (Milan: A. Mondadori Editori, 1979); I refer to the 2nd ed. in 2 vols. (New York: Possev-USA, 1985). In the Soviet Union it was first serialized in the Latvian (Riga) journal Daugava, nos. 7-12 (1988) and 1-6 (1989) then published in one volume in Moscow by Sovetskii pisatel’ in 1990. 3 The play Krutoi marshrut was performed at the Sovremennik Theater in 1988-1989. Irina Paperno traces the “explosion” in personal life narratives to the publication of N. Mandelstam and Ginzburg’s memoirs: “The trend began with the sensational publications of accounts of personal experience of Stalinist terror written in the 1960s-1970s and circulated underground, such as, in 1988, the memoirs of Nadezhda lakovlevna Mandel’shtam and Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg. There are reasons to believe that what impressed the public more than the stories themselves was seeing them published: it was now possible, even desirable, for individual people to speak of their horrible experiences” (Irina Papemo, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 [Fall 2002]: 578). See also Paperno’s Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 4 Private conversation with the memoirist Elena Sukhorukikh Romine, 1994. 5 Although many more were submitted than were ever published or even circulated in samizdat. Alekseyeva recalls reading, in 1956-57, “the typewritten prison memoir of a Communist named Yevgeniya Ginzburg,” and continues that “according to a Khrushchev statement, ten

M i m e t i c R e s i s t a n c e i n E v g e n i a G i n z b u r g ’s K r u t o i m a r s h r u t

literary merits and conscious construction of Krutoi marshrut serve as testimony to its author’s larger intentions. What is often overlooked is that while Ginzburg’s private and familial concerns provided the initial motivation, over time those motivations ceded to more public ones. Her published text(s) are the result, as she admits at the end of the second volume of Krutoi marshrut, of “a succession of constantly rewritten drafts, as I . . . searched for more accurate words, more carefully considered judgments” (2.417). In other words, responding to the shift in possibilities from Stalinist to Khrushchevian discourse, which since 1956 opened up a range of opportunities for candor and transparency—albeit limited, still under strict official control—she transformed a repository of private concern into something intended for the public arena. It is this document that we read, not the original, familial memoir. In the epilogue to the English edition, Ginzburg offers a telling account of the compositional and textual trajectory of Krutoi marshrut. When, after eighteen years of Gulag and exile, she takes up the pen to memorialize that experience, Ginzburg initially does so for personal and family reasons—to share those ordeals and the perceptions they produced with her one surviving biological son, Vasily Aksenov, and his son, and to set down on paper the poems she had mentally composed but could not write down during her imprisonment: “When I began to work on the book, the only landmarks in the labyrinth of the past were my poems . . . composed without benefit of a pencil or paper, but, thanks to the efficiency of my memory where poetry is concerned, clearly imprinted on my brain . . . they did duty for the notebooks I did not possess” (2.418). At the time, she could do little more since, as Veronica Shapovalov writes, “Before their release from camp . . . convicts were made to sign a document (podpiska o nerazglashenii) stating that they would never ‘disclose any information about places of confinement,’ and any violation of this rule was punishable by deprivation of freedom for three years.”6 By 1962, however, after the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Ginzburg’s dissatisfaction with the private “emotional outpourings and soul baring” of those first efforts had grown, as she saw that this was “not a book but only the raw material for one” (2.419). With some regret (“it might have won my readers’ hearts”), she burned that first,

thousand memoirs by old politzeki [political prisoners] had been submitted to publishing houses. None of them were published” (Ludmilla Alekseyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era [Boston: Little, Brown, 1990], 99). 6 V. Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 1.

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private effort, and (re)turned to public authorship after a hiatus of a quarter of a century.7 I intend to examine Ginzburg’s memoir from two perspectives: first, as an example of a “hybrid” text, and second, as a lens through which to explore shifting perspectives on the dynamics of domination and resistance in recent criticism. By hybrid, I mean a text that uses rhetorical devices and symbolic structures shared with dominant discourses within the state socialist structure of which Ginzburg remained a willing member, even as she sought to expose the crimes and irrationality of this ostensibly fair and rational society. Basing my analysis of Krutoi marshrut on research from three recent studies of the Stalin era and immediately thereafter, I will examine the complex interaction between the discourses of the dominant and the dominated in a totalitarian culture. By looking beyond the parameters of traditional forms that Ginzburg unquestionably draws on, and specifically the Russian autobiographical tradition, which has always heavily emphasized social or political reality,8 and examining more closely contemporary discourses that may have molded Ginzburg’s strategies of self-representation and self-construction, I hope to arrive at a more nuanced reading of this important text.9 One of the challenging aspects of Ginzburg’s position in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s was her incorporation into Krutoi marshrut of many commonplaces that she shared with the official discourses of her day. Or, to put it in the context of Serguei A. Oushakine’s recent article on ‘’The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,”10 it is possible to read Ginzburg’s narrative as a form not of opposition—taking a stance that is openly confrontational and offering a clear alternative to the discourse, for example—but, rather, of

  7 In the years before her arrest, Ginzburg wrote for the Kazan-based newspaper Red Tataria.   8 Barbara Heldt makes this distinction about Russian autobiographies: “Russian autobiographies differ from those of the more familiar nations of Europe in their greater concern with social or political reality, with Russian reality in particular” (Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 64).   9 It is also worth keeping in mind Paperno’s observation on the specifically Russian features of historical self-consciousness: “the sense of self derived from the coincidence of personal life and world history. . . . Intellectuals throughout the Soviet regime, in their search for instruments of self-determination, followed 19th century models.” Irina Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,” Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 (September 2002): 584. See also N. Kolchevska, ‘The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag,” in The Russian Memoir: History and Literature, ed. B. Holmgren (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 145-66. 10 Serguei Alex Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” Public Culture 13, no. 2 (2001): 191-14.

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what he calls mimetic resistance, that is, a strategy that “exploit[s] already present rhetorical devices elaborated within the dominant symbolic structure of state socialism” in order to represent herself as a writing subject.11 In Oushakine’s analysis, “the oppositional discourse in a sense shared the symbolic field with the dominant discourse: it echoed and amplified the rhetoric of the regime, rather than positioning itself outside of it or underneath it.”12 As I will show, this notion of mimetic resistance is key to understanding both the constraints and the possibilities for creative expression available to writers in the postStalin period. It is fair to say, especially about the first (and more widely read, at least in the West) volume of Krutoi marshrut, that in spite of her realization of the evils inherent in the Gulag and its creators, Ginzburg’ s discursive position is of an inside critic of her society who wants to remain inside that system. In an ironic reversal of the common pattern of wives being imprisoned for being married to “enemies of the state,” Ginzburg is arrested before her husband, and for her own “crime.”13 If the pre-arrest Ginzburg is a respected and well-trained professional who wears multiple hats—university teacher, historian, journalist , wife of a high-ranking Party official in Kazan’, and a Party member herself—in her post-Gulag life she attempts, successfully, to regain many of her former roles. She writes with a strong sense of personal and collective aggrievement, with alternating feelings of amazement and outrage, and certainly her suffering and loss deserve the reader’s compassion. However, one can also argue that through this tale of spiritual and physical rebirth, Ginzburg returns to positions of even more profound respect than in her pre-Gulag life. By the end of Krutoi marshrut, she has become, again, a teacher, the matriarch of a “blended” family, a writer, and, finally, one of those “powerful widows” about whose role in post­Stalinist Soviet society Carl Proffer wrote some years ago (1987).14 She is eventually

11 Ibid., 196. 12 Ibid., 192. 13 As Veronica Shapovalov writes, “Those [women] who were prominent and active in the political and social life of the country, in academic and creative work . . . were the first to be arrested.” Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness, 7. 14 Carl Proffer, The Widows of Russia and Other Writings (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987). See also Beth Holmgren’s chapter on “The Widow’s Might” in her Women’s Work in Stalin’s Time: Lidiia Chukovskaia, Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 171-79. Technically, of course, Ginzburg is not the widow of a famous man, as were Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, or Anna Larina, nor does her narrative display the “other-orientedness” and caretaker priorities of many women’s memoirs. I include her in this group because of the major, if not unproblematic, role that she played in post-Stalin discourses.

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rehabilitated and allowed to return to Moscow, where she becomes the center of an admiring community of fellow ex-zeks, members of the old intelligentsia and, eventually, her celebrated writer son’s friends. Ginzburg’ s insistence that the first translation of Krutoi marshrut was published (in samizdat) abroad against her wishes is one final piece of evidence of that unwillingness to part with the insider status that her stay in the Gulag disturbed but did not destroy. Ginzburg’s reliance on a number of rhetorical stances and symbolic systems from the dominant discourses of her life and times need not diminish the power of her narrative. By regarding it as a “hybrid construction,” to borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, I read Krutoi marshrut as an example of an “utterance that belong[s] . . . to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two . . . languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems,” which, according to Bakhtin, “are of enormous significance” in the novel form15 (the genre to which Krutoi marshrut has often been compared). Oushakine’s further explication of Bakhtin’s concept is particularly relevant here: “a ‘hybrid construction’ [is] a mixture of two individualized language consciousnesses . . . and two individual language intentions as well. . . . This mixture of intentions caused by being constituted by the authoritative discourse as well as by being constituted at a location different from that of the authorities finally produces a ‘replication’ of the dominant discourse.”16 Thus, by composing Krutoi marshrut initially by sharing her experiences orally with friends and family in the 1950s from a distant location (mostly Magadan in the Far East and, to a much lesser extent, several Russian provincial centers), this former insider—now displaced from the easy access to power to which she was once accustomed—draws on discourses familiar to both herself and her future readership in order to write her way back from the margins of Soviet experience. Oushakine goes on to make the important point that “‘dissidents’ resistance expressed itself in amplification of the discourse of the dominant, rather than in reversal of it.”17 Indeed, Ginzburg amplifies, internalizes, and replicates these dominant discourses, yet without merging with them, since her intentions are to reveal and expose, rather than glorify and mythologize, the Soviet system, and to relate the trajectory of her own maturation and spiritual growth. Nonetheless, several of the memoir’s major themes—such as overcoming threats to her physical and psychological well-being, the process

15 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 304, 305. 16 Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat”: 203. 17 Ibid.

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of rebirth into a new, more legitimate self, and reforging herself into a new person who will perform a more socially useful role than the old self—overlap with the cultural and literary paradigms within which she operated (and was educated) before her arrest.18 Moreover, the narrative’s frame as a work of heroic (auto)biography similarly replicates the monumental feats and romance of Socialist Realist classics, even as the Gulag subject matter resists those discourses. Numerous scholars, beginning with Katerina Clark,19 have addressed the patterns of heroicism and mythification that permeate the fictional form in its Socialist Realist incarnations. The protagonist of Krutoi marshrut displays many of the iconic attributes of the hero(ine) of mainstream Stalinist fiction: not only is she brave and willing to take risks, but she also has an exceptional capacity for life and enormous reserves of life energy. Dynamic and loath to be far removed from the action, when she is not at death’s door Ginzburg charges through the pages of her narrative in this journey of enlightenment and maturity. In due course, she undertakes (or is put through) many of the rites of passage of a socialist realist hero: she undergoes a number of near-death experiences, which she overcomes; she loses a son, who dies without her during the siege of Leningrad; she takes on the cruelty of nature in Siberia and survives; and finally, she meets and marries her Prince Charming, in a union, as Alexander Zholkovsky has pointed out, that is as much a bond of spirit and culture as it is romantic.20 Traditional and contemporary cultural texts, such as newspapers, movies, novels, and memoirs, reinforced the cult of heroism in both pre- and postSoviet Russia. As Clark puts it, “heroes were those who had wrought or suffered in some extraordinary way, [especially] in the field of warfare or other strenuous activity.” She continues: “it is a rare Socialist Realist novel that fails to include either death or threat of death for the hero(es).”21 Linked to this 18 Anne Hartmann treats the concept of perekovka as a model for the whole society in “Concepts of the Criminal in the Discourse of ‘Perekovka,’” in Born to be Criminal: The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union. Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Riccardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 167–96. 19 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 20 Alexander Zholkovsky, “Before and after ‘After the Ball’: Variations on the Theme of Courtship, Corpses, and Culture,” in Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History, ed. A. K. Zholkovsky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 21 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, 180. The first part is a quote from Moses Hadas and Morton Smith, Heroes and Gods: Spiritual Biographies in Antiquity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 10–11.

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paradigm is another feature often admired in Krutoi marshrut—Ginzburg’s physical strength and stamina. Key scenes, such as the one at the end of volume one when she lies at death’s door on the prisoner transit ship Dzhurma, mark this hero(ine)’s capacity for life and serve as passages to higher states of awareness and spirituality. In each of these death-threatening experiences, the old Evgenia dies symbolically, to be transfigured (to use another of Clark’s images) into a witness and ultimately a writer who can legitimately address history from the point of view of a heroicized survivor. Sheila Fitzpatrick has written about the centrality of the “reforging myth” to Stalinist culture.22 This was the myth “that in Soviet society, every man, no matter what his crimes or the defects of his origins, had the possibility of being remade.”23 Ginzburg had to respond to, or overcome, several biographical “defects,” and “reforge” herself into a more authentic Soviet citizen, cleansed of the “stains” of her bourgeois background and privileged pre-Gulag life. What is left unsaid in a personal narrative is often highly telling, and it is revealing that she attempts to downplay this “stain” by including in her memoir virtually no information about her childhood or life before she became a Communist. The latter omission—the privileged nature of her life once she becomes a Communist and marries a prominent Party member—is acknowledged by Ginzburg, but not the former. Her narrative gives us an opportunity to compare and contrast the (perceived) deficiencies in her pre-arrest, “ordinary’’ life with its mundane concerns of work as a Party activist who showed more affinity (at least in the text) with the concerns of the petit bourgeoisie, with its fancy dresses, ranking of cars and comfortable dachas, than with the Party line.24

22 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See especially 115-38. 23 Ibid., 115. 24 In Everyday Stalinism, Fitzpatrick writes that “Luxurious lifestyles were the target of [newspaper] stories. A Kazan′ newspaper . . . chose this ground of attack in writing of the recently disgraced leaders of the city Soviet, including P. V. Aksenov, former soviet chairman and husband of the later Gulag memoirist Eugeniia Ginzburg, who faced criminal charges for the misuse of government funds. It was alleged that they built themselves an elite dacha settlement, taking the funds from local building trusts as well as soliciting contributions from factory directors (who would be among the users of the dachas). . . . The dolce vita at these dachas was described as follows: Life at the dacha was lavishly appointed. Breakfasts, dinners, suppers, snacks and drinks, bed linen—everything came free. The hospitable hosts, generous at the expense of the state, did not have to bother with any financial calculations. . . . Here, in the shadow of pines and fir trees, no one worried about accounts and accountability; they spent money as they wished, without the usual formalities. Altogether, about 225,000 rubles of state funds were wasted on ‘exploitation’ of the dachas.” (Ibid., 196).

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Moreover, in an ironic twist on standard “great moments” in Bolshevik autobiographies, Ginzburg passes through the same stages—arrest, prison, exile—but only after her exclusion from the Party rather than in the tsarist past. How does she address this double blot—class origin and privileged lifestyle—concerning her credibility as an honest witness? In Krutoi marshrut, she does it by mimicking and amplifying another core paradigm in Soviet discourse: that, through proper endeavor and mentoring, she ‘’had the possibility of being remade.”25 Like Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg describes the many kinds of work that she is assigned to and often volunteers for as a transformative experience. Certainly, there are instances of that work being mindless and absurd, as in this scene from the orphanage, which opens the second volume of Krutoi marshrut: [T]he main preoccupation was the floors. Camp bosses everywhere had a mania for clean floors. The whiteness of the floor was the one criterion of hygiene. The fumes and the stench in the huts might he suffocating, and our rags might be stiff with dirt; but all this would pass unnoticed by the guardians of cleanliness and hygiene. Heaven help us . . . if the floors did not shine brightly enough. (2.5) By and large, however, work is a redemptive experience that is critical to the heroine’s “reforging.”26 Whether it is working in the tree-cutting projects or, later, the hospitals, the poultry yard, orphanages, and schools, these experiences take their place alongside her encounters with a diversity of women prisoners thereby allowing Ginzburg to reclaim herself as a person of integrity

25 Fitzpatrick points out that, typically, juvenile delinquents and criminals were the most likely to be “reforged,” but that, at least in the rhetoric of Stalinist propaganda, even “those . . . whose crimes were political” were also potential candidates. However, she makes the important distinction that in reality “[t]aints of social origin could not be overcome, and neither could political sins in the strict sense. . . . People tainted by social origin or political history were, in practice, almost invariably disqualified as objects of reclamation. To be eligible for reforging you had to have committed real crimes” (ibid., 7). 26 Dariusz Tołczyk provides an intriguing analysis of the “reforging” theme in the Gulag stories of Georgy Shelest, Andrei Aldan-Semenov, Boris Diakov, and Yurii Pilyar—camp memoirists writing at about the same time as Ginzburg—and its source in Maxim Gorky’s representation of earlier camps (Solovki) and prisoner construction projects (Belomor Canal) in his See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 210-17. Chapter 5 of the same volume, on Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha, also provides a useful discussion of the intertwining of dissident and dominant discourses in camp literature.

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and ethics. Moreover, these experiences are closely linked to those in a variety of narratives that Ginzburg would have been aware of before her arrest. As Fitzpatrick writes, [t]he theme of man’s remaking was popular in all sorts of contexts in the 1930s . . . The press was full of such reclamation stories [and] these . . . cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda, for they obviously caught the public imagination to an unusual degree. Even in the Gulag labor camps, where the reforging theme was strongly emphasized, it seems to have had some genuine inspirational impact.27 Ginzburg’s narrative also exemplifies many of the stances that were fundamental to one of the most prevalent official discourses of the Soviet period, that of the personal avtobiografiia that every Soviet citizen was expected to compose every few years. Anna Krylova points out the retrospective, and often transformative, role that the personal avtobiografiia played in the lives of Soviet citizens: Written autobiographies were required for a multitude of ordinary life events: entering school or university; joining a professional organization, the Komsomol, or the Party; as well as applying for a job. During the course of a lifetime, a citizen might write several autobiographical narratives, even if s/he remained within the same organization. Composing autobiographies every five or ten years required citizens to review and represent their lives from different historical perspectives, and allowed them to reinterpret themselves and their participation in Soviet “historical” events within the context of new realities.28

27 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 76. Fitzpatrick bases the last part of her comment on the research of Thomas Lahusen in his How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Socialist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 46-52. She continues: “the conversion tales that were so popular in the 1920s and 1930s had the dual appeal of adventure stories . . . and psychological dramas in which an unhappy, isolated, individual finally finds happiness in membership of the collective” (ibid.). As I discuss in “A Difficult Journey: Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women’s Writing of Camp Memoirs,” in Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Bergahn Books, 1998), 148-62, this description fits Ginzburg’s narrative quite well. 28 Krylova, “In Their Own Words?,” 245-46. My italics.

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Ginzburg, as an active member of Soviet society, would have (repeatedly) participated in this widespread exercise. Perhaps the most direct illustration of this appears in the epilogue to Krutoi marshrut, where she writes, “in the twilight of your days . . . you feel an irresistible need to change [the unpublished part of your book] again and again (to alter not the facts, of course, but the selection, treatment, and above all your judgments on them)” (2.417). I would suggest it is the last part of Krylova’s observation that is particularly applicable to Ginzburg’s position, for at the very center of Krutoi marshrut is her reinterpretation of the significance of her participation in building socialism, in the operations of the Soviet project, from the perspective of new experiences and realities. In general, retrospective revisionism of one’s life story is a common feature of late life autobiographies. Nonetheless, Ginzburg’s willingness to reassess her avtobiografiia, as well as her facility with the project, suggest a repetition, even an amplification, of the officially required avtobiografii observed by Krylova.29 In her discussion of texts by mainstream Soviet women writers who were widely published between the 1930s and the 1970s, Krylova notes Vera Inber’s distinction between “the life possessed by everyone, and the biography possessed by only a few.”30 She further observes that “[w]ithin the emerging system of signification, a ‘heroic biography’ was presented as admirable, desirable and enviable, as something to strive for, while the meaning of ‘ordinary biography’ could vary from boring to shameful to socially alien and dangerous.”31 A comparison of Ginzburg’s memoir with the narratives (fictional, but heavily autobiographical) written by two of Krylova’s subjects, Inber and Antonina Kotiaeva, reveals important contiguities. Like Inber’s description of her earlier life as lacking and inadequate in Eti 15 let (1932), Ginzburg constructs her pre-Gulag life as inauthentic, immature, selfish rather than self-reflective in the early chapters of Krutoi marshrut.32 Often in the course of her narrative, and contrary to her self-characterization as a riadovaia kommunistka—“an ordinary

29 Moreover, as one example in Shapovalov’s collection shows, avtobiobiografii were often required of prisoners, and remained in their files. For example, see Evgeniia Isaakovna Iaroslavskaia-Markon’s avtobiografiia in Shapovalov, Remembering the Darkness, 25-57. There is no such extant avtobiografiia written by Ginzburg. 30 Krylova, “In Their Own Words?,” 246. 31 Ibid. 32 For a more thorough discussion of this aspect of Krutoi marshrut, see Natasha Kolchevska, “A Difficult Journey: Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women’s Writing of Camp Memoirs,” in Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self Perceptions, ed. R. Marsh (New York: Bergahn Books, 1998), 151-52.

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communist woman” in the prologue of the 1985 Russian edition and the epilogue to volume 1 of the English—the heroine expresses a retrospective astonished self-awareness of herself as someone who has broken out of the ordinary and into the historic. She does this, first, by experiencing and surviving trials and, second, by putting that experience down on paper, thereby—and here lies an important distinction—bringing it into the public sphere. Finally, it is also worth noting the overtly confessional tone taken by Ginzburg from the position of a repentant believer in a cause she now understands to have been erroneous. In a 1999 Foucauldian study of the dynamics between the collective and the individual in Soviet Russia, Oleg Kharkhordin describes self-development, and its concomitant strategies of self-fashioning, self-perception, and self-criticism, as integral to practices of individualization in Russian culture: “By making continuous efforts to emphasize the practice of self-perfection, the Bolsheviks intensified the relation to the self among Party members, and then among the rest of Soviet citizens. This self was made an object to care about, to reflect upon, to perfect.”33 Self-awareness is the first step in this process of individuation, and even before her arrest, Ginzburg begins to differentiate herself, first through the woeful tale of the suicide of another female Communist, Comrade Pitkovskaya, then from her husband: “if I ever tried to talk to him frankly about what was going on, he immediately adopted the orthodox attitude. Of course he trusted me unreservedly and knew that I was innocent. But as a member of the regional committee, he could not bring himself to share the view of the situation which was more and more clearly taking shape in my mind” (1.36). Soon after her arrest, after mentally arguing with the advice of Garei, a more senior Communist detainee, Ginzburg admits that “For the first time in my life I was faced by the problem of having to think things out for myself—of analyzing circumstances independently and deciding my own line of conduct” (1.74). And immediately after that, when an interrogator’s words ring in her memory—“It’s not as if you were in the hands of the Gestapo”—Ginzburg mentally separates herself from the collective of which she had always considered herself a part: “How much easier and simpler,” she ruminates, “if I had been a Communist held by the Gestapo—I would have known exactly how to

33 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 4-5. For Soviet citizens telling the stories of their lives in public, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Lives under Fire: Autobiographical Narratives and Their Challenges in Stalin’s Russia,” in De Russie et d’ailleurs: feux croisees sur l’histoire: pour Marc Ferro (Paris: Institute d’etudes slaves, 1995), 225-32.

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behave. But here? Here I had first to determine who these people were, who kept me imprisoned. Were they Fascists in disguise? Or victims of some supersubtle provocation, some fantastic hoax? And how should a Communist behave ‘in prison in his own country,’ as the Major had put it?”(1.74) This confessional tone is further amplified by the frequent self-reflective passages that are sprinkled throughout Krutoi marshrut. Inflexibility, inconsistency, demagoguery, passivity in the face of authority—these and other negative qualities are badges of her former, “ordinary” life—and stand in sharp contrast to the pride, adaptability, steadfastness, honesty, and integrity that she exemplifies in her later life. She strikes a confessional mode in the first pages of her narrative (“I’m no longer the proud, incorruptible, inflexible being I was then” [1.11]), and it is one that she reiterates and reaccentuates right through the epilogue. She calls attention to her confessional (and therefore redemptive) intentions most explicitly in a chapter significantly titled “Mea culpa”: Is the need for repentance and confession an integral part of the human soul? Perhaps we ourselves [Ginzburg and Anton Walter], though we talked about such things because we were intellectuals, and couldn’t break the habit, were in fact as morally dead as the rest. I used to parade before Anton a whole string of arguments to prove that our society had reverted to barbarism. True, the new barbarians were divided into the active and the passive, that is, into butchers and victims; but this division did not invest the victims with moral superiority, for slavery had corrupted their souls. . . . My only purpose in flinging these hard sayings at him, sayings that I myself loathed, was to get him to prove me wrong. I hoped that a gleam of the astonishing serenity with which every particle of his being was infused might also illumine my soul. (2.144) Here and elsewhere, Ginzburg rolls the confessional mode into another Stalinist myth—that of the mentor and their disciple—and while Walter will lead her into a very different kind of consciousness from that of the stereotypical Socialist Realist novel, the point here is that she incorporates that paradigm into her exposé of Soviet history. What I find particularly intriguing, then, is the way that the Party’s emphasis on self-perfection is imbedded in Ginzburg’ s narrative and generates practices of self-criticism and confession in her memoir. While it can be read as a confessional in the long Russian tradition of spiritual autobiography that begins

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with the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, it is the relatively newly widespread practice of publicly performing samokritika (self-criticism) that underscores Ginzburg’s internalization of the dominant discourses of her day. Kharkhordin’s emphasis on the public nature of this self-criticism in Stalin’s time is also worth emphasizing in order to understand its force as a motivator for the polished and published text that became Krutoi marshrut rather than the original familial memoir: “samokritika was used . . . in the 1920s and 1930s [and] implied self-criticism of the individual performed in public, rather than in depths of inner consciousness.”34 Confession and penance permit Ginzburg to launch the first part of Krutoi marshrut, and thereby “conduct one’s activity in the form of a publicly available discourse,” to borrow another of Oushakine’s formulations.35 Using her authorship as a base for reestablishing herself in Soviet society, she writes, “I had assigned myself a specific aim: to offer the manuscript to the major journals, that is, to step out into the public arena. Perhaps to Iunost′ [the most widely read “youth” journal of the 1960s, where Aksenov got his start as a writer—N. K.]. . . Or—you never know your luck—even to Novyi Mir” (2.419). However, as she begins writing the new manuscript that will ultimately be published, first abroad and then in the Soviet Union, Ginzburg reveals the power of self-censorship for somebody writing from the position of the loyal opposition. Unlike the simple, if naive emotions she attributes to the first draft, the author’s sentiments about the second are marked by a number of contradictions, self-doubts, and uncertainties. She writes: Alas, together with my hopes of publication the missing inner editor came into being [narodilsia v moei dushe]. He carped at every paragraph: “You won’t get that past the censor.” I started looking for more streamlined formulations, and I not infrequently spoiled passages that had come out well, comforting myself with the thought that, after all, a sentence or so was not much sacrifice for the sake of publication, of reaching people at last. (2.419) And so here, continuing in the mode of public confession, Ginzburg reveals her own intimate knowledge of what she needs to do to have her manuscript

34 Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia, 144. 35 Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat”: 192.

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accepted. The revelations in this paragraph proceed in a two pronged fashion, revealing both the widespread interest it was attracting from “ordinary” readers, as well as the attention it was receiving from major Soviet writers—such as “Ehrenburg, Paustovsky, Kaverin, Chukovsky, Solzhenitsyn, Evtushenko, Voznesensky, Vigdorova, Panova,” who acknowledged her “gift” by enclosing their own gifts, “copies of their books with touching inscriptions”—as well as from scientists and historians. She attributes its underground success (passing on one academic specialist’s assessment that “from what his experienced eye had seen, my book had beaten the samizdat publication records not only of our time but of the nineteenth century too”) to its “truthfulness,” repeating the word truth ten times in the space of four paragraphs. (2.419-20) This manuscript succeeds in its author’s eyes, then, because of her willingness to tell the truth. And yet we have seen that, far from being “unvarnished,” this “truth” draws on familiar discourses internalized by a witness who, like another memorable, if also problematic, memoirist, Ilya Ehrenburg, “evoked the image of [someone] crushed under history’s wheel.”36 The above analysis does not imply a judgment of failure on Ginzburg’ s part as either “truth-teller” or writer. After all, as Oushakine writes, “there is a certain difference between accepting the rules and being constituted by the rules” (italics in original).37 Like other, more confrontational dissidents, such as Pyotr Grigorenko, Ginzburg saw her memoir as a way of initiating a “fruitful dialogue” with the Soviet authorities within the limitations of the particular “regime of truth” (2.206, 208) in which both she and the authorities operated. In a totalitarian society in which access to other forms of discourse had been highly restricted for decades, one in which autobiography had become a widespread and dominant form that interiorized and often converged with the rhetoric of socialist realist and autobiographical narratives. She writes “the discourse of the dominant was probably the only one that could be accepted in that society as truthful. . . . To bring in a rival discourse—what in fact amounts to a distancing of oneself from the dominant symbolic order—would have meant for the dissidents to locate themselves outside the system they wanted to influence” (2.208-9). And, for all of the impassioned reception that Ginzburg’s memoir elicited (and continues to elicit, judging by random internet responses) from readers abroad, her epilogues to both volumes make it clear that her fellow

36 Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,” Op. cit., 590. 37 Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat”: 206.

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Soviet citizens, and specifically Communists, were her target audience. In the epilogue, she writes: So I have written down the truth. Not the whole truth (for that I could have hardly hoped to know) but nothing but the truth. To be able to encompass the whole truth I had neither the range of information or the skill, nor the depth of understanding. All I could do was resist subordinating my story to nimble sophisms about what was and what was not expedient, to calculations about what was called for by the needs of the moment. (2.42022—italics in original) Returning to Krylova, I would agree with her assessment that “the official is not necessarily opposed to, or in negation of, the truly autobiographical [and that] boundaries between different selves are fluid and interdependent.”38 Thus, far from being “entrapped” by the signs and systems within which she operated, Ginzburg was able to establish an identity, initiate a dialogue, and distance herself from (if not exit) the dominant order by mimicking the discourses of that order while simultaneously filling those discourses with a significantly different content.

38 Krylova, “In Their Own Words?,” 255.

3

A Communist Woman in the Gulag: Gender, Ideology, and Limit-Experience in Ginzburg and Budzyńska Anna Artwińska

In Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, the chapter on women (and children) begins: They met the same work norms and they ate the same watery soup. They lived in the same sort of barracks and travelled in the same cattle train. Their clothes were almost identical, their shoes equally inadequate. They were treated no differently under interrogation. And yet—men’s and women’s camp experiences are not quite the same.1 Fifteen years have passed since the publication of Applebaum’s book: in the meantime, many new studies have appeared on feminist issues within the context of limit-experiences, as well as on the unique experiences of women in the Gulags.2 Nevertheless, Applebaum’s judgement still holds true. Meanwhile, the question of differences between the female and male experiences of Gulag imprisonment has been one of the leitmotifs of “camp and Gulag literature”

1 2

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 284. See, among others, Meinhard Stark, Frauen im Gulag. Alltag und Überleben (Munich: Hanser, 2003); Tatiana Czerska, “Kobiety w łagrach,” Annales Neophilologiarum 5 (2011): 59–74.

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from the beginning. Already, the first notes from “a world apart”3 informed people about the suffering of imprisoned women (a suffering very different from men’s), but also about the different treatment they received from other prisoners and the guards.4 We might conclude that, like studies of Nazi labor camp survivor literature,5 in Gulag literature gender is also an indispensable analytical category, affording a better understanding of such texts and the experiences they articulate. When analyzing the phenomenon of Soviet Gulags, a gendered approach is useful on a sociological level, as it enables a study of daily life of women in the Gulag (from the administrative to existential) and for what it reveals about women’s narrative practices and memoir-writing conventions. In this essay, I focus on one genre of female Gulag narratives: memoirs by women associated with the Communist movement6 at the time of arrest and while serving their time in the Gulag, as well as, albeit to a different degree, after release. Through readings of Whirlwind (Krutoi marshrut: chronika vremen kul′ta lichnosti, 1967)7 by Evgenia Ginzburg and Shreds of a Family Saga (Strzępy rodzinnej sagi, 1997) by Celina Budzyńska, I will consider how the authors’ gendered perspectives blend with their ideological worldviews, and whether it is possible to distinguish formal features and thematic motifs in memoirs written by Communist women who were former prisoners of Soviet Gulags. At the same time, I will explore the role that time spent in the Gulag plays in the two narratives and the significance the authors assign it in the process of shaping their Communist identities. The essay is in three parts. First, I will examine the works in terms of genre, approaching them as examples of testimonial memoirs that relate Gulag experiences from a female point of view. Next, I will ask to what extent it is justified to read them not only in the context of so-called “Gulag” poetics, but also as a discourse whose modal framework is delimited by a need to understand one’s own biography, especially one’s Communist past and its retrospective assessment.

3 A book by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński of the same title (Inny świat. Zapiski sowieckie), first published in English in 1953 as A World Apart: A Memoir of the Gulag. A chapter entitled “Hunting by Night” brings up sexual violence experienced by imprisoned women (cf. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Inny świat. Zapiski sowieckie [Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007]). 4 Nina Kamm, ed., Weggesperrt. Frauen im Gulag (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2009). 5 See, among others, Andrea Petö, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, eds., Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2015); Bożena Karwowska, Ciało. Seksualność. Obozy Zagłady (Kraków: Universitas, 2009). 6 “Communist movement” is used as a technical term here and I am aware of the simplifications it implies. Yet a thorough analysis of the various factions of the Communist movement would go beyond the scope of this work. 7 From here on, I use the abbreviated title Whirlwind in reference to the entire text.

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I am interested in the arguments and rhetorical and aesthetic strategies the authors use to write about their paths to communism and how they present the very fact of being a Communist: during incarceration in the Gulag and after release. I will focus on two central categories here—that of autobiography and that of generation. In the final part of the essay, I will consider the value of comparing the experiences of these two prisoner authors who, while hailing from the same generation of prewar Communists of Jewish descent, were, after all, shaped by different historical, cultural, and—last but not least—gender contexts. In other words, I am interested in the degree to which the issue of gender and ideology may be deemed universal in the context of limit-experiences, and the extent to which it is determined by particular contexts.

Shreds of a Family Saga and Whirlwind: Testimony and Gender The texts I am exploring in this article are of different literary value and belong to different genres. Whirlwind is a seminal work in the canon of Gulag literature, one of the first accounts of Soviet crimes, and a text that delineates and determines the poetics of the “Gulag memoir”8 as a genre.9 Commentary on the subject places Whirlwind alongside books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Józef Czapski, and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, as masterpieces among testimonial narratives about life in “the Gulag Archipelago.”10 Budzyńska does not (yet?)11 belong to this canon; Shreds of a Family Saga is read first and foremost as an autobiographical novel or, as suggested by its title, a family saga, in which center stage is taken by the problem of understanding one’s own life story, approached as a model biography of a certain generation. Even though the longest chapter is entitled “Gulag,” and though it contains all the motifs and topoi characteristic of Gulag literature (a description of an arrest, investigation, moments of reprieve, the Gulag as a zone, a narrative that follows subsequent   8 I concur with Tadeusz Sucharski that employing the term “Gulag literature” to refer to accounts from soviet camps “as opposed to ‘Gulag’” shifts the attention “from a criminal system onto its victims” (Tadeusz Sucharski, “Literatura Holocaustu i literatura Gułagu? Literatura doświadczenia totalitarnego!” Susie Prace Filologiczne 5 [2007]: 97).   9 Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, “Narrative Gesten der Nähe. Evgenija Ginzburg,” in Gebrochene Linien. Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Berlin: Kadmos, 2014), 87–88. 10 Olga Cooke, “Introduction,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 3. 11 However, Feliks Tych includes Budzyńska’s memoirs amongst “the greatest works of Gulag literature” (Feliks Tych, “Słowo wstępne,” in Celina Budzyńska, Strzępy rodzinnej sagi [Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1997], 6).

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“stages”),12 it is rarely cited within the context of narratives on twentieth-century limit-experiences. The acclaim it has received cannot compare with Ginzburg’s, as Shreds of a Family Saga was published in a small print run in Poland and is practically unknown to foreign readers. These facts, however, say less about of the value of the text itself than the political and cultural circumstances in which it was written. Both works conform to the theoretical and methodological premises regarding the poetics of testimony and the position of eyewitness in literature.13 Their value does not lie in providing tangible evidence of verifiable, thoroughly reliable information on limit-experiences, but rather in combining a subjective perspective with information,14 as well as in feeding an individual experience into a broader historical, political, and sociocultural context. The need to give testimony arises from the belief in one’s moral obligation to testify, that is, to tell others of one’s experience and fate. As noted by Leona Toker, this is about “1) tension between the ethical drive and aesthetic impulse, closely associated with the bi-functionality of Gulag narratives as acts of witness-bearing and as works of art, 2) interconnection of individual and communal concerns.”15 Giving testimony is at the same time a strategy that legitimizes autobiographical reflection, allowing an individual to understand their own position in the aftermath of a catastrophe.16 To both authors, the process of writing a memoir fulfils a quasi-therapeutic role, allowing them a space to express their own experiences.

12 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulags Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 82–94; Lidia Burska, “Obozowa literatura,” in Słownik litera­ tury polskiej XX wieku, ed. Alina Brodzka (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1992), 740–46. 13 See, among others, Politik der Zeugenschaft. Zur Kritik einer Wissenspraxis, ed. Sybille Krämer, Sibylle Schmidt, and Ramon Voges (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011). 14 Sigrid Weigel, “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage. Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von identity politics, juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs,” in Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft. Jahrbuch des Einstein Forums 1999 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000), 111–35. I would like to point to one similarity between the two texts. In the epilogue to her memoirs, Ginzburg highlights that she has written “the truth and nothing but the truth.” These words reveal the need to emphasize the reliability of her own memories, as—though they cannot serve as a basis for reconstruction of what the Soviet gulags were really like—the category of truth relates mainly to the situation of the subject, who tries to describe her own experience as honestly as possible. For Budzyńska, the need to clarify her own motives also comes to the fore, as well as the desire to tell of her fate in a way that may be understandable to future generations. 15 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 74. Next, Toker enumerates the following features of the genre: “3) inclusion of specific topoi as morphological variables, and 4) a modal scheme that can be described in terms of Lent.” 16 Thun-Hohenstein, “Narrative Gesten der Nähe. Evgenija Ginzburg,” 90.

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The narration on time spent in the Gulag seamlessly morphs into reflections on the twists of life and the attitude of the subject toward communism, a topic I will explore later. Giving testimony invariably assumes the presence of an audience, the addressee of the story. Thus, a virtual addressee is a constant presence in these texts, making them immanently dialogical. Testimonial memoirs are often stories addressed first and foremost to family and friends and only second to a broader readership: “The sense of one’s obligation to testify on behalf of the collective is often intertwined with a specific personal motivation for telling the story.”17 Both texts feed into this convention. The first addressee of Ginzburg’s story was her teenage son Vasily Aksenov, to whom she related her experiences before writing the memoir, while in exile. Budzyńska reconstructed her story in response to questions from her children and grandchildren, curious about her life. Thus, in both cases giving testimony was harnessed to transgenerational dialogue. The tales were meant to bridge a generational gap, to fill an abyss that stemmed from radical differences between the horizons of their experiences. At the same time, the story-testimony addressed to family members was a tale that allowed for other listeners—especially those whose biographies had a similar trajectory and those to whom the authors felt obliged to testify, clarify, and explain. In their memoirs both authors operate with an essentialist definition of femininity. They weave their narratives as Communist activists, but also as wives and mothers, who even in the Gulag try to fulfil the expectations associated with these roles. They devote quite a lot of attention to questions of the body, corporeality, personal hygiene, appearance. They closely register problems connected with human physiology, lamenting the loss of femininity in the camp. They express solidarity with women who suffer sexual violence.18 They also write about their feelings towards their husbands and children (motherhood plays a significant role in both texts, although it does not exhaust the identity of a female Communist). And they believe women to be stronger than men or rather their feelings to be stronger than those of male inmates. According

17 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 76. 18 At the same time, both texts relate with disgust and revulsion the nonnormative sexual acts that women in the Gulag engage in and—typical for narratives of that time—representations of limit-experiences, such as mass rapes, concerning others, but not the authors themselves: “I describe what I saw and what I went through, perhaps I was very lucky, because I did not experience any such thing”. See Celina Budzyńska, Strzępy rodzinnej sagi (Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1997), 413; henceforth citations will be followed by page number in the text.

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to Budzyńska, “men let themselves go faster. . . . they were unkept, unshaved. They degraded quickly. They were tremendously lonely.”19 It would be difficult to find in these texts any subversive potential aiming to undermine the cultural gender order. On the contrary, both authors draw concrete conclusions from the fact of being female prisoners. Their belief that female identity cannot be separated from the identity of an activist is, in my opinion, an important distinctive feature of both memoirs, determining their uniqueness. In addition, their allegiance to the Communist movement results in certain obligations, which often overlap with humanistic ideals: even in the Gulag they try to make the world a better place. Yet, this is not about grand, heroic feats, but rather about normal, everyday actions.20 When remembering the time spent in the Gulag, Budzyńska writes at length about the solidarity of women and the strength of female bonds, which made imprisonment more bearable. One of her first reflections after the arrest is that after months of paralysis caused by her husband’s detention, in the camp she could finally “get back to life” and feel “a member of community of these unfortunate women” (298). And so, for example, when describing the nightmare of the first time she went into the prison bathhouse—“Clouds of steam, pools of filthy water, slippery stone floor. And this feeling of humiliation, when naked, drenched women take their clothes reeking of disinfection back from the hands of grinning guards,” she adds casually: “Yet, in this chaos, I retained enough clarity of thoughts to take care of Stefa, hand in and take back her things, bring [her] water. I even tried to decipher the writings etched on the wall, names, sentence numbers.”21 When writing about female energy, strength, and wisdom, Budzyńska refers

19 Teresa Torańska, “Celina Budzyńska” [interview], in Oni (Warszawa: Iskry, 2004), 30. 20 Natasha Kolchevska, “A Difficult Journey: Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women’s Writing of Camp Memoirs,” in Women and Russian Culture: Projection and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 153–54. Kolchevska cites Barbara Heldt who, writing about (also gender-determined) differences in the attitudes of Solzhenitsyn and Ginzburg, stresses that “Ginzburg while describing the most abject inhumanities, also seeks and finds the human spirit: this is her ‘great aim’, but it is performed rather than stated, her continual forging of links with other human beings . . . gave life to others and surviving strength to herself ” (149). 21 Ibid., 299. A similar motif appears in Ginzburg’s memoirs. In the chapter “A Bathhouse! Just an Ordinary Bathhouse!” in which she recounts her time in prison before the Gulag, she describes meeting other women in the bathhouse, preceded by a long period of isolation: “In a way that is all too rare in life, we in that bathhouse felt true love for one another. We were not yet affected by the corrosive jungle law of the camps, which in later years—it is no use trying to hide the fact—degraded more than one of us . . . At present, purified by our sufferings and full of the joy of meeting other human beings after two years of solitude, we felt like sisters in the noblest sense of the word” (1.264).

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mostly to female Communists and activists. Thus, this is not solidarity built exclusively upon a shared female experience, but above all, solidarity stemming from the experience of a shared political fate and a common cause.22 Her fellow female inmates sometimes feel moments of crisis or doubt, but even in the most challenging situations they never neglect thinking about education, self-improvement, and character building. Unlike male activists, busy with lofty ideas, female Communists had their minds set on changes on the micro level. We can see a similar attitude in the memoirs of the Russian author: [. . .] by far the greater number actively clung to life. We still took pleasure in the fugitive mists of morning, the violet sunsets that blazed over us as we returned from the quarry, the proximity of ocean-going ships which we felt by some sixth sense—and in poetry, which we still repeated to one another at night. [. . .] It was by preserving all these treasures in our minds that we should resist the onslaught of the horrors around us. (1.343) Both Budzyńska and Ginzburg recall group book readings and attempts at organ­ izing a semblance of cultural life in the barracks. In Shreds of a Family Saga we read: “Perhaps Solzhenitsyn [. . .] would be appalled by the fact that the wives of husbands shot to death, mothers of children wretched by orphanhood, were having fun with poetry, dance, crippled self-education. But I think [. . .] that all this expressed our striving to salvage our humanity” (346). Each author devotes much attention to the need for education, even in the camp. Ginzburg relates, for example, her attempts to raise Gulag children, whom she tried to encourage to talk about themselves, which failed altogether, because hardly any of the children knew words like “mother” or “family,” and they were unable to tell that a building that the narrator had drawn on a piece of paper was meant to be a house rather than a barrack. This failure only strengthened Ginzburg’s belief in the need to continue the work, understood as striving to improve not just the living conditions of children in the barracks, but also their education. This attitude was accompanied by a belief that the upbringing of next generations is, in a way, a natural duty of a woman, and especially a Communist woman, who

22 I would like to thank Agnieszka Mrozik for bringing this problem to my attention, as well as for all her comments, to which this chapter owes a great deal.

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believes that the world may be made better. Ideology and worldview eased the horrors of the Gulag.23 Celina Budzyńska writes that Gulag years instilled in her a “respect for women” and that she did not see similar solidarity among male prisoners. Interestingly, to support this thesis, she refers to Ginzburg’s “beautiful memories,” which to her emphatically attest to the phenomenon of female solidarity (435). This focus on the motif of female solidarity, as well as stressing the heroic attitude of women prisoners, does not mean that the authors reduced the meaning of the Gulag as a system of violence—their tales are still tales of the inhumane, of limit-experiences: hunger, excruciatingly hard labor, physical and mental abuse, disease, and, ultimately, death by exhaustion. In these memo­ irs, stories of women who hold philosophical debates after returning from tree logging appear alongside stories of Gulag Muselmänner, of sadistic guards, and of waves of prisoner deaths.

“Gulags did not open people’s eyes, not always and not everywhere”: Biographical Truth and Generational Logic Celina Budzyńska was born in 1907 in Warsaw to a family of assimilated Polish Jews with rich revolutionary and Communist traditions.24 Since 1923 she had been active in the Young Communist League, where she met her first (and later her third) husband, Zygmunt Trawiński, who would also be a long-term Gulag prisoner. Her second husband was Stanisław Budzyński, with whom she had two daughters. In 1927, in order to avoid repressions and potential arrest for her Communist activities, illegal in Poland at the time, Budzyńska left to study in the USSR, where she graduated from the Communist University of National Minorities of the West. She also studied in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). In July 1937, Budzyńska was arrested in Moscow by the NKVD and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag as “a family member of traitors of the motherland.” She arrived in the camp after two years in jail.

23 Stark, Frauen im Gulag, 459–61. 24 Celina Budzyńska was a niece of Julian Bruno, a well-known socialist-democrat and a Communist activist, writer, and publicist. Her aunt was Helena Bobińska, children’s and young people’s author, translator, and activist. Budzyńska’s mother, a painter, had been politically involved with the Communist movement for years. The first part of Shreds of a Family Saga recounts memories of conspiracy work and revolutionary activities of the milieu in which the author grew up.

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In 1937, during the purges of Polish Communists by NKVD, Stanisław Budzyński was executed. Celina was at first held in the Temnikov Camp in the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and later in the Talagi camp in the Arkhangelsk oblast. Freed after Bolesław Bierut intervened, in 1945 she returned to Poland. After her return, she was prohibited from mentioning either the arrests or the Gulag in her official biography. She retained close links with the Communist Party, where she held important political and cultural positions. Among other things, Budzyńska was principal of the Central Party School in Łódź and a pedagogue. The antisemitic purge of 1968 shook her confidence in Communist ideology, but it was only the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981 that finally alienated her from the Party. In the 1980s, she was active in the anti-Communist opposition. She began writing her memoirs in the 1960s, continuously adding to them and adapting them in subsequent decades. They were finally published in 1997 as Strzępy rodzinnej sagi. In the 1990s, Budzyńska gave an in-depth interview to Teresa Torańska, a distinguished Polish journalist, who included it in a new edition of Oni (Them),25 a collection of interviews with the most prominent Polish Communists. Budzyńska died in 1993 after a serious illness, before her memoirs could be published.26 Evgenia Ginzburg also belonged to a generation of prewar Communists. Author, lecturer, literary historian at Kazan University, and the editor of a local Communist Party newspaper, she was born in 1904 in Moscow to a pharmacist’s family of assimilated Jews.27 In 1909, her family moved to Kazan. In the 1920s, following her studies at Kazan State University and the Pedagogical Institute, Ginzburg commenced her academic career, became involved with the Communist movement, and married a doctor Dmitry Fedorov, with whom she had a son. Within a few years, she married Pavel Aksenov, a high-ranking official and also a Communist activist. Ginzburg’s first son, Aleksey, was six years old when the Aksenovs’ son, Vasily Aksenov, was born. In 1937 Ginzburg was expelled from the Party and arrested for counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activ­ ities. After two years in the Yaroslavl prison, she spent the next decade in the

25 Torańska, “Celina Budzyńska,” 11–67. 26 This section is based on a biographical note written by Feliks Tych for Budzyńska’s memoirs (Tych, “Słowo wstępne”) and on the author’s own accounts (Celina Budzyńska, Strzępy [Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1997]); see also Torańska, “Celina Budzyńska.” 27 The section on Ginzburg’s biography is based on Wolfgang Kasack, Lexikon der russischen Literatur ab 1917 (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1986), 224 and Joachim Klein, “Lagerprosa: Evgenija Ginzburgs ‘Gratwanderung,’” Zeitschrift für Slavistik 37, no. 3 (1992): 378–79.

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Gulags of Kolyma. Upon her release in 1947, like countless other former prisoners, she was sentenced to many years in exile. The place of her banishment was Magadan, the main city in the Kolyma region. The Gehenna of the Gulag was soon made worse by another arrest in 1949; and this time she spent a month in prison. Ginzburg was finally released from exile after Stalin’s death, and fully rehabilitated in 1955. After the rehabilitation, Ginzburg and her third husband Anton Walter, a doctor whom she had met in the Gulag, and their adopted daughter Tonya moved to Lvov. Following Walter’s death in 1959, after several more years, Ginzburg relocated to Moscow, where she worked as a journalist and author. She mostly wrote articles on pedagogics and autobiographical texts about the Soviet Union in the 1920s.28 She was invited to rejoin the Party, an offer that could not be refused. At that time, as will be explored later, her attitude to communism was not thoroughly negative—it was ambivalent.29 Ginzburg was only able to start working on her memoirs of the Gulag in 1959, even though she had felt the need to testify to what she had been through from early camp days. Whirlwind was officially accepted for publication in the Soviet Union in 1988,30 but it had been available (and popular) in samizdat from the 1960s. The Soviet edition was preceded by Western ones: the first in 1967 in Milan. The first volume of Ginzburg’s memoirs was published simultaneously in Russian and Italian. Ginzburg died in Moscow in 1977. The memoirs of Evgenia Ginzburg and Celina Budzyńska may be read not only as testimony on limit-experiences in Soviet Gulags, but also as commentaries criticizing the system that gave rise to these camps—as “chronicle[s] of the period of the cult of the individual”31 and as sociological analyses. In their assessments of Stalinism, and communism more generally, both authors attempt to understand the role they have played in this system. The attempt to make sense of Stalinism/communism is intertwined with the question of how they became its active participants and the consequences that this collaboration had brought. What their considerations have in common is a sense of

28 See, among others, Evgenia Ginzburg, Tak nachinalos′. Zapiski uchitelnitsy (Kazan: n.p. 1963). 29 Klein, “Lagerprosa,” 379, 382. 30 What impressed Russian readers was not only the content of these memoirs (as people already partially knew about life in the Gulags), but the fact that they could finally be published. This had a significant influence on the situation of personal documentaries in Russian literature. See Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2. 31 “Chronika vremen kul′ta lichnosti,” the Russian subtitle of Whirlwind, which does not appear in the English translation.

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tremendous, almost eschatological guilt, and the need to redeem themselves: “Mea culpa . . . and it occurs to me more and more frequently that even eight­ een years of hell on earth is insufficient expiation for the guilt” (2.153), writes Ginzburg. In both texts, the question of guilt comes to the fore: the two female prisoners of the Gulag feel that they are not only victims of the Stalinist system, but also its co-authors. Perhaps it is because of this that they write about their suffering, and also about the fact that they did nothing to prevent it. Shreds of a Family Saga and Whirlwind, then, are also interesting in that they provide the perspective of actors in the Russian Revolution. This is the perspective of accomplices who, up until a certain moment, actively shaped that system, unaware of the fact that their vision of the Party was based on false premises, or that they did not know the truth about the system they helped create. Thus, the social roles of accomplice and victim overlap. This is not to say that a victim became a Stalinist perpetrator, but merely that in some situations Ginzburg and Budzyńska acted entirely in the spirit of the Communist Party. Both authors reconstruct in their memoirs the drama of their own lives, whose critical moments came in the tragic decades of the 1930s and 1940s. What is interesting here is not just their admonition against Stalinism—it should be remembered that both authors began writing their memoirs after Stalin’s death, when such criticism was already possible and practiced—but rather their shared attempt at responding, when, for the first time, they realized that joining the Communist movement may have been a mistake. Celina Budzyńska claims that, even though she was forced to review her worldview until after the war, long after her return from the Gulag, that she began to comprehend that her political choices were based on false premises and that she had been mistaken in her judgments. Speaking to Teresa Torańska, Budzyńska makes a striking comment: “Gulags did not open people’s eyes, not always and not everywhere.”32 She admitted, effectively, that time spent in Soviet Gulags did not undermine her faith in the Communist system or that it could be “reform[ed] . . . from within.”33 In her memoirs, she often emphasized that she saw her experiences in Soviet Russia and in the Gulags as a high, yet necessary, price for the revolution, which did not undermine the idea itself: I have lived through my worst years in the Soviet Union— collectivization, trials, arrests of my nearest and dearest, 32 Torańska, “Celina Budzyńska,” 44. 33 Nancy Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 127.

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prison, camp. My husband was murdered, my mother led to death, my friends killed. I saw violence, lawlessness, a tragedy of a nation. At the same time, I was not quite as blind as were many others. [. . .] Well—then, and for many years to come, I still deeply believed that the idea itself was right and that what had happened in the Soviet Union were mere deformations stemming from the fact that the revolution had won in such a backwards country that did not know democracy. [. . .] I was certain it would be different in Poland. (458) This distinction between the varieties of communism also comes up in Ginzburg’s memoirs: it was the fact that Stalinism had been overcome in the USSR that made Ginzburg faithful to Communist ideas despite her experiences in the Gulag. Unlike Budzyńska, however, Ginzburg presented herself in retrospect as someone who quickly realized the dangers associated with the politics of the 1930s, and especially with Stalin. In one of the first chapters of her memoirs, regarding the period from before her arrest (!), she offers the following reflection: Evidently some sixth sense told me that this man [Stalin— A. A.] was to be the evil genius in my life and that of my children. [. . .] The naive monarchistic notion of the kindly ruler ignorant of the abuses perpetrated by his officials was not one which I felt sympathy for even at that early stage of my long and steep road. (1.26) In literary studies, writing that grapples with the issue of departing from communism is referred to as “literature of disillusionment: the writings of former Communists in response to Stalinist terror.”34 It is comprised of a group of autobiographical texts written from the perspective of “former Communists,” recounting their road to communism (and away from it) through the categories of ideological enslavement, mistake, and error. The breakthrough moment in these biographies is often the arrest, followed by investigation and deportation to the Gulag. On the other end of the spectrum are the writings of Communists who, despite repressions or many years in exile, remained faithful to the Party and its ideals, although the degree of this loyalty, as well as the

34 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 52.

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motives behind it, vary.35 In the two analyzed memoirs, feelings of guilt and disillusionment as well as the need to confess one’s “sins” are very strong—even so, I still do not think that they are typical only of the literature of disillusionment. In Whirlwind, communism is not presented in an exclusively negative light; and this is certainly not only because Ginzburg had been a Party member. Writing her memoirs in the 1960s, Ginzburg asserts that the great “Leninist truth” ultimately claimed victory over terror and repressions; she is also certain that, at some point in the future, “honest people and true Communists” will be able to understand her life choices. This supports the theory of Pavel Kolář on the complex process of transformation of Communist identity after Stalinism: to the majority of ideological Party members, awareness of Stalinist crimes did not automatically imply a break with communism. It was, rather, an opportunity to shift their own position. Khrushchev’s speech on the personality cult allowed the membership to return to the roots of the movement: To be communist in the twentieth century meant to believe that there was no other meaningful way of life but being communist, for the development towards communist society was assumed to be irreversible. In this understanding, human life made sense only as long as it evolved in concert with the objective course of history.36 Ginzburg’s statement about remaining with the Communist movement after Gulags and despite Gulags does not stem from the need to consolidate her identity or to find a complete closure for her biography. To the contrary: the author strongly emphasizes the transformation of her personality, distancing herself from her former “naive Communist” self.37 Yest, while, her memoirs are constructed so as to distance her from the old “naive self,” they also provide a

35 Adler’s typology (concerning the USSR) entails the following models: (1) faith-like belief in communism; (2) psychological defense mechanism; (3) cognitive dissonance; (4) functionalism; (5) traumatic bond. See: Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party, 12–22. For more about Communist autobiographies (as regards Spanish Communists), see also Gina Herrmann, Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 36 Pavel Kolář, “The Party as a New Utopia: Reshaping Communist Identity after Stalinism,” Social History 37, no. 4 (2012): 403. 37 Franziska Thun-Hohenstein observes that Ginzburg does not dwell on the reasons for her own naivety. Unlike Budzyńska, she dismisses the influence of her Jewish background, her family home and early youth on her political choices (Thun-Hohenstein, “Narrative Gesten der Nähe”: 99).

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framework in which this old identity can be analyzed and reflected. Thus, her declaration of loyalty to the Communist movement after and despite the Gulag should rather be seen in the context of her belief that the Communist system remains the only feasible alternative. When recounting the first months following her arrest, Ginzburg easily moves on from criticizing Stalin to gratitude toward the revolution: “Even now—we asked ourselves—after all that happened to us, would we vote for any other than the Soviet system? . . . Everything I had in the world . . . all this had been given me by the Soviet system, and the revolution, which had transformed my world while I was still a child” (1.227).38 The autobiographical narration also disintegrates into two voices in Budzyńska, but this disintegration is not a metonymy of a personality breakdown. Unlike Ginzburg, the Polish author does not view her old self as “the other” or “a stranger”. One significant example: My grandchildren and my young friends ask me: “How could you, after everything you’d lived through and everything you’d seen, return to ‘building socialism,’ and in your own country at that?” It is hard to respond to this question when asked by others but it is especially hard to answer to myself. I cannot get away [. . .] with saying that it was not me, that it was someone completely different. No, it was me, with all my thoughts which somehow co-existed alongside a deep faith in socialism, with the ideas of justice, etc. Funny, but not all that much, and this is not about beating my chest, it is about figuring out how this could have happened. (453) Despite narrative gestures that articulate the need for expiation, and despite Budzyńska’s involvement in anti-Communist opposition, Shreds of a Family Saga does not, in my opinion, fully belong to the literature of disillusionment either. The author wants nothing to do with Stalinism in its Russian or Polish variety, yet she does not reject communism itself. Her narrative oscillates between the need for rhetorical “redemption of guilt,” all the stronger considering when it was written, and the need to justify all those who had joined the Communist movement for idealistic reasons, but whose attitudes did not lend themselves to the clichés of anti-Communist discourse.

38 In an interview with Torańska, Budzyńska said: “It was the Party that pulled us out of this swamp [the gulags—A. A.]. Never mind who did it personally, it was the Party” (Teresa Torańska, “Celina Budzyńska,” 40).

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It is noteworthy that both Ginzburg and Budzyńska view their political decisions not only on an individual level, but also as choices characteristic of a certain group of people born around the same time and shaped by a similar worldview. The category of generation,39 also applied by the authors, may be helpful in describing this issue. By adopting a collective perspective, both works become as much autobiographical as biographical, attempting to grasp the dynamics, values, and mentality of a certain generation. In the case of Budzyńska, it is the generation of Polish and Polish Jewish prewar Communists, born in the early twentieth century and growing up in interwar Poland. Their association with the Communist movement grew out of a deep belief in the need to reform the world and especially to abolish class differences, antisemitism, and illiteracy, improve the conditions of the working class and the rural population, and restrict the influence of the Catholic Church.40 Joining Polish Communists and, consequently, having contact with Soviet Russia were for that generation logical consequences of these beliefs. This is the context provided by Celina Budzyńska for her deliberations, as she positions herself as a representative of a larger group, for whom communism became a real opportunity to change the world they lived in. Party membership was not for them strategically motivated; it was not so much about career as about service: We were all young, ideologically driven, enthusiastic, under the profound influence of the October Revolution. Many . . . had travelled a long and winding road from patriotic-legionary or Christian ideology to Marxism or communism. The first 39 Research regarding the topic of generation, starting with Karl Mannheim’s groundbreaking study The Problem of Generations (1923), is enormous and still growing. In this work I am mostly influenced by Ohad Parnes et al., Das Konzept der Generation. Eine Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008). 40 Both in the case of Budzyńska and Ginzburg, I restrict myself to reconstructing their own visions of themselves and of the worldview of their generation. The way the motivation of this generation is described in research is a different matter and does not fall within the scope of this chapter. As a side note, it is worth mentioning that prewar Communists are not perceived as a generation in Polish historical discourses of twentieth-century generations, as this term is reserved for groups particularly associated with resistance, conspiracy, and opposition against fascism and communism, and not for the members of the Communist Party. What this fact reveals is the problematic nature of “generation” as an analytical category on the one hand, and on the other, the stigmatization that results from treating Communist movements as foreign to Polish culture. See Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik, “Generational and Gendered Memory of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe: Methodological Perspectives and Political Challenges,” in Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, ed. Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik (London: Routledge, 2020), 9–29.

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years of independence gave us plenty of reasons for disappointment and bitterness. Abject poverty, unemployment, incredible inflation, lack of perspectives, the indolence of the constantly changing government, acts of lawlessness—all this pushed ideological and thinking youth to search for new paths. We came from different backgrounds, there were many workers, youth from the intelligentsia or petit bourgeois families, from poor Jewish houses, but there was no lack of sons and daughters of the wealthy bourgeoisie either. . . . The common idea gave rise to a feeling of fraternity, deepened by political repressions. . . . We shared an ideology. . . . There were no symptoms of a cult of the leaders. (439) When anti-Communist discourse—already present in Polish culture before the war and particularly strong after 1989—draws an equivalence between communism as an ideology and its worst perversions, it does an injustice to Celina Budzyńska’s generation. In notes to her memoirs, as will be discussed in the next part of this chapter, Budzyńska herself adopts the arguments of this discourse, discrediting her own life choices. These notes become, to some extent, errata to her earlier works. Her growing anti-communism affects her assessment of the past. For example, she idealizes the generation of her mother, aunts, and uncles, the first generation of Polish Communist ideologues, while criticizing her own “lost generation” of “Stalinist” Communists. A generational perspective is also characteristic in Ginzburg’s writing. Leona Toker proposes the term “priviligentsia”41 to describe Ginzburg’s generation, emphasizing its privileged position in the Soviet social system and its (perhaps slightly paradoxical) connections with the ethos of Russian intelligentsia. In her memoirs, Ginzburg paints a portrait of a group that believed in progress, education, and modernity, and that severed its connections with its “bourgeois” roots. The author writes in fact about how difficult it was for her to accept her own nonproletarian background. It cannot be denied that this generation enjoyed certain privileges (Ginzburg does not gloss over them either), but they did not define its generational identity. More important seemed to be the belief in the possibility of creating a better world, in overcoming social injustice, almost organically intertwined with Russia’s history.

41 Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 53.

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Party membership and compliance with its directives was to this generation proof that they understood the overarching idea and how to turn it into reality. Owing to the subsequent schism between theory and practice, the balance of life turned out particularly unfavorably for them: “For the old generation who were committed to the Party, who considered themselves to be the ‘builders of socialism’ even while in camp, a disconfirmation of their original ideology could raise unsettling questions about how they (mis)spent their lives.”42 Reminiscing about her early days in the Party, Ginzburg will later say with irony that “we didn’t possess the truth in its final form” (1.22) and, at the same time, confess that none of her later suffering in the camps could compare with the torment of hearing the first accusations against her (1.16). These were so painful to her because they put a question mark over everything that she thought had given meaning to her life. The absolute belief that the October Revolution marked a total breakthrough moment in the history of the world and that the Communist Party was infallible was shared by many of her Communists peers. It was the cornerstone of her generational community and of people’s readiness to make even the greatest sacrifices in the name of an idea.

Gulags, Communism, Gender: The Rules of Memory Researchers interested in the theory of memory and the processes of remembrance/forgetting, such as Pierre Nora or Jan and Aleida Assmann, have argued that individual memory depends on social frameworks—that what we remember as actors is determined by the memory of our environment, and so by particular memories of our group, family, generation, society, or culture. An individual’s biographical memory depends on collective memory, which often acts as a censor, in a way forcing them to filter their memories so that they align with the official version of the past. At the same time, collective memory cannot be treated as a monolith—many collective memories coexist within a single community, which becomes obvious if the memories of various groups or generations are juxtaposed.43 It is worth keeping these concepts in mind when reading the memoirs of Ginzburg and Budzyńska. For instance, the final structure of Shreds of a

42 Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party, 23. 43 Bernhard Giesen, “Ungleichzeitigkeit, Erfahrung und der Begriff der Generation,” in Generationen: Erfahrung—Erzählung—Identität, ed. Andreas Kraft and Mark Weißhaupt (Konstanz: UVK, 2009), 200.

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Family Saga was certainly affected by the memory of discourses that emerged in the 1960s, especially those that contributed to the revision of the Stalinist past and the anti-Communist memory promoted by the 1980s Polish opposition. Although they do not explain the feeling of guilt that consumes the author or her disillusionment with communism, they help to understand her everpresent need to justify her past life choices and to “confess her sins” in public. In line with the rules of anti-Communist discourse, joining the Communist movement cannot be either logically explained or understood—thus, the reasons must remain inexplicable, a mystery or a riddle. In a note added to her memoirs in 1990 (composed when she was already ill), Budzyńska explains: Shedding your old skin is very painful, especially when it is accompanied by a feeling that your whole life was devoid of sense, that the prisons, camps, renouncing your personal happiness were futile. . . . This awareness, the awareness of being partly responsible, remained with many of my friends until their death. Well, the young generation will not understand us; it can’t understand us, and it will not forgive us . . . (452) What comes to the fore in this declaration is that Budzyńska, who is ideologically already on the side of the opposition (after “shedding her old skin”) and who edits her memories to toe the line of the discourse propagated by the socalled Solidarity generation, still tries to speak for the generation of her youth (“my friends,” “will not understand us”—emphasis mine), presented in the categories of a tragic, lost generation, cheated by fate and history. In the 1990s, Budzyńska was still a member of this generation of prewar Communists. Her note, finally, confirms my earlier thesis that, despite the fact that her views evolve in Shreds of a Family Saga, her identity remains coherent and cohesive: while regretting her earlier decisions, Budzyńska does not shift responsibility onto the “other I”; acknowledging the failure of her own generation, she remains (or wants to remain) faithful to its ideals. This example clearly shows the restrictions that individual biographical memory has to contend with, overshadowed by various images from the past and rituals of remembrance. As a side note, it would be futile to search for similar rhetoric of guilt in the memoirs of other female Communists from this generation, published in the 1960s and 1970s. As shown by Agnieszka Mrozik, even though the majority of these authors were removed from political posts upon Gomułka’s ascent to power and were shunted out of political life, not only did they not break with Communist ideals, but they also did not regret their earlier commitment to

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Stalinism. In this respect, Budzyńska’s attitude stands apart from the majority of her generation and it may be understood within the context of frameworks of memory-binding in the 1990s.44 Ginzburg’s memoirs were also influenced by contemporary discourses, and specifically the debates of the 1960s generation, formed at times of Thaw and de-Stalinization. For this reason, Ginzburg’s memoirs should be analyzed in the context of opposition to Brezhnev, a period in which “a new stock figure emerged in films and literature, the martyred intellectual as tragic bearer of cultural memory.”45 For the 1960s generation (the so-called “people of the 1960s”), the Thaw presented hope for an end to cults of personality and Stalinist repressions. While acknowledging the crimes of Stalinism, they positioned themselves as guardians of Russian culture and humanism, which had been systematically quashed in the years of red terror. It was then that the habitus of the Russian intellectual-dissident was forged, combining intellectual and moral functions in reference to the values and ideals of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia.46 In Ginzburg’s memoirs, we observe a conflict between the need to belong to a generation of dissidents and the need for separateness, or, as it was put by Thun-Hohenstein: “Eugenia Ginzburg shapes her autobiog­ raphical ‘I’ as part of a real community, from which she simultaneously tries to break free.”47 Her identity and biographical memory had been, after all, also influenced by values typical of the “priviligentsia”—that generation of Soviet Communists born in the first decade of the twentieth century who, after the revolution, busied themselves with implementing a utopia, holding important Party functions, and who then themselves fell victims to repressions in 1937. Following her rehabilitation, Ginzburg changed from an orthodox Communist activist into a liberal activist, which certainly played a role in her contacts with

44 Agnieszka Mrozik, “Porządki (po)rewolucyjnej rzeczywistości. Konstruowanie historii lewicy we wspomnieniach polskich komunistek w latach sześćdziesiątych XX wieku,” in Rok 1966—PRL na zakręcie, ed. Katarzyna Chmielewska, Grzegorz Wołowiec, and Tomasz Żukowski (Warszawa: IBL, 2015), 263–64. 45 Katerina Clark, “Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture,” in Late Soviet Culture from Perestroika to Novostroika, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Gene Kuperman (Durham: Duke University Press, 289). Cited from Natasha Kolchevska, “The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag,” in The Russian Memoir: History and Literature, ed. Beth Holmgren (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 162. 46 Ibid., 148. 47 Thun-Hohenstein, “Narrative Gesten der Nähe,” 89.

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dissidents;48 yet she never drew a line between herself and communism. In this sense, despite many obvious historical, political, and cultural differences between Poland and Russia, the circumstances that accompanied the writing of Whirlwind may be compared with those experienced by Budzyńska; for both authors a marked tension is present between the various types of memory and ways of remembering, as well as attempts to situate one’s own narration in the context of the potential reader’s worldview. As much as Budzyńska stresses the difficulties associated with justifying her choices, Ginzburg structures her own narration as a coming-of-age story, emphasizing the evolution of her own views and her transformation: Whatever happens, I consider it my duty to finish the book. Not so much because I want to record the facts about my later years in camp and exile as to reveal to the reader the heroine’s spiritual evolution, the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforget­ tably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a human being who amid all her setbacks and suffering also had moments (however brief) of fresh insight in her search for truth. It is this cruel journey of the soul and not just the chronology of my suffering I want to bring home to the reader. (2.423) According to Dariusz Tołczyk, the motif of transformation is of key significance in understanding, on the one hand, Ginzburg’s position on the map of accounts of the Gulag and, on the other hand, the fact that Whirlwind interweaves the Gulag narrative with discourses and contexts related to the Thaw.49 In the postStalinist period, the Gulag was used by the Party to legitimize its own position: it could now present itself as a victim of Stalin’s politics as well as forcing through the claim that “true Communists” had come out victorious from the trials of the Gulag. It was, as shown by Tołczyk, one of the versions of the tale of transformation that takes place as a result of the limit-experience of being deprived of one’s liberty and imprisoned. This tale, deeply ingrained not only in Russian

48 Raissa Orlowa and Lew Kopelew, “Am Ende der Gratwanderung—Jewgenija Ginsburg,” in Zeitgenossen. Meister. Freunde, trans. Eva Rönnau and Marianne Wiebe (Munich: Albrecht Knaus, 1989), 126–27. 49 Dariusz Tołczyk, “The Politics of Resurrection: Evgeniia Ginzburg, the Romantic Prison, and the Soviet Rhetoric of the Gulag,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 53–70. See also Dariusz Tołczyk, “The Uses of Vulnerability: Literature and Ideology in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Memoir of the Gulag,” Literature and History 14, no. 1 (2005): 56–74.

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culture, may emerge in the version hailing the death of the “old man” and the birth of a “new man,” or to the contrary, it may stress the need to preserve one’s own identity in the face of coercion.50 While during Stalinism the dominant version was the former, where Gulags were fashioned as sites of transformation of the “class unconscious” into people of the Party (perekovka—the reforging of men), during the Thaw the Gulag began to be presented as a litmus test for “true Communists.”51 Tołczyk argues that Ginzburg refers to the paradigm present in the official discourse intentionally—by writing of her evolution and return to “Leninist truth,” as this is the only way she can relate what she had been through. This reference, then, is a type of game with the rules of discourse. Is it a game, as Tołczyk believes, or a maneuver designed to distract the reader from the fact that in reality Ginzburg does not return to her old identity, but, on the contrary, is, in fact, writing herself as reborn. In my opinion, it is indeed impossible to overestimate the role of internal censorship and the pressure of the official politics of remembrance. Yet, as I stated earlier, I believe that the process of shedding her illusions about Stalinism and the attendant evolution of her own identity was not tantamount to Ginzburg rejecting communism as an idea. Whirlwind, similarly to Budzyńska’s Shreds of a Family Saga, is interesting also because it shows with acuteness that to one generation communism was the only conceivable vision of the world—against the Gulags and despite the Gulags. Both authors regret their shortsightedness regarding a specific social practice and feel guilty for not having foreseen its distortions. For this reason, they transform their identity and write about this transformation. Nevertheless, the transformation takes place within communism, not outside of it. Budzyńska and Ginzburg wrote their memoirs when men were “naturally” perceived as more important than that of women. Both authors, more or less consciously, challenged in their work the authority of Solzhenitsyn, whose unquestionable position as a moral and literary beacon was partially predicated on his gender. Yet, while Budzyńska and Ginzburg internalize the belief of “natu­ ral” differences between women and men, they rework the received gender hierarchy in their writing: they attribute a greater significance to women’s

50 Ibid.: 55–59. 51 “So, in the thaw, the Stalinist paradigm of perekovka, which portrayed the Gulag as a locus of the death of the old man and the birth of the new one, was replaced in the official Soviet discourse by a new paradigm presenting spiritual ascent in the Gulag as a result of the resistance of ‘true Communists’ to forced transformation. According to this discourse, the Gulag and the purges did not change the ‘true Communists.’ On the contrary, these experiences made them (and their Party) even more what they had been before their arrest” (ibid., 61).

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experience than men’s. Although they are writing their own biographies, both authors also speak on behalf of other imprisoned women, thus forming a female collective subject of sorts, onto which they project their own experiences and thoughts. This collective subject is comprised of women activists—well educated, conscious of their social position, and involved with the Party from early youth. Regardless of how much the authors themselves were convinced of the equality of the sexes, or in fact of female superiority in some sense, their memoirs must be read as texts shaped by cultures with prevalent patriarchal models. Besides their shared Jewish origins and worldview, it was the authors’ gender that determined the shape of their writing and the reception of their works both in Russia and in Poland.

4

My Son, My Self: Reevaluating a Culture of Vulnerability Kathryn Duda

On September 1, 1940, in a letter to her husband, Pavel Aksenov, Evgenia Ginzburg wrote, “My dear, let’s arrange a date by correspondence. Remember how it was in Herzen? Let’s name the date, the day, when we will both think about each other from morning to night. And each of us will know that the other is also thinking about him at that time. Well, let’s take January 1, 1941. I hope by that time you will have already received this letter.”1 This letter, Ginzburg’s second attempt to establish contact with her husband, provides evidence of their endeavors to maintain intimacy despite their separation and a lack of communicative infrastructure.2 Writing through her mother in Rybinsk, from Kolyma where Ginzburg had been sent nearly a year before, she seeks to transcend the distance between herself and Pavel. Here and elsewhere in their correspondence, she highlights their intimacy as psychological and moral support during her ordeal; but this letter complicates Ginzburg’s claim in her twovolume memoir Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind (1959–67; 1979) that she believed Aksenov had died only to find, after her release, that he had survived. The newly discovered letters partly conflict with Ginzburg’s

1 2

Letter from E. S. Ginzburg to P. V. Aksenov, September 1, 1940, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Universität Bremen, box M/6, FSO 01-103/SB, S. E. Babenysheva papers. There are fifteen letters that Ginzburg wrote to Pavel between 1940 and 1945, which survive in the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen Germany. The dates of these letters are: (1) July 19, 1940, (2) September 1, 1940, (3) February 3, 1941, (4) June 2, 1941, (5) June 8, 1941, (6) June 14, 1941, (7) July 5, 1943, (8) August 21, 1943, (9) November 4, 1944, (10) June 12, 1945, (11) June 17, 1945, (12) July 1, 1945, (13) July 23, 1945, (14) September 3, 1945, and (15) December 12, 1945. FSO 01-103/SB/M collected by S. E. Babenysheva.

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self-presentation as “a victim” and “an observer” of the Great Purges who, by losing everything, dismantles her own understanding of Stalinist Communism. Ginzburg’s failure to address the end of her relationship with Aksenov challenges the narrative she constructed of her camp experience that ended with her rebuilding a family, since that arc seemingly depends on preventing the reader from accessing the truth. Instead, though, in exposing the memoir’s elision, the letters indicate that Ginzburg is reframing her own history in favor of reclaiming authority as a moral agent who can evaluate herself and guide others by way of a literary model. The first part of Ginzburg’s memoir Journey into the Whirlwind (Krutoi marshrut) was published by the Italian publishing house Arnoldo Mondadori in 1967 and simultaneously by the German tamizdat publishers Possev. In 1979, two years after Ginzburg’s death, the second installment, known in English as Within the Whirlwind (Krutoi marshrut; vtoraia chast′) was published, also by Mondadori, after the first part had been translated into many languages and received considerable international press.3 Ginzburg’s memoir introduces her readers to two families with two different masculine centers: the first with Pavel Aksenov and the second with Anton Walter. While Natasha Kolchevska has suggested reading Ginzburg’s two families as a narrative device, new evidence from Ginzburg’s archive suggests Aksenov and Ginzburg relationship fails as a result of Ginzburg’s success in her post-camp life.4 Such an end to a relationship conflicts with the stakes of Ginzburg’s memoir. Marriages and family life bookend the experience as signs of Ginzburg’s growing understanding of herself and the Stalinist system. In her look at the topography of the late Soviet memoir, Irina Paperno argues that the memoirist attempts to mediate two strong valences when trying to narrate the life of an individual: that she is both a member of the community and an actor in history. Ginzburg’s eventual divorce from Aksenov in 1951 and their complicated relationship in their post-Gulag lives detract from her self-presentation as someone who recognizes a second chance at family as being a signifier of an

3 See Helen Muchnic, “Nightmares,” New York Review of Books, January 4, 1968, http://www. nybooks.com/articles/archives/1968/jan/04/nightmares/, Dominique Desanti, “Un doc�ument exceptionnel: ‘LE VERTIGE’, d’Evguenia Guinzbourg Un temoignage de foi communiste,” Le Monde, June 7, 1967, and Buecher, “Artikel 58,” Der Spiegel, September 25, 1967, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46353390.html. 4 See Natasha Kolchevska, “Angels at Home and at Work: Russian Women in the Khrushchev Years,” Women’s Studies Quarterly (Fall–Winter 2005): 114–37. Kolchevska argues that Ginzburg intended Walter to be read as an improved version of Pavel. I challenge that argument, in part, given the extended correspondence between Ginzburg and Pavel.

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identity Stalinism robbed her of. Completely losing Pavel to the violence of the regime, though, provides Ginzburg the narrative space to reconstruct a family, synthesizing within herself the roles of victim, survivor, and heroine with an orientation towards future generations. As her focus shifts to rebuilding her family in the final part of the memoir, Ginzburg extends the value of her deepened consciousness, modeling how to cultivate humanist culture. By modeling this kind of cultivation for her children and her reader, Ginzburg reclaims a right to bildung (vospitanie or formation) and challenges the dogmatic authority of the Party. This “history” makes the camps a locus for a type of moral education wherein culture becomes more than a tactic of survival. In the act of telling the reader how she survived, Ginzburg shows what kind of person survived. Undoubtedly, the camps could not bring about moral refinement, but neither are they accidental to Ginzburg’s refinement of values, specifically who can communicate what her life and her suffering means. Her camp vospitanie, manifested in the textual subjectivity of the memoir, becomes a constitutive alternative to the hegemonic partiinost′ (party-mindedness) that labeled her an enemy. Ginzburg’s narrative of refinement dovetails with an older notion of the camp as a site of “reforging” (perekovka)—the notion that people, like industry and canals, could be “constructed according to a master design.”5 Through the lens of her formal and literary education, Ginzburg represents herself as a vulnerable heroine, who emerges as a morally informed agent at the end of her “cruel route.” This article examines how Ginzburg, incorporating her family relationships as significant to her own survival, exposes the transcendence of cultural humanism. Read in this way, the construct of her family provides a kind of narrative tree in which to trace Ginzburg’s efforts to reclaim an agency denied to her by her own Party upon her arrest. 5 See Julie Draskoczy, “The Put’ in Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal,” The Russian Review, January, 2012. Ginzburg is careful not to link any of this inherently to the system. In fact, her arrest and charges lead her to utter confusion. Rather, as accidental to the stated purposes of the camps, the camps themselves strip away assumptions about the system and force Ginzburg to reevaluate and refine her attitudes. For more about perekovka and its most famous use in the building of the White Sea canal, see Cynthia Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998). Dariusz Tołczyk also discusses Gorky’s accounts of Solovki—an earlier attempt to frame the camps ideologically. See Dariusz Tołczyk, See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press), 93–183. See also Anne Hartmann “Concepts of the Criminal in the Discourse of ‘Perekovka,’” in Born to be Criminal: The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union. Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Riccardo Nicolosi and Anne Hartmann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 167–96.

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The Texts in Process While Whirlwind was largely written during the early 1960s, after the death of Walter in 1959, Ginzburg continued to edit the text and add to it throughout the 1960s, presumably until her death in 1977.6 It became a seminal work that helped shape both Western and Soviet understanding of a particular wave of Stalin’s terror centering around the purge of the Communist intelligentsia beginning in the mid-1930s. Moreover, Ginzburg’s text represents one of the most widely read examples of women’s writing from the period after the Second World War, along with those of Nadezhda Mandelshtam and Lydia Chukovskaya. Luminaries of the Soviet post-Thaw underground, such as Lev Kopelev, Raisa Orlova, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Andrei Sakharov, and Roy Medvedev, mention Ginzburg’s memoir alongside the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov as having both a profound personal influence on their lives and being among the most worthwhile texts written about the Gulag.7 The archival documents frame Ginzburg’s published work within a larger corpus of her writing about survival. These documents include letters to and from family members, as well as friends and contacts in the literary world; they also include photographs, and various versions of the Whirlwind manuscript. The documents are housed at FSO Bremen, Germany, RGALI in Moscow, and a quickly growing collection at the University of Notre Dame. The archival material reveals the conscious construction of the memoir; the subject of her own text, Ginzburg presents herself as a victim who becomes a heroine through the organization of her ordeal into a narrative. Leona Toker categorizes camp literature as “bifurcated into the predominantly factographic

6 Antonina Aksenova, in discussion with the author, September 27, 2013. I am thankful for Antonina Aksenova for sharing stories about her mother. Aksenova’s memories about Ginzburg working on her manuscript fill in some of the history, to which Ginzburg alludes, in her epilogue at the end of volume 2. See Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (San Diego: Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, 1981), 417–23. 7 Kopelev and Orlova were present at Ginzburg’s funeral. In an afterward they wrote for Whirlwind, they share that they first became acquainted with her through an illicit copy of her memoir. See L. Kopelev and R. Orlova, “Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Her Journey” in this volume. Alexeyeva tells a similar story of her own political awakening being hastened by texts such as Whirlwind. See Lyudmilla Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 43. Medvedev speaks of the merits of Ginzburg’s text as well as Sakharov’s admiration for it in his Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. See Roy Medvedev, Sakharov i Solzhenitsyn (Moskva: Prava cheloveka, 2002), 41.

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materials in emigre publications, and the predominantly fictional ones in official Soviet literature.”8 As Toker demonstrates, both kinds of sources are read as testimony about the camps, but the expectations for the factographic accounts are such that the authorial subject is predominantly defined by the truth claims. Understanding how Ginzburg positions truth claims over and against such labels as “enemy of the people” is essential to recognizing the full scope of Ginzburg’s project of cultural communication. At the heart of Whirlwind lies a performance of vulnerability in order to suggest ethical alternatives to Party adherence. Revealing a history of presenting and editing her memoir, the archives highlight what Ginzburg thought was essential for the project and her strategies for communicating its stakes. Ginzburg attempted to have the first volume published in the Soviet journals Novyi mir and Iunost′ (2.419). She had hoped, along with others, that Novyi mir’s publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den′ Ivana Denisovicha, 1962) heralded a time of openness about the camps. In a 1963 letter to Ginzburg, Novyi mir’s editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, promises to consider her memoir for its quality: “Of course, Solzhenitsyn’s tale set a quite high standard of artistic merit for works of a similar theme. It is not possible for the journal to deviate from these standards. The ‘fundamental possibility’ of publishing your manuscript will depend on meeting these standards.”9 Tvardovsky seems to allude to his own introduction to Ivan Denisovich “Instead of a Preface” (“Vmesto predisloviia”). He wrote that Solzhenitsyn’s novella “does not consist merely of notes on the author’s personal experience and his memories of them [. . .] It is a work of art. And it is the way in which the raw material is handled that gives it its outstanding value as a testimony.”10 Tvardovsky does not detail specific features but suggests that Solzhenitsyn struck a balance between lived experience and artistic expression so as to resonate with readers, allowing them to reflect productively on the reality of the camps. Tvardovsky thus prioritizes an artistic treatment of camp material, which only encouraged Ginzburg to send him her manuscript.11

  8 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 28–29.   9 G. A. Tiurina, ed, “Dorogoi Ivan Denisovich! . . .:” pis’ma chitatelei (Moskva: Russkii put’, 2012), 38. 10 Alexander Tvardovsky, “Instead of a Foreword,” in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Max Hayward and Ronald Hingle (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1963), xix. 11 Ginzburg had reason to believe she would meet such a standard. Solzhenitsyn wrote to her in 1964 praising her work, which he found remarkable in its honesty about the camp

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In the epilogue to the second volume, Ginzburg reports that despite the encouragement by the rest of the staff at Novyi mir, Tvardovsky was dismissive of Whirlwind, and cites his review: “She began noticing something was wrong only when they began to arrest Communists. But when they were exterminating the Russian peasantry, she found that to be quite natural” (2.421).12 As Denis Kozlov reveals, this is only a portion of Tvardovsky’s review of the manuscript. Tvardovsky was, on the one hand, very impressed with the memoir: “The rendition of facts of an individual fate is, from a properly literary standpoint, is almost impeccable—this is a free and confident account by a person sophisticated enough in literary writing.”13 However, on the other hand, this same “literary writing” destroyed the “authenticity” of her account.14 Kozlov maintains that, taken together, these two points—her literariness and her thematic focus on the intelligentsia—amount to a criticism of Ginzburg’s literary posturing as an intellectual voice with claims to a traditional literary heritage, rather than an unadorned, spontaneous mode of self-expression. Iunost′ likewise did not publish the text, despite Ginzburg’s previous publications for the journal and her son Vasily Aksenov’s position on the editorial board. In the same epilogue, Ginzburg claims that many people at the journal encouraged her.15 In the unpublished version of the text, she relates how one of the department heads offered to personally give the manuscript to the

experience and its honoring the memory of the dead. See Letter from A. I. Solzhenitsyn to E. S. Ginzburg, 1963, RGALI, f. 2549, op. 2, d. 57. Solzhenitsyn’s encouraging words echoed Tvardovsky’s own words at the 1961 Twenty-Second Party Congress, where he encouraged “writers to tell ‘the whole truth’ about the past” (quoted in Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016]: 142). Tvardovsky’s final rejection of Ginzburg’s text seemingly conflicts with Solzhenitsyn’s evaluation. While Tvardovsky specifically cited style for rejecting the manuscript, editors purposely limited what they published concerning the camps to avoid the impression that their publications were preoccupied with highlighting victims of Stalinist crimes. 12 This is published as an epilogue in the English translation, while it stands as a prologue in the Russian. RGALI houses an expanded epilogue and Ginzburg explains more about this exchange with Tvardovsky, how an editor at Iunost’ encouraged her to send the manuscript to Novyi mir, and which employees at Novyi mir encouraged Tvardovsky to publish it. The unpublished version also expresses Ginzburg’s disappointment at her ultimate rejection in more detail. See RGALI, f. 3129, op. 1, d. 4. 13 Quoted in Denis Kozlov, Readers of “Novyi Mir”: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 162. 14 Ibid. 15 A fuller account of her experience at Iunost’ is also given in the longer, unpublished portions of her epilogue. She first sent it with Vasily to the editor in charge of prose, Mary Ozerova. Ozerova sent that copy to Novyi mir where she thought it a more appropriate fit. So Ginzburg re-sent a copy to Iunost’ (RGALI, f. 3129, op. 1, d. 4).

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assistant editor, Sergei Preobrazhensky. But Ginzburg says, “Time was not on my side.” Preobrazhensky delivered the final verdict to Ginzburg that “it would be better for the magazine and for you” that portions are not published. Ginzburg reads this as implying that the Gulag was no longer a safe subject, but the reason cited by Iunost′ was that, as it was a magazine for children, the material was inappropriate.16 Boris Polevoi, Iunost′’s erstwhile editor in chief, eventually told Ginzburg that he could not believe that she thought that the text was publishable. However, Iunost′ sent the text to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute to “serve as material on the history of the Party” (2.422). Essentially, Journey into the Whirlwind was buried by Iunost′ for the sake of Party history. In 1968, after Mondadori had already published her book, Ginzburg wrote a letter to Polevoi asking him to publish the book in Iunost′, despite its rejection by the journal’s previous editor. This letter articulates three things. The first is that Ginzburg believed that writing the memoir fulfilled her civic and familial duty: “I considered it my human and Party duty to write this [the first] part. I am convinced that this part of my work, which is still incomplete, was written with the correct Party position in the spirit of the decision of the Twentieth Party Congress. In the preface to this work, it says, ‘I wrote these notes like a letter to my grandson, etc.’”17 Ginzburg contextualizes her sentiment about writing to her grandson, with which she starts the memoir, within a broader responsibility to the Party; both aims are united in a humanist voice (1.417).18 The second is that she denies any involvement with the samizdat copies circulating already: “I cannot understand what happened and how this manuscript ended up replicated in many copies. I personally did not have anything to do with its distribution, but just the opposite, having learned of it, as I feared, I grew concerned that this might disrupt its future publication for which I had always hoped and continue to hope.”19 In the epilogue of Whirlwind, however, she confesses to ambivalent feelings about the independent life of text: “The state of mind of the author of such publications is entirely a new subject, engendered by the strange times we live in. He is torn by conflicting feelings” (2.422). Still, she concludes the epilogue with an echo of the same hope to see the manuscript eventually published in her own land. The third is Ginzburg’s awareness of the book’s publication abroad, with which she likewise implies no 16 Ibid. 17 Letter from E. S. Ginzburg to B. Polevoi, December 14, 1968, FSO Bremen, box M/6, FSO 01-103/SB, S. E. Babenysheva papers. 18 Ginzburg’s preface is published as an epilogue in the English translation from 1967. 19 Letter from E. S. Ginzburg to B. Polevoi, December 14, 1968, FSO Bremen, box M/6, FSO 01-103/SB.

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compliance: “I am certain that the publisher pursues purely commercial aims when he briskly trades my suffering. These dealers advertise my book which was written, as they say, in my own blood, as ‘a fascinating adventure novel’ in the spirit of the Count of Monte Cristo.”20 Ginzburg insists that her text is primarily Soviet and that, although a journal such as Iunost′ appreciates adventure stories, it would not strip the text of its native and Soviet context. This letter attests to Ginzburg’s hope of inserting her testimony into Soviet public discourse and signals her willingness to capitulate, at least in part, to editorial and even ideological critique. Perhaps referring to these efforts with Polevoi, in the epilogue of Whirlwind Ginzburg indicates that her writing at the time was a compromise for the sake of publication: Alas, together with my hopes for publication, the missing inner editor came into being. He carped at every paragraph, “you won’t get this past the censor.” I started looking for more streamlined formulations, and I not infrequently spoiled passages that had come out well, comforting myself with the thought that, after all, a sentence or so was not much sacrifice for the sake of publication, of reaching people at last. (2.419) The epilogue ends with a univocal declaration that the memoir contains the whole truth, but the tension of this conscious crafting is impossible to ignore. This confession has led Kolchevska to suggest that without having to consider a Soviet censor, the second volume deviates away from Party considerations and into a more universal ethical scope. Additionally, as hope for publication faded, the narrative, which shed light on the experience of a female victim of the purges, could shift to more explicitly focus on feminine concerns.21 Nevertheless, Ginzburg herself does not treat her conscious crafting as being at odds with the memoir’s truthfulness. The project does not shift away from construction, but redirects itself towards a more familial focus and an assessment of Party ideals. Ginzburg was hardly able to ignore her readership vacuum. Consequently, in the second volume Ginzburg’s survival as a story of rebirth extends beyond the narration of domestic ethics; she addresses the challenge of how one should witness this kind of survival and deploys the family trope to conjure, through

20 Ibid. 21 Natasha Kolchevska, “Evgeniia Ginzburg and Aleksandr Tvardovskii: On Class and Gender in Khrushchev-era Publishing,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 33 (2006): 71–84.

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writing, a community of readers. Doing so, she subtly disputes the role of vospitanie that the Party claimed for itself. The familial focus at the end of the memoir constitutes this desire to participate in a public sphere fashioned according to Ginzburg’s own image. While in the first part, she was preoccupied with representing herself as a faithful Communist, in the second, freed as she was from considering a Soviet audience, Ginzburg probed her experience for a different meaning. Ginzburg synthesizes her ordeal into a narrative that elicits an ethical response from readers without belying the truth of the text; she does so by shifting her narrative focus towards her efforts to rebuild a family. She ends the memoir with the claim that she survived through an attachment to culture, and she continues to enculture the coming generation. In the second part, Ginzburg focuses on a renewed family life in order to model readership. In the concluding paragraphs of the epilogue, she plays with the metaphor of book-as-child: “The book has become a grown-up daughter off on her continental tour, without so much as looking over her shoulder or a thought to spare for her old mother left to fend for herself at home” (2.423). Ginzburg underscores the independent circulation of the text which adds a new dimension to the metaphor; like a child, the book too becomes separate from its author. Despite the lingering resentment toward the foreign publications which sidelined her writing career at home, Ginzburg must trust that the text is effective in enhancing an appreciation of culturally grounded humanism. The progression in the drafts of the second volume speaks to a development of the idea of communicability. RGALI houses a draft of the manuscript marked by the author’s son, Vasily. It is dated between 1963 and 1966, and contains all three parts (published in the West as two volumes) with Vasily’s corrections (mostly spelling) and notes (on word choice). In many places the initial text differs notably from that of the published memoir, supporting Ginzburg’s assertions (in the epilogue) that she continued to pore over the manuscript. Vasily, as an editor, approximates Ginzburg’s imagined familial reader (a grandson). Independent of her son’s suggested edits, Ginzburg would add a conversation with Vasya on the night he comes to Magadan as a sixteen-year-old and is reunited with her for the first time in ten years. This scene stands out as almost anachronistically inserting Vasily into the text as a stand-in for a reader. After discovering that they knew the same poems and after Ginzburg realizes, that like herself, Vasya has used poetry to anchor his chaotic life, he says: “Now I know what a mother is. . . for the very first time. Before, especially when I was a small boy, it seemed to me that Aunt

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Xenia looked after me like a mother. And she did look after me, but. . .” He paused for thought. The pause lasted several minutes. Then he came out with a fairly precise formulation: “Mother means, above all, unselfishness. And another thing—you can recite your favorite verses to her, and if you stop she will go on from the line where you left off.” (2.266) The topic of the conversation takes on a metanarrative quality, which suggests how the text should be read. With literary culture being a sign of ethical evaluation, the dialogue enacts an exchange that indicates the hoped-for response to the text. Vasya expresses a recognition of cultural value. He and his mother know the same poetry and can support each other through cultural expression. Here, Ginzburg discloses, in the words of her son, the image of herself which she has been forming in her memoir. Through Ginzburg’s survival, a respect for cultural humanism has survived Stalinism. For the reader, the text promises to enact Vasya’s recognition. The question is not so much what is a mother, but what kind of motherhood Ginzburg establishes. Physical vospitanie can be accomplished through proxies, but the formation of the mind through culture is the significant feature of motherhood.

The Ginzburg-Aksenov Family, Fractured and Rebuilt Comparing Ginzburg’s families’ biographies with the way they appear in her narrative, we see how the models of heredity and adoption position Ginzburg as both heroine and victim. The text draws human choice into a conflict with nature and other external forces so that Ginzburg might recreate her anguish for her readers. I suggest that the breaks between Ginzburg’s roles as heroine and narrator are to be read as rhetorically significant moments in which she shapes the function of family as a trope and guides the reader through a productive reading. The case of the Ginzburg-Aksenov family as told in the public record is a study in the categorical implications of the title “enemy of the people.” The state viewed such “enemies” as corrupting influences, not only on associates, but on family members as well. Even young children of suspicious persons were rendered suspect by sharing a bloodline with the accused.22 In his memoir, Pavel 22 See Catherine Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky, Children of the Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1–12; 257–300; Corinna Kuhr, “Children of ‘Enemies of The

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and his family implicate Ginzburg as the cause of his arrest.23 Ginzburg’s refusal to return to Kazan and to Pavel in 1956 was especially bitter, since he had not availed himself of the opportunity to divorce her after her arrest (as spouses often did in the hope of preventing their own arrest) and she herself did not divorce him until 1951.24 While the trends of arrest in 1937 do not support the view that her arrest was the main cause of his own, the order of events suggests that Ginzburg’s behavior invited suspicion and was the first source of trouble for the family.25 Ginzburg herself expresses no guilt regarding the fate of her husband and does not acknowledge that she might have introduced dangerous associates into her family. Instead, like so many other accounts of the Great Terror, she presents her arrest as an inevitable absurdity. Nonetheless, Ginzburg was not ignorant of the idea that family members inherited guilt and turns the model of guilt by association inside out on the pages of her memoir. Ginzburg posits that it is her and Pavel’s family which is the primary victim of her arrest. She writes the following in the chapter “That Day” in Journey into the Whirlwind: The nights were terrifying. But what we were waiting for actually happened during the daytime. We were in the dining room, my husband, Alyosha, and I. My stepdaughter Mayka was out

People” as Victims of the Great Purges,” Cahiers du Monde russe 39, no. 1/2 ( January–June 1998): 209–20; Golfo Alexopoulos, “Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–1940s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 ( January 2008): 91–117. 23 This implication is not necessarily malicious. Pavel insists that she was innocent, and he focuses on his own naïveté for believing that the Party was interested in truth. Nonetheless, he emphasizes how he heroically and faithfully stood by her, even when his marriage to her was repeatedly implicated as evidence of lack of care. See P. V. Aksenov, “Posledniaia vera,” Kazan’, no. 1–2 (1994): 156–73; also no. 3–4 (1994): 127–41. 24 Ginzburg, Evgeniia Solomonvna, Svidetel’stvo o brake E. S. Ginzburg s A. Ia Val′terom, March 15, 1951 (RGALI, f. 3129, op. 1, d. 29). There is little evidence that Ginzburg notified Pavel of a divorce before her marriage to Walter, and there was a repeated rumor about how Ginzburg was not careful to make her intentions known to Pavel. 25 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press), 193–97. Fitzpatrick discusses the broad trends involved in the purges and how they were mediated. Aksenov is an example of a highranking Party official, who was held accountable for spending and misusing government funds. Pavel Aksenov uses much of his memoir trying to detail the atmosphere among officials during the purges. He does not blame Ginzburg but keeps insisting on the absurdity of the processes. Nonetheless, his expulsion from the Party follows on her alleged confession to belonging to a Trotskyite cell and his faithful affiliation with her is mentioned first among his errors. See Aksenov, “Posledniaia vera,” 147, 149–50.

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skating. Vasya was in the nursery. I was doing some laundry. I often felt like doing manual work; it distracted me from my thoughts. Alyosha was having breakfast, and my husband was reading a story by Valeria Gerаsimova aloud to him. Suddenly the telephone rang. It sounded as shrill as on that day in December 1934 [Kirov’s murder]. (1.44) This domestic scene that is punctuated by work, sport, and culture could not have seemed more wholesome, highlighting by contrast the chaotic and illogical influence of the purges. Ginzburg’s brief, single-clause sentences create a clear image for the reader of the family she was about to lose. The disturbance arrives unexpectedly “in the daytime,” underscoring the destruction of this familial scene. The family members are positioned in significant places, indicating the ruination of domesticity and hinting at how Ginzburg will eventually rebuild it. The nuclear cluster of Pavel, Alyosha, and Ginzburg in the dining room foreshadowing the deprivations all three were to suffer represents the core of Ginzburg’s family whom she would lose in her journey: Alyosha would die in the Leningrad blockade; Pavel, in the narrative of the memoir, would die in the camps. Maya, the stepdaughter, is out of the house; she will survive, but her relationship with Ginzburg is severed. Vasya, who is only four years old and incapable of understanding, is left alone in the nursery, indicating that his rearing remains suspended. Vasya would be reunited with his mother twelve years later. Ginzburg had secured his passage to Magadan after her release in 1947. In the fall of 1948, she had arranged a travel companion for her son through Nina Konstantinovna, an acquaintance, whom Ginzburg characterizes in her memoir as an honestly good-natured but poorly educated woman whose son-in-law works as an interrogator. Ginzburg writes of Nina: “She never made a mistake in counting out the change at her cash desk. Her arithmetic, though, was better than her Russian. She spoke in the accent of the lower-middle-class suburbs of Moscow, and couldn’t even pronounce her own patronymic right” (2.329).26 Ginzburg signals that Nina Konstantinovna’s relation to an interrogator is evident in her

26 Ginzburg dismissively links Nina Konstantinovna’s family with her boorish (meshchanskii) language. Ginzburg draws attention to Nina Konstantinovna’s meshchanstvo by highlighting her petty exactingness in the face of the material poverty of the camps. All of this serves to separate Nina Konstantinovna from Ginzburg through habits and culture. As Vera Dunham has argued, “Meshchanstvo’s natural and historical antagonist is the intelligentsia” (Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction [Durham: Duke University Press, 1990], 20).

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language, implying that not just power barriers but cultural barriers existed between interrogators and enemies in the societal composition of the Terror.27 Ginzburg affirms this barrier between herself and Nina Konstantinovna, between her “inimical” family and the family of interrogators, between her own reverence for culture and Nina’s lack of it. The distinction materializes not just in Ginzburg’s mind: her son recognizes it when Nina Konstantinovna’s daughter plays a joke on Ginzburg who has come to meet her son on his arrival. Since Vasya has not seen his mother in twelve years, the women think it would be amusing to see if Vasya can pick out his own mother rather than her friend, Julia, who has accompanied her. After the son recognizes his mother with little hesitation, Ginzburg is almost reduced to tears. When she hugs Vasya, he whispers in her ear not to cry in front of “them.” Vasya’s “them” vocalizes Ginzburg’s assessment of Nina and her family and inverts the power structure of perpetrator and victim by juxtaposing the groups in terms of culture. The line that mother and son share instinctively serves to insulate them from the hostile onlookers and to strengthen their bond. The scene between Ginzburg and Vasya directly precedes the conversation Ginzburg would add to the account of the night of their reunion in Magadan. “Now I know what a mother is. . . for the very first time. Before, especially when I was a small boy, it seemed to me that Aunt Xenia looked after me like a mother. And she did look after me, but. . .” (2.266). These scenes re-perform and thereby re-adopt the model of hereditary mind-set. The reunion between mother and son performs the son’s recognition of his mother in stages: the physical recognition, the sharing of poems, the son’s expressed recognition of the mother in her behavior, and eventually the mother telling the story to her son. “After that I told him with absolute candor and truthfulness about everything I had been through and learned as a result [. . .]. I gave him a verbal precis of the chapters of Journey into the Whirlwind as I had conceived them. He was my first listener” (2.268). Vasya and Ginzburg progress through these stages without interruption or conflict. Each stage reveals Ginzburg as the mother, as a bearer of culture, as encouraging said culture in her son, and finally, as the source of family history. The reunion scene in Magadan recalls the previous time Vasya had called Ginzburg “mother” and brings peace to her memory of her failure to meet his call. Earlier in the text, while chastising herself for believing her children safe

27 Ginzburg seems to incorporate the model of guilt by hereditary transmission, although, instead of being related to an “enemy of the people,” Nina Konstantinovna is related to those who sought them out.

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with their father, her thoughts move to memories of them while in prison, especially one involving Vasya and an inescapable sense of guilt: It was no use trying to think of things “on a world scale.” Tonight I cared nothing for the world, only for my children, orphaned twice over—helpless small, trusting children, brought up to believe in human kindness. Vasya had once asked me: “Mother, what’s the fiercest of all the animals?” Fool that I was! Why didn’t I tell him the “fiercest” was man—of all the animals the one to beware of the most. (1.118) The recollection of that night in prison is superseded by the immediacy of Vasya’s words. He calls Ginzburg “mother,” bestowing on her a role that she does not fulfill that night, and worse, she fears she can no longer fulfill at all. The moral mistake in not answering the question about the nature of cruelty correctly represents a failure to shape her son’s ethical framework. Ginzburg juxtaposes the intimate memory of Vasya’s words and the “world scale.” She consciously disconnects from “the world” because Vasya’s search for motherly guidance remains unfulfilled. The problem of communicability in this moment becomes generational and Ginzburg represents naïveté not as an isolated flaw but as one that risks being passed on. Ginzburg builds on the realization of perpetuating naïveté when her memory about Vasya’s question turns into one about slapping his face for breaking a bottle of perfume. According to Ginzburg, this memory is “hellish torture” (adskaia muka), since being faced with the prospect of separation from Vasya for the rest of his life from such a young age, she worries “how will he remember his mother?” (1.118). At the heart of this memory is the conflicting value systems that Vasya will now face without the guidance of a mother. Through punishment, Vasya is presumably taught to respect the broken perfume bottle—an item of luxury and a sign of the status of the Ginzburg-Aksenov family. As a harbinger of the camps, on the most intimate and familiar scale, the lesson is enacted through violence—the slap on the face. Violence is used to establish value in the home as well as in the camps. Vasya’s search for motherly wisdom and the violence surrounding the bottle of perfume invite a comparison that suggests that memory is both a lasting marker and a fundamental component of vospitanie. Ginzburg’s anxiety combines the concern for how she will be remembered with that of how one recognizes value more broadly. While distinct, these are not separable concerns for the victim of Stalinist terror. The purge represented an opposition between

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the individual and the state over what was at stake in acknowledging guilt. The public branding of “enemy of the people” was one component, but so was the exercise where arrested citizens would be forced to acknowledge their guilt. As a prisoner of the Terror, it was not within the citizen’s rights to admit or deny any wrongdoing; instead, accused enemies were expected to submit their conscience and the evaluation of that conscience to the authority of the state. On a “world scale” the state enacted a totalizing vospitanie by insisting on its authority to determine an individual’s value. Consequently, Ginzburg’s distress about the memory she leaves Vasya with prioritizes the question of not just who survives but what survives. Ginzburg does not abandon her son in a vacuum, but in a competing system of values. The questions embedded in Ginzburg’s anguish concern her right to claim value for herself as a person, as well as her ability to transmit a system of values. Such questions remain unanswered until the second part of the memoir, when Ginzburg is reunited with her son, when the “mother” is no longer a failed figure but one who represents a successful familial bond. After the revolution, the state insisted that raising children came under its purview, because the family was less capable of instilling collectivist values. Under Stalin, the family was recovered, but as an image of “the great family” with Stalin at its head. As a result, whole families of political enemies were attacked on the grounds of threatening “the great family.” “The Stalinist project of social transformation sought both to destroy families of enemies and to forge new socialist families.”28 Inherent in this vision is the notion that family creates values, even without deliberate intention. Ginzburg adopts this assumption but denies the state its power by asserting that heredity is effective in transmitting values despite the efforts of Stalinism to prey on familial relationships. The type of value transmitted is crucial for Ginzburg: her survival is significant because it can be a catalyst for humanist values to take root in a future generation. Ginzburg insists on the evaluative capacity of the individual. The family becomes a locus (similar to the camps) that encourages such a capacity by introducing categories that are not easily reduced to political status. The family trope in Whirlwind, then, is multivalent. On one hand, it seems directed towards instructing future readers; on the other hand, it serves

28 Alexopoulos, “Stalin and the Politics of Kinship,” 98. Alexopoulos argues that attacking the family was not a Soviet invention, but had been inherited from imperial Russia where the family was used as leverage to intimidate various groups of people. When revolutionaries like Kollontai maligned the family as a bourgeois institution, the metaphor of the Party as family began to take root in public discourse. Consequently, even when material considerations, such as a diminishing birth rate, forced the family to be appropriated by Stalin, it was still in the service of this macro-metaphor.

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Ginzburg’s positioning of herself as the heroine of the narrative. The exchange of her role as victim for the role of author and mother is the narrative arc of her story, but the silence about lost relationships, like the one with Pavel, sheds light by way of contrast on what Ginzburg considers the most essential aspects of her authorial role.

Pavel Aksenov Revisited The extant letters that Ginzburg sent to Pavel Aksenov from Kolyma contain a different attitude from that in her memoir. Unsurprisingly, the letters reveal Ginzburg’s physical and moral exhaustion alongside her fears and desires at a more vulnerable time than she was willing to recreate in her memoir. Even in the first letter dated July 19, 1940, she expresses a sentiment to Pavel that she regularly repeats throughout these letters: I only want to die next you. The most dramatic example appears in the second letter from September 1, 1940: “But it seems that happy endings more often exist in novels than in real life, that it would really be possible for us to live together after a span of three years when the most ardent and, at the same time, the most unrealizable of my dreams has been to die together.”29 The desire to be reunited is at odds with itself on multiple levels. First, the reunification for death, rather than a future life together, expresses the transformation enacted by the camps. Death, assumed by those outside the camp to be an evil, offers Ginzburg an end to her physical suffering and the only possible circumstance which cannot be threatened by separation. But even the desire to die together is beyond reasonable hope, as the use of the present passive participle, neosushchestvimaia, suggests. The dream itself compounds her anguish, since it is not realizable. These self-conscious conflicts augment the impression of the camps as a system of meaningless chaos that not only perverts human desire but tries to subjugate it altogether. The inner conflict transpires more clearly in the letters than in the memoir. Lydia Ginzburg suggests an explanation for the presence of the conflict around the uncertain idea of survival: “Memoirs [. . .] are almost always literature presupposing readers in the future or the present; they are a kind of plotted structuring of an image of reality and an image of a human being, whereas letters [. . .] fix the indeterminate process of life with its yet

29 Letter from E. S. Ginzburg to P. V. Aksenov, September 1, 1940, FSO Bremen, box M/6, FSO 01-103/SB.

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unknown dénouement.”30 A reading of survival then emerges as that soughtafter dénouement of E. Ginzburg’s writing. The letters highlight survival in its lived ambiguity, while the memoir uses survival as the telos around which Ginzburg organizes the narrative. The camps, while being endured, cannot organize a human story; instead, they format life’s orientation to death. The letters, therefore, lacking resolution, must negotiate the value of both possibilities: life or death. In this letter to Pavel, Ginzburg negotiates the value of their suffering in terms of death and mastery: You write about the legitimacy of grief in human life, and that only the emotional chiaroscuro of happiness and unhappiness creates, in essence, life itself. This is true. To a certain degree, grief ennobles, towers over the daily grind, and lays a greater claim to the title of person. But here, as everywhere, the quantity surpasses the quality. Sometimes there is so much suffering that it becomes simply offensive to our human dignity. At such moments, it is necessary to overcome fate with some incredibly huge effort of will or die.31 Pavel’s implicit argument that suffering provides the “chiaroscuro” suggests that suffering might be appreciated aesthetically and contextualized as part of a larger whole. Ginzburg rejects his suggestion by insisting that given their current reality, they cannot assume such a removed stance toward suffering, because their suffering is overwhelming. Ginzburg emphasizes that suffering is not simply emotionally inordinate but threatens physically and morally to inundate their very persons. The only response, therefore, is an act of the will: one can either attempt to master suffering or succumb to it. Moral depletion and yearning for reunification with Pavel are combined with elements that are very typical of Ginzburg’s memoir. She quotes poems, speaks of her work in the camps and her trials. She describes the conditions of her life in Kolyma. She does talk about their sons, something that she says in her memoir was taboo among the women prisoners (1.286). Nonetheless, the full manifestation of spiritual exhaustion conveyed by the unfulfillable dream all but completely vanishes in the memoir; from the point of view of the survivor, it is

30 Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 9. 31 Letter from E. S. Ginzburg to P. V. Aksenov, September 1, 1940, FSO Bremen, box M/6, FSO 01-103/SB.

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not valuable to a narration that attempts to extract meaning out of the experience, which is Ginzburg’s dominant mode in recalling the camps. After finishing her first hard labor sentence, Ginzburg took pains to rebuild a family community, which included people from the important phases of her life: her pre-arrest years, her years in the camps, and her time after her arrest but before her rehabilitation. This is also the time when she confronts her losses most clearly.32 While she was completing her sentence in the camps, she secured a position as a nurse. Among the other prisoners she met through this work was Dr. Anton Walter. After she introduces him to her reader, Ginzburg explains, “This jolly saint was to become my second husband [sic]. Our love grew amid the stench of putrefying flesh, against the darkness of the arctic night. For fifteen years we marched together across the abysses, through all the blizzards” (2.116). While Walter had many disadvantages—he was a German, a Catholic, and practiced homeopathic medicine—he was a successful physician. Consequently, although his sentence was longer than Ginzburg’s and for most of their time in Magadan he was still a prisoner, Walter had certain privileges because he had cared for many of the local officials. Walter was a beloved figure, fondly remembered even by Pavel.33 Upon her release, Ginzburg tirelessly petitioned the authorities for permission to move her surviving son Vasily to Magadan. When she was finally granted this permission, she had to borrow money from another ex-zek in the community to purchase the ticket. This collective effort brought about the reunification of mother and son, and Ginzburg’s families came full circle. Nonetheless, Vasya’s move to Magadan represents, for Ginzburg, a reacquaintance with her past family, including the unmitigated loss of parts of it. Vasya’s presence in Magadan is marked by the two directions Ginzburg wants to develop in her heroine: on one hand, she is capable of thriftily securing Vasya’s well-being, and on the other, she is unable to avoid the associations the town has with her deceased older son Alyosha. Reminders of lost family members come concurrently when meeting those who have survived. Ginzburg enacts her victimhood through the figures of her children, by using them to mediate her own guilt about survival. The bifurcated roles of Ginzburg as the memoir’s protagonist—that is, survivor-victim and survivor-heroine—intersect in the scenes that touch on her

32 Each person also might be representative of a part of the text: Vasya as a return to part one, Walter as the final salvation in part two, and Tonya as the future-oriented project of part three. 33 In a letter to Vasya and Ginzburg, Pavel thanks Walter for the attention the latter paid to his family while Ginzburg was very ill (Letter from P. V. Aksenov to E. S. Ginzburg, January 22, 1950, RGALI, f. 3129, op. 1, d. 18).

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motherhood. The antithetical sentiments of hope and loss are especially acute in the scene in which Ginzburg sees Vasily, alive. This episode, likewise, stands as the most intense realization for Ginzburg that Alyosha has died. When reunited with a sixteen-year-old Vasya, Ginzburg as narrator performs the disorientation she felt at the time of the reunion. As the scene progresses, it becomes unclear to the reader whether Ginzburg’s disorientation pertains to the event narrated or to the time of composition. The transformation of the boy from a chubby four-year-old to teenager makes her remark, oddly, that “[a]ltogether he was more like Alyosha rather than his earlier self ” (2.264). While Vasya recognizes, without hesitation, which of the two women standing before him is his mother, Ginzburg’s emotions blur her ability to identify her son clearly: His eyes were definitely not hazel. Not like Alyosha’s. Alyosha’s hazel eyes were closed forever. They could not come back again. And yet . . . How much he resembled Alyosha as he was then, at the age of ten—no nearly eleven. My two sons had for an instant merged into one and the same image. “Alyosha, my darling,” I said in a whisper, almost involuntarily. Suddenly I heard a deep, muffled voice: “No, Mamma. I’m not Alyosha. I’m Vasya.” (2.264–65) This outpouring of feeling is Ginzburg’s most effluent and nearly culminates in a public display except for Vasya’s command to not cry in front of the women. The external and public display checked, the reader is left to contemplate Ginzburg’s internal response. In the description of Vasya’s eyes, the distance between Ginzburg’s narrator and protagonist breaks down, as the argument with herself is reproduced or performed for the reader. Despite the attempts to locate a correct point of view—the eyes are not even the right color— the act, and the memory of the act, of looking into her son’s eyes overpower Ginzburg’s ability to process this information. The Russian has two sentences about Vasya’s/Alyosha’s eyes which the translator renders in the past placing Ginzburg’s confusion in that moment. However, these sentences might easily be an expression of the present confusion of Ginzburg the author, since they exceed historical narration and suggest that the encounter made such a strong impression on Ginzburg that she is still arguing with herself at the time of writing. There is no comment or self-reflection on the mistaken perception that has just occurred, but instead the narrator still insists that something about Vasya’s eyes (whose own color is not given) is reminiscent of Alyosha’s. The calling out of Alyosha’s name rather than Vasya’s is “involuntary,” just like the recollection

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about her sons’ eyes. Her words stand apart not just from the people at hand, but from herself as the speaker. The episodes that Ginzburg shares with her reader about the times when she allowed herself to worry about her children are rare but telling. Critical moments when her habitual distance towards herself as a protagonist breaks down and she bares her emotions for the reader, as in the passage above, most often involve recollections of Alyosha. The death of Alyosha, a victim of the Leningrad blockade, consequently remains beyond the tragedy of the camps. The circumstances of his death separate Alyosha from Ginzburg; their suffering has different causes. As the narrative reaches its conclusion with Ginzburg beginning to work in Magadan, the loss of Alyosha comes more to the forefront of her story. Ginzburg’s survival is now realized, and she is able to better appreciate her loss. Her narrative stance may recall Pavel’s suggestion that she regards the suffering of the camps as a “chiaroscuro” that provides life with greater depth, but it finds its limit with Alyosha. He stands as a reminder of the assertion that “the quantity surpasses the quality. Sometimes there is so much suffering that it becomes simply offensive to our human dignity.” Rather than dwelling on so many deaths, Ginzburg figures her son’s as a way to express the impossibility of completely rebuilding in the face of loss; that is, Ginzburg conflates herself as narrator and heroine around the memory of Alyosha because his death is absolute and defies contextualization in a narrative. The last member of the new family to be added was Tonya. Tonya was a Gulag orphan who was in the kindergarten where Ginzburg was working as a music teacher. Tonya was small, very young—barely two years old—and sickly. Her weakness provided a pretext for Ginzburg to keep her.34 According to Tonya’s birth certificate, Ginzburg adopted her with Pavel Aksenov officially in 1952.35 Tonya was nearly fourteen years younger than Vasya; she stood out from the other children because, among other things, she loved music and could speak especially well “for her age and background” (2.274). When Ginzburg first brings Tonya home, it is, in fact, to show her what it means to be home. Tonya embodies a complete absence of domesticity when she meets Ginzburg: her biological mother was a prisoner, and she was raised

34 She gets sick with diphtheria and is left behind from her transport. See 2.277. 35 The date is curious. According to the marriage certificate, Ginzburg married Walter in 1951. Consequently, Pavel’s name on this document leaves many questions unanswered. Antonina Aksenova herself could not account for this discrepancy. She said she did not discuss it with her mother. Ginzburg mentions Tonya’s birth certificate in conjunction with her marriage certificate to Walter and Vasya’s entrance certificate to university. She claims that such documents provided “a form of defense, however fragile, around our house of cards” (2.317).

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in a camp’s children’s shelter and is almost always crying in her kindergarten. In other words, Tonya bears the tragedy of the camps unconsciously and represents a life entirely limited and determined by them. When Ginzburg takes Tonya home, the girl gets upset because she does not understand where the other children go when they go home. “How was she to know? And how could one possibly explain it to her? Her biography to date had not included this strange concept. She had been in the Elgen children’s home, the hospital, our resident kindergarten . . . And ahead of her was a children’s draft to another special institution. Would it even be right to try to explain what ‘home’ meant?” (2.275). Tonya’s innocence is a product of her circumstances rather than her age. While she is quite eloquent for her young age, “home” is not something that can be explained to her through words. Domestic security is a strange and unfamiliar concept until Ginzburg shows Tonya a home. At the same time, Ginzburg herself finds peace at home with Tonya. Tonya’s camp origins do not engender the same ambivalence as Vasya’s reunion with his mother. Tonya figures as a gesture by Ginzburg to allow the reality of the camps into her home. Just as she uses music and domesticity to calm Tonya, Ginzburg makes Magadan’s harsh and unforgiving surroundings her home by establishing an appreciation of culture. When Ginzburg tells Walter “I need Tonya more than she needs me,” the implicit therapeutic meaning might also be read as a metanarrative suggestion (2.279). Ginzburg ultimately needs Tonya to enculture camp life. However, as Tonya becomes a fully adopted member of the family, the threat of her loss recalls losses Ginzburg has already suffered. After she has built a home with Walter, Vasya, and Tonya, Ginzburg takes great care to note that she was plagued with melancholy while her children, particularly the very young Tonya, feel that their lives are complete. Ginzburg is jarred by Tonya’s simple understanding of the family—mom, dad, and herself. “I was racked with remorse! How could I ever have linked the child to my life, a life preyed on by demons! It had been sheer egoism on my part. I had needed a substitute for Alyosha. No, not a substitute; there could be no substitute for him, not even Vasya. Not a replacement, but a constant reminder of him” (2.348). Ginzburg checks herself in writing about this experience. The tension within having a “new” family to replace the one which was lost is not able to be synthesized and Ginzburg’s narrative voice remains ambivalently split. The conflict between the selfish despair associated with the fear of adopting Tonya and the inherent hope for a new life that the adoption of children promises embodies the specific victimhood that the memoir grapples with. The victimhood that is marked by the loss of Alyosha is not a stagnant or stationary

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sense of loss, but a loss that at times paradoxically pushes Ginzburg forward to rebuild a family, and in doing so rebuilds hope. The particulars of ambivalence as they relate to Alyosha, Vasya, and Tonya indicate the general problem of victimhood within Ginzburg’s writing about herself. One terminus of this ambiguity is egoism, which would mark the consideration of her suffering as indulgent. The other terminus is the concern that victimhood can be completely overcome, which would involve comprehensively contextualizing the losses involved. Considering Alyosha specifically, Ginzburg can express the anguish over suffering that omits any possibility of hope, but at the same time she cannot help but draw attention to the fulfilled hope of her own survival. Victim and survivor reside together uncomfortably, as is revealed by the juxtaposition of her survival and the ultimate loss embodied in her son’s death.

Conclusion Beth Holmgren has described the narrative arc of a bildungsroman in the structure of Whirlwind, which Ginzburg traces politically rather than developmentally: from a naïve participant to a fully formed agent.36 Much of the opening chapters of the memoir records trips and meetings she and her family had in the early thirties with other influential Communists of the day. The memory of these meetings is overlayed with a sense of incaution and tragedy, since many of these people would lose their power and do little to save their associates from the purges. In contrast, at the end of the memoir, Ginzburg more efficiently safeguards the people she loves by exercising influence among her personal connections in Magadan and working hard for the small community. Yet her story is not complete until she rebuilds her family.37 Ginzburg’s successful self-preservation hinges on her ability to share the narrative with her family so she might help them understand where they came from and how they got here; that it is their story as well as hers. Ginzburg’s marriage to Walter, reunion with Vasya, and her initiative to adopt Tonya and bring her home despite evidence that her second

36 See Beth Holmgren, “Writing the Female Body Politic [1945–1985],” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. A. M. Barker and J. M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 232. 37 See Toker, Return from the Archipelago. Ginzburg’s memoir displays key features which Leona Toker formulates in her synthesis of the Gulag memoir, including many of Toker’s nine topoi, the last of which focuses on life outside after the camp.

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arrest was approaching suggest that an ethics of enculturation has supplanted a rigid sense of partiinost′ (party-mindedness). Ginzburg’s project of familial enculturation, then, is an act of resistance on par with her heroic expression of cultural humanism in the face of brutish chaos. Ginzburg illuminates the failure of Stalinism to dominate her life and, more importantly, dictate meaning to her children. Combing her letters, early prose, and memoir one sees her efforts to construct a family of intellectuals. Cultural elitism is foundational in her conception of self and provides the foundation for her new family. This is both expansive and narrowing. It is expansive insofar as it provides her with a broader historical model from which to draw; as opposed to “typical Communist” culture, humanist culture extends beyond the revolution and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.38 It is narrowing insofar as it requires that she separate herself from others. While Ginzburg meets a number of kindred spirits during her ordeal, her family becomes the locus of activity to rebuild in the wake of her experience. Intellectual culture, then, is a family affair, and home is a place that can negotiate meaning that is not essentially political, but that has ramifications for society at large. Consequently, Ginzburg rebuffs any attempts to reduce herself, her family, and her home to political goods or evils. Yurii Slezkine argues that “All radical attempts to remake humankind are ultimately assaults on the family” and that all of them ultimately “either fail or dissimulate.”39 As this applies to Ginzburg, the distinction between family space and more public space remains inviolate, except for a furthering of literary humanist culture. Consequently, as Khrushchev’s version of de-Stalinization amounted to a rejection of her (and others’) narratives, Ginzburg chose to cordon off the space of the family as the genuine literary rejection of Stalinism. The family, as a locus for renewal and enculturation, embodied the flexibility and adaptability at the core of her own survival and the means whereby she laid claim to an alternative evaluative system.

38 When Walter is wooing Ginzburg, he sends her a note in Latin for the purpose of secrecy. Ginzburg is able to make it out through her knowledge of French. See 2.122. 39 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 363.

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Vasily Aksenov and Evgenia Ginzburg in Magadan: Reconceiving Soviet Authorship through the Gulag Experience Ann Komaromi

This article analyzes the different portrayals by Evgenia Ginzburg and her son Vasily Aksenov of their time together in Siberia at the end of the 1940s. The meeting of mother and son following Ginzburg’s imprisonment in the Gulag and temporary release into exile in Magadan formed a key moment in both Ginzburg’s uncensored memoirs Journey Into the Whirlwind/Within the Whirlwind (Krutoi marshrut, two volumes) and Aksenov’s samizdat novel The Burn (Ozhog).1 When the sixteen-year-old Vasya (Vasily Aksenov) arrived to live with his mother in the port city of Magadan in the far northeastern Kolyma

1 Ginzburg’s memoirs, published as Evgenia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut, vol. 1 (Milan: Mondadori, 1967); and Evgenia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut, vol. 2 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1979), became available in English in the following editions: Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967); and Evgenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Bolan (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). Vasily Aksenov’s novel Ozhog. Roman v trekh knigakh. Pozdnie shestidesiatye. Rannie semidesiatye (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1980) appeared in English as Vasily Aksyonov, The Burn: A Novel in Three Books (Late Sixties–Early Seventies), trans. Michael Glenny (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).

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region, he could not have known that shortly thereafter, in 1949, she would be rearrested along with other former prisoners. Ginzburg’s humanistic account of this reunion and the trauma of renewed separation is different in tone and style from the refraction of the same events in Aksenov’s avant-garde novel. Nevertheless, mother and son shared the goal of asserting an authorial voice in relation to notions of the Russian/Soviet intelligentsia and its literary traditions. After Stalin’s death, Ginzburg, who had been imprisoned like many others for no actual crime, enjoyed official rehabilitation in 1955. Ginzburg’s uncensored memoirs, circulated in samizdat (the self-publishing network) beginning in the late 1960s, offered her perspective on the mass phenomenon of incarceration and her view of what it meant for her and for Soviet society. After Nikita Khrushchev alluded to the crimes of Stalin in his speech to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, he and other Party leaders did much to suppress public discussion of the subject.2 Ginzburg’s memoirs were among those texts circulated unofficially in the years following that addressed the experiences so little acknowledged in official print. Ginzburg asserted a compelling vision of the strength of humanity and cultural values at a time when they seemed to have been lost. The interval of relative freedom she enjoyed in 1949, when she was reunited with her son, stands out in her memoirs as a moment ratifying the possibility of the survival of human and cultural connections. Aksenov approached his literary portrayal of the Magadan reunion with his mother with the success of a Young Prose author behind him.3 In his novel The Burn (1969-1975), Aksenov turned to uncensored writing to express his pent-up anger and frustration, giving freer rein to his impulse for experimental literary art. His fictional version of the Magadan meeting in The Burn highlights generational differences among authors writing about the effects of the Gulag on Soviet society. Ginzburg’s writing comes from the perspective of a witness and survivor; Aksenov’s point of view is that of a child of survivor who has also

2 On the “pact of silence” binding Soviet society in the post-Stalin era, see Kevin M. F. Platt. “Secret Speech: Wounding, Disavowal, and Social Belonging in the USSR,” Critical Inquiry 42 (2016): 647-75. 3 Aksenov had been known and loved by Soviet readers since the early 1960s for his publications in the journal Youth (Iunost′). Particularly popular were his novellas, including Colleagues (1959), A Starry Ticket (1961), and Oranges from Morocco (1963). On his more mildly experimental Youth Prose style of this period, see Priscilla Meyer, “Aksenov and Soviet Literature of the 1960s,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 6 (1973): 447-60. Other sources include J. J. Johnson, “V. P. Aksenov: A Literary Biography,” in Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksenov: A Writer in Quest of Himself, ed. Edward Mozejko, Boris Briker, and Per Dalgard (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1984), 34. Critic Stanislav Rassadin identified Aksenov as a leader among the new young writers in his article, “Shestidesiatniki,” Iunost′ 12 (1960): 58-62.

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suffered trauma himself. He lost both of his parents to arrests by the age of four, becoming for practical purposes an orphan as well as a socially disadvantaged close relative of convicts. At the age of sixteen, in Magadan, Aksenov also witnessed the condition of prisoners and ex-prisoners from up close. Aksenov’s muse in The Burn takes many forms (Marina Vlady, Arina Beliakova, Masha Coulagot, the sexy Muscovite Alisa Fokusova, a heron), but they all appear related to the young female prisoner, Alisa, whom the character Tolya (an alter ego for “Vasya,” Aksenov himself) glimpses in a convoy in Magadan. In this way, Aksenov pointed to the centrality of the trauma of the Gulag experience for his own work and that of his generation of creative intelligentsia, who continued to be influenced by the unresolved legacy of Stalinism into the late 1960s and beyond.4 If Ginzburg wrote about the Gulag experience to reestablish connections to the past and redeem her experience and place in Soviet society, Aksenov worked through that trauma in The Burn in order to show the alienation of his generation and the rifts in the fabric of society. With his radically experimental style and departure from the literary mainstream in this uncensored book, Aksenov also broke with traditional understandings of the authorial self and the intelligentsia.

“Don’t Cry in Front of Them” Ginzburg’s account of her encounter with son Vasya after nearly twelve years of separation is moving and nuanced. She had struggled for months to obtain official permission and the practical wherewithal to bring her son out to stay with her in Magadan. When he finally arrives, he plans to stay with her for two years and finish high school there. Mother and son first see one another at a party in the home of Magadan acquaintances. These people helped provide a chaperone to accompany the teenage Aksenov on the long plane journey from Moscow out to the far northwest. Despite providing such welcome assistance, these relatively privileged members of Magadan society do not really grasp Ginzburg’s situation and seem insensitive to her ordeal. After making Vasya wait

4 The possible rehabilitation of Stalin worried prominent Academicians and winners of state awards (among them writers V. P. Nekrasov, K. G. Paustovsky, and K. I. Chukovsky; physicist A. D. Sakharov; actor I. M. Smoktunovsky; and ballerina M. M. Plisetskaia) who wrote a letter, which circulated in samizdat. The letter was published also in no. 18 (March 1966) of Roy Medvedev’s Samizdat edition Politicheskii dnevnik, and included in An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union from Roy Medvedev’s Underground Magazine Political Diary, ed. Stephen Cohen, trans. George Saunders (New York: Norton, 1982), 177-79.

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and forgetting to inform his mother about his long-awaited arrival, they watch the meeting of mother and son through the lens of their own revelry, expecting a moving spectacle. Ginzburg asserts her strength of character by restraining the overwhelming emotions she feels, but she manages to do this only because Vasya whispers to her, “Don’t cry in front of them . . .” (2.265) The episode featuring this reunion appears late in the second volume of Ginzburg’s memoirs. It represents a peak of drama, the culmination of much planning, work and worry. Vasya’s whispered words form the title of the chapter. Heinrich Böll, introducing the English edition of this second volume, picked up the line for the title of his remarks, suggesting that “Don’t cry in front of them” could be the watchword for the millions inhabiting the underground realm of the Gulag that Ginzburg describes. Böll made the point that building the supposedly classless society of the USSR depended on creating a division between “us,” those sacrificed to purges, and “them,” the people involved in the massive system of detention along with those who lacked the imagination to comprehend the injustice perpetrated on millions of their compatriots, co-workers, friends and family.5 Victimized by that inhuman division, Ginzburg writes about the continuation of human feeling, of culture, compassion and the ties that still bind people together even after enforced separation lasting for years. In the midst of the turmoil caused by finally seeing her son in Magadan after so many years of incarceration and so many months of fighting and waiting for this moment, Ginzburg becomes confused by the resemblance of the young man to her first son, Alyosha, who died after her arrest, during the siege of Leningrad. She whispers, “Alyosha, my darling,” and her son corrects her: “No. Mamma. I’m not Alyosha. I’m Vasya.” At that moment he adds, “Don’t cry in front of them . . .” Vasya’s response helps Ginzburg pull herself together. His whisper lets her know that he understands the emotional stress of the situation, and it confirms the sense of kinship and comprehension they need from one another. Ginzburg describes this as “the most crucial moment of my life,” when family bonds were reestablished, when “the broken links in our chain of time” were joined up, and an “organic closeness” was reestablished after so many years of separation.

5 Heinrich Böll, “Don’t Cry in Front of Them” (1.xi). The division between “us” and “them” was referred to also by Anna Akhmatova’s conception of two Russias. As she said on March 4, 1956, “Now the prisoners are returning, and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that pronounced sentences, and the one that served them”— see Lidiya Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi: 1952-1962, vol. 2 (Moscow: Soglasie, 1992), 190. In reality, as Irina Paperno noted, such divisions were not so easy to sustain. See Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 102.

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Having come back to herself, Ginzburg finds it possible to maintain the dignity and reserve that help her preserve her self-respect in a hostile world (2.264-65). This restoration of an integral sense of self in Ginzburg’s work implies the rejoining of past and future. Ginzburg and her son communicate through poetry, too: on their first night after reuniting in Magadan, too excited to sleep, mother and son get to know each other by reciting verse.6 Ginzburg is joyfully astonished to hear Vasya recite poems that had been faithful companions to her during the years when she was fighting for survival in the camps. Thus, poetry constitutes a form of recognition between mother and son that also signifies the “underground” survival of a cultural legacy largely repressed or distorted under Stalin. “Like me,” writes Ginzburg, “[Vasya] too found in poetry a bulwark against the inhumanity of the real world. Poetry was for him a form of resistance. That night of our first talk together we had Blok and Pasternak and Akhmatova with us” (2.266-67). She is glad to be able to reinforce for him that which has provided spiritual sustenance for her. Her son says, “Now I understand what a mother is [. . .] Mother means, above all, unselfishness. And another thing—you can recite your favourite verses to her, and if you stop she will go on from the line where you left off ” (2.267).7 The restoration of a spiritual link between the two of them occurs in and through the assurance of cultural continuity, of the successful transmission of a heritage, a connection with the past and its values that provides some assurance for the future.8

Making Whole, Breaking Apart If Ginzburg conceived her authorship through the Gulag experience, Aksenov reconceived his authorship by referring to the experience he shared with her.

Olga M. Cooke discusses this scene in “Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Exegi Monumentum,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): Evgeniia Ginzburg: A Centennial Celebration: 19042004, 117. 7 Aksenov talked about learning modernist poetry from his mother. She taught him symbolist and acmeist poetry, including “miles of Pasternak,” as well as early futurist verse by Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov that he could not get from his schoolbooks. From an unpublished interview with Vasily Aksenov by D. Barton Johnson, May 20, 1990, in Fairfax, Virginia. Thanks to D. Barton Johnson for sharing this interview and to Lisa Wakamiya for bringing it to my attention. 8 Ginzburg goes on to reflect that the memory of this night gives her strength for her remaining years of incarceration and exile, providing her with the secure sense that, despite whatever difficulties her son might encounter and manifest as he grows to complicated adulthood, these “pure depths” remain. See 2.267. 6

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They accomplished these processes through very different—though related— styles of writing and modes of imagining subjectivity and authority. Ginzburg’s memoirs address a broken world and a damaged sense of self to show how they might be put together again. Aksenov, as we shall see, starts with a post-Stalin world in which that shattering has been covered over. He enacts the breaking apart in his writing, in order to more adequately address the trauma. We might in part explain the difference between the way Ginzburg and her son treat the biographical material they share in terms of a generational distinction based on problems of authority and trauma. Ginzburg’s writing reflects her mission to “promote a cultural and moral vision” for the sake of a society that had lost it, as Natasha Kolchevska puts it. She pursues this mission in part by tracing her own trajectory from being a member of the intelligentsia by virtue of social status to being one on the strength of inner substance and insights acquired through long years of imprisonment and exile.9 By contrast, we might liken Aksenov’s writing in The Burn to what Marianne Hirsch characterizes as the art of postmemory. While Hirsch analyzes the cultural production of the generation succeeding survivors of the Holocaust, the dilemmas and techniques she describes seem applicable to the generation that comes after Stalinist camp survivors as well. These dilemmas include forging an authority different from that of the survivors and witnesses, in order to be able to emerge from the shadow of their parents’ experience and to speak about their own lives. Art of the generation of postmemory characteristically involves citation as well as critical interrogation of media and the means of expression.10

  9 See Natasha Kolchevska, “The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag,” in The Russian Memoir: History and Literature, ed. Beth Holmgren (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 148-49. As Kolchevska pointed out, Ginzburg’s accomplishment as a writer was significant: “Whirlwind reads like a novel, has a polished narrative exposition, a strong authorial voice alternating with dialogue that is staged and characters who perform, a grasp of the difference between ‘real’ and narrative time, and a wealth of literary and cultural references” (152). While not trained or published as a literary author prior to writing her memoirs, Ginzburg exhibited a command of her material and wielded the tools of literary realism with a sure hand. 10 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 10328. Varlam Shalamov drew the analogy between the Holocaust and the Stalinist camps in the context of a literary art that had to justify its means and aims in new ways after those massive traumas: “It seems to me that the person of the second half of the twentieth century, the person who has survived war, revolution, the fires of Hiroshima, the atom bomb, treachery, and—crowning all this—the shame of Kolyma and the ovens of Auschwitz— this person who has survived the scientific revolution simply cannot fail to approach questions of art differently than before.” From Shalamov’s letter to I. P. Sirotinskaia. See Varlam Shalamov, Novaia kniga. Vospominaniia. Zapisnye knizhki. Perepiska. Sledstvennye dela, ed. I. P. Sirotinskaia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004), 839-40. (Translation mine).

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In The Burn, Aksenov departs radically from his more conventionally realistic works of the early Sixties. Addressing his own encounter with the Gulag in that uncensored novel, he explores the nature of his authority and the adequacy of the artistic means of expression at his disposal for rendering that experience. At the same time, Aksenov, already a prominent author, channeled artistic and public debates animating the post-Stalin cultural scene.11 In The Burn, Aksenov exposes the repressed trauma that had rent him and his society apart. His narrator comments ironically at the beginning of book two that what Russian readers and writers like is some problem that they can probe with a “not very clean but very honest finger.”12 This suggestion of a painful wound can be compared to the burn sustained by saxophone player Samson Sabler in the novel when he improvises on “The Fateful Questions of Nineteen Sixty-Eight” (409). Absorbed in playing his saxophone, Sabler inadvertently leans up against an exposed hot water pipe like those common to the boiler rooms where marginalized artists and poets found the place and time to pursue their own work.13 Sabler’s wound emblematizes the pain felt by the Soviet intelligentsia when it learned of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The invasion, in which Soviet tanks and troops violently suppressed a peaceful reform movement, marked a watershed for Aksenov’s generation, and it seems to have precipitated the writing of Aksenov’s angry novel, which he commenced in 1969. This event brought the festering violence of the Soviet regime out into the open and convinced many in the intelligentsia that there could be no good relationship with this regime. In The Burn, Aksenov explores the discomfort of being part of the creative elite in Moscow, forced into concessions and uncomfortable entanglements with the authorities. In book one, the reader meets Aksenov’s representative group of creative types who are vacationing in the Crimea when news of the invasion reaches them.14 The narrator comments wryly, “[A]ll of us, dirty pigs, were to blame for what happened” (29). With

11 American scholar D. Barton Johnson called The Burn Aksenov’s chef-d’oeuvre, “certainly the most eloquent description and diagnosis of the ups, downs, and ultimate demise of the liberal hopes of his generation during the Brezhnev years.” See D. Barton Johnson, “Vasilij Aksionov’s Aviary: The Heron and The Steel Bird,” Scando-Slavica 33 (1987): 45. 12 Aksyonov, The Burn, 221. Subsequent references in the text are from the English edition. 13 V. E. Dolinin discussed this phenomenon, in “Preodolenie nemoty,” in Samizdat Leningrada, 1950-e–1980-e: literaturnaia entsiklopediia, ed. V. Dolinin, B. Ivanov, B. Ostanin, and D. Severiukhin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), 26. 14 There are five adult protagonists in Moscow who share a common past embodied by the teenager Tolya in Magadan. These five “sons of Apollo”—the Apollinarevichs—include a writer, a jazz musician, a scientist, a doctor, and a sculptor. Aksenov used a related technique in his novella Rendevous (1971), in which the protagonist Lyova Malakhitov was fantastically

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his novel, Aksenov asks not simply how the violence of the regime could be exposed and opposed—he seeks to provoke members of the intelligentsia to confront their own complicity and festering wounds. To make this uncomfortable point, Aksenov employs an avant-garde technique that differs dramatically from the clear and harmonious realism of his mother’s prose. In his essay “On Socialist Realism,” published under a pseudonym in the West in 1959, Andrey Siniavsky identified a problem for Soviet writers: “We wanted to become famous and to write like Chekhov.”15 The demands of the ideology of Socialist Realism did not allow for the realistic psychology of Chekhovian protagonists, Siniavsky argued, and straitjacketed realism did not, in any case, fit the needs of the Soviet period. Aksenov evokes this Chekhovian legacy in The Burn: gazing at the port of Yalta, the narrator alludes to Chekhov’s famous metaphor for literary technique: “Where is the broken bottle, required to complete the landscape?” He spots it with a cigarette butt floating in it: “Forgive me, classics!” he exclaims (166).16 The broken bottle with its cigarette butt symbolizes a degraded reality rendered fantastically in the later scenes of the book by a whole sea of garbage (493). Despite this grotesquely rendered degradation, Aksenov’s protagonists identify with the longing for ideals about which Chekhov wrote—Chekhov’s The Seagull17 becomes Aksenov’s The Heron (317), embodied artistically in the project for a play that remains unrealized in the novel.18 The contemporary retelling of Chekhov’s Three Sisters presented in

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accomplished in a variety of fields. See Konstantin Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant: Vassily Aksenov’s Works in the Brezhnev Era (Columbus: Slavica, 1992), 89. See Abram Tertz [Andrey Sinyavsky], “On Socialist Realism,” in The Trial Begins and on Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 213. Aksenov alludes here to the terse description of nature, which Anton Chekhov had advised his brother Aleksandr to employ in a letter from 10 May 1886: “In the description of nature one must seize the tiny bits, grouping them in such a way that after reading, when you close your eyes, a picture is formed. For example, you have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star.” See Perepiska A. P. Chekhova v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), 67. Ten years later, in act four of The Seagull, Chekhov recycled this example of a broken bottle and “a moonlit night” as exemplary of conventionalized devices of the older writer Trigorin from whom the young playwright Treplev distinguishes himself. Mentioned in Aksenov’s The Burn, 26. For details on Aksenov’s play The Heron (Tsaplia, 1979) and an exploration of bird imagery in his works, see D. Barton Johnson, “Vasilij Aksionov’s Aviary,” Scando-Slavica 33 (1987): 45-61. Iurii Mal′tsev, in perhaps the first review of The Burn, compared the novel’s ultimate effect, if not its style, to that of works by Turgenev and Chekhov: one reads those writers to know what Russia was like in the middle and end of the nineteenth century, and one reads The Burn for a similarly artistic portrayal of the spirit of the age, said Mal′tsev in his

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the context of carousing elites suggests the corruption of ideals in the late Soviet period (310-14). Aksenov recapitulates Chekhovian themes of the exhaustion of the Russian intelligentsia at the twilight of the imperial period for Aksenov’s own era of late Soviet socialism.19 At the same time, however, the Chekhovian realism and idealism function as a familiar background against which Aksenov’s use of grotesque and phantasmagoric modes of depiction—more adequate to rendering Soviet reality—stand out.20 Aksenov spoke frequently about his interest in both the grotesque and the avant-garde and their more authentically popular roots, as contrasted to the artificial tradition of realism cultivated in the nineteenth century and adopted in Soviet socialist realism.21 Aksenov’s provocative formal experimentation in The Burn doubles as a response to the aesthetic demands of the official regime, which Khrushchev famously expressed in crude comments about abstract paintings exhibited at the Manège in December, 1962.22 Aksenov’s formal experimentation in The Burn also positively reflected the influence of new trends that made their way to the Soviet Union from abroad beginning in the post-Stalin “Thaw.” These trends included the “new novel” (nouveau roman) with its challenging formal structures, discussed at the Сonference of the European Association of European Writers on Problems of the Contemporary

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review of Aksenov’s novel: Iurii Mal′tsev, review of The Burn, by Vasili Aksenov, Kontinent 29 (1981): 403-6. I am indebted to Yury Shcheglov for this parallel between Aksenov and Chekhov. Siniavsky wrote, “Right now I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life. Such an art would correspond best to the spirit of our time.” See Abram Tertz (Andrey Siniavsky), On Socialist Realism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 25. Cynthia Simmons connected Aksenov’s turn from realism in 1963 toward “phantasmagoric” art to Siniavsky’s advocacy of such art. See Cynthia Simmons, Their Fathers’ Voice: Vassily Aksyonov, Venedikt Erofeev, Eduard Limonov, and Sasha Sokolov (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 28. Aksenov asserted that the grotesque and avant-garde experimentation came from the depths of folk art, as opposed to rootless realism, which he called a nineteenth-century creation associated with “cheap superficial positivism.” See “Interview with V. P. Aksenov,” in in Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksenov: A Writer in Quest of Himself, ed. Edward Mozejko, Boris Briker, and Per Dalgard (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1984), 24. Aksenov made similar comments in Priscilla Meyer, “Interview with Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 5-6 (1973), 570-71; and in Vassili Axionov, “Comment on devient un ‘produit d’exportation’ en Union soviétique,” Le Monde, April 14, 1978. Aksenov recalled Khrushchev’s violent reaction to abstract art at the Manège exhibit in December, 1962, and his intemperate response to Aksenov and others at the meeting in March 1963; this facilitated his turn to a more “avant-garde” style, which he tried first in plays. From “Vasily Aksyonov,” in Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad, ed. John Glad, trans. Richard and Joanna Robin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 72.

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Novel in Leningrad in 1963. That same year brought to Moscow the invigorating surreal aesthetics of Federico Fellini, whose film 8½ won the top prize at the Third International Film Festival held in the Soviet capital.23 Although official Soviet critics panned the film, the liberal intelligentsia loved it. Aksenov’s work turns toward these foreign influences from his own perspective rooted in the Russian tradition and cognizant of Soviet historical experience. One important episode in The Burn portrays these cultural dynamics as they impacted Aksenov in 1963. In the section titled “The Occasion on Which His Youth Came to an End,” writer Pantelei recounts a public meeting between creative intelligentsia and authorities. Although the scene is wildly fantastic—a character called “the Boss” (Glava), and referred to also as Nikita Kornponevich (Kukita Kuseevich), oversees the proceedings (115-22), while the “High Priest” (Verkhovnyi Zhrets) appears as a weird anteater creature with sucking appendages (118). Contemporary readers would have easily recognized the prototypes Nikita Khrushchev and head of the Ideological Commission L. F. Il’ichev, as well as the event, a meeting held on 7-8 March 1963, with over six hundred members of the young creative elite, to talk about their responsibilities. During that meeting, Khrushchev took Aksenov to task for an interview Aksenov and the poet Andrey Voznesensky had given to the Polish paper Polityka. In that interview the writers touched on the theme of “fathers and sons.” Voznesensky claimed that the present literary “fathers” were no good, and said that he looked further back for spiritual predecessors in poetry. Aksenov treated the theme more personally. His father had been a victim of Stalin, but he also blamed his father’s generation: “How could they have allowed the year 1937 to happen?” he asked in that interview, referring to the height of Stalin’s purges.24 Many peculiar details in The Burn invite the reader to tease out their logic. Pantelei, crazed with fear, starts singing the “Song of the Varangian Guest,” from the opera Sadko (121). Elsewhere, the High Priest with his sucker appendages tries to suck Pantelei into an uncomfortable relationship with the authorities (161-63). Pantelei’s singing realizes a threatening metaphor from official discourse, “to sing to someone’s tune,” as in “to sing to the

23 European and Soviet participants debated the new novel at the UNESCO conference on the novel held in Leningrad in August 1963. See coverage in I. Anisimov, “Leningradskii dialog o sovremennom romane,” Inostrannaia literatura 11 (1963): 246-52. Federico Fellini’s film 8½ aroused controversy. Iurii Zhukov’s review was scathing: see Iurii Zhukov, “Vosem′ s polovinoi krugov kinematograficheskogo ada,” Literaturnaia gazeta 87 (1963): 3. 24 On this event and the debate over “fathers and sons,” see Priscilla Johnson and Leopold Labedz, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965), 36-37.

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tune of the imperialists” (pet′ pod dudku imperialistov). The Boss’s language, wild as it is in this scene, also seems only slightly exaggerated relative to the outbursts Khrushchev was known to make in real life. At the Manège exhibition, Khrushchev had denounced formally “renegade” artists as “pederasts and abstractionists,” threatening, “We’ll grind [them] into powder!” Aksenov puts this latter phrase in the mouth of the Boss (121). He thus echoes statements from Khrushchev’s visit to the Manège and suggests the continued use of crude coercive tactics with respect to artists at subsequent events, such as the March meeting with leaders.25 Aksenov felt this pressure directly: subsequent to the meeting, he published a statement in the official newspaper Pravda acknowledging the “just” criticism and pledging to do better. For various reasons, he felt compelled to make this statement.26 The shattering impact of forced capitulation appeared in retrospect to foreshadow in a personal way the sense of profound shock and betrayal that Aksenov shared with others in 1968. The portrayal in the novel of both moments of the regime’s violence, in 1963 and again in 1968, suggests a link between the two events and their significance for Aksenov’s shattered sense of self and alienation from Soviet society. Peter Bürger characterizes the challenge avant-garde artists raise to their society in terms of the destruction of subjective integrity and harmonious or reconciled coexistence with the reigning social order.27 Bürger, a Marxist theorist who denies the possibility of an authentic avant-garde in the postwar period, would almost certainly not have recognized in Aksenov’s novel a legitimate artistic challenge. Aksenov’s readers found the novel extremely provocative and hard to assimilate. Leading émigré literary figures—Vladimir Maksimov, Eduard Kuznetsov, and Natalia Gorbanevskaia—all of whom were basically sympathetic to Aksenov and to uncensored literary efforts generally, expressed reservations about Aksenov’s novel. They testified to the near 25 Aksenov, “Zima trevogi nashei, ili kak marksist Nikita uchil pisatelei partiinoi pravde,” Strelets 1, no. 65 (1991), 182-202. William Taubman provided a detailed account of Khrushchev’s immoderate language and confused ranting in Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 594-96. 26 Aksenov spoke about his colleagues at the journal Iunost′ asking him to publish his statement of loyalty and save their journal (See “Vasily Aksyonov,” 77). 27 In his influential Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger analyzes the distinctive character of the avant-garde work as inorganic, as opposed to the “man-made organic work of art that pretends to be like nature,” projecting “an image of the reconciliation of man and nature.” That integral whole of the work expresses the unified will of the artist and projects a harmonized sense of self onto the viewing or reading subject. By contrast, Bürger, traces the historical development of the avant-garde’s assault on integral images of subjectivity in “inorganic” work. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 77-78.

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universal respect for Aksenov as a person, and they appreciated the Magadan scenes in his book, which corresponded in their view to a recognizable human core.28 Scholar Aleksey Zverev similarly characterized Aksenov as exceedingly honest, and praised the episodes set in Magadan as perhaps the best of what he wrote. At the same time, Zverev disliked the portrayal of compromised adult protagonists.29 This reception of the Magadan scenes might directly or indirectly draw on the impression left by Ginzburg’s account. These evaluations refer to Aksenov’s former work, which was far easier to digest and exceedingly popular, as a standard by which his (non-)success in The Burn is judged. While the episodes set in Magadan seem most acceptable by those standards, I would argue that we find precisely there, in the heart of the Magadan scenes, the core of Aksenov’s avant-garde assault on the unified subject and the unified work. In The Burn, the moment when Tolya (Aksenov’s alter ego in the Magadan scenes of the novel) learns about his mother’s second arrest in 1949 serves as a source of explosive energy. Aksenov depicts that event breaking through the controlled surface of realistic representation, creating a whole landscape of shame (pozor), which Tolya feels at being publicly identified as the son of a prisoner. Right after his mother’s arrest, Tolya has the opportunity to see her briefly before she is taken away. Aksenov describes the scene when Tolya emerges from the school building before seeing her: So now he was standing at the main entrance to the school, flights of steps curving away to the right and left, as though on show in an arena of shame. The hideous, noseless face of his guide said nothing, but only breathed heavily alongside him, making occasional odd, embarrassed grunting sounds. He asked no questions, because there was no point: Disaster had struck, and now there was no hiding from the shame. Shame—clean, snowy, and sunlit—stretched out in front of him. The expanse of shame was crisscrossed with wooden, raised sidewalks along which the Magadan public flowed in various directions. On the right and left extremities of shame were the two wings of his school, one in the shade, the other in the sun, from which hung a massive translucent stalactite, one of the 28 See Vladimir Maksimov, Eduard Kuznetsov, and Natalia Gorbanevskaya, “A Conversation in the Editorial Office of Kontinent,” in Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksenov: A Writer in Quest of Himself, ed. Edward Mozejko, Boris Briker, and Per Dalgard (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1984), 26-31. 29 Aleksey Zverev, “Bliuzy chetvertogo pokoleniia,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 11/12 (1992): 9-17, 12.

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adornments of the landscape of shame. The backdrop to shame was the Palace of Culture. The sharp, cubist geometry of shadows decorated the background of shame, and the bronze statues of a frontier guard, a milkmaid, a miner, and a sailor—THE FOUR WHO DON’T DRINK—crowned its upper level. The people on the wooden sidewalks were moving hurriedly, striving to leave the scene of shame as quickly as possible, feeling that they were out of place here, because shame is static, precise, and beautiful, without a single puff of smoke, without a single wisp in the sky, without hope. (297-98). Considered theoretically, shame represents a special event in the (de-)composition of subjectivity. Shame attends the breakdown in communication and identity of the person shamed vis-à-vis those around him. It also generates an existential anxiety about how to reconstitute oneself and the social relations crucial to life.30 The grotesque visage and strange grunting of the guide who accompanies Tolya (a woman presumably damaged by the harsh conditions of camp life in the north) help express this breakdown. The people seemingly fleeing the scene reinforce Tolya’s isolation at this moment when the literary narrative freezes into a static composition that mixes the verbal and the evocation of the visual in line with the avant-garde aesthetic Aksenov favors. The cues signaling this avant-garde aesthetic are multiple. The visual scene, with blocks of dark shade and sunlight within a flat expanse crisscrossed by sidewalks, create what Aksenov here calls a “sharp, cubist geometry.” Although we know the figures of the frontier guard, milkmaid, miner, and sailor to be sculptures on the school building, we can easily imagine them to be mere images pasted onto the composition, citational fragments inserted into the work from the pantheon of edifying figures of Soviet ideology.31 The novel

30 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick treats shame in the context of queerness and literature. Although the specific manifestation she explores differs from issues of the Gulag experience treated here, her analysis of shame as a sign of the breakdown of the sense of self and social relations resonates with works by Aksenov and other late Soviet dissident authors, such as Andrey Bitov and Venedikt Erofeev. Those authors similarly depict the feeling of shame caused by alienation. Shame generates the longing to perform oneself differently for the purposes of reconstituting social connections. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 19002000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 609-10. 31 Bürger emphasizes montage as “the fundamental principle of avant-gardiste art” (Theory, 72). Cubist painters pioneered the technique of inserting bits of reality from outside the artistic work. The citation of elements from official culture in this work prompt the reader to

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features a bewildering variety of citations from literary sources and songs, from repressed modernist works and popular culture,32 in a pastiche that makes the reader an active participant in negotiating the construction of meaning, identity, and authority in Soviet culture. The experience is not comfortable: deciphering the text rarely leads to a gratifying conclusion, and the overall meaning proves to be far from conciliatory with regard to the intelligentsia and the Soviet world. Aksenov, like the postgenerational writers of whom Hirsch speaks, focused in this scene on his own experience, exhibiting, at the same time, self-conscious awareness of his identity and authority as an unfinished project. He imposed his mature authorial perspective onto that of the confusion and emotion of the teenage character Tolya, creating the distance needed to consider the trauma of that moment. Tolya’s mother exhibits her own terrible calm: “Tolya, try not to be upset. The most terrible thing has happened. I have been arrested again,” she says in a flat, expressionless voice (299). This reserve, as opposed to the dignified demeanor described at the first meeting of mother and son in Ginzburg’s memoirs, does not help to reinforce Tolya’s own self-control. Instead, it furthers Tolya’s distress. Tolya is shaking with sobs: “Tolya knew he was humiliating himself, knew that his mother found it intolerable to hear her grown-up son crying. [. . .] It wasn’t him crying [. . .]. He would never cry in front of these pigs! It was something else in him that was crying, something small with wet, sticky fur, a little living creature caught unawares, trembling, and there was no power that could stop it” (300). Such painful humiliation connects the scene with Aksenov’s personal experience in a way that seems authentic and compelling, if also uncomfortable. At the same time, the implications stretch beyond the personal to resonate with the repressed traumas of Soviet society at large. Aksenov’s writing in The Burn distinguishes itself from his mother’s writing by foregrounding the discontinuity of avant-garde representation and the disruption of the self and the world that it entails. It seems possible to say that the energy of the novel flows from this moment of Tolya confronting the world in light of the rearrest of his mother. The “cubist” landscape of shame depicted

ask what the relation of the individual and the individual work can be to that kind of authority. See Bürger, Theory, 72. 32 On such citations, see A. Vishevsky and T. Pogacar, “The Function of Conventional Language Patterns in the Prose of Vasiliy Aksenov,” in Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksenov: A Writer in Quest of Himself, ed. Edward Mozejko, Boris Briker, and Per Dalgard (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1984), 132.

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at the moment when Tolya emerges from school to confront the reality of his mother’s arrest amounts to an externalization of the self shattered by shame, as well as by grief and fear. Aksenov’s narrator brings to the scene an adult’s awareness of the way his mother’s second arrest tore apart his already fragile teenage world. The sense of fragmentation created by events like these occurred in millions of families. This trauma remained inadequately addressed by society and official culture even after Stalin, and therefore it rises up in Aksenov’s artistic rendering of the event to break down the conventions of novelistic and realistic representation. Aksenov projects the lack of social coherence and the lost integrity of the self that Tolya experiences at this moment onto the whole landscape in this passage. He further extends it to disrupt the structure of the entire novel, where past and present lack a coherent relationship and the depth of time progressing from the past into the present flattens out into a disjointed composition. Shards of the Magadan experience surface in the consciousness of adult protagonists beginning already in book one of the novel, and Aksenov introduces Moscow scenes into book two directly after and amongst the events in Magadan, showing them to be related by the logic of trauma and repetition. Aksenov thus renounces the official propaganda about a progressive march to a bright and just future, suggesting that with no adequate public memory of the traumatic Stalinist past, there can be no coherent present or promising future. By making his intensely personal experience emblematic of larger societal issues in the broad panorama of the novel, Aksenov aimed to forge his independent authority as a voice for his generation.

Magadan: To the Outer Limits of the Gulag and Beyond Aksenov inherited the humane values reflected in his mother’s work and reconceived them for the purposes of his generation in order to look toward the future. Ginzburg sought to establish continuity with the values of the past that seemed nearly lost in her generation owing to mass imprisonment in the Gulag. By contrast, Aksenov aimed to convert the trauma of Stalinist violence into the energy necessary to facilitate a renewal of the Soviet intelligentsia’s values that would be adequate to the time. Ginzburg’s writing brought author and reader together and consolidated the sense of shared values. By contrast, Aksenov’s avant-garde rendering of the explosion of the identity of the Soviet intelligentsia produced energy directed toward a future in which readers would have to reestablish core values in their lives. Aksenov’s critique of the intelligent in late Soviet conditions helped generate the centrifugal force that pushed out beyond

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the borders of the Soviet Empire and its confined present toward a possible reconfiguration of the identity and authority of his generation. Aksenov’s protagonist travels widely in the course of the novel, from scenes of the glittering life of Moscow’s golden youth to the Crimea, and later, in book three, to the heart of provincial Russia. The protagonists take excursions to the wilds of Congo and travel to England for a glimpse of Russian émigré life there. In all these places, and in order to set fire to the image of the Soviet intelligentsia, Aksenov uses the psychic and artistic energy of the protagonists whose selves have been shattered by their teenage experiences in Magadan. Members of Moscow’s creative intelligentsia prove to be complicit in the regime’s violent policies and too willing to close their eyes as they sink into debauchery, a pattern suggested by the repetitious ABCDE episodes in book one. The protagonists in the Congo episode agree to drink with the mercenaries who attack the hospital, blurring the lines between bad and good, and between complicity, compliance, and heroism, in disturbing ways (63-84). In book three of the novel, Aksenov subjects the mythology of the “heart of Russia, still untouched by corruption” (468, 502) to parody.33 He invites critical scrutiny, too, of the mythology of the martyred Russian intelligentsia, embodied in the figure of the “Victim” (Postradavshii). The “Victim” roams through a symbolic landscape in book three dominated by the senseless beast of the people (the dinosaur with the face of a Ryazan peasant) and the image of nefarious control by the regime (Cheptsov at a surveillance screen). Aksenov suggests that the intelligentsia perceives and perhaps helps maintain these two poles of beastly people and authoritarian control to define the landscape through which it sees itself moving as Victim. The fixed nature of the images supports the idea that the intelligentsia engages with its own projections and myths more than with reality itself. Cheptsov, one of the officers involved in the second arrest of Aksenov’s mother in Magadan (he is Chentsov in her memoirs) embodies the violence of the regime in Aksenov’s novel. His ubiquitous presence in the life of adult protagonists in Moscow speaks to the lingering and everyday quality of violence that has not been exorcised after Stalin. Aksenov’s samizdat novel performs the

33 This kind of mythology was promoted by the “Village Prose” movement in Soviet literature. Ostensibly critical of the regime, yet dangerously close to chauvinistic ideas promoted by the regime, Village Prose played on fixed ideas about a purer Russian past and provincial core. Kathleen F. Parthé traces the emergence of Village Prose out of the “Ovechkin-style” essay sometime in late 1950s-early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, the term derevenskaia proza was in use. The movement declined by the late 1970s. See Kathleen F. Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 81-83.

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needed exorcism by exposing Cheptsov in all his degeneracy and banality. The ultimate refusal of Aksenov’s protagonists to take revenge on Cheptsov (leaving him to God and his own conscience) signifies the vitality of a legacy of humane values that Aksenov inherits from his mother.34 Aksenov combines his mother’s humanist values with the Christian forms associated with the faith of his stepfather, the Catholic homeopath Martin.35 Building on the spatialization of the novel suggested by the “cubist landscape” in which Aksenov situated Tolya at the time of his mother’s second arrest, we might note that the protagonist’s conversation with Sanya the priest about the “Third Model” occupies almost the exact center of The Burn (265-68). This sacred center, as it were, might help us see the novel as something like a medieval manuscript page, crowded around with endless grotesque figures of illumination. Interestingly, the words of the protagonists about God and the meaning of this “Third Model” seem patently insufficient to express their objects. They do not rise to the level of divine truth: the sacred meaning remains ineffable. If the authority of the novelist fails to rise on a vertical axis to the level of divine truth, the energy of that authority flows out expansively on the horizontal plane across the broad canvas of the text and the geographic expanse of the Soviet Empire it evokes. In this way Aksenov knocked sideways the paradigm of Romantic “lyrical afflatus,” according to which the poet would ascend to the heights of imperial authority.36 The parallel between author and secular ruler persisted into the age of Russian modernism37 and played an important role in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita. In Bulgakov’s novel, the Master finds comprehension and validation of his work through Woland.

34 Priscilla Meyer locates the roots of morality in The Burn in Ginzburg’s work. Their common engagement of the problem posed by Cheptsov (Chentsov) underscores the fact that Akenov’s The Burn is written “in dialogue” with his mother’s memoirs. See Priscilla Meyer, “Aksenov and Stalinism: Political, Moral, and Literary Power,” Slavic and East European Journal 30, no. 4 (1986): 509, 515. 35 Martin in Aksenov’s Magadan episodes corresponds to Ginzburg’s husband Dr. Anton Walter, described in her memoirs. The figure of Sanya the priest in The Burn seems to be entirely fictional. Nina Efimova traces the connections between Aksenov’s work and the Christian trend in Russian thought represented by Nikolai Berdiaev. See Nina Efimova, Intertekst v religioznykh i demonicheskikh motivakh V. P. Aksenova (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo MGU, 1993). 36 See Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 6. 37 Omry Ronen traces this trope for authorial identity through the abundant instances of opposition of cultural and political authority in the self-understanding of the Silver Age poets. See Omry Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 26-28.

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Woland’s stature in the metaphysical realm mimics the authority of Stalin in the Soviet Union. Bulgakov thus imagines the author’s work and authority as recognized and validated in that exalted sphere, a fictional relationship that bears some comparison to Bulgakov’s hopes for Stalin’s patronage in real life. Although Bulgakov’s novel functions as one important intertext for The Burn, Aksenov constructs his author differently. Rather than raising the author up to a height of power parallel to that of the ruler, he imagines the creator’s voice in horizontal dialogue with his peers. The principle of dialogue required that Aksenov build an identity specific to his experience and position in the world in order to create meaningful relationships with other voices. In the novel, the American Patrick Thunderjet and the daughter of Russian émigrés Marina Coulagot represent two of those other identities with which Aksenov seeks to bring his Soviet Russian perspective into dialogue. The harshly negative representation of security officer Cheptsov made it impossible for Aksenov to publish The Burn officially at home in the USSR.38 However, the novel showed that building a viable new authorial identity meant going beyond the fixed boundaries of official Soviet literature, which seemed hopelessly provincial and unjustly exclusive. The uncensored collection Metropol, which Aksenov helped edit for publication abroad at around the same time, presented a vision of Soviet literature liberated from the bonds of official censorship and in dialogue with work from outside the Soviet Union.39 Ginzburg’s uncensored memoirs helped pave the way for Aksenov in his new role as an uncensored Soviet writer. After publishing her first volume with Mondadori in Italy in 1967, Ginzburg enjoyed remarkable success with samizdat readers at home, as well as with readers of Western publications and

38 Aksenov described a visit by two KGB officers who came to him in 1977, and said they had seen his novel in manuscript. The real-life prototype of Cheptsov had apparently risen in the ranks and was incensed at his portrayal (my interview with Aksenov, 2003). They offered to overlook other uncensored publications if Aksenov kept The Burn under wraps. However, should Aksenov choose to publish The Burn, they warned, he would have to emigrate. 39 Authors involved with Metropol, which included officially published Soviet writers, Soviet authors of uncensored works, and the American writer John Updike, announced the collection as samizdat in the USSR in a provocative move timed to coincide with its 1979 publication by Ardis abroad. Metropol′. Literaturnyi al′manakh, ed. Vasilii Aksenov et al. (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979). The work appeared in English as Metropol: Literary almanac, ed. Vassily Aksyonov et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1982). Kevin Klose described the political circumstances in his foreword to the latter volume. Aksenov portrayed work on the anthology and the consequences for some writers involved in his novel Skazhi izium (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985).

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translations. Aksenov followed suit, publishing an Italian version first with Mondadori, followed swiftly by the long-planned publication of the Russian edition with Ardis in the United States. A few years later, Random House published the English edition of The Burn.40 Aksenov complained later of the resistance of the American market to his brand of avant-garde writing.41 In fact, the intense way in which Aksenov engaged with painful issues of the post-Stalin Soviet intelligentsia in his provocative and experimental novel has proven difficult to assimilate for Russian and non-Russian readers alike. Aksenov’s energetic wrestling with various aspects of the Russian cultural tradition and contemporary events has required time to appreciate.42 Yet for all the differences between their writing and reception, Aksenov shared with his mother Evgenia Ginzburg a profound commitment to the values and identity of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia and to honestly portraying their experience in the Gulag and beyond.

40 Joseph Brodsky apparently did not like The Burn, and his influential opinion might have hurt Aksenov’s attempts to find a publisher for the English edition. Aksenov refers to Brodsky’s opinion in a letter to Carl Proffer at Ardis from Paris, dated December 1, 1977 (Ardis Press Papers, University of Michigan, Hatcher Library, Box 1, F. V. A[ksenov] Correspondence, October, 1977–January, 1978). 41 Aksenov said that Random House sold more than thirty thousand copies of The Burn. Despite its complexity, that novel did better in English than his later works. See Vassily Aksenov, “Amerikanskim pisatelem ia tak i ne stal,” Inostrannaia literatura 1 (2003), http:// magazines.russ.ru/inostran/2003/1/aksen.html#_ftnref2. It seems likely that the talk of confrontation and literary scandal in the immediate pre-Perestroika era helped attract the attention of the American public and boosted sales. Aksenov lamented what he saw as a failure of the American literary market to appreciate truly avant-garde art. He likened the commercial hegemony of his new American home to the ideological hegemony from which he had come. See Vassily Aksyonov, “An Exile in Literary America,” New York Times, April 14, 1985, A52. 42 Anatole Shub, an early appreciative reviewer, compared The Burn to classic Russian novels, including Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Shub declared The Burn to be a “supremely ambitious work worthy of a great tradition.” He found that Aksenov’s novel “makes Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago seem sentimental and much of Solzhenitsyn’s fiction seem wooden in comparison.” Anatole Shub, “The Intelligentsia in the Fires of Stalinism,” New York Times, November 25, 1984.

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The Survival of the Sublime in a Universe of Malice: Testimonies by Evgenia Ginzburg and Other Gulag Writers Rimma Volynska

A survivor of concentration camps himself, and the originator of the psychotherapeutic school of logotherapy, Victor Frankl (1905-1997) was living proof of his own philosophy. He claimed that human beings caught in circumstances of the utmost evil—Nazism and Stalinism being two prime examples—can, mentally, remain beyond the executioner’s reach. Frankl’s thin volume, Man’s Search for Meaning, turned out to be not only a groundbreaking exploration of the threshold of the human ability to survive, but also an ever-challenging diagnosis of the existential crisis that haunts the postindustrial world. What interests us specifically, as we re-examine Evgenia Ginzburg’s life with reference to testimonies by Lev Razgon, Meyer Galler, Varlam Shalamov, Khava Volovich, and Elena Glinka, is the question Frankl asked and answered in his search: Why do some people survive, physically and spiritually, the most horrific experiences, whereas others, in the same conditions, crumble and die? In concentration camps, Frankl saw a seemingly inexplicable occurrence: certain prisoners endured despite their physical frailty, while some, who appeared to be strong, perished. The whole purpose of Frankl’s work is to explore the key phenomenon of human resilience in adversity. He found that persons who had a real chance of survival possessed a sense of purpose in their lives, knew how to

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transform their experiences, even those of the most unbearable suffering, into a larger context of meaning. According to Frankl’s theory, the derivation of meaning for a survivor is tied strictly to her or his personal commitment to perform a deed, knowledge of suffering, and the appreciation of some value.1 Evgenia Ginzburg was able to survive in this meaningful way. Through her service as a nurse and work with children, and drawing on her vast inner reserve, she could withstand the most brutal deprivations without spiritual compromise, keep hold of her love of life, and value human beings as a life-giving force. Ginzburg endured eighteen years of hardship, beginning with the harrowing year of her arrest (1937), followed by two years of solitary confinement in Yaroslavl, eight years of hard labor in the Kolyma region’s camps, a second arrest in 1949, and continued forced residence in Magadan, the capital of Kolyma, in an atmosphere of constant denunciations lasting, until she was rehabilitated in 1955 and returned to central Russia. These painful years were punctuated by a persistent policy in the Gulag of depriving the prisoners of their self-identity. At the time of her first arrest, Ginzburg possessed a manifold identity: as mother, the wife of a highly ranked Party official, a loyal and devoted Communist Party member, an academic instructor, a literary historian and researcher at Kazan University, and the editor of a local Party paper. Upon arrest, she was officially stripped of all these layers of her self—private, public, professional; she became a despised “enemy of the people,” was labelled a Trotskyite, and locked up as a political prisoner; her husband was arrested and her children orphaned. What did remain intact, however, was the voice within, her inner self. Throughout her years in the Gulag, she created a hidden, internal testimony to her existence; single events, experiences, were stored and maintained by the witness inside her, one who resolved to stay alive through the promise to herself to one day give testimony.2 Like the authorial narrator of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Ginzburg embraced as a sacred task the role of eye witness to her nation’s years of Stalinist repression. Seeing at first hand the historical cataclysm, and resolving to bear witness to it, mobilized her will to survive and, eventually, recover her personal voice as well as that of her nation. Throughout the phantasmagoric ordeal of the interrogations and incarcerations, Ginzburg saw herself as an “astonished observer” (izumlennyi nabliudatel′) in a kingdom of “non-humans” (necheloveki)

1 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: From Death Camp to Existentialism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 110-14. 2 In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), Shoshana Feldman writes about the liberating effect of confession and witnessing. Emphasis mine.

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who knew that it was only a matter of time until the evil that befell her would be punished. The sense of impending retribution gave meaning to her suffering in that final circle of hell: “I was consumed with the desire to survive the tragedy which had befallen our Party. More than ever I felt sure that they could not destroy it completely, that there were people in it who would stop them. Keep alive . . . Keep alive . . . Grit your teeth . . .” (1.175). Ginzburg’s firm resolve to live to see this day of punishment was strengthened by her near-death experiences. The moments she spent waiting in the Butyrki prison for the death sentence to be pronounced against her turned out to be life altering. In the course of that night, the film of her life flew by in a staccato rhythm: “There was once a little girl called Genia. Her mother used to braid her hair, and she grew up and fell in love and tried to discover what life was about. And she lived as a grown-up woman for two whole years, till she was twenty-eight. And she had two sons, Alyosha and Vasya . . .” (1.167). Her thoughts shift from death and the pain of execution to the bright silk dress that she never had a chance to wear, to the cheerful chatter of sparrows, whose freedom she envies. In the morning, when she is reprieved and her death sentence is commuted to ten years of hard camp labor, she treats the deprivation that awaits her as the embrace of life and liberation: “the camp meant life—a nightmare life perhaps, but not the living grave in which we were now spending our third spring” (1.258). This experience precipitates a commitment to life, which validates Frankl’s belief that suffering is a prerequisite for survival and the affirmation of life through witnessing. This is not to say that she is forever free of thoughts of death as the ultimate salvation; they return with stubborn insistence during her two years of solitary confinement. The specter of death, and even wishes for it end her suffering, visit and revisit Ginzburg, even when the miraculous appearance in her prison cell of another inmate, Julia Karepova, temporarily lifts it from her mind. It is only when she turns to Russian literature that the desperate desire to end it all disappears. The prison library at Yaroslavl was surprisingly well stocked, containing items that had long been withdrawn from public circulation, and Ginzburg resorted to these books as a way of transcending her confinement. Her vast knowledge of Russian poetry, much of which she committed to memory, became an inexhaustible, sustaining source of spiritual strength for her. She survived the horrors of punitive solitary confinement (kartser) by “reading” to herself from memory the poetry of Pushkin, Griboedov, Nekrasov, Tiutchev, Blok, and Mayakovsky. When she exhausted what she remembered, she composed her own poetry. Doing so, she achieved spiritual liberation and fulfillment: “Poetry,

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at least, they could not take away from me! They had taken my dress, my shoes and stockings, and my comb, they had left me half naked and freezing, but this it was not in their power to take away, it was and remained mine” (1.221). In her memoir, Ginzburg frequently asks herself what helped her survive the decade of her “posthumous wandering in hell.” In retrospect, she is able to see that her passionate interest in the possibilities hidden in human nature was another key reason for her survival: “I have said that my intense curiosity about life in all its manifestations—even in its debasement, cruelty, and madness— sometimes made me forget my troubles” (1.107). This life-giving inquisitiveness about the limits of human nature as it played itself out in the conditions of the Gulag camps is perhaps the most direct link tying Ginzburg to another giant of prison camp memoiristic literature: Lev Razgon. Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon (1908-1999), arrested, like millions of other innocent Soviet citizens, on trumped up charges of counterrevolutionary activity, spent seventeen years in the labor camps. What strikes one as almost inconceivable, upon examination of his life and work, is that he, like Ginzburg, emerged from the Gulag as a victorious survivor with his spiritual fiber intact. In his True Stories (Nepridumannoe) and A Captive in One’s Homeland (Plen v svoem otechestve) Razgon describes the entire epoch of Soviet history, searching for a universal moral criterion applicable to both the executioners and the victims, whom he sees as equally responsible for the tragedy that befell his nation. Like Ginzburg, Razgon admits that his determination to survive, and his “search for meaning,” to use Frankl’s expression, were inextricably linked to his determination to “outlive” evil, to live to witness its inevitable collapse. In the course of his imprisonment, he, too, composed an internal memoir, committing to memory the bestial atrocities perpetrated by camp overseers against prisoners, or by prisoners against prisoners, as well as the manifestations of humanity that he observed. Many biographical facts link the fates of Ginzburg and Razgon. Both were originally active and ardent members of the Communist Party. Razgon actually attended the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, at which an ill-fated attempt to oust Stalin was made.3 Prior to being arrested (in the same year), both were well established in their respective literary milieus, and both were tragically separated from their young families at the time of arrest. Both found second

3 The attempt to oust Stalin at the Seventeenth Party Congress, and the fear and anxiety of the Party members involved, are brilliantly described in Razgon’s story “Ivan Mikhailovich Moskvin,” in Nepridumannoe. Povest′ v rasskazakh (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 6-36.

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loves while confined in the camps—something Frankl would likely argue was essential for their survival. Until his arrest in 1937, Razgon led a very active professional life. He worked as an editor and critic in the children’s publishing house Detizdat, and enjoyed the friendship and professional association of such pillars of the Soviet literary world as Samuil Marshak and Kornei? Chukovsky. Chukovsky is credited with the proverb: “One must live long in Russia” (V Rossii nado zhit′ dolgo), and Razgon did just that, dying just two months shy of the twenty-first century. He frequently joked that his greatest accomplishment in life was to outlive Stalin, and he annually celebrated the date of Stalin’s death, March 5, 1953, as his own birthday, receiving congratulations on that day from friends and survivors of the Gulag. Beyond the biographical, Razgon’s belletristic-cumdocumentary autobiographical writing played—to no lesser a degree than Ginzburg’s—a significant role in the downfall of the Soviet regime by precipitating the return of individual history and the crisis of a common conscience.4 In Razgon’s documentary prose, one can distinguish two idiosyncrasies of attitude that enabled him to survive: his unconditional interest in both the executioners and the prisoners and a sense of inner freedom. Razgon maintained that, ironically, the years he spent in the camps made him feel freer than if he had been on the outside. Inside the Gulag world, Razgon was inwardly freed from serving the official dogma.5 In the early years of perestroika, Razgon was one of the first to be allowed access to the archives of the KGB. He pored over the “monstrous” documentary deposits, which included all the diligently preserved denunciations, interrogations, and sentences, as well as physical evidence, such as letters to prisoners. During his visits to the KGB archives, Razgon came into direct contact with the most tangible proof of the vast dimensions of Stalin’s oppression. What he found was not only evidence about the fates of his first wife and daughter and the relentless persecution of his second wife, Rika Berg, but confirmation of the unspeakable brutalizing of the whole nation. Though this prolonged period of research affected his health and resulted in his suffering multiple heart attacks, his visits to the archives further reinforced his determination to

4 But unlike Ginzburg’s memoirs, which were published during the Brezhnev era, Razgon’s memoirs were published during glasnost′. Razgon’s work consists of his collections of autobiographical stories Nepridumannoe and Plen v svoem otechestve, as well as the autobiographical novel Pozavchera i segodnia. In English, Razgon’s memoirs appear in the collection True Stories (New York: Ardis, 1997). 5 Rada Polishchuk, S Razgonom o Razgone (Minsk: Met, 2000), 35.

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leave written testimony for those whose lives were cruelly cut short and who were thus denied the possibility of witnessing in words for posterity. Razgon’s collection of short stories functions simultaneously as fiction, memoir, and autobiography. In his short stories, literary prose and documentary coexist as an interconnected unit: plotlines and factual digressions alternate without interrupting narrative progression. Both in his and Ginzburg’s memoirs, a cross section of Soviet society is represented by both prisoners and their jailors. Razgon’s protagonists are members of Moscow’s intelligentsia— politicians, scientists, actors, and doctors, privileged members of the Soviet political structure, the nomenklatura, as well as foreigners—Italians, Spaniards, Poles, and so on—all of whom were caught in the events of a great social experiment. Both writers convey a sense of prison camp life as phantasmagoric, yet they describe it realistically in the most graphic detail. The strength of Razgon’s stories lies in the representation of character, which imbues his work with the affective quality of true literature. In Razgon’s “The President’s Wife,” for example, we meet a colonel, newly appointed as head of the local Gulag health department. Razgon, who is always a writer as well as a character in his stories, meets the colonel while riding to another camp. At the beginning of the story, the colonel is introduced as a confident and self-satisfied figure, who boasts in front of a major that, through a lucky turn of events, he had the opportunity to meet the formal head of the Soviet Union and president of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Kalinin. Razgon includes himself as an uninvited participant in the conversation, informing the cocky colonel that Kalinin’s wife is kept as a prisoner in one of the camps in Vozhael. The incredulous colonel goes to Vozhael to disprove what he deems to be an inconceivable rumor. When he learns that Kalinin’s wife is indeed a prisoner in the camp, he is transformed from a self-assured officer into a howling, hysterical figure crushed by his realization of the cruel, senseless nature of system that consumes its own devotees. The author’s mastery of prose structure is evident in the brilliantly compressed climactic scene, in which the officer is imagined confronting the woman in her undignified state: I found neither the cause of the colonel’s hysterics nor his hysteria itself any laughing matter; still it was hard to keep a straight face at the idiotic mouthings of a man who was, after all, Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the entire Gulag. I had a fleeting vision of the ever-meticulous president’s wife. There she was, sitting in her tiny room in the washhouse at the base camp, carefully scraping nits from the grey, newly-washed, prison-issue long

The Survival of the Sublime in a Universe of Malice

johns with a piece of glass just as the colonel arrived to pay his respects.6 Razgon transforms the simple episode into an epiphany for the reader, to whom the grotesque absurdity of the Gulag is suddenly revealed. The piece of glass Kalinin’s wife uses to crush nits in the prisoners’ underwear reveals the inhuman dimension to which the camp inmates’ lives are reduced. Razgon’s technique of presenting a philosophical quandary that is then relieved by a sudden insight into the pointlessness of the prisoners’ byt is characteristic of Ginzburg’s writing. She, too, seeks to uncover the fundamental nature of human malice beneath a meaningless system of pernicious behavior. Razgon’s short story technique involves reducing a plot to a key incident from which the meaning of the tale is derived. He is equally conscious that his stories accumulate to create an autobiographical testimonial to a period of humanitarian crises in his country’s history. Despite the difference in structure between the prose texts of Razgon and Ginzburg, both authors are united through a universal search for a moral criterion with which to define, but also to indict, a society of persecutors who have escaped punishment. In a society that cannot incriminate the evildoers, Ginzburg and Razgon take on the task of exposing the acts of those who, despite their murderous past, live peacefully in Soviet society, sitting unrecognized on park benches, playing with their grandchildren, collecting their pensions, and having heart attacks.7 In terms of Frankl’s principles, Razgon and Ginzburg manage to imbue a universe of malice with meaning, personally escaping the erosion of their moral standards and the disintegration of their personalities. In his Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn asserts that female prisoners, simply because of their gender, stood no chance of surviving the Gulag unscathed.8 Further, he claims that female prisoners were more prone to the gradual disintegration of personality and erosion of morality than men, often leading to prostitution, due to the state of permanent deprivation and hunger in the camps. It seems nothing short of miraculous that Ginzburg was able to escape being sexually brutalized, even though she witnessed sexual abuse and just missed becoming the victim of an orgy and rape. Indeed, Ginzburg

Lev Razgon, “The President’s Wife,” in True Stories, trans. John Crowfoot (New York: Ardis, 1997), 7. 7 In his story “Niyazov,” Razgon tells of meeting a former Gulag executioner in a hospital, where both men were recovering from heart attacks. Ibid., 13-24. 8 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag (Paris: YMCA Press, 1973). 6

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attributes her very survival to “miracles.” In the chapter titled “Light Work,” she depicts her miraculous rescue from rape by a deeply religious, deaf Volga German inmate (1.381-408). In “Izvestkovskaya,” the hardened, professional criminal element of the Gulag attacks Ginzburg’s ward, and she notes how the women lustfully welcome the intruders. She escapes the orgy with the help of “Uncle Senya,” a handyman she knew from before in Elgen. For women prisoners, however, such “miraculous” rescues as experienced by Ginzburg were not the norm. Whereas she managed to escape gang rape, other Gulag testimonies describe this as a frequent and cruel form of abuse suffered by female inmates. Elena Glinka’s short narrative “The Big Kolyma Streetcar” (Trium, ili bol′shoi Kolymskii tramvai)9 documents unimaginable forms of sexual violence and perversion. The author describes being transported to mainland Kolyma on a cargo ship, the Minsk, along the same route Ginzburg had travelled with a shipment of prisoners aboard the Dzhurma a few years earlier. As in many of the prose memoirs that emerged from the Gulag, the moments surrounding the actual process of imprisonment are described precisely and in minute detail. The ship’s holds, five deep, have been especially outfitted to transport convicts. In the case of female prisoners, it is necessary to descend a ladder leading to the central hold, where they will be confined while on route. At the foot of the ladder, each approaching passenger is first attacked by a group of women who are common, not political, criminals. This group tears off whatever decent clothes the new prisoners might still be wearing. As with the other incoming women prisoners, the author/protagonist is herself seized by a gang of five lesbians, stripped naked, and left bleeding heavily from cuts inflicted by the razors the criminals use to “welcome” them. The female gangs confiscate everything of value, even prying open the mouths of their victims in search of gold crowns. At first, amidst the noise and confusion of this violence, no one noticed the steady pounding coming from the other side of the bulkhead separating the female from the male transportees. After a time, the wall cracks open and a mass of half-naked criminals pour into the female compartment. All the women— young, old, mothers, daughters, political prisoners, and common criminals— are mercilessly assaulted. Those who resist the mass rape are wounded or murdered on the spot by the male attackers using knives and razors. When the ship arrives in Kolyma, the men refuse to leave and will not let the women go. Finally, the guards use hoses to fill the holds with water. Only then are the

9 Elena Glinka, “The Big Kolyma Streetcar,” in Russian Life, March 1998. See the shorter version, “The Kolyma Tram,” in Gulag Voices, ed. Anne Applebaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 39-47. Tramvai was a term used to denote gang rape.

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rapists flushed out, along with excrement and the corpses of their victims. The lifeless bodies of those killed by the rapists, or by the guards if they try to escape the mayhem below, are thrown overboard. The guards are officially responsible for the prisoners and occasionally have to pay with their lives if a prisoner manages to escape. Glinka’s narrator self, who somehow manages to climb out of the female hold unharmed, is aware of this regulation. From the deck, she watches the terror below and wonders how the guards will account for the murdered women. Eventually, she concludes that “guarding” is an illusion and that no one is really responsible for the prisoners’ lives; the atrocities were committed with the tacit consent of the authorities. Glinka’s graphic story confirms the undeniable feeling in the reader that, no matter how often or how much the factual reality of the Gulag is recorded, the mad and surreal nature of this prison camp system cannot be rationally described. The unfathomable cruelty of some human beings, the pervasive malice of man toward man, speaks bleakly of what the human species is, what it is capable of doing. Within the malicious, incomprehensible universe of the Gulag, replete with well-documented acts of violence committed by camp administrators against prisoners and by prisoners against prisoners, it is remarkable that, despite several close calls and intense psychological trauma, Ginzburg not only escaped being physically violated, but even experienced the most sublime love in the camps. Such an experience was one of the key factors making her survival possible. This is the most subjective of the three conditions that Frankl asserts are necessary for humanly surviving adversity in inhuman surroundings: to do meaningful work, to know suffering, to experience value. The last concept is the most intimate and perhaps the most crucial for survival. By experiencing value, Frankl means the act of loving as a vital affirmation of life, one that transcends the here and now. “By the spiritual act of love man is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person, and even more, he sees that which is potential in him.”10 In the same way as Viktor Frankl underscores the importance of loving to surviving, Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, wrote the following about love and the Holocaust: “We lived in circumstances incomprehensible to the world, circumstances that, at their core, touched the notion of a human life that has no future, no prospect of surviving. And yet, what allowed us to live was love; it was love, and only love, that allowed people

10 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 113.

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to survive; only by experiencing it were people able to rid themselves of the constant feeling of imminent danger. Love made us feel secure, despite the knowledge that one might die within the hour.”11 Whereas Edelman focuses on love for survival, in her moving account “My Past” (O proshlom)12 another memoirist, Khava Volovich, claims that sexual attraction was an instinctive search for meaning, an assertion that, after all, life did make sense in those abhorrent conditions: “Human rights, dignity, pride were all reduced to nothing. There was only one thing that these stock-breeders from hell could not exterminate: the sex drive. Indifferent to regulations, to the threat of the punishment cells, to hunger and humiliation alike, it lived and flourished far more openly and directly than it does in freedom.”13 In “A Breeze amid the Sweetbriar,” Ginzburg describes love between two zeks, a sexual love that is both carnal and sublime, life affirming and life preserving: “It [love] sometimes visited our huts unrecognized by the bystanders, humiliated, abashed, and defiled; but for all that it was love, true love—that very same ‘breeze amid the sweetbriar’” (2.15). Contrary to her usual manner of using actual names, Ginzburg provides only scant information about her characters and refers to them personally only as pronouns: on and ona (he and she). We learn that “he” is a Meyerholdian actor and “she” a ballerina, and that they met in the “serf theater” in Magadan. Due to her pregnancy, “she” lost her enviable acting position; subsequently, “he” and “she” obediently withstand various acts of persecution in order to remain together. Writing about love in the Gulag depicts a passion that is at once refined and gruesome, full of life and death touching one another, and that attains tragic-romantic and grotesque peaks.14 The technique of juxtaposing the

11 Marek Edelman, “Rozmowa Piotra Najsztuba z Markiem Edelmanem,” Przekroj, March 2003, 30-33. 12 Khava Volovich, “O proshlom,” in Dodnes′ tiagoteet (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1989). Translated as “My Past,” in Till My Tale Was Told, ed. Simeon Vilensky and trans. John Crowfoot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 13 Volovich, “My Past,” 260. 14 In Varlam Shalamov’s story “Prokazhennye” (The lepers), the camp officials panic when the female character Leshchinskaya contracts leprosy from Fedorenko. They separate the leprous lovers from the others in the camp, placing them in complete isolation, under constant guard, and behind a heavily locked door, only to find that one morning both inmates have disappeared. In their desperation, Leshchinskaya and Fedorenko had decided to separate themselves from imprisonment, the guards, the persecution, and the lepers’ quarters. After searching with dogs for three days, the guards discover the couple dead, lying naked and isolated in their barricaded basement refuge: “Fedorenko’s dark mutilated arms were around Leshchinskaya’s gleaming body.” The two star-crossed lovers, covered with blankets, and fittingly carried away together, embody the ideal yet tangible proximity of eros and thanatos in

The Survival of the Sublime in a Universe of Malice

macabre and the sublime so often used to depict Gulag love finds stark expression in a collection of short stories by Meyer Galler.15 In “The Night Visitor (A Love Story),” the author relates the experiences of a prisoner who is assigned the enviable duty of guarding the camp morgue. While on duty, he discovers that the place is used by some inmates as a safe location to have sex. One night when a man and woman appear and ask to be let in to the morgue, the narrator hesitates to let them use the place for such a purpose; he relents when he is threatened with a knife, then generously bribed. The eerie activity continues: “Paying me not the slightest heed, the couple then stepped into the morgue and disappeared. From the outside I could hear their laughter, their whispers, and the noises, as the corpses were pushed aside, presumable to make space to lie down.”16 After the lovers leave, it occurs to the narrator that, due to the extreme hard labor and deprivation in the camp, the only thing that had been on his mind up to this point was physical survival, and that not once had he grappled with his conscience before it was pricked by the gruesome disrespect for the dead people. Eventually, however, the woman whose sexual partner had threatened the narrator returns to the morgue by herself to kindle a sublime relationship with the guard, “to be with someone of good background with whom I have something in common,” she says.17 The greater part of the second volume of Ginzburg’s Krutoi marshrut is concerned with the experience of “value” (in Frankl’s sense of love as a supreme value) that saved her life: her love relationship with Doctor Anton Walter. Her deep love for Walter was physical, psychological, and spiritual. Through him, she not only found the meaning necessary to go on existing in the camps (where several times before she had considered suicide), but also direction and sanctity in her life and work. Walter not only taught her how to ease the physical suffering of others by instructing her in the fundamentals of medicine. By virtue of

the Gulag. See Varlam Shalamov, “The Lepers,” in his Graphite (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 181-86. 15 Meyer Galler’s (1914-2000) short stories Plowing the Steppes and Other Gulag Stories, were also published in Russian under the title of Pokorenie stepei i drugie rasskazy o Gulage (Castro Valley, CA: Soviet Studies, 2000), and were based on his fifteen years in the Gulag. While the stories are masterfully centered around singular episodes experienced in the camps, they supply the reader with information on the camps’ byt and lore. 16 Meyer Galler, “Night Visitors (A Love Story),” in his Plowing the Steppes and Other Gulag Stories (Berkeley, CA: Judah L Magnes Museum, 1996), 85. Galler also wrote works on the special terminology used in the camps: Soviet Prison Camp Speech: A Survivor’s Glossary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Soviet Camp Speech: Bilingual Glossary with Supplements (Hayward, CA: Soviet Studies, 1990). 17 Galler, Plowing the Steppes, 87.

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being a highly religious person (a devout Volga Deutsch Roman Catholic), he also imparted to her the sense that the terrible suffering they were experiencing even ennobled them and blessed their love: “Our love grew amid the stench of putrefying flesh, against the darkness of the arctic night. For fifteen years we marched together across all the abysses, through all the blizzards” (2.115-16). She credits this relationship with Walter, whom she calls “the bearer of all that is good, of forbearance, and of brotherly feelings toward his fellow man” (2.122), with saving her from the “eyes of Lazarus,” her term for the spiritually fatal indifference that eventually settled inside the souls of camp prisoners. Frankl’s third and final condition necessary for a prisoner to survive the camps is the “deed,” doing significant work.18 In Ginzburg’s case, her work as a nurse, and especially her work with orphaned and half-orphaned children in the camps, not only endowed her prison life with meaning, but also redeemed it (2.175). She was able to withstand the despair of being deprived of her motherhood—the loss of her first son Alyosha, who perished from hunger in the siege of Leningrad, and the twelve years of separation from her youngest son Vasily—by working with children. Eventually, she healed her pain through her desperate struggle to obtain permission from the Gulag administration for her surviving son to come to Magadan, and by adopting (first informally, then with official approval) an orphan girl, Tonya. Despite her fears and reservations about reuniting with him after so many years, sixteen-year-old Vasya, only four when she was arrested, may even have helped to shorten Ginzburg’s stay in Vaskov’s House when she was arrested a second time. Indeed, Aksenov’s love and concern for his mother impressed the administration or the Magadan prison (2.298). In her eighteen years of captivity, Ginzburg instinctively embodied Frankl’s logotherapeutic principles. Demonstrating that an individual can find personal meaning even in hopeless circumstances, her life testifies to the human potential to achieve meaning within tragedy. Together with the works of Solzhenitsyn, Razgon, and Shalamov, Ginzburg’s text provides a venerable testimony for a nation that lived through the devastating rigors of the Stalinist years. Its value is associated with its function as a witnessed account of human losses and suffering, of new knowledge about evil and good, but also in the powerful way it raises the question of responsibility, not just that of the executioners and their victims, but also of the author herself and of every person, Russian or any other, who was implicated in the Gulag system, unaware of the malice that underlay it. 18 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 113.

7

“Up to Their Old Tricks Again? Taking Mothers from Their Children?” Evgenia Ginzburg as a Mother in the Stalinist Gulag1 Elaine MacKinnon

As a Gulag survivor and memoirist, Evgenia Ginzburg remains significant well into the twenty-first century, decades after her camp narrative first began circulating in samizdat and then found its way into print in the West. Her courageous, generous spirit and profound literary gifts turned her memories into classic texts for Gulag studies, particularly for our understanding of the gendered experience of the Stalinist camps. Despite a plethora of new sources and autobiographical writings about the camps, and despite the opening of archives, we still return to Ginzburg to reflect on what it meant to be human in the nightmarish Gulag world, and how individuals, especially political prisoners swept up by the purges, coped with the unjustified destruction of their families, their careers, and their hopes for the future. An important dimension of Ginzburg’s gendered experience of the camps is the fact that she was a mother torn from her children—two sons and a stepdaughter. Like so many women in the Gulag, though exact numbers are not

1 Evgenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pub., 1981), 187.

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known, Ginzburg not only had to face the trauma of her own arrest and the challenge of physical survival in the Gulag, but she also had to worry about what was happening to her children, all of whom, under the age of twelve, she could no longer protect and nurture. Prior to her arrest, she was a committed party worker, devoted to Soviet ideals and to her family, fully subscribing to the Stalinist celebration of the importance of the socialist family. The beginning of the 1930s had seen the Soviet state shift its focus from the liberation of women from household tasks to reaffirming their traditional roles as mothers and homemakers. Stalin himself proclaimed that a woman must not neglect her duty to the socialist order as a mother, and propaganda projected images of women primarily in domestic settings.2 While the Stalinist state fully embraced the notion of women as a vital economic asset and a necessary contributor to the collective economy, it also sought to encourage women to bear more children. Along with guaranteeing women equal rights to employment and equal wages for equal work, Article 122 of the 1936 USSR Constitution pledged the state to protecting the “interests of mother and child” and providing public childcare institutions.3 Yet, at the same time, the paranoia of the Stalinist regime regarded the family bond as a potential threat; the fear that blood ties might prove stronger than those of ideology contributed to the mass arrests of family members of “enemies of the state.” Motherhood thus became in the contradictory realm of Stalinist politics both an object of veneration and a target for punishment. Tragically, Ginzburg had to confront this darker side of the Stalinist view of family—that when the family became a nest of enemies, it was a contagion to be punished and broken apart.4 Even children were suspect. And Ginzburg’s children certainly suffered; they became victims of the terror. Her youngest son, Vasya, ended up for a time in a NKVD home for children of “enemies of the people” in Kostroma, although Ginzburg was not aware of this at the time. It took months before a relative was able to locate him and return him to Pavel Aksenov’s family.5 Upon her arrest, Ginzburg’s eldest son Alyosha went to live with his father, Dmitry Fedorov, in Leningrad. For Ginzburg, Alyosha’s death in the siege of Leningrad was the undeniable result of her imprisonment. This

See Barbara Engel, Women in Russia 1700—2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177, 182. 3 See 1936 Constitution, Chapter 10, Article 122, accessed August 15, 2022, http://www. departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons04.html#chap10. 4 Golfo Alexopoulos, “Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–1940s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 ( January 2008): 91–117. 5 See “Interview with Vasily Aksenov” in this volume. 2

“ U p t o T h e i r O l d Tr i c k s A g a i n ? Ta k i n g M o t h e r s f r o m T h e i r C h i l d r e n ? ”

fact adds poignancy, then, to our understanding and appreciation of her survival when we consider that she had to endure such intense psychological grief on top of the horrific and brutal conditions of the Kolyma camps. Her inner turmoil, guilt, and despair over the separation from her children and the death of Alyosha permeate her two camp memoirs and provide an essential lens through which to observe what it meant to be a mother in the Gulag. Recording her pain, Ginzburg left one of the most compelling indictments of the Stalinist terror and the innumerable human tragedies it set in motion. This essay will examine the impact of Ginzburg’s arrest and imprisonment on her role as a mother and how her shattered maternity influenced her postGulag efforts to reconstruct family life and cope with the death of Alyosha. Motherhood amplified and exacerbated the anxieties of imprisonment in both volumes of her “Whirlwind” memoirs; yet it also inspired her to seek out her fellow prisoners, to connect with others suffering similar sorrows, and to find new outlets for nurturing and protecting children and younger prisoners. Ginzburg’s narratives provide insight as well into the broader experience of motherhood in the camps through her study of other women who were mothers or who became mothers while prisoners. For as Barbara Heldt has pointed out, in order to survive Ginzburg had to avoid thinking about “her own children because it is unbearable, but when she thinks of her fellow prisoners it is as mothers or members of destroyed families.”6 Ginzburg shows how motherhood produced both strength and vulnerability; it could bring women together and provide agency, but it could also induce emotional breakdown and capitulation. Gulag mothers had to worry about their own situations and those of their children: they had to live with the ongoing fear that their fate was going to inadvertently and almost inevitably affect them, and there was nothing they could do about it. Ginzburg’s story also illuminates how difficult it was to try and rebuild family and repair the parent-child relationship once prisoners’ terms in the camps ended. She shows the bureaucratic ordeal of trying to get Gulag officials to allow her to bring her son Vasya to her place of exile in Magadan, as well as the fears that continued to haunt her about his continued vulnerability and her own inability to protect him. Additionally, the need to fill the void left by Alyosha’s death and lingering guilt over the fate of her children contributed to her decision to adopt Tonya, a Gulag orphan, and raise her as her own. Ginzburg’s memoirs reveal the extent to which her concerns over the welfare of her children dominated her thinking both at the time of her arrest and 6 Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 153.

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in her narrative memory when reconstructing her experiences. Even before her actual arrest, she remembers her growing sense of panic as she realized how the web of lies being spun around her was going to impact the fate of her children. In chapter seven, she details her horrifying confrontation with Party ideological chief E. Yaroslavsky in Moscow, who accused her of having collaborated with an enemy by not denouncing her colleague Professor Elvov. With a chilling sense of foreboding, she closes this chapter by musing, “I knew for certain now that what was left of my life could not be measured in years or months but in minutes and I must hurry back to my children. What would become of them?” (1.34). Unable to simply focus on her own situation, she agonizes over what might happen to her sons, particularly her oldest boy. She recalls how angry she was at a young naïve guard who thought he was being nice to her. She had started sobbing uncontrollably and pounding on the door of the cell, and he responded by referring to her as a young girl and told her to cheer up or else the boys would never look at her, to which she responds: “I’m not a girl. . . . I’m a mother, I’ve got children. I’ve done nothing wrong at all. . . . And they . . . Do you believe me?” (1.178). The guard then leaves her with the scant comfort that at least her gender was saving her life because women were only receiving prison terms. Men were being shot at the rate of over seventy a day (1.178). Sacred items, like Alyosha’s baby blanket, provide only brief respite (1.146). While traveling to the prison by rail car, Ginzburg gazes at the mothers with their children at station stops, smiling and living their regular lives while hers had been completely torn apart. “I felt ready to die of envy and amazement. So there were still people in the world who were allowed to hold their children’s hands” (1.190). Ginzburg describes other women driven equally mad by anxiety about their children. In hut no. 7 of a Kolyma transit camp, where a prisoner cultural performance takes place, she shows mothers using it to alleviate their pain, if only for a moment: “Thirty women who had been forcibly separated from their children and knew nothing of their fate were singing with great feeling as they pretended to rock a baby in their arms: Sleep, my love, sleep, my little one, / The darkness does not frighten us, / No bogeyman shall come to hurt you. Hushaby, baby, hushaby baby” (1.368). When Pavel Aksenov is arrested soon after her, shattering Ginzburg’s confidence that their children were safe, she laments that [t]onight I cared nothing for the world, only for my children, orphaned twice over—helpless, small, trusting children, brought up to believe in human kindness. Vasya had once asked

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me: “Mother, what’s the fiercest of all animals?” Fool that I was! Why didn’t I tell him the “fiercest” was man—of all animals the one to beware of most. (1.118) Her husband’s arrest means that she has to face the threat of the NKVD taking her children. She recalls conversations with other women who were mothers and whose stories of their own children’s arrest compound her anxieties: With dreadful clarity, I imagined all this happening to my own Alyosha. It was unbearable. It is still just possible to live, inwardly resisting, when you yourself have been snatched and swept away by some evil power which seeks to rob you of your health and reason, and either turn you into a dumb beast of burden or kill you. But when this happens to the child you have reared and cherished . . . (1.111-12, 126-27) These uncertainties unleashed a torrent of regrets and haunting memories of moments lost or taken for granted. She torments herself by returning in her mind to the scene of parting from her children. One memory entails the New Year in 1937, the last she would share with Alyosha, which she failed to ring in with her son because of a midnight phone call. She had taken Alyosha to a special resort for his health (he had suffered from malaria), near Moscow, and she took the call because she thought it might be her husband. Instead, it was a colleague she did not care for, and when she returned to her son, the New Year had already come and he had celebrated with someone else. A trivial incident at the time, with the coming tragedy of her imprisonment and then Alyosha’s death it becomes seared in her memory that she had missed their last opportunity to share in this traditional ritual (1.38). Further pain comes from the memory of her final moments with her son. Fearing that parting with him would be upsetting, she had sent Alyosha off to the skating rink on the day of her arrest. She would be haunted for the rest of her life by the thought that she had not said goodbye, had not held him or kissed him (1.46). Sadly, this rational decision to save his feelings is a lasting source of pain for her. The revelation of her husband’s arrest evokes an equally troubled memory of an incident with Vasya, her youngest, when Ginzburg slapped him for lying about breaking an expensive perfume bottle. Years later, her remorse is still an endless source of agony: Now this memory tortured me like fire. Nothing seemed to weigh more heavily on my conscience. My poor little one, alone

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in this dreadful world—and what did he have to remember his mother by? That she had slapped him for an idiotic bottle of scent. And, worst of all, there was nothing in this world I could do now to put it right. My pain that night was so great that it brimmed over into the future and reaches me today when I write of it after twenty years. (1.118)7 Similar to other prisoner-mothers who composed memoirs, such as Olga Adamova-Sliozberg and Nadezhda Joffe, Ginzburg writes of having to force herself not to think or talk about her children. In prison and in transit, the rule was that unlike husbands, children were a “forbidden topic.” But, on occasion, prisoners would inadvertently exchange memories, describing the “endearing moments or qualities of their children” (1.286). This tenuous wall of silence is breached in the chapter “Car Number 7” when women, singing songs about their husbands, inevitably begin telling humorous stories about their children: “The twilight gloom of Car Number 7 was filled with children’s smiles and tears and their voices saying ‘Mother, where are you?’” (1.286). Soon the joy would give way to despair, as Ginzburg depicts her own effort to “keep from breaking down”: “Soon we were all sobbing and crying: ‘My little boy! My darling little girl . . .!’” (1.287). Some women think that death will release them from their suffering: “Better a terrible end than to go on suffering like this forever” (1.287). In the same chapter, a woman offers a story about her cats and dogs, comparing them to children. An enraged mother responds: “‘How dare you put on airs like that. There are mothers here, do you understand? Mothers whose children have been snatched from them and left to the mercy of fate. It is an outrage to compare our children with your cats and poodles’” (1.288). On the other hand, memories of her children could also be life-giving reminders that she did have a life and an identity outside of that imposed on her by her imprisonment as an “enemy.” They helped to fortify her against the dehumanizing conditions of the camp. Thoughts of her children and letters from her mother confirming their wellbeing sustain her. Once, Ginzburg writes of recalling a song that their nanny had sung to Vasya: a simple phrase—“the sandman is coming”—enables her to return to a sensation of warmth and “homey security.” It provides her a momentary, sustaining mental escape (1.399).

7 Equally chilling is her memory of her step-daughter Maya’s face on the day of her arrest. She realized that Maya that day intuitively sensed what was happening: “Her enormous blue eyes wide open, she pressed herself against the wall, and so deep an understanding of pain and horror showed in her twelve-year-old face that I dreamed of it for years afterward” (1.46).

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Considering herself fortunate that her mother kept her informed about her children, Ginzburg prefers not to write directly to her children, thereby sparing them the stigma of having direct contact with a prisoner. Those who do not receive communication from their children fare worse, such as the woman who has only received one letter in two years. This woman’s son had written her from a children’s home, and requested his mother to write out the Latvian alphabet, because he is forgetting it. But she does not get another, which heightens her anxieties over what may have happened to him or what pressures might be exerted on him to view his mother as an enemy (1.288). Mothers were prime targets for malicious interrogators, who sought to manipulate them through threats or insinuations about their children. During one of her earlier interrogations in Kazan, Ginzburg is taken to an office that looks out over a familiar skating rink in Black Lake Park. Major Elshin points out that her two oldest children might be skating there, referring to them by their first names, Alyosha and Mayka. “Was it a hallucination? Had someone within these walls really spoken the names of my children? It was more than I could bear” (1.65). Elshin thinks that, by threateningly evoking her children, he can compel a confession or denunciation from Ginzburg. He also puts on a pretense of familiarity, pretending to pass on her children’s love to her from his supposed phone conversation with her husband (1.67). In later sessions her interrogator tries to make her feel guilty by saying it would be her fault when her noncompliance affects their fate. She is promised that if she signs she would see her children (1.64-65, 84). Silence and cynicism, though, are her only responses. As she explains it, no matter how desperately she wanted to return to her children, she could not contemplate naming names. Her own ethical principles prevent this, but she is also thinking of what such a betrayal could do to these other peoples’ children. For example, her confrontation with Volodya Dyakonov, a fellow journalist, reveals the wrenching dilemmas that parents faced when arrested, and how viciously the Stalinist state manipulated the emotional vulnerability of parents. Dyakonov admits that he was forced to name names for the sake of his daughter; but Ginzburg reminds him that in the act of naming individuals, he was essentially endangering their children’s’ lives. In response to Dyakonov, who says, “Forgive me, Genia. We’ve just had a daughter. I have to stay alive,” Ginzburg counters, “And what about my three children, Volodya? And the children of all those people on your list?” (1.9293). She refuses to denounce others, but not because it violates her sense of party discipline to besmirch loyal comrades’ good party names; rather, she will not help to turn others’ children into orphans, as was happening to her own.

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Shared bonds of motherhood enable Ginzburg to commiserate with a troubled woman from Kazan, the wife of a prominent political figure, head of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars of the Tatar Republic. Returning from a brutal interrogation, this victim is relieved when Ginzburg speaks to her in Tatar, reminding her of her two children (1.127). Later in Kolyma, when she is recommended for a position in the Elgen camp nursery, Ginzburg channels her maternal warmth to the children of other inmates. It is emotionally draining because of the pitiful condition of the children, but it enables her to gain skills to qualify as a nurse, work that she is able to do for much of her remaining time in the camps. The doctor responsible for saving her life by getting her assigned to the Elgen children’s home is Dr. Petukhov. Allowing her to qualify as a “medical assistant” brought release from manual labor and a position allowing her to nurture and “mother” fellow prisoners in need (2.38). Of all the traumatic maternal experiences in the Gulag, her son Alyosha’s death is the harshest. Ginzburg’s separation from Alyosha and subsequent death affects her more than any other death in the Gulag. For the reader, Alyosha is a figure in the shadows; we meet him briefly in the beginning, but thereafter he only comes to life through Ginzburg’s evocative allusions to him. Alyosha’s death, the outcome of her arrest, shape her subsequent actions in profound ways. His tragic fate brings her nightmares and insomnia throughout her term in the camps and then afterwards in exile. It leads her to seek some relief by working with children. It drives her to do everything in her power to bring her surviving son Vasya to live with her in Magadan, no matter the cost or the bureaucratic obstacles that have to be overcome. It is also what motivates her decision to adopt the camp orphan Tonya. In Within the Whirlwind, Ginzburg recounts Alyosha’s death not as his story but as her own. Just as she begins working as a nurse in Elgen, a position providing easier work, warm accommodation, and kind colleagues, she receives the news of her son’s death: The stove crackled peacefully in the evening in the outpatients’ clinic of the central compound of Elgen. I wore a clean overall. There was a folding cot with two calico sheets in the hut. But none of this was of the least concern to the clockwork figure with her mechanical movements and lifeless eyes who now went by my name. Was there still a me? Could I still be alive after the most fearful of all punishments had been visited on me? After the death of my son, my first-born, my other self? (2.81-82)

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With the onset of war, Ginzburg knew that Alyosha was living in Leningrad, the city that was suffering under the German siege, with her first husband, Dr. Fedorov. Fearing that her children were alone during the war, she adds: “[It was] our own private horror. The children! Our children! For in the situation as it now was, the first to be trampled underfoot would be those orphans of ours” (2.32). The Cultural-Educational Section had ceased to function; letters were not arriving. All Ginzburg can do is recite poems and hope that Alyosha is evacuated: “But at night—at night I lay there, knowing full well that this, the greatest punishment in my life, was awaiting me, and that the day, the hour, when it would be administered was at hand” (2.32). However, upon learning of his death, she contemplates suicide. “Had I not been under escort during those weeks. . . There were so many of them, all around me—those turbulent, icy booming rivers and streams of the taiga. Any one of them might have ‘extinguished this poor anguished memory.’ But I was not alone for a moment” (2.82-83). Ginzburg finds an outlet in nursing other prisoners. It is Dr. Anton Yakovlevich Walter who helps her deal with her debilitating grief: “He was the only person to whom I could talk about Alyosha, and that alone made him different from all the others” (2.121). Walter points out how she can fulfill her duty to Alyosha by helping the young patients in the hospital, comforting them for the sake of her son. Ginzburg finds herself especially drawn to Latvian prisoners from the so-called “special contingent,”8 who remind her of Alyosha: “[It became] a close, almost familial relationship with the young Latvian lads—in each of them I saw my own Alyosha. They were almost like his contemporaries, just a year or two older. They were tall, like him, with the same feathery eyelashes and trusting, still chubby, young lips” (2.136-37). Acting as a second mother to them, especially in their last moments when they cry out for their mothers, Ginzburg holds them as they draw their last breaths. “How many sighs had I heard? It came to something like a thousand” (2.137).9

8 Ginzburg refers to the “special contingent” as the “new postwar Kolyma class.” These were prisoners from the Baltic states who were sentenced to terms in the Gulag following the Soviet annexation of their countries. Some were soldiers who had served in the Wehrmacht during the Nazi occupation, some had escaped from POW camps, and some had simply been living in Nazi-occupied regions and were deported when the Soviet Union took control over Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia (2.136-37). 9 In her first memoir, Ginzburg writes tenderly of the young girls she encounters in prison, admitting that she feels a greater pity for the very young and the very old women, the former because of her step-daughter and the latter because of her own mother, and her sense of separation from both (1.150).

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While she is living in exile in Taskan, awaiting the release of Dr. Walter, Ginzburg’s nightmares of Alyosha’s death continue: haunted at night by “wild and desperate visions” of her son’s death in Leningrad, Ginzburg nurses hopes for his “miraculous salvation” (2.187). For example, she listens to an elderly former criminal prisoner who tells fortunes and reads palms. The fortune teller glances at her left hand, and declares that he does not see her children dead, adding that Alyosha has “gone off somewhere . . .” (2.186). This enables her, at least in her own mind, to deny the reality of what telegrams had reported: “These mumblings were enough to outweigh all the precisely worded telegrams, official reports, and answers to inquiries of which I had already been the sorrowful recipient” (2.186-87). While believing these speculative fantasies, Ginzburg does not dare to share these readings with Walter: “I really disregarded the eternal verities so steadfastly drummed into me at the university, giving myself up to dreams of the impossible” (2.187). Throughout her narrative, Ginzburg continually returns to the realization that because of unfounded charges and Stalinist politics she has lost her firstborn son. When she is arrested for a second time in 1949, her interrogator Colonel Tairulnitsky asks her how many sons she had: “There were two of them. People started interfering with my life, and then I had only one” (2.296). While Tairulnitsky reassures her that in Leningrad Alyosha would have died anyway, Ginzburg insists that he would never have been in Leningrad had it not been for her and her husband’s arrest. Particularly in the final pages of the memoir, Ginzburg notes that the harshest blow she bore was Alyosha’s death. In 1953, while so many people are weeping for the dead Joseph Stalin, she thinks of herself and Alyosha as the victims of this man’s devastating regime: I was also weeping for two lost decades. In the space of a minute the whole procession of events swept by before my eyes. All the tortures and all the prison cells. All the long files of those who had suffered the final penalty, and the countless legions of those who had been made to suffer. And my own life destroyed by his diabolical will. And my boy, my dead son . . . (2.356) In exile, Ginzburg continues to cultivate a role as a mother figure. While in Magadan, she lives with Julia, a prisoner whom she had met in Yaroslavl Prison soon after her arrest. There she could have joined the same workshop where Julia worked, but Ginzburg insists that she wants to work with children, as a way of allaying her grief over Alyosha. In the company of children,

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“the relentless torments of grief for Alyosha were somewhat eased” (2.210). Teaching at the kindergarten is therapeutic, and helps her reconnect with her former life: “Even the mechanical repetitiveness of our basic daily chores had given me illusory relief from the knowledge that my role as a mother had been cynically and brutally trampled upon” (2.210). She is drawn to these thin and pale children, many of whom had been born in the camps and were her “fellow travelers within the whirlwind” (2.216). Through these pupils, who were considered “difficult,” but were suffering from arrested development, neglect, malnutrition, and neuroses, Ginzburg seeks to fill the aching void and alleviate the pain of separation from her own two boys. These children become her companions in her exile. On Sundays, when parents are allowed to visit their children, Ginzburg accompanies the remaining orphans on long hikes. Worried that some children suffer from insomnia, Ginzburg tenderly tucks them in, saying “Go to sleep, my little one” (2.221). Because of her status as an ex-prisoner, when any misstep or slip of the tongue regarding the regime or its policies could lead to a new sentence, working with children posed a risk. Ex-prisoners could easily be charged with seeking to lead their charges astray. Yet, although it sickens her to use propaganda pieces in her repertoire of music and teaching materials, she cannot bring herself to give up this work. One of Ginzburg’s most compelling struggles to sustain her motherhood is her campaign to reunite with her surviving son Vasya (who would grow up to become the novelist Vasily Aksenov), despite all obstacles. Her sense of responsibility for Vasya, in fact, impels her survival as she faces continual frustrations in exile: “Each morning I wanted to die—chiefly so as to forget it all. But my passionate desire for oblivion fought and lost the daily battle. It lost out to my memory, which kept confronting me with the one word, ‘Vasya’” (2.245). Her mother’s letters reveal to Ginzburg Vasya’s troubled teenage years. In addition to learning that Vasya no longer was thriving in his paternal family’s environment, she is also appraised that the Aksenov family resents that she has not returned for her son now that she is “free.” This is an unfair accusation: Ginzburg is not allowed to leave Kolyma and she is repeatedly denied permission to bring her son to join her there. At night, she endures nightmarish dreams that Vasya has dropped out, broke the law, and ends up in the camps, where she runs into him (2.233). By day, she drives herself to do whatever is necessary to keep her job at the kindergarten so she can pay for his passage and to keep petitioning for the right to bring Vasya to her in Magadan. Deep within her, one unrelenting fear torments her: “And again, as during the sleepless nights at Elgen, I heard the formula of despair hammering in my ears: ‘No one will ever call me Mother again’” (2.261).

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Although her application is turned down nine different times, Ginzburg does not give up. She declares that her rights as a mother trumps the strictures of any sentence handed down to her (2.250). When Colonel Franko at the Dalstroi Personnel Department once again repeats that having her son with her in Magadan is against regulations, she retorts that the court could not “deprive me of my maternal rights. My elder son died of starvation in Leningrad. By what law are you sentencing me to permanent separation from my second and only son?” (2.251). Franko’s refusal leads to Ginzburg forcing herself into the office of the Magadan camp administrator, Alexandra Romanovna Gridasova, “the Queen of Kolyma” (2.252). It proves fortuitous that the commander is a woman and evinces sympathy out of a shared bond. She orders Colonel Franko to assist in reuniting Vasya with his mother, acknowledging that “I’m a woman myself. . . I know what it is to have a mother’s heart . . .” (2.253). Yet even with this permission, Ginzburg is haunted by fears that Vasya would die. When he is delayed in Moscow for over two months, she worries he had not packed for late autumn and will freeze. As she anxiously awaits his arrival, she keeps phoning the family of the woman who is to escort him from Moscow; and a moment of dark despair comes when someone there tells her that the woman had indeed turned up, but makes no reference to Vasya. What flashes through her tortured psyche are nightmarish scenarios of all the cars in Moscow running him down, or all the criminals in Vladivostok brutalizing him, or the MVD arresting him for one careless word (2.262-63). Thankfully, it turns out that Vasya had arrived and they are reunited. The impact of hearing him utter the word “Mother” is profound: “And then at long last the word that I had been afraid of never hearing again, that now came to me across a gulf of almost twelve years, from the time before all these courts, prisons, and penal drafts, before the death of my first-born, before all those nights in Elgen. ‘Mother,’ said my son Vasya” (2.264). At the very moment of their reunion Ginzburg muses how Vasya’s eyes are not like Alyosha’s: “Alyosha’s hazel eyes were closed forever. They could not come back again” (2.264). Alyosha seems to merge with Vasya as she utters, “Alyosha, my darling,” a painful slip of the tongue, confirming that the trauma of Alyosha’s death is still very real (2.264). Nonetheless, the bond between mother and son proves to be therapeutic, for on that very first night they share not only love for the same poetry, but also an unspoken understanding. Their first moments together reassure her that their familial ties have defied the state’s blows against them: “He understood my look. It was the most crucial moment in my life: the joining up of the broken links in our chain of time; the recapturing of our organic

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closeness severed by twelve years of separation, of living among strangers. My son!” (2.265). In the Gulag, however, building and rebuilding personal ties and family was always a delicate undertaking. Ginzburg’s recovered maternal relationship with her son is threatened when the regime begins rearresting former prisoners in 1949. On the day Ginzburg is rearrested, she insists on being allowed to see her son before being taken away. The MGB officers retrieve him from school and parent and child are allowed to say goodbye while their apartment is searched. All she can think about is the impact of her arrest on Vasya, and decides that he must stay and finish school in Magadan. Recalling his words— “Momma dear . . . momma dear . . .” (2.286), as the officers lead her out of the apartment, Ginzburg glimpses his face glued to the window, watching her. This image haunts her in prison “like a deathly visitation. Even now, after a period of so many years, I find it painful to write about” (2.287-88). Fortunately for Ginzburg, her interrogator, Colonel Tairulnitsky, is moved by hearing about Alyosha’s death and the fact that Vasya is currently living with her in Magadan. Tairulnitsky falsifies Ginzburg’s report, claiming that she has an infant son instead of a teenager. This enables her to receive a sentence of exile with the right for Vasya to remain with her in Magadan. Vasya is thereby able to finish high school and gain admission to university studies. Ginzburg also builds a new maternal relationship with a little girl abandoned by her prisoner mother. Having met Tonya in the kindergarten where she teaches music, Ginzburg takes pity on the child’s plight. Tonya had never known the meaning of the word “home,” for she had spent her short life in a camp children’s home and now was boarding at the Magadan kindergarten. Ginzburg’s need to nurture and protect Tonya grows as Ginzburg sees features that replicate the actions, gestures, and traits of her dead son, especially as she recalls helping Alyosha sleep (2.275-76). When Tonya stays with her on Saturdays, Ginzburg’s insomnia and habitual nightmares about Alyosha cease. Before Tonya’s arrival she would “see” Alyosha and imagine him with Vasya, comparing the two boys and constantly constructing conversations that they would have. The daily rituals of caring for a toddler revitalize her. These moments revive “memories of the maternal feelings I had never been able to gratify fully and poured healing balm on my mortally wounded soul” (2.277-78). Ginzburg describes her relationship with Tonya, not as a substitute for Alyosha, but in terms of a mystical connection: “No, not a substitute; there could be no substitute for him, but a constant reminder of him. Not one that tore me to sheds, but a gentle reminder” (2.34849). Ginzburg believes that fate has intentionally brought Tonya, a little girl with the attributes of her son, into her life.

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While Ginzburg’s Gulag story is a stirring tale of survival and personal courage, it is also important for its examination of motherhood as a key dimension of the human experience of the Gulag and of the long-term impact of imprisonment. What happened to her family, and the traumatic ripping apart of her maternal existence and identity, permeates both volumes of her memoirs, shaping her actions as a prisoner and her consciousness as a memoirist reconstructing the camp world she inhabited. She is drawn to portray women in the camps who suffered either as mothers or daughters. She begins the second volume of her memoirs with “a group of children born in the camps, speechless, loveless little animals,” her description a powerful indictment of the terror’s irrational and unjust destruction of the innocent, so hauntingly embodied in the wretched existence of these camp toddlers.10 Her second volume culminates in the enthralling story of “that most fragile of families,” the family unit she rebuilds so courageously in Magadan with Dr. Walter, Vasily, and Tonya.11 Ginzburg’s memoirs expose the contradictory “Jekyll and Hyde” relationship the Stalinist regime had with motherhood. As noted above, under Stalin, the regime had reinvigorated the association of women with motherhood; the family was proclaimed the foundation of socialist society, the means through which new Soviet citizens were created, reared, and socialized. Motherhood was again a sacred duty as well as a patriotic service for the good of the nation and for its future.12 Yet for those who were arrested and sentenced to the Gulag, it lost its sanctity and instead put a target on mothers: it was viewed as a potential contagion to be weakened and eliminated. Motherhood became a victim of the terror in parallel with its elevation in regular Soviet society as a sacred icon. Ginzburg’s writings reveal how profoundly and deeply she suffered from the blow wielded by Stalinism against her identity and role as a mother. The loss of her eldest son and the interruption of her life as a mother as described in her memoirs offers a powerful indictment of the Stalinist system; it is a theme that is never far from Ginzburg’s consciousness as a prisoner and as a memoirist.

10 Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 156. 11 Ibid. 12 On the celebration and sacralization of motherhood under Stalin, see Engel, Women in Russia 1700—2000, 177-85; Barbara Evans Clements, “The Birth of the New Soviet Woman,” in Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 232-33; Lynne Atwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 19221953 (New York: Palgrave, 1999); Mary Buckley, “Women in the Soviet Union,” Feminist Review 8 (Summer 1981): 79-106; Greta Bucher, Women, the Bureaucracy, and Daily Life in Postwar Moscow, 1945-1953 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2006).

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She reveals the pain and bitterness of the Gulag mothers and mother-survivors who had to bear the corrosive contradictions of Stalinist propaganda and state rhetoric, who had to hear and see celebrations of Stalin as the “Beloved Father and the Greatest Friend of Soviet Families” while struggling to keep together whatever shattered remnants remained of their own families (2.316). Experiencing the trauma of separation, coping with the disruption to children’s lives, and seeing the impact of political terror extended to the most innocent members of society contributed to the political disillusionment of Ginzburg and many others like her. It brought home the complete inhumanity of the regime and the baseless nature of the mass arrests. Mothers could see and feel more visibly the horrendous “collateral damage” of Stalinism, and rendered even more hollow for them the once revered slogans and images of the Stalinist state. The loss of her children in the end affected Ginzburg more deeply than the loss of her party card and career. Separation from or loss of a child was irreparable and irrevocable; it was far more damaging than lost opportunities and career options. Yet, despite all of her suffering, motherhood strengthened Ginzburg’s sense of humanness and gave her a reason to keep going each day. It engendered an altruism and ability to nurture that she could channel to others besides her own birth children, and thereby enhanced the lives of many others. The Stalinist terror unquestionably destroyed much that was dear to her. But in the end it could not destroy Ginzburg’s humanity or her identity—at the very core of her being—as a mother who would not let politics take away what made her human and enabled her to survive.

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Ethics, Play, and Poetry in the Interval: Evgenia Ginzburg’s Struggle to Survive in the Whirlwind Oana Popescu-Sandu

Mea culpa . . . and it occurs to me more and more frequently that even eighteen years of hell on earth is insufficient expiation for the guilt.1 Recalling events which took place in early 1935, Evgenia Ginzburg writes in Krutoi marshrut: “A few days after Elvov’s arrest, a party meeting was held at the editorial office of Red Tataria at which, for the first time, I was accused of what I had not done.”2 Evgenia Ginzburg faces this paradoxical guilt as she starts on the path that will lead to her mea culpa in the second part of her memoir. The first part of the memoir engages with this paradoxical sense of responsibility, and it is a story about finding one’s moral standing after realizing that a straightforward belief in the ideals of Communism is no longer possible. The author’s

1 2

Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel′, 1990), 153. Krutoi marshrut, which has two parts, was translated into English in two volumes. The first volume is Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967, 1995), hereafter cited as Journey. It contains the first part, nine chapters of the second part, and a short epilogue. The second volume is Within the Whirlwind, trans. lan Boland (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981, 1982), hereafter cited as Within. All English translations used in this article will come from these editions. All references—to the two volumes—are in parentheses.

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mea culpa speaks of a moral state that was not only difficult to reach, but, most of all, difficult to uphold. In order to create an ethical interval in which to survive along with this responsibility, then, Ginzburg had to reconfigure her sense of self and strip bare the mechanism of choice so as not to be burdened by the different ideological structures that had affected her life until her arrest. Woven into her strategy of survival is a “game with ideas,” an existential ludus3 that transforms the ashen world into a vibrant search for points of genuine contact with the suffering Other. The ethical interval is the in-between, the transitory, the relative, the realm of life and movement, the struggle with choice. True moral problems, writes the Romanian philosopher Andrei Pleşu4 in Minima Moralia. Elemente pentru o etică a intervalului, “are not those that you pose to yourself and try to solve pen in hand, in the relaxation—however responsible—of reflexivity—but those that are placed before you, which emerge unpredictably, with the ultimate violence of everyday life events.”5 In this view, morality is not a passive state but an ongoing struggle: ethics is nothing else than a discipline of the interval, which is at home only in the space before the final choice. . . . Ethics 3 I will use the notion of ludus as defined by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950). Huizinga writes: “Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise of other means” (ibid., 13). Huizinga’s notion of play is always linked with notions of ritual and culture, and he emphasizes the less than rigid separation between play and seriousness. The above definition will be further developed later in my essay. 4 My use of the work of Andrei Pleşu is not accidental here. An intellectual figure educated in Communist times, but in a tradition that was devoted to true scholarship and the search for answers to the problems of contemporary existence, Pleşu inherited the world of Communist torturers and their victims and has been working to understand the Communist past in Romania through his political, social, and cultural work. His work circles around questions of aesthetics and ethics in the modern world. Pleşu was a professor of philosophy at the University of Bucharest and was a member of the National Commission for the Study of Former Security Archives. Among his publications are: The Picturesque and Melancholy (1980), The Eye and the Things (1986), Minima Moralia (1988), The Tescani Diary (1993), The Language of Birds (1994), On Angels (2003). He is the founding director of Dilema Veche (The Old Dilemma), one of the main cultural weeklies in post-Communist Romania. 5 Andrei Pleşu, Minima moralia. Elemente pentru o etică a intervalului [Minima moralia. elements for an ethics of the interval] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1988; 1994), 144. All the quotes from his work will be in my translation.

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begins when common sense enters a crisis noticing that none of the rules that it mechanically repeats in the name of its illusory moral competence are any longer valid.6 This is the ethics of crisis—characterizing the moment when the rules guiding the world prove to be erroneous and are nullified by the reality of the prison or the camp. The ethics of the interval is one that refuses to blindly accept given dogmas and one that embraces flexibility, as opposed to fixity and lack of compromise, and opposes the everyday routine of consenting to the Party rubric. I believe that this interval is the universe of Evgenia Ginzburg. It is a world which moves from certainty about the rules of the (Communist) world she inhabited (“I had not the shadow of a doubt of the rightness of the Party line” [1.3]) to uncertainty when faced with the decisions made for her in that world. She gains back her confidence in her moral choices and is no longer affected by the inflexibility and blindness of Communist ideology. However, at the beginning of her imprisonment, Ginzburg is painfully banished into a reality from which she had been protected by her status as a member of the Communist Party and by her position in its hierarchy. Theoretically, she is not a morally innocent victim, as she herself declares in Within the Whirlwind: When you can’t sleep, the knowledge that you did not directly take part in the murders and betrayals is no consolation. After all, the assassin is not only the one who struck the blow, but whoever supported evil, no matter how: by thoughtless repetition of dangerous political theories; by silently raising his right hand; by faint-heartedly writing half-truths. (2.153) She insists, as Pleşu does, on the danger of not questioning the rigid principles imposed by the system and on the danger of applying them mechanically. Therefore, the system she will create will be greatly simplified, using as few rules as possible, but first of all it will be a system that accommodates independent thought and judgment. In building this new ethical framework, Ginzburg has to start over and deal with both her past and her present. At this point, the notion of play becomes a strategy of coping, a moment of transfer from one set of beliefs to another. The writer inhabits that territory defined by Julia Kristeva as the world of the abject—that of the marginal and the dejected. As Kristeva writes: “It is not lack 6

Ibid., 8, 18.

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of cleanliness and of health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”7 From this point of view, Ginzburg is doubly abject: from one of the privileged she turns into an political undesirable, isolated, both physically and socially, at the edge of the world; and, most importantly, in order to survive morally she has first to reject her own self, her own moral and axiological beliefs. She is abject not only to the regime, but also to herself, until she realizes that she has to reduce the mechanism of choice to a small number of factors: truth, her own conscience, memory, and the relationship with a caring other. She writes: if the demagogic habits of the mind I’ve been trained in were so deeply rooted in me that I could not now make an independent analysis of the situation in the country and the Party, then I would be guided simply by the voice of my conscience. I would speak only the truth about myself, I would sign no lies against myself or anyone else, and I would give no names.” (1.75—italics mine) This simplicity is ironical: the independence of thought is difficult to achieve because it is not easy to listen to the voice of conscience in a totalitarian universe, especially in a universe where you become a nonentity, a nonsubject. However, the writer will try to abide by these rules, which she uses to create an inner interval. Yet how can this intellectual humane interval exist when it is constantly assaulted by the physical, by the extension of outside forces? For Ginzburg, everything becomes easier when her attention is no longer focused on herself, when she is nurturing her own pain, but directed outside, towards the well-being, as well as the suffering, of the other. To use one of Emmanuel Levinas’s terms, this is not mere compassion but substitution: she brings “comfort by associating [her]self with the essential weakness and finitude of the other . . . [she] bear[s] his weight by sacrificing [her own] interestedness and complacency-in-being, which then turns into the responsibility for the other.”8 She is able to turn outside of her own self because of the very nature of abjection, which, as Kristeva emphasizes, separates, demarcates, isolates, and alienates the abjected from one’s own self first and foremost: “The 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 1982), 4. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews With Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University. Press, 2001), 229.

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one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a sense, and not without laughter—since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection.”9 The camp inhabitants always place themselves against the coercive powers that lock them in the camp. Existence is a matter of permanent adjustment, as the prisoners have to distance themselves from all forces that demand moral compromise. The prisoner’s life, although fixed in space, is spiritually fluid; it therefore becomes an interval that offers freedom of choice rather than a narrow path that might resemble Stalinist ideology in its dogmatism. Ginzburg cannot achieve an absolute state of ethical peace, nevertheless, because of the constant changes in her circumstances and the enormous challenges she faces. This struggle is highlighted, when, at the beginning of the first volume she writes: “Doubtless, if the same things happened to me today, I would ‘recant.’ I almost certainly would, for I too have changed. I am no longer the proud, incorruptible, inflexible being I was then. But in those days this is what I was: proud, incorruptible, inflexible . . .” (1.11). She had to renounce the principles of inflexibility and incorruptibility in order to survive. By using the Russian word zlaia,10 Ginsburg stresses that her former straightforward ideological beliefs and her indifference to counterevidence were morally wrong. Her success in redefining herself resides in the fact that she became inflexible on a different level, abiding by fewer external rules—that is, those handed down by the Party—and establishing her own. This is why, in her own characterization, she associates chistaia (meaning clean, pure) with zlaia. There is a kind of ideological cleanliness that becomes “evil” when it turns dogmatic, concerned with its own preservation, the way the Communist system had become. Moreover, instead of claiming credit for her moral transformation, Ginzburg often acknowledges the importance of a number of circumstances, in particular a series of felicitous encounters. On arrest, she is first taken to prison and not to a camp; and when first imprisoned, she is not alone, but is with companions who teach her the rules of survival. It is only after she understandstands the rudiments of her new life that she faces solitary confinement and, afterwards, camp existence. Each change comes with a crisis during which each new rule is tested and adapted to the new environment. Her life is repeatedly

  9 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. 10 Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut, 11.

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saved by the kindness of others, and when this kindness turns out to have been motivated by self-interest, she considers it tainted and no longer acceptable. Such tainted kindness is that of one of her supervisors, the cook Ahmet, who cares for her in the hope of sexual favors. Ginzburg writes: “More and more often I felt his greedy eyes on me. When one morning, he turned up strutting like a peacock and offered me a large woolen scarf . . . I realized that my breathing space was over and that I must resign myself to going back to outdoor work” (1.391—my emphasis). With the words “My breathing space was over,” she suggests not only the end of physical comfort, but also reveals her flexible but nevertheless uncompromising stance in the interval that she inhabits. This is also one of the passages in the book that takes the body of the prisoner out of the asexual domain it is usually compelled to occupy. As noted above, Ginzburg’s survival is closely related to a “game of and with ideas.” Her game is part memory and part Scheherazade strategy. In his memoir At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Améry, a Holocaust survivor, is critical of such “playfulness” of the intellect vis-à-vis the camp environment. He emphasizes that in the camps the intellect “nullified itself when at almost every step it ran into its uncrossable borders. The axes of its traditional frames of reference then shattered. Beauty: that was an illusion. Knowledge: that turned out to be a game with ideas.”11 For Améry, it was futile to try to maintain an intellectual life in the camps. He adds: “we brought with us the certainty that remains ever unshakable, that for the greatest part the intellect is a ludus and that we are nothing more—or, better said, before we entered the camp we were nothing more—than homines ludentes” (author’s emphasis).12 For him, play is trivial. Although this position is hard to disagree with in the context of the cruelty of the camps, Ginzburg’s book, along with other Gulag and Holocaust memoirs, reclaims the life of the intellect and the importance of play. In Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, Tzvetan Todorov argues that Améry’s ideas contrast with Primo Levi’s insistence that the intellectual and spiritual life is worth maintaining in the camps. Todorov proposes that, as a professional intellectual, Améry “kept trying to establish a high-minded relationship with a peer, someone with whom he could share his delight in the beauties of the mind.”13 When he could not find that highminded relationship he was disappointed. However, Todorov explains, “it is perhaps because Levi considered the life of the mind an ordinary virtue and 11 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964, 1980), 19. 12 Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Polack (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 20. 13 Ibid., 94.

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not something reserved for an elite that he was able to keep faith in it and safeguard its power.”14 Like Levi, Ginzburg does succeed in using the life of the intellect as a means for survival or for creating a peredyshka, a breathing space. Poetry and literature in general are used as means to define and express her experience and also to communicate with others. As a result, intellectual life achieves a new dimension for Ginzburg. It is a game, it is ludus, but it is a game played to survive. In her case, maintaining the mind is closely connected with maintaining the body. The mind can will the body to continue, especially in the case of solitary confinement. Again, to quote Huizinga, “Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.”15 It permeates reality, comes from a time before culture, and is at the basis of language and its creations. Play is irrationality (in the sense that it has no immediate purpose), breaking away from pure reason into the more flexible world of the imagination. Here, the “cosmos” it disrupts is the camp world, which is suspicious of creativity, imagination, and difference. There are a number of characteristics of play in which Huizinga is particularly interested. First of all, play requires freedom.16 In Ginzburg’s case, it creates freedom and has to be entered into of one’s own free will. It starts with knocking on the walls in order to exchange information and it continues with singing arias from operas containing verses that communicate vital news. Play and survival are closely linked, creating a hybrid that might feel uncomfortable at first for the reader who is used to a strict separation of play and seriousness in camp literature. For example: “One day one of the non-party engineers told us, to a tune from Prince Igor, that Sasha had come back with a split lip. It was swollen and bleeding” (1.116). The song goes as follows, putting the serious message in the form of a playful song. Yet the inmates do not confuse the two: Up above your window, Sasha, Shines a cigarette so new, Quickly go retrieve it, or, We’ll be in the stew. . . . I hear and understand. The fair one Will be rescued before dawn. (1.116) 14 Ibid. 15 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 3. 16 Ibid., 7.

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The irony of this situation is closely connected with the absurdity and irrationality of the circumstances in which they live. Yet, the role of play is further emphasized when she adds that “We giggled like schoolchildren” (1.116). Probably the most telling moment when memory, play, and survival are closely knit is when Ginzburg is asked to recite Pushkin for half an hour in order to prove that she is not reading from a book and that she has not broken any rules. The setting is the overcrowded and dingy railway car that was transporting prisoners to Siberia. Her poetry recital has the power to draw in the reluctant other: “As I went on reciting, I kept my eyes fixed on the two guards. The Brigand at first wore a threatening expression: she’d get stuck in a minute, and then he’d show her! This gave place by degrees to astonishment, almost friendly curiosity, and finally ill-concealed delight” (1.295) This performance, on the fluid border between play and seriousness, confirms Huizinga’s idea that while play is limited in time and space it can be repeated, therefore becoming memory.17 Memory acquires a special role and we can talk, in respect to Ginzburg, about a rediscovery of memory. In the abject, the self meets with its repressed, rejected side and it somehow completes itself in order to rebuild itself. Memory not only creates an inner interval, but the memorizing of poetry creates and requires order. In a world as imperfect and chaotic as the one in which Ginzburg found herself, poetry brought a sense of perfection, of limit and beauty. When faced with the limitations of solitary confinement, Ginzburg decides to keep her mind alive by reciting poetry to herself. “So what was left? Poetry . . . only poetry . . . my own and other people’s” (1.198). Here, memory feeds upon itself and it itself becomes an interval that serves for both play and survival. Poetry creates the inner interval, the unseen separation from reality. As Huizinga said, play “is a stepping out of the real life.”18 However, this separation is not meant necessarily as escape but as a way of adjusting oneself to the conditions of reality. This is what Ginzburg does when she recites Pasternak’s verse “It’s penal servitude! What bliss!” (1.176). She momentarily redefines her situation with the help of this verse that becomes less effective later, in new circumstances: “It was useless to repeat Pasternak’s consoling lines about the bliss of penal servitude. Nothing helped” (1.177). This inadequacy points to the fluidity of the interval. Ginzburg’s ethics is a constant “move towards” an answer rather than stagnation and inaction until a moral solution is offered from the outside. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Ibid., 8.

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Ginzburg uses every chance to prolong the interval, even during her short walks: “It could never have occurred to my warder how many new impressions, dreams, sweet memories, a prisoner brought back from a fifteen-minute walk in a gray roofless cell” (1.197). Poetry has the power to give beauty to one’s surroundings when it is brought to bear on them: “Throw away your ax and come here! I found ‘berries of golden wine’. With this quotation from Severyanin I described my treasured trove” (1.412); or, “The constellations wheeling overhead seemed from time to time to change their shapes. I remembered Pasternak’s words: ‘The wind, warm and selfless, caressed the stars / With something of its own, eternal and creative . . .” (1.336). Ginzburg’s narrative technique is quite conventional for the autobiographical genre and in its reliance on the conventions of realism. Her work strives for formal and axiological coherence. However, it still successfully renders the subtle move of the subject from the permissible to the illicit, from the normative to the abject, from the tragic to the sublime. To paraphrase Kristeva, the more Ginzburg strays from the ideological self, the more fully she is saved. She becomes convinced of the importance of spontaneity and independent thinking: “For the first time in my life I was faced by the problem of having to think things out for myself—of analyzing circumstances independently and deciding my own line of conduct” (1.74). The ethical interval is a space for learning to think. The book starts with Ginzburg being accused for what she has not done. She feels that she cannot assume responsibility for acts not committed. The book ends, however, with the realization that every choice or relinquishing of choice has and should have moral content. Her message is existential, focusing on contemporary life as a struggle, as a life of permanent crossroads. This is why I believe that the intellect, in her work, is redeemed by its existence in what Pleşu describes as an interval, by the intervention of play as the source and material of culture. Conversely, the Gulag is a proof of the danger of rigid values and, therefore, in her book Ginzburg suggests a model which argues for a notion of truth that is not institutionalized but rather individual yet responsible. Thus, the textual interval in Ginzburg is inhabited by a rediscovered memory and by an inventive use of culture in both its high and low registers. Moreover, she simplifies the mechanism of moral choice and gets closer to an authentic “I” by looking at ethics not as an absolute, but as a continuous struggle with the given conditions. She endorses play, fluidity, and performance in order to avoid the fixity of the ideological self and to suggest a way of being that circumvents it. This way, the “abject” existence of the prisoner is made sublime. It is a sublime lined with irony: “It’s penal servitude! What bliss!”

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A Winter Coat for Vasya: The Evgenia Ginzburg-Vasily Aksenov Correspondence (1948-1976) Rimma Volynska

The Evgenia Ginzburg-Vasily Aksenov correspondence spans twenty-eight years (1948-1976), and although the exchange of letters is by no means regular or systematic, it delights the reader with heretofore unknown biographical materials of everyday byt.1 It also supplies very personal and novel glimpses into the Stalinist and immediate post-Stalinist epochs, and, most importantly, provides insights into both mother’s and son’s creative paths, as well as their almost simultaneous literary debuts. Whereas Ginzburg’s first attempt at her memoirs took place in 1958 with So It Began: Notes of a Teacher,2 throughout the 1960s she worked on her magnum opus Krutoi marshrut, completing the first volume in 1967. At almost the same time, Aksenov made his literary debut

1 See Vasily Aksenov, “Lovite golubinuiu pochtu . . .” Pis′ma (1940-1990 gg.) (Moscow: AST, 2015), henceforth, referred to as the “Ginzburg-Aksenov correspondence.” While the focus of this article is the correspondence between Aksenov and his mother, this edition also contains exchanges between Aksenov and Pavel Aksenov, Bella Akhmadulina, Boris Messerer, and Josif Brodsky. The correspondence between Ginzburg and Aksenov was discovered upon the death of Aksenov’s widow, Maya. The letters were originally deposited in the Aksenov American archive, but are now housed in the Solzhenitsyn Center of Russian Émigré Studies (also known as “The House of Russia Abroad”) in Moscow. Throughout his life, Aksenov had a very special sentimental attachment to these letters; they were among the very few things which he carried with him upon his exile from the Soviet Union in 1980. 2 See Evgenia Ginzburg, Tak nachinalos′. Zapiski uchitel′nitsy (Kazan: Tatknigoizdat, 1963).

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with the publication of Colleagues in 1959, but didn’t fully establish his name as an avant-garde writer until 1968 with the publication of Overstocked Barrels. In 1948, after tirelessly and relentlessly struggling with the Gulag administration, Ginzburg managed to obtain official permission for Aksenov to join her in Kolyma, where she was in forced exile until 1955. Aksenov was the first son of “enemies of the people”—that is, parents arrested and incarcerated in Gulag camps—to receive official permission to join his parent where she was in exile. To reunite with his mother in Magadan, Kolyma (a northeastern region of Siberia), Aksenov had to traverse almost the entire mainland free zone of the Soviet Union. The forbidding distance turned out to be a lure and an exotic attraction for the adventure-starved sixteen-year-old Vasily. In Within the Whirlwind, Ginzburg recollects his first letters and the thin thread of connection she was able to establish between herself and her son:3 For the first time since our parting twelve years before I started to receive letters from him in which I caught glimpses of my unknown son’s personality. Instead of the terse little notes he had previously sent (“How are you? We are all right. How is the weather where you are? It’s all right here,” etc.) I began to get emphatic assertions that he had received the pass and would definitely be coming. Was it true that Kolyma was a stone’s throw from Alaska? And was it the case that there were tribes in Kolyma related to the Iroquois? (2.255) For Aksenov, 1948 was not only the year of reunification with his mother in Kolyma, but also the most important intellectual turning point of his life. Thus, in The Pupil of [His] Eye: In Place of Memoirs (Zenitsa oka: vmesto memuarov), Aksenov wrote: I’ve had several turning points in my life. The main one is not emigration to America, but coming, when I was sixteen years old, to Magadan, to my mother. After eleven years of separation this [pivotal turning point] was, essentially, getting to know her. Youth coincided with the transition to a completely different life. Magadan, at that time, was the freest city in the Soviet Union, since many were not afraid to say what they wanted to

3 At the time of Ginzburg’s arrest in 1937, Vasya was only four years old; at the time of the first mother-son reunion, he was sixteen.

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say. They had nothing to lose—so what if they sent you back to the zone, the hell with them! I suddenly found myself in an intellectual environment. Mom was in the settlement and people who were former zeks were drawn to her. Professors, who worked as watchmen or washed the floors, came every week and had interesting conversations. This for me was of tremendous importance. Mom began to acquaint me with some of the forbidden literature, reading it from memory. In particular, Pasternak, who was not only not published—this was 1948-1949—but was also removed from libraries. Then by the way, Dostoevsky was also removed from shelves. Mom read Gumilev, Akhmatova, Igor Severyanin, whom for some reason she loved very much. It was there that I received an intellectual charge.4 While there was brief exchange of letters between mother and son upon her second arrest in 1949—“Vasenka, bring me a gray cotton blanket, two blouses (make sure you launder them first, they are in the dirty laundry), two sheets . . .”5—their correspondence proper did not resume until 1953 when Aksenov, after finishing at Magadan High School, left first for Kazan and then for Leningrad. We can distinguish various thematic concerns in the correspondence that start in 1953: unceasing worries about money; concern over his propiska, that is, Aksenov’s relentless bureaucratic struggles to obtain a permit, allowing Ginzburg to move first to Lvov and eventually to Moscow; his countless hapless infatuations; his poverty as a student; fascinating insights into the Stalinist and immediate post-Stalinist periods; revelations about his and his mother’s personal lives; their paths to creation; their keen interest and reliance upon one another’s literary opinion; and, finally, Aksenov’s irresistible drive to abandon medicine in order to become a writer. Interestingly, right from the beginning Ginzburg was not thrilled with her son’s growing passion for writing. As early as March 1959, Aksenov wrote: “As you see, I continue to crawl brazenly into literature. Now I can’t think about anything else, not medicine, nor scientific activity. A risky game, but interesting.”6 Ginzburg was tolerant towards Aksenov’s fascination with

4 Vasily Aksenov, “Zvezdnyi bilet na ostrov Krym,” in his Zenitsa oka: vmesto memuarov (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 420 (all translations mine). 5 Aksenov, “Lovite golubinuiu pochtu . . .” Pis′ma (1940-1990 gg.), 73. 6 Ibid., 94.

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literature and writing only for as long as he continued working as a doctor. Convinced that whatever attempts her son would make at publishing would be thwarted due to his status as the son of “an enemy of the people,” she did not overly concern herself with this issue. There were enough difficulties with his application to the Kazan University Medical School and his ongoing conflicts with the dean (because of his “parental lineage”), so Aksenov’s dream of a literary career did not seem to need serious discussion, according to Ginzburg. She should have known better, however. As the years went by, she observes Aksenov’s passionate engagement with literature, and his dream to abandon medicine in favor of full-time writing. After all, she witnessed her son’s stubborn and determined nature as soon as he arrived in 1948; she also saw his fierceness and resentment regarding the humiliations she had endured during her years in the Gulag. Most importantly, she remembered his plea, by now an almost legendary admonition, not to abandon her personal dignity in front of Ginzburg’s acquaintances: “Don’t cry in front of them” (2.265). In the course of their correspondence, their roles gradually changed. She began to encourage him to fight for his future. When, in 1954, the dean of the Kazan University Medical School refused to admit Aksenov before his mother was formally released from her term of exile in 1955, Ginzburg encouraged her son to challenge the dean by contacting both Kliment Voroshilov and Georgy Malenkov.7 Even so, her full support of his literary pursuits still had some way to go. Aksenov stated in a letter: “You write that it’s not worth paying too much attention to literary matters. Of course, I agree with you, that for moral peace it is better not to immerse oneself entirely in these matters, but what is one to do if the infection is gnawing away at you?”8 In April 1958, the editors of literary journals once reluctant to publish Aksenov had a change of heart. Overjoyed, he informed his mother that his short story “The Mechanic from Hamlet” (Mekhanik s Gamleta) was on the verge of being accepted by Don, a Rostov literary journal.9 Yet, when the editors requested that he alter the German man’s love for a Russian girl in the story, Aksenov refused. In the letters, he discussed with his mother various themes in his short stories, which he hoped to explore some more in his

7 See Ginzburg’s letter from May 7, 1954, in which she encourages her son not to give up, not to allow the stigma of the “sin of the enemies of the people” to curtail his professional career. The tone of the letter is highly emphatic. Ibid., 25. 8 Ibid., 102. Aksenov shared every literary victory with his mother. E.g., he immediately informed her when the journal Iunost′, no. 7 (1959) agreed to publish “Nasha Vera Ivanovna” and then “Asfal′tovye dorogi” (ibid: 98). 9 Ibid., 90.

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forthcoming longer works. One such theme was that of “superfluous people,” which had already proven problematic due to censorship. Instead of abandoning it, however, Aksenov hoped to develop it in Ticket to the Stars. In a letter of September 15, 1958, Aksenov wrote: “I, discouraged by my literary failures, conceived a story. It will be about ‘superfluous people,’ about those who have clung to big cities, about the false romance that leads to crime . . .” Soon afterwards his self-evaluation was positive: “I just finished the story Ticket to the Stars and consider it a step forward after Colleagues.”10 The early 1960s marked a remarkable literary breakthrough for both mother and son. By 1964, because the publication of Colleagues (1960), Aksenov became a member of the editorial board of Iunost′. He was also invited to join a Russian delegation to Japan, at the same time that his play Colleagues was being performed all over Eastern Europe and Ticket to the Stars was made into a film titled My Younger Brother. These successes also coincided with the circulation of Ginzburg’s hand-typed copies of Journey into the Whirlwind in samizdat. Aksenov wrote: “Moscow is full of rumors about your memoirs. Every intellectual is coming up to me and asking for a copy . . . Have you heard anything from Novyi Mir?”11 Within two years, though, Aksenov was expressing growing concerns about censorship: “For the first time I find myself in a position where I cannot write what I want, but what I must under contract, what other people demand or want.”12 Over a decade later, Aksenov would be forced into exile.13 A separate part of the mother-son correspondence pertains to Aksenov’s participation in the stiliagi trend, that is, his predilection for hip, beatnik-style clothing. The subject took up substantial space in their letters.14 Ginzburg lamented and agonized over her son’s rebellious attitude and his dandyish clothes. Writing to her younger sister on June 25, 1954, Ginzburg described what Aksenov looked like when he arrived at the Magadan airport for one of his visits from mainland Russia: “He was wearing a checkered cowboy shirt, on top of some ridiculous-looking jacket, also checkered, but small. This hoodie of

10 Ibid., 108. 11 Ibid., 117. 12 Ibid., 125. 13 Aksenov was stripped of Soviet citizenship and forced into exile in 1980. Ten years later, his citizenship was officially restored; however, he didn’t resettle in Russia until 2004. 14 The stiliagi trend—a term which doesn’t really have an English equivalent that does justice to its adherents without a perhaps derogatory connotation (fops, dandies, hipsters, beatniks, clothes’ horses)—consisted of young people’s admiration of Western, particularly American, clothing, film, and music (jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, in particular).

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incredible width with ‘drooping shoulders’ (he informed me this was the latest fashion trend!). Well, simply like a dressed-up clown. To complete the charm he wore chintz pants, which were too short, and in place of a hat, a monstrous hair style, the front strands of which, under the gusts of the Magadan wind, hung down to his chin. I was embarrassed in front of my seniors, who were right there at the airport, waiting for the plane for Moscow. They were so interested in seeing my son . . .”15 At first, Ginzburg imagined that her son’s fascination with a Western, especially American style of clothing would not have any serious consequences. However, as Aksenov persisted in his adolescent infatuation with Western fashion, Ginzburg despaired: “I hoped that the ordeals he had endured would bring him to his senses at least a little, would increase his sense of responsibility, abandoning this idiotic sense of style and clownish antics. But, it was not to be.”16 Aksenov referred to his mother as possessing a “nineteenth century mentality.”17 The reader must take into consideration that the motherson correspondence was conducted by two members of thoroughly opposite aesthetic tastes—the modernist Aksenov and the more nineteenth-century realist Ginzburg. Despite the horrors she experienced in the Gulag, Ginzburg retained her views on positivism. Her opposition to her son’s stiliazhestvo was rooted in an inability to comprehend and relate to this 1950s counterculture phenomenon. The trend, precipitated by the liberty allowed during the Thaw that followed Stalin’s terror, manifested itself in young people’s rejection of the mandatory drab Soviet style of dressing, along with the earlier period’s moral code and behavior. Ginzburg observed that her son’s fascination with stiliazhestvo centered on an inordinate attention to the fabric design and cut of his clothing. For Ginzburg, this represented disrespectful clowning, as well as an adolescent “psychosis of stiliazhestvo” (psikhoz stiliazhestva)18 which she hoped would pass as her son matured. She referred to it both at the time and later on as an “outright mockery of common sense” (priamoe izdevatel′stvo nad zdravym symslom)19 and a syndrome of the “yellow shirt” (zheltaia kofta).20 What Ginzburg could not understand was that her son’s concern with style represented his rejection 15 Ibid., 18. 16 Ibid. 17 See “Interview with Vasily Aksenov” in this volume. 18 Aksenov, “Lovite golubinuiu pochtu . . .” Pis′ma (1940-1990 gg.), 44. 19 Ibid., 31. 20 Comically, and with an obvious allusion to Mayakovsky’s tendency to shock the public with his clothing, such as a yellow shirt, Ginzburg refers to Vasya’s taste in clothing as the syndrome of the “yellow shirts.” Ibid., 29.

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of the social cruelty that had personally affected him from very early age. What was at first merely rebellion in clothing soon took over his whole personality, his kind of writing, taste in literature and art, and weltanschauung. Aksenov’s stylistic revolt represented, in effect, a protest against the stultification of Soviet reality. While it led to the ban on the publication of his works and expulsion from his homeland, it became synonymous with the global perception of Aksenov as a writer. Indeed, even when he died, obituaries from all over the world unanimously announced the death of a popular anti-Soviet prose writer and legendary stiliaga.21 A prominent place in the Ginzburg-Aksenov epistolary drama is held by “Vasya’s winter coat,” a motif which recurs almost throughout the correspondence. As soon as mother and son were permitted be together again, Ginzburg worried obsessively that her son would not have clothes suitable for the treacherous Kolyma winter. In her memoirs, she recollects that “My nervous tension mounted. Vasya was so skimpily dressed that he would freeze, having to fly in late autumn” (2.260); and further, when he finally arrives, she write: All this happened on October 9, 1948. After an interval of eleven years and eight months I was again taking my second son down the street, his hand clasped firmly in mine [. . .]. And now here he was, walking by my side, taking broader strides than I, with his belongings clutched in his arms—a muchpatched, much-washed rucksack resembling the packs we used to cart around in the camps. And the jacket on his back was the same kind we used to wear in Elgen. In my time nobody wore a jacket like that on the mainland [ . . .]. But I was terribly upset that nearly all that Vasya was wearing closely resembled camp clothing . . . a huge new task loomed ahead—getting Vasya an overcoat. (2.265-66) The topic of a “winter coat for Vasya” and Ginzburg’s constant concern about earning enough money to purchase it was further heightened after 1950 when Aksenov left for medical school. During her exile in Magadan, Ginzburg worked full-time as a kindergarten teacher and also tutored after hours in order to send money for Aksenov to purchase a proper winter coat before his journey. How dismayed she must have been when, upon reaching her goal,

21 Ekspres-gazeta v Kanade, July 6, 2009, 17.

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the winter coat suddenly disappeared under the most mysterious of circumstances. Hearing of its disappearance in the fall of 1953, she wrote: “this perpetual story with coats, which we buy every year and which we never have! . . . your ‘stylish coat’ is an old rag, but the price of it equaled two coats + an extra thousand . . . Take one and a half thousand from the account. And buy yourself a simple and sturdy coat. In no circumstances should you walk around in an autumn coat in the winter . . . You must buy a coat. I’m so afraid that you will freeze once again.”22 In the late 1990s, Aksenov gathered a number of his documentary-style and publicity articles, as well as three memoiristic short stories, into a collection titled The Pupil of His Eye: Instead of Memoirs.23 These autobiographical stories—“Three Overcoats and a Nose” (Tri shineli i nos), “My Mother’s Dossier” (Dos′e moei materi), and “The Pupil of His Eye” (Zenitsa oka)—are highly relevant to our discussion. In “My Mother’s Dossier,”24 Aksenov recollects the emotionally depleting process of obtaining permission to read his mother’s KGB case file held in the Tatarstan KGB Archives. All of the horrific incidents from Ginzburg’s life are in the story: her arrests, the names of her interrogators, the protocols of the interrogations—all described with her son’s characteristic detachment. The second story “The Pupil of His Eye”25 is a reworking of Aksenov’s early ’60s story “Father’s Blue Eye” (Goluboi glaz ottsa), a little known masterpiece in which the author relates poignant episodes from his childhood, among them the traumatic nights of his parents’ arrests, the KGB’s detention of the four-year-old Vasya, and his placement in the orphanage. The pupil in the title belongs to his father’s artificial blue eye, which was left behind at the time of his arrest. Yet the story which resonates most with the mother-son correspondence is “Three Overcoats and a Nose.”26 In a mockingly documentary manner, Aksenov recollects his medical school years in Leningrad, while engaged in following the stiliazhestvo of the 1950s. Comparing his own “provincial Kazan” brand of stiliazhestvo with that of Leningrad, he recounts his attempts to see Western movies and read Western journals in order to get information about

22 Aksenov, “Lovite golubinuiu pochtu . . .” Pis′ma (1940-1990 gg.), 22. 23 Vasily Aksenov, Zenitsa oka: vmesto memuarov (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005). 24 Vasily Aksenov, “Dos′e moei materi,” in his Zenitsa oka: vmesto memuarov (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 268-73. 25 Vasily Aksenov, “Zenitsa oka,” in his Zenitsa oka: vmesto memuarov (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 393-411. 26 Vasily Aksenov, “Tri shineli i nos,” in his Zenitsa oka: vmesto memuarov (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 248-68.

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style and fashion outside the USSR. (In his medical school’s Komsomol paper he recollected the bullying he suffered because of his foppish clothes.) We also find a description of his “solid winter coat,” the very same one that Ginzburg worked so hard to procure for him. Finally, the reasons for the mysterious disappearance of his winter coat become apparent: “Now I can admit. I hated my winter coat more than Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. This product seemed to be especially designed to destroy human dignity: the heavy drape with batting, the nastiest ‘seal’ collar, the tight shoulders, the cow’s nape, the crooked flaps.”27 Aksenov’s detailed description of the despised winter coat contrasts hauntingly with Akaky Akakievich’s coat in Nikolai Gogol’s famous “Overcoat,” the acquisition of which requires the protagonist to make so many sacrifices. In “Three Overcoats and a Nose,” Aksenov recalls how he sold his coat to buy a Western one he accidentally found in a “commission store that smell[ed] of mothballs” that is significantly located on Nevsky Prospect. Though the garment was “worn to shreds,” the young stiliaga cannot not refrain from buying it. The epiphany of his first encounter with this item strikes Aksenov like lightning. Using Nikolai Dobroliubov’s topos, Aksenov writes: “And suddenly one day ‘a ray of sunshine in a dark kingdom’28 flashed upon me. That day, in the vilest March slush, I wandered into a thrift shop on Kolts . . . In the middle of ordinary Soviet black and brown colors a camel-colored spot stood out insolently, a belt hung from a metal buckle, not resembling ours. Unprecedented buttons looked innocently like cracked nuts.”29 Just like the hapless hero of Gogol’s story, who places on a pedestal a woman who turns out to be a harlot, the young Aksenov idealizes this secondhand Western coat, only to realize that it has been worn to shreds and will provide no defense against the harsh Petersburg winter weather. Thus, forty years later, Aksenov returned to the key unresolved question that so distressed his mother in their letters, that is, what happened to the winter coat. Ginzburg wrote: “I never found out under what circumstances your coat went missing. You don’t seem to think it necessary to write about this.”30 Albeit posthumously, she gets an answer and, perhaps, more than poetic justice.

27 Ibid., 251. 28 See Nikolai A. Dobroliubov, “Luch sveta v temnom tsarstve,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1963). 29 Aksenov, “Tri shineli i nos,” 253. 30 Aksenov, “Lovite golubinuiu pochtu . . .” Pis′ma (1940-1990 gg.), 51.

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Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Krutoi marshrut Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova1

Lev. She died May 25, 1977 at 7:00 am in the morning. She was buried the next day. There were no funeral announcements. It wasn’t possible to tell too many people. The rain persisted from the night before, a grey, cold, autumn rain, now fading, now increasing. Towards noon her tiny apartment was full. In the tight entrance, raincoats, coats and umbrellas were piled high in the corners and along the walls. The coffin was on the table in the room. She was unrecognizable. A saffron-yellow old lady. But in life she never seemed old, even in the most difficult days of her illness. The whole time, friends, acquaintances, and readers were coming in and walking out: former Kolyma and Vorkuta friends, neighbors living nearby. People smoked in the kitchen. They were crowding around the staircase, and in the doorway. In the corner of the room there was a record player. Bach played not too loudly. Her son, Vasily Aksenov, grew dark and thin in the process of greeting people silently; he moved around slowly, changing records. They carried the coffin out in the rain. A hearse, bus, and a few cars. There were no fewer than one hundred persons seeing her off to the grave site. Kuzminsky Cemetery. It’s old, spacious, and green. The main avenue is wide. They were driving the coffin in a hearse, as though it were an ambulance. We turned into a narrow avenue and stopped. Further on we had to get through narrow passageways in between

1 A translation of Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova, “Evgenia Ginzburg v kontse Krutogo marshruta,” in their My zhili v Moskve 1956-1980 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), 311-44. Henceforth, the abridged memoir will identify the speaker as either Lev or Raisa in small caps. Translation Olga Cooke.

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fences. The cross on her husband Anton Walter’s grave was dark. Right next to the grave there was a fresh hole in the clay. The rain subsided. They opened the coffin once again. The unnaturally sallow complexion looked more clearly like the face of a stranger. I asked Vasya: “Can I speak?” He nodded. “She was born for happiness. To be happy and give the gift of happiness. In order to love and be loved. To raise sons. To write poetry and prose. To teach students. To teach the marvelous. And upon this young, beautiful, lifeaffirming woman came crashing down such misery, such trials and sufferings, which would have broken many a strong man. She experienced all the horrors of Stalin’s imprisonments, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of people. There she learned about the death of her oldest son . . . And after being imprisoned ten years, after a short-lived period of hope, a new arrest, new trials, the conviction of perpetual exile. And after freedom came the death of her husband, Doctor Walter, and all the new hardships, new disappointments. Short on joys and long on misfortunes. And finally a tortuous, horrible illness. But always and everywhere she remained her own person. Always and everywhere she was a real person, a real woman. Just like the trees of the north, where she suffered so, trees that grow in spite of the frost and storms, grow and yield fruit. So she each time rose above her miseries, worked, brought joy to others, and knew herself how to be joyful. “Her book reached worldwide fame. [. . .] Everyone who has ever written and continues to write memoirs, who tries to impress and imagine our past, and the tragic fate of our country, all of us have followed in her footsteps. Journey into the Whirlwind is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of our social thought and our literature . . . What joy it is that she found the time to partake of a morsel of such glory. She saw Paris, and spent time with Böll in Cologne.2 And she so loved this marvelous trip . . . It’s sad she did not live to see the publication of the second volume. She died in great pain. Death was a release from all her suffering . . . And nevertheless this was an absurdly cruel death, which brought all of us grief and pain . . . But death ended. And her immortality will continue. She will live, as long as everyone who remembers her lives. The language in which her book was written will live even longer, as well as those languages into which these books were translated and will be translated.” Then Zora Ganglevskaya, a former prisoner, spoke. Grey-haired, she was not too tall; she spoke quietly, in a somewhat muffled, somewhat even voice:

2 Heinrich Böll wrote the introduction to Ginzburg’s second volume of memoirs. Friend to Soviet dissidents, Böll provided refuge to Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was expelled from the USSR in 1974.

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“When the prison transport arrived in Kolyma, I was working as a nurse in the hospital. The women brought her to us very sick, very emaciated, in a fever. They brought her and said: ‘Heal her. Zhenya must live, absolutely must live. She is the best of us, the most talented. She will write about everything.’ We watched over her. And everyone in the hospital loved her greatly. From that very moment, we became friends. And so she lived and wrote. And just imagine how much more she would have written. Whoever knew her will never forget her, will always love her. Farewell, Zhenya . . .” Her other old friend, Wilhemina Slavutskaya, walked up to her coffin. “I want to tell Alyosha3 (Alyosha was standing across from the coffin, tall, handsome, absent-minded, in a bright cap) that your grandmother started writing her book as a letter to her grandson. We are so grateful to you for this. But you have to be worthy of this book. This is a huge honor. Remember your grandmother.” The last good-byes. We heard the hammer pounding. The jerky hammer pounding above the coffin. That sound was also in the crematorium—in that machine section of death—reminding one of cemetery good-byes. The funeral banquet was laid out on the same table where the coffin had lain in the morning. A common wake, with the sad and the drunk, when finally people laugh more than they cry. Vasya recalled how he went to France with his mother. Daughter Tonya on this day flew in from Orenburg, where she was touring with her theater. She was late for the funeral, and sat by herself at the grave in the evening. At the wake she told us how much her mother loved to celebrate, how cheerful she always was and how she infected others with her joy. Someone said: “We have to write about her. Everyone has to write about knowing her.” Raisa. I saw her for the first time in August of 1964 at Frida Vigdorova’s,4 who exclaimed triumphantly: “Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg-Aksenova, who wrote Journey into the Whirlwind, arrived from Lvov.” While reading her manuscript earlier, I tried to imagine the author of the book: I had before my eyes the face of a suffering, tragic old woman. But she was young, pretty, cheerful. Although chubby, she was light on her feet. Her hair was parted down the middle, with a bun at the back. Not fashionable. Curls hanging down her neck. No note of suffering about her. On the contrary, a successful woman. A well-groomed,

3 Aleksey Aksenov, born in 1960, is the son of Vasily Aksenov and his first wife, Kira Mendeleeva. 4 Frida Vigdorova (1915-1965) was known for her transcriptions of Joseph Brodsky’s trial in 1964.

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well-cared-for woman. Such women have maids, dachas, cars. Her eyes radiated intelligence. Her face was soft, while her cheekbones were widely set apart, and in the slits of her eyes one noticed both Tatar and Russian common folk traits. In this way, she resembled Frida like a sister, as one glimpses ancient historical events on the faces of Russian Jewish intelligentsia. Once, I saw how she was talking to a Tatar peasant woman. Both of them had round faces, fine, high-cheek-boned women. Their pronunciation was roundish and soft, sharply distinct from the language of medium-level intelligentsia, which we often hear around us. “If you believe in the transmigration of souls, then in my previous life I was a peasant woman.” Within a month after we met, we went to Lvov on a business trip. I was afraid of visiting her. But she greeted us so warmly in the town, which seemed strange and unfriendly, that we didn’t want to go anywhere without her. We parted when we left to lecture. On the first night, we were up late, a downpour started, and she asked us to stay for the night. “I don’t have anything to offer you, only tea and eggs,” she said. She was indifferent to food. She had a small apartment, scantily furnished, clean. There was a reproduction of Raphael’s Madonna, which would go to Moscow, too. A photo of Pasternak hung in such a way that when you entered the apartment you couldn’t see it. I wouldn’t have noticed this, but she pointed it out herself. She would do this for her friends. Piles of music. We talked and talked, moving from one theme to another, about her and Lev’s prisons and camps, Moscow news, both political and literary, Vasily Aksenov’s books, a newspaper from Lvov, where she worked as a correspondent. She talked a great deal about her late husband, Anton Yakovlevich Walter, who was a German from the Crimea. A doctor, fascinated by folklore; he took down German songs, fairy tales. He met Zhirmunsky a few times. Indeed, he was arrested because of the “Zhirmunsky Case.”5 When Evgenia Semenovna and Dr. Walter were rehabilitated, they settled in Lvov. Walter liked the city a great deal, the streets, churches, buildings, which preserved the spirit of German architecture. They both started working there. Everything was looking up. Then all of a sudden his camp scurvy returned. “Avitaminosis . . . even though we had lots of fruit, his organism could no longer assimilate vitamins . . . Anton had worked in the mines for a long time.

5 The “Zhirmunsky Case,” so-called after Victor Zhirmunsky, 1920s literary critic and formalist. He was arrested three times, in 1933, 1935, and 1941, for his focus on German studies.

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Seven ribs were broken. I tried to get him cured in Moscow, and ended up burying him instead in Kuzminki. [. . .]” She herself did not want to restore her membership of the Party. But a Party official asked: “‘So what are you going to write in your application? CRTD?6 For Anton, my return to the Party was a blow! Komarov got me back in. They praised me for displaying my Bolshevik steadfastness and didn’t sign anything about myself, or others. “I met my former husband, Pavel Vasilievich Aksenov, in 1956 in Kazan. He was doctrinaire in the past, and so he remained. This distinction, between doctrinaires and liberals largely determined our relationships with people.” On April 9, 1965, she wrote to us from Lvov: “Raechka, my dear, thank you for sending Solzhenitsyn’s letter, which brought me great joy . . . Please send him my note of gratitude for his attention and good wishes. How I’d like to meet him, but this is so difficult, as we both live in the provinces.” They met in Moscow. They arranged a meeting not far from the house he regularly visited whenever he arrived from Ryazan. They looked at one another and turned away. They kept waiting. Then they took a few steps forward, and started to look at each other again uncertainly, and both practically simultaneously said: “I imagined you to look very differently!” A photograph had been saved in which we are standing in the entrance of her house in Lvov, 8 Shevchenko St. She was smiling, squinting, eyes getting narrow. In another photo, she is in profile. She’s pinning up her hair, fixing it. It seemed an ancient feminine, coquettish move. Her elbow was raised high. Her arms appeared refined. She knew that this gesture flattered her. I gazed at it admiringly, but it’s painful. When she was imprisoned she had turned thirty-four. She was older than fifty when released. Looking at young, fashionconscious women, she would sometimes say to me with bitterness: “I didn’t look like this! They took this away from me, they robbed me.” The loss of her “female years in the prime of life,” as she called them herself, was more bitter than the loss of her work, than even the loss of her freedom. In Lvov, she acquainted me with her friend, Leonid Vasilievich. He was a retired colonel, tall, reddish-blonde, handsome. He admired her, and she enjoyed his admiration. In the fall, she wrote to us that he had left for Tula to see his dying mother. She wrote: “I’m deprived of the one understanding, loyal companion just at a time when I need him.” [. . .] After Leonid Vasilievich’s death she was no longer capable of remaining in Lvov. On July 7, 1966, she wrote: “no

6

Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activities.

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matter how often you’ve wished to hasten my permission to live in Moscow, it, alas, keeps falling apart. There’s something fatal about this . . . Apparently, the Lychakov Cemetery does not want to yield me to Kuzminsky Cemetery (note the gallows’ humor?).”7 Occasionally, her son would get her rest house stays from the House of Arts. She loved the measured routine, the strolls, the possibility of working without obstacles, the chance to socialize. When she first arrived in Maleevka,8 the registration official asked: “Are you a member of the family?” She answered: “No, it is my own case.” It was difficult moving to Moscow. But her friends helped, her readers, her acquaintances and strangers, more than thirty people. Roy Medvedev9 and Grigory Svirsky10 did a lot; they were both Party members at the time. [. . .] In 1966, she moved to a one-room apartment at Aeroportovskaya station in a writers’ co-op. [. . .] After moving to Moscow, she would sometimes ask: “Perhaps I was supposed to sit quietly in Lvov and write and write! But I am alive, after all!” Inner turmoil, discord, even the schism between being a writer and a human being was one of the sources of the drama in the life of Evgenia Ginzburg’s final years. She wrote to us on April 5, 1965 from Lvov: “Yes, Raechka, you probably felt that during my rather short-lived celebration of Women’s Day, I should be sad. Why be merry? I don’t have many years left, maybe months (this is not pessimism, but simply a reckoning with my age), and the time remaining keeps apace, and I have to get everything done that hasn’t gotten done, which is why I should be watching lost time . . .” She herself was not truly a selfless servant to the Word. She could be distracted by large and small joys, everyday chores, and holidays, and sometimes just bustle. But she overcame the striving for joy, a striving so unsatisfied she overcame illnesses, and fear. Her memory and sense of duty powerfully brought her back to her typewriter, which did not have a cover, but was neatly covered with a matted red throw. When she moved to Moscow, she didn’t join the Union of Writers, nor a committee of a publishing house. As a pensioner, she attached herself to the Party group of her house management. She paid her dues. And published a wall newspaper twice a year. She would punctually attend meetings (she did everything punctually). And continued to write Whirlwind. “In my Party cell, there

7 The Lychakov Cemetery is located in Lvov. 8 Maleevka is a village outside of Moscow. 9 Roy Medvedev, author of Let History Judge, was among Ginzburg’s friends, who circulated her memoirs in samizdat. 10 Grigori Svirsky, author of A History of Post-Soviet Writing (The Literature of the Moral Opposition) (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981).

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are mostly retired persons, ‘black colonels,’11 who have no idea who I am or any idea about samizdat.” The need to see them, hear them, and go to meetings became more and more difficult for her; in fact, it turned her off. But it was this Party organization that gave her the reference needed for permission to travel to Paris in 1976. Beginning in the 1960s, people read the manuscript of Journey into the Whirlwind; then, they distributed it and retyped it. In IMEL,12 they made four hundred copies (the magazine Iunost′ sent the manuscript). Roy Medvedev, who befriended Evgenia Ginzburg (she affectionately called him her “nephew”; his father had perished in the years of the Terror) gave Journey into the Whirlwind to Andrey D. Sakharov.13 [. . .] One of her readers dictated the entire book onto tape. In the last years of her life, Evgenia Semenovna would repeat: “I’m grateful to Nikita [Khrushchev], not only because he released all of us, or I’d be lying in eternal permafrost with a dog-tag on my leg, but also for saving us from fear. For ten years, right up until they arrested Siniavsky and Daniel,14 I was not afraid.” If we could gauge the exact number of samizdat copies, I think that Journey into the Whirlwind would be in the forefront. The manuscript ended up in the West. In 1967, the Italian publisher Mondadori published the book simultaneously in Italian and in Russian. Many chapters were broadcast on the BBC. The minister of security, Semichastnyi,15 announced at a meeting in the publishing house of Izvestiia that Journey into the Whirlwind is a “slanderous work, which aids our enemies.” This is what the most powerful head of the KGB said. In Lvov, we had learned that there had been another version of the manuscript, which was much harsher. It was entitled Under Lucifer’s Wing.16 She talked about it in a whisper in a deserted park. A few years later I asked Zhenya about this manuscript. And she answered: “I burned it. I got scared and burned it.” [. . .] She herself writes this at the end of her book: “One can still understand, and forgive, those who were permanently haunted by fear, who were unable

11 “Black colonels” were so called in the military dictatorship of Greece. 12 The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (Institut Marksa-Engel′sa-Lenina) was a library and archive attached to the Communist Academy in Moscow. 13 Andrey D. Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, Nobel laureate, and an activist for peace and human rights. 14 Andrey Siniavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested in 1966 for publishing their work in samizdat. 15 Vladimir Efimovich Semichastnyi was chairman of the KGB from 1961 to 1967. 16 Orlova is referring here to Ginzburg’s first draft, discussed in Olga Cooke’s introduction to this volume.

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to master their own nervous reflexes. I too still sometimes relapse into the old state of terror—though not to the point of renouncing my past, or my friends, or this book—when the doorbell rings at night or when I hear the key turning on the other side of the lock” (2.391). Her friends got frightened for her too. They started coming up with ways to defend her. They organized an interview with a correspondent from the newspaper Unita, to whom she said: “My book was published abroad without my knowledge or permission.” This was true. But, as for the fact that her manuscript became a book in Italy, Germany, France, and the USA, this made her happy. I translated for her the reviews from American and British newspapers and magazines. She was upset that some of the reviews connected her Journey into the Whirlwind with Svetlana Stalina’s Twenty Letters to a Friend,17 which appeared almost at the same time. Our attempts to defend Svetlana were hopeless. She [Ginzburg] hated everything that had any connection to Stalin. Soon they removed Semichastnyi. That immediate danger for her passed. Lev. In October 1970, the president of France, Pompidou, came to Moscow. Among the journalists who accompanied the president was K. S. Karol,18 the famous publicist and political scientist, author of books on China and Cuba. He was born in Poland, into a family of Communists; in 1939, as a sixteen-year-old, he escaped from the Nazis eastward. He finished school in Rostov, and enrolled in the university, became a soldier, but was arrested for his “anti-Soviet conversations.” He again ended up on the front after the camps, in a penal battalion. After the war, he was repatriated to Poland and from there he left for France. Karol was an independent left-winger. In the spring of 1963, he collaborated with the leaders of the journal Express and participated in an edition of Evgeny Yevtushenko’s Autobiography, which angered many Party hacks and certain leaders of the Union of Writers. It was Karol who turned to Togliatti19 for help, and the latter sided with the poet. Karol was extremely excited when we introduced him to Evgenia Ginzburg. “Your book is a wonderful work. It’s both documentary and artistic. It’s not enough to tell the truth, it is even more important for it to be believed. And it’s important that not only those who didn’t know anything believe it, but also the biased, the deceived. Your book convinces and changes attitudes.” She liked Karol as much as we did. They spoke in a completely friendly manner, while

17 Svetlana Alliluyeva published her samizdat memoir about being Stalin’s daughter in 1967. 18 K. S. Karol was a journalist from Poland. 19 Palmiro Togliatti was the leader of the Italian Communist Party, 1927-1964.

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he listened and probed. But as soon as he made sympathetic remarks on Che Guevara and about the student riots in Paris in May of 1968, she got angry: “What are you saying! This Che Guevara is a common bandit, fanatic, and your girls and boys have simply gone crazy over insane slogans and because of drugs. They’re praying to Che Guevara, and worse, to Mao.” Karol tried to respond, but she would interrupt him even more angrily, even more loudly: “Excuse me, but you don’t understand a thing. Mao is a new version of Stalin. Sometimes I stumble on their radio broadcasts—which are so disgusting, in such a shrill treble. How they praise their great helmsman. Everything is the same as happened with us. Your Sartre is either an idiot or a scoundrel. How can one talk about a revolution after all that has happened? All revolutions are criminal. Immoral! Inhuman!” A few of the present supported her vociferously. Karol had a difficulty in making his points. “Please, please, I can’t understand. You don’t believe your newspapers when they write about the West or about your country. Why do you believe them when they lie about China? I was there. Twice. And for long periods of time, I drove around the country. I spoke with Chou En Lai,20 with students, with workers. They do have a lot that is wrong, repugnant. There is hypocrisy, there is cruelty. But their system is completely different from yours. At first the cultural revolution was precisely a revolution. The youth rebelled because they didn’t want to reconcile with bureaucracy, and they didn’t want conditions like yours. Mao was sufficiently smart and did not only not crush this movement, but started to direct it. Naturally, there is a great deal in China that is awful, cruel. And I wrote about this. But their conditions are completely different from yours. And the politics is the opposite of yours. For the first time in hundreds of years there is no hunger in China. No famine, no indigence . . . You were raised in the Stalinist school of intolerance. You go from one extreme to another. I understand your anger. Yesterday and today I was with Pompidou at events. Bureaucratic shows. Vulgar, stupid rituals. I walk along the streets and see how the world of the Kremlin and her ministers does not resemble the world of streets, stores, and pubs, or this world of yours. There are abysses between them. But now I’m observing a strange paradox—these different worlds converge in one thing: they are extremely conservative. One can understand why your government does not want the independent activities of the masses. But, as it turns out, you reject all revolutions, because they are immoral.

20 Chou En Lai was the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1976.

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What do you want, to forbid them? Not allow them? Do you like earthquakes or typhoons? They, too, are immoral and inhumane!” “Oh, the inevitability of revolution! This is a fairytale concocted by Marx. In the 1920s, our Trotskyites screamed about world revolution. And you’re doing the same thing. The Swedes and the British avoided all revolutions. Their unemployed live better than our workers and our professors.” “But you forget that they, too, had revolutions in their time. And even now, not everyone would agree with you that they live in paradise. And as to the inevitability of a revolution—it is not a fairytale. Take, for example, May 1968. It caught us by surprise. This was a true elemental revolution. No one knew what to do. The Communists were the most confused. Now we try to draw conclusions. We have to be ready for inevitable convulsions, in order to prevent such destruction, such victims, which can be avoided, in order for the revolution to not turn into terror, into totalitarianism. We do not want to duplicate you, or the Chinese.” “You don’t want it, but you are moved by the Chinese henchmen, just like Romain Rolland21 and Feuchtwanger22 cared for our henchmen. You are satiated snobs, crazy with living off the fat of the land, you don’t understand what you are doing! In the end you will destroy yourselves. You will come to your senses, when it is too late!” Karol also got heated up, stopped holding back and screamed just as much as his detractors. “You are wrong, totally wrong! We are trying to learn and understand. Understand that besides your past afflictions there are other horrific problems today. There are a billion starving people in the world. Every day hundreds of thousands of people die of hunger. People are killed daily in Vietnam, in Indonesia. They are killed, tortured, and persecuted . . . We empathize with you. We speak and write about Solzhenitsyn, Siniavsky, Daniel, Ginzburg, Galanskov; we petition and protest. But we cannot forget about the sufferings of other people in other countries. You shout ‘satiated snobs.’ But you don’t know anything about us. Yes, some of us have enough money to live peacefully, to write essays and books, to enjoy art, to travel. But we have engaged in a political struggle only because our conscience forces us to, as does our compassion . . . And you call this snobbery!”

21 Romain Rolland was a French dramatist and novelist, but more famous for his admiration for Stalin. 22 Leon Feuchtwanger, a German novelist, was, like Rolland, an apologist for Stalin.

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The argument wore itself out hopelessly. Karol left in near-dejection. On the next day, he said to me: “Ginzburg is a remarkable woman. I knew even earlier that she was a splendid writer. Yesterday I loved her ardor, her young passion. She resembled our students, the most radical ones, then, in May. But she curses them and doesn’t want to understand them. It’s a terrible thing that your best people become such convinced reactionaries. This is one of the most cruel consequences of Stalinism.” And Evgenia Semenovna, remembering Karol, said: “He is, of course, smart and knows a lot. Only he is crack-brained. A typical Trotskyite. I met a lot of them in my youth. One of them took me out. He was an obnoxious loudmouth. I never liked them. And here, thank you very much, half a century goes by, and the same thing: ‘world revolution!’ ‘Control the elements.’ They have gone completely mad in the West.” Raisa. She got used to being the first at everything. In her prison cells, in exile, and, probably, much earlier, in school, at the university. She would naturally become the center of attention, the focus of any social event. Because she was good-looking, sociable, witty, more often than not the most educated, she amazed everyone with her extraordinary memory. She would tell stories in an entertaining and artistic manner. She got along wonderfully with her neighbors in the huge communal apartment. For this reason, she attracted both young and old, refined members of the intelligentsia and rank-and-file Party members, SRs and Stalinists, society ladies and peasants. A live mind, energy, temperament, along with the desire to be first—all of these are, of course, innate, just like musical pitch or memory. But in her youth these abilities were further developed and strengthened in the midst of the Party intelligentsia of Kazan, and later in the barracks and transports. She sensed that she was attractive, she knew about the permanence of her life forces. And this consciousness made her even stronger. She experienced many misfortunes, but she didn’t know the sadness of female loneliness, nor unrequited love. She survived, transcended the horrors of an eighteen-year imprisonment. And so a proud sense of victory emerged. In the beginning, as expected, a joyful surprise. Here it is, this is how it happens! I could do it! But there was also grief—how much of life was lost, hopeless, gone and never to be returned! The more time separated her from Kolyma, the louder the voices of her fans, the more frequently and harshly came bitter thoughts: “You don’t understand that I am just a sick old woman! It’s all too late! I type for half an hour and get tired, as though I were cutting down trees.

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I’m short-winded, I have arrhythmia. Poor, poor Zhenya, once upon a time I was indefatigable . . . And now it’s difficult even to think. [. . .] And I’m of no use to anyone. It’s miserable to look at myself and at all of God’s creation.” But then within a few days or even a few hours she would be able to say proudly: “Today I walked twenty thousand steps. According to a pedometer. At first, I was short of breath, but I drove myself. And here I am, fresh like a cucumber. And for no less than four hours I sat at my typewriter. I don’t know whether anything good came out of it, but eight and one-half pages are almost ready.” [. . .] Her Moscow apartment was equipped without any pretensions, it was conventionally comfortable: a piano, a sofa with pillows, an old soft armchair, a shaky telephone table, an oval table covered with a fringed tablecloth, lots of books, on shelves, on the table, and chairs. A large reproduction of the Madonna, brought from Lvov. Lots of photos: her sons, Tonya in different roles, Anton Walter, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, her parents. Photos of herself in her youth. A great multitude of different people came to visit her, and some who were not acquainted with one another. Fellow prisoners came to see her, her cohorts on prison transports, their children and friends, intellectuals, literary figures, doctors, lawyers, people from publishing houses and editorial offices, from scientific institutions, theaters. This is why Evgenia Semenovna’s birthday on December 21 was celebrated two or three times. She took this very seriously; she would carefully match up who would sit with whom at the table. This, too, was a desire to go back, to celebrate like in the old times. Lev. She would judge poetry, books, and people, as it seemed to us, rather unjustly or in a biased manner: either too severely or too indulgently. In Journey into the Whirlwind, she wrote: “For this entire year, there was only one happy occurrence: in the beginning of spring we succeeded in receiving from the library a large one-volume book by Mayakovsky. For a few weeks we lived and breathed Mayakovsky.” But then she would tell us: “I have fallen out of love with Mayakovsky. In my youth I loved him immensely, but not now. He’s coarse, a loudmouth. He’s a newspaperman, not a poet. And how he praised the Soviet regime. An agitator! A brawler! Yes, I fell out of love. True, after him there were many even worse . . . I never demanded anyone send me missives about “the depths of Siberian mines.” But why be scoundrels? Almost all Soviet writers collaborated with the powers that be, they cursed the enemies of the people, which means, all of us. And Russian literature was always for the oppressed, the humiliated, and injured. [. . .]

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“I really love Zhenya Yevtushenko. He is such a big baby. Sincere to the point of naivete. Once, he fell to his knees and said: ‘I want you to be my mother. Consider me your son.’ What a total child. But he has wonderful poems. ‘Heirs of Stalin,’ ‘Baby Yar,’ and ‘Winter Station,’ are, in my opinion, really poetic.23 Or, for example, ‘Fears are disappearing in Russia . . .’ They are fabulous poems and they inspired Shostakovich.24 These snobs have started a fad of cursing him. But, in my opinion, he’s better than Voznesensky.25 The latter is very talented, but he’s artificial, machine-like.” Raisa. Each year, Evgenia Semenovna would spend two, three weeks on motor ships: “I am opening and closing navigation.” She loved these voyages, rejoiced in the open spaces of the Volga, strolls in new cities and polished comfort. And she followed her invariable regime strictly. In the spring of 1970, her old friend from Kazan went with her. And she demanded the following conditions: “No conversations about Journey into the Whirlwind . . . You are on a pension, and I’m still working. So, don’t say anything about yourself.” A tall, lean, stooping man started visiting their table more and more often. His eyes were translucently pale blue. He was an engineer, a childless widower, Evgeny Nikolaevich. The motor ship approached Kazan, and passengers were loading onto the deck. Someone noticed: “Here is my alma mater. I finished law school before the revolution.” Evgenia Semenovna couldn’t hold back: “And I finished at the Departments of History and Philology in 1925.” And she immediately heard Evgeny Nikolaevich’s voice: “That must mean you studied along with Evgenia Ginzburg?” “What Ginzburg?” “Have you not heard? The author of Journey into the Whirlwind . . .” “Seems like I met her.” She answered dryly, absentmindedly, turning to her friend. Evgeny Nikolaevich looked hurt. He stopped visiting their table. His cabin was across from the wheelhouse of the radio operator. A gust of wind blew open the door into the corridor and a few letters flew out. He picked one up and saw “Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg” on the envelope and brought her the letter. “So it’s you . . .”

23 These are three of Evgeny Yevtushenko’s most famous poems. 24 Dmitry Shostakovich based his Symphony no. 13 upon Yevtushenko’s “Baby Yar.” 25 Andrei Voznesensky, a contemporary of Yevtushenko and Aksenov, was considered part of the post-Stalinist “Thaw” generation.

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We told our friends and acquaintances this May fairytale. So, that means miracles exist. In September of that 1970 year, she had extra tickets for the motor ship Dobroliubov: Moscow–Perm–Moscow. We were overjoyed at her invitation to sail together and then became acquainted with Evgeny Nikolaevich. For twelve days we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Often we strolled, the four of us. We sat on the deck. In the restaurant, everyone paid for himself. They addressed each other by their patronymic. Occasionally, we heard: “[the informal] you,” “Zhenya.” We pretended not to notice. He attended to her in an old-fashioned way. She was coquettish, seemed younger and more beautiful. And he radiated pride. And I fell in love with her all over again, the way I did in Lvov. I loved her joy, so late in life and so well deserved. He seemed a solid support, a woman could rely on him. He didn’t say much about himself. More often, he spoke about his childhood on the Volga, his love of fishing. He never argued. He openly detested politics, always. He wasn’t too interested in literature. And he did not pretend that everything that so occupied the three of us was important to him. The main thing is he loved her. It was evening once. We were on the deck. She was reading “Russian Women.”26 We were resting. The Volga. Freedom. Careless people. And I tried to imagine prison cells, where she read Nekrasov’s poem, where she gifted poetry to her unfortunate cellmates, and to those who heard the poem for the first time, and who recalled, listening to her. In the chapter “Car No. 7,” she wrote that the heroines of Nekrasov’s poem “imagine themselves as neighbors on a transport. No one would be surprised if right next to Klava Mikhailova and Nadya Tsareva were Masha Volkonskaya and Katya Trubetskaya.”27 [. . .] Evgeny Nikolaevich said delightedly: “What a memory? Who else could remember as well? Both of us added: “No one!” And it’s true: not one person in the world could recite by heart all of Evgeny Onegin. For two evenings in a row we listened to Woe from Wit. She didn’t forget a single retort, not a single remark. In the lounge of the motor ship a few people were playing cards. The people were strangers, yet she came up to them: “Why do you play cards, when all around you there is such beauty?” Lev tried to hold her back: “Zhenya, you have Bolshevik tendencies. They want to play cards, why do you force your tastes upon them?” [. . .]

26 Nikolai Nekrasov’s narrative poem “Russian Women.” 27 Maria Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya were the wives of the Decembrists, exiled to Siberia after the 1825 Decembrist uprising.

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When we had rainy days. Lev would drink one hundred grams or so with Evgeny Nikolaevich, sometimes two hundred, and she would get angry: “You just need an excuse. This is just dissolute.” Evgeny Nikolaevich would hide his occasional smoking. At first, a lot of people were thrilled they were together, just like we were. But she would not allow anyone to call them husband and wife. “We’re just friends in old age.” But soon this friendship revealed little cracks, then whole cracks. He asked her to live together. But she refused, saying that she couldn’t leave her home, that Vasya is nearby, friends. And that she loved her apartment. She couldn’t get by without long strolls, without trips out of town. In the winter, she rented a room in Peredelkino. But it was difficult for him to live where minimal comforts were absent. The main thing is that she didn’t love him. She just allowed him to love her. Her friend said: “It’s just that she is extraordinary, and he is ordinary.” Perhaps that is so. She got sick, and he got old and sick. They saw each other more seldom. He moved to an old-age home and soon killed himself. [. . .] In March of 1977, she exclaimed from the porch of her Peredelkino house: “Hope I can survive until the autumn. Until the publication of the second and third parts.” She didn’t survive. [. . .] She no longer allowed new chapters out of her house.—“Come on over and read here. I have a kitchen with a reading area for friends.” . . . [She was writing about her] second arrest . . . Vaskov’s House—the prison in Magadan. It was awful. It was as though I were living through this now. I had heard this story from her earlier. At one point, we thought this could be published in Yunost’, right after her sketches on the 1920s. “I always knew I would write. And all around me knew this too. We shared prison rations. You have to start somewhere. But there wasn’t any place to write during our first three years in freedom. You couldn’t even find a place to put a table. I started in the beginning of the summer in 1959 in the Carpathian Mountains. In the forest, on a stump, in a school notebook. Anton, Tonya, and I were there. But already in the prison and in the camp I had started to compose separate chapters. I memorized them by heart, like poems.” Most likely, she wrote relatively easily, quickly. “I read the chapter ‘Butyrky Nights’ to my first listener Anton, and he cried. Then I suddenly felt that he did not have long to live.” Toward 1970, she wanted to finish writing only one last chapter, “In the absence of corpus delicti.” During that autumn her heart would often ache, insomnia tired her out, and she said, that she would not have the time to finish, that death would vanquish her. And each time I stubbornly repeated: “You are obliged to not only finish Journey into the Whirlwind .” [. . .]

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As it happened, I was rereading Journey into the Whirlwind while I was finishing the rough draft of [my own] memoir. I got through the first pages with difficulty: certain turns of phrases bothered me, the sentimentality, and journalese. But all this soon disappeared. Indignation, horror, compassion, shame all came together. And I didn’t think anymore, I didn’t want to think about how this was written. Certain word combinations continued to bother me, but now I’m bothered that I notice them. [. . .] When I was rereading Journey into the Whirlwind . . . I couldn’t tear myself away. No, I don’t know anything. And it doesn’t matter whether there are other books about THIS. She once said: “History will group us under the rubric of ‘and others.’ Say, Bukharin, Rykov, and others.” No, that’s not true. She, Evgenia Ginzburg, having written Journey into the Whirlwind . . . she was one of a kind. I live through her life. I lose. Gain. I learn immeasurable grief and humiliation. If all of this has been conveyed somehow, has been preserved, that means this is not a simple document, not a simple “Chronicle during the time of the cult of the personality.” It’s only by virtue of art. And its modesty, general accessibility, naivete, these qualities are not weaknesses of the book, but their uniqueness. [. . .] Lev: She would get angry at unfavorable responses to Solzhenitsyn’s, Maksimov’s,28 and Korzhavin’s29 pronouncements abroad. “Let them exaggerate sometimes. That’s natural. They are justified in being angry. They are trying to explain to these Western idiots that they are betraying us and destroying themselves. So, let Heinrich Böll be dissatisfied. He doesn’t understand anything either. He’s just a kind, naive German. I love him. But he is incapable of understanding either Volodya or Alexander Isaievich—he hasn’t experienced what they and we did. He merely read about prisons, transports, Kolyma, Vorkuta. He’s kind, he sympathizes with everyone—Chileans, Vietnamese, different Blacks. But for us these are not comparable . . . Volodya Maksimov is a kind, soulful person. We had such a wonderful conversation. He really loves Vasya. And Continent is a good journal. Excellent. Volodya told us so much about their new plans. You are unfair to him. And Heinrich is not fair. [. . .] “Volodya Maksimov called the Medvedev brothers agents of the KGB. Of course, I don’t believe this. Roy is a good naive person. I love him, but am totally not in agreement with him. He still lives in a world of Marxist illusions and dogmas. Of course, his point of view is closer to our government,

28 Vladimir Maksimov, a leading Soviet dissident abroad, was the editor in chief of Continent, an émigré journal. 29 Naum Korzhavin, a Russian poet, dissident, and contemporary of Solzhenitsyn, living abroad.

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than Sakharov’s. That is why they persecute him less. It’s bad that Roy attacks Solzhenitsyn. The latter is doing a great deed. And he’s so alone. I myself know that there are inaccuracies and mistakes in The Gulag Archipelago. No one should say, “he perished comically.” But, in general, Archipelago is a great book, a huge book. He even alludes to me a few times. And you too. And in The Calf . . . he speaks very kindly of you.30 And you are not fair toward him, and it upsets me more than Roy. Roy never was friends with Solzhenitsyn. I can’t agree with this. We all have one opponent, one horrible opponent. He is crushing the whole world. He’s prepared to strangle us again. Why create enmity among ourselves.” [. . .] She was trusting. She would trust people she was hardly acquainted with and often accidental interlocutors, especially if she liked them. She would often repeat that she considered lying one of the most unforgiveable deadly sins. But she herself could entertain the most free flights of imagination, which sometimes transformed a cursory observation, poorly overheard or underread words in a rather whimsical way . . . One of our mutual friends said to me: “I heard you are hiding the fact that you were christened. Evgenia Semenovna said that you converted to Orthodoxy a long time ago. But that you don’t want to advertise this.” Soon I heard that a few people were saying the same thing, basing it on what she told them. It became impossible to get around this without an explanation: “You know what, Zhenechka, there is some wild gossip circulating about me. Last year, one figure from the Foreign Commission confidentially told everyone that I am an informer and that that is why all my sins are forgiven, and why they do not exclude me from the Union of Writers, yet Solzhenitsyn and Böll heard about this and, apparently, this is why they have cut off relations with me. Then someone in the union, and in the State Literary Organization, declared that I applied to go abroad. And now they say that I somehow converted to Orthodoxy and secretly go to confession. “But you yourself said that you were christened!” “That’s crazy?! Where? When? By whom?” “Have you forgotten? You told me. In your house. I noticed that you had a cross hanging over your bed. You said that this was a gift from Igor Khokhlushkin. Then we had a good conversation about God, about religion. Since childhood you have been disposed toward Orthodoxy. I read this in your memoirs. I don’t understand what you are afraid of—you aren’t a Party

30 Ginzburg is referring here to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf.

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member. I’m the one who has to hide that I am a Catholic believer. I’m in the Party. My ‘black colonels’ would tear me to pieces. But the Catholic Church allows secret confession.” “Zhenechka, come to your senses! If I had become a believer, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. And, of course, I wouldn’t be hiding it from anyone. Least of all, from my friends, from close friends.” “I never lied. Maybe you wanted to joke around then. But such jokes cannot be—” “Tolerated. I agree. And I never joke around like this. It seems I can figure out how you could come up with this. Probably, I told you something I had told a lot of people, that I no longer consider myself an atheist. I’m convinced that our atheism, our militant godlessness, is the most harmful, the most fanatical of all religions. But I have not become a believer. I am an agnostic. I don’t believe in the existence of God, and I cannot, and do not want to prove his inexistence. But I am convinced that if a certain higher supernatural force exists, that this force so surpasses all mortal people, that no one has the right to consider himself its representative, its only fair interpreter. And, of course, he has no right to establish laws in the name of God, to persecute nonbelievers and apostates . . . Christianity is closer to me than other creeds. I will never claim that it is the best and the fairest. If I grew up in India or China, I would probably prefer Buddhism or Taoism. But I have been so raised that morally, culturally, and historical Christianity is closer to me than anything else. And I think that Christian moral principles are urgently needed today so that humanity does not perish. And Orthodoxy has been really close to me since childhood. My nanny taught me to pray to her icons, and she would take me to church. Together we sang ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary,’ and we ardently listened to the bells of St. Sophia Cathedral and the Cave Monastery. “I am no less pleased with the creations of Catholic art—the Sistine Madonna, masses, requiems . . . In Stettin prison, I accidentally found a Catholic prayer book in the garbage can near the boiler room; I learned by heart ‘Pater Noster,’ ‘Ave Maria, ‘Credo,’ and repeated them in dark solitary confinement. And when a powerful choir with an organ sang in Lvov in the ‘Cathedral’ church, I was so shaken that even now I can’t find the words to describe it. But all the same, Russian churches, Russian prayers, Russian icons, and the most naïve folk customs—in a word, the aesthetics of Russian Orthodoxy—are closer to my heart. Even now, I am more moved by them than Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. This is what I told you then, and not you alone. But you heard somewhat arbitrarily, and your creative imagination extrapolated what was missed in the direction that you yourself went.

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“I do not know. I must have really gone crazy in my old age: senility has set in.” We didn’t speak about it anymore. Only a few times, on other occasions, did she remark with ironic intonation: “Yes, yes, you are an agnostic . . . Well, of course, as an agnostic, cannot admit it . . .” Twice we worked together. We translated Schumann’s letters.31 We would translate our own separate sections, then we would compare them, check them, and correct each other. She worked so meticulously, so scrupulously and conscientiously, in a way that few professional translators worked. The agreement with the publisher was in my name. She didn’t have to worry about her reputation . . . Nevertheless, she stubbornly worried about every doubtful line—she’d seek out reference books, memoirs of contemporaries, both musical scholars and historical works. “You can’t translate, if you don’t know what it is about. In a few letters a certain Mr. N. is named. How can I go on further, not knowing, who this person is? What relationship does he have with the author? With the addressee? Without this, I cannot convey the intonation of the letter correctly. You have to know more about everyone who is mentioned here. And it is more imperative that you imagine the musical works that are being referred to. Some of them he [Schumann] describes in great detail, others he only names or alludes to. Today’s reader has to understand what this sonata, this song, meant to the author, or who wrote the verses he put to music . . .” She would check herself and me and then double-check. Sometimes, I would get irritated, when she dwelled too long on a certain idiomatic turn of phrase, or colloquial usage, or an old-fashioned refined phrase, or an allusion by a musical critic. But she was inexorable. “So let the compiler take up commentaries, let it be his business. But we have to understand everything.” She somehow got attached to the author of the letters immediately, in a feminine way. “At first I simply pitied him, the poor guy. Clearly a psychopath. And his personality was like that of a grumpy old maid: someone hurt his feelings, another person he castigated, and then he himself acknowledged it was nonsense. Sometimes it isn’t clear why he is upset. But little by little I got accustomed to him, even fell in love with him. What a sad life. Humiliating poverty. His wife was constantly sick. He had to count every penny, had to beg for an increase. And at the same time he composed fabulous music! See here, I found some of his piano music, and I tried to

31 Robert Schumann was a German composer of the Romantic era.

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play them yesterday. No, I will not play in front of you. I’ve become completely unused to playing. My fingers are wooden. I get tired quickly. I can still do it for myself. Because I see the notes. How do I explain this to you? I don’t hear what I’m playing but what is supposed to be heard. I hear the inner music. In front of you, I’ll play worse and then will not hear anything . . . But now I’m interested in translating. Sometimes I’m so sad, even aching for him, especially when he does silly things, when he trusts scoundrels. I’m so sorry for his unhappy wife, for him. . .” Then we translated texts from Brecht for the ballet Seven Deadly Sins.32 This was a special “private” commission. A certain Moscow actress wanted to produce this ballet with songs, and she planned to play the main role. We were acquainted, and she asked me to translate urgently, super-urgently, assuring me that the repertoire committee had given everything the green light, the Ministry of Culture, the Central Concert Authority; that the translators were guaranteed the most profitable conditions. The only important detail was finishing the translation speedily, and in the meantime the agreement would be drawn up; only a few insignificant office details remained . . . The text of the songs was going to correspond to the music. We translated every song at first by eye, sometimes together and sometimes separately. Then Evgenia Semenovna would sit at the piano and we would try line after line, singing along, redoing the translation, then restructuring. Without her, I simply could not have completed this work. Sometimes we argued, at times jokingly, at times angrily, about separate strophes or lines. She would not allow me or herself to neglect anything or take any liberties. We worked at exactly determined hours. I didn’t dare come a single moment late. When I arrived, I would find her at the piano. Sometimes I reproached her for her pedantic ways. She would pick on some trifle too much. Later, I started to understand that this “pedantry” was one of her spiritual foundations. (We finished the translation by the deadline. But the woman who had commissioned it, who earlier would call us two or three times a day and would pour praise upon Evgenia Semenovna, virtually forgot about us. When I finally reached her by phone, she answered me dryly that everything had suddenly fallen apart, that the repertoire committee had not agreed to the production, and, of course, that she could pay for our labor out of her own pocket: “Just name your price.” Upon which I said goodbye—not in a very friendly way. But Evgenia Semenovna was not sorry that we’d worked for nothing.) 32 Bertold Brecht wrote the libretto for Kurt Weill’s ballet The Seven Deadly Sins in 1933.

Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Krutoi marshrut

“It was interesting. I never suspected that Brecht was such a good poet . . . This is the first time I have translated his songs. [. . .] “Yes, I’m a pedant. Because I cannot live without the strictest order, without Ordnung. And don’t think I’ve been this way since I married a German. When I met Anton, more than anything he liked that I, a nurse, would strictly fulfill all appointments and meticulously monitor cleanliness. And everything had to be in its right place. And you know what a camp hospital is. And, in general, how you can maintain cleanliness in a prison, in a camp. But since childhood I have hated laxity, dirt, and sloppiness. And now I simply would not be able to exist if there was not the strictest routine in everything, without exception. That is why I like to stroll with Tamara Motyleva,33 because she is always on time. She, too, likes order. And she understands me. If a guest is invited for a particular hour, and he’s late, he will be greeted with stern reproaches. You robbed me of twenty whole minutes. There is an old saying: ‘Precision is the courtesy of kings.’ Since the fall of the monarchy, there is always someone who permits himself to spit on any precision.” When she borrowed a book, magazine, or manuscript from us, she would return it strictly on the given day. And she demanded the same from her “borrowers.” The most precise precision was for her one of the foundations of her independence. And she jealously defended her independence in every smallest detail. She would not allow anyone to pay for her, even for the metro. “Leave the upper-class manners. My penny is no worse than yours. No, I will not go by taxi: I have no extra money, and I will not ride on yours.” [. . .] Raisa. A period of estrangement started in our relationship. My love for her did not translate into a lasting friendship. In October of 1974, I came to see her after we had not seen each other for a long time. I came, knowing that she had cancer. She sat on the couch, completely unrecognizable, confused. Her hair was hanging loose; her robe was open; there were tears in her eyes. She told me that, having discovered a growth in her breast, she decided to hide it from everyone. “Let it be cancer. I won’t go to a doctor. I won’t let them cut me.” Then she spoke confidently about cancer. For almost three years, in the hospital and at home, she tried to prove to people, and tried to convince them, that this was a benign tumor, and that her illness was caused by radiation poisoning. Incomprehensible to the mind, a protective film developed, which the disease itself weaves. Yet, until the very end she was always combed, tucked up, tidied up. But who knows what was really in her soul? [. . .] 33 Tamara Motyleva, Soviet author and literary scholar, wrote monographs about literature.

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I understand more and more how much she and her book meant to me . . .  She returned from abroad looking younger.34 It was as though she was cured. The whole evening she spoke about Paris, about Cologne, about Nice. [. . .] “The PEN Club arranged an evening in my honor. The crème de la crème of French literature were present: Claude Rouas, Eugene Ionesco, Pierre Emmanuel. I signed autographs. On the table there was a huge pile of books, a new edition of Journey into the Whirlwind. When they were photographing us, I asked them not to photograph Vasya with these books as a background. Pierre Emmanuel made a speech about me which is just uncomfortable to repeat. In general, everything in French comes out more subtle, more refined. And he was so great! No politics, only artistic values, on language. ‘At the Pen Club they greeted the writer Evgenia Ginzburg and her son. And at the celebration of L’Humanité the Soviet writer Vasily Aksenov was the respected guest along with his old mother.’ (She coquettishly brushed off our indignant objections) At the celebration various people walked up to me and whispered in my ear: ‘We read . . . We were amazed . . . So wonderful . . . So terrible . . .’ And I understood that it’s the same there as here, their censorship, their authorities. And they’re also afraid of the authorities, afraid of our people.” She ended this part of her narrative angrily: “I detest the left. I hate all of the left . . .” On the table were autographed books. French and Russian. There was a thin collection of poems by Irina Odoevtseva.35 “Old Russian émigrés were reading my book. They are so naive. Poignant. They speak Russian well. But only insert French words. . . . I was worried about how I would get by. But almost immediately my French returned. Somewhere from the depths words appeared. I chatted freely, even surprised myself.” In the room, on the floor, on the couch, on the chairs, unpacked and packed suitcases, boxes, bundles. Not all the gifts had been distributed yet. She brought gifts for her family, friends, acquaintances. The most for her daughter. Tonya approached us. Our conversation was interrupted. The holiday hurlyburly began with trying things on. Mother and daughter, and we, the audience, were happy. We carefully asked about the doctors, since the trip was tagged “for curing.” And Vasya accompanied his mother, who went seeking medical

34 Raisa Orlova is referring here to the foreign trip, which Ginzburg took with Aksenov in 1976, as a guest of honor at the PEN Club in Paris. 35 Irina Odoevtseva, a Russian poet and novelist of the early twentieth century, lived in Paris with her husband, Georgy Ivanov.

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help. When Chakovsky paid for the trip with a check from Literaturnaia gazeta, he enthusiastically noted: “I’m only signing this because I remember my own mother.” To our question about the doctors, she answered, irritated: “We didn’t go and I’m not planning to. I warned Vasya here, before the trip: no medical help. I’m going to see people, to be happy.” After the brief eruption of irritability, she smiled anew: “Vasya rented a car. It’s true we had to do a lot of walking in Paris. It’s difficult to park there. (We laughed, the champion of pure speech is condescending to Americanisms) We had to park so far away when we went to the theater or movies; we ended up walking two to three blocks. We drove around France. To the south. To Nice. To visit Herzen’s grave. As guests of the Chagalls. Bouquets of flowers arrived at our hotel. From Italian and French publishers. That was as a struggle was going on over who would receive copyright for the second part. I didn’t think I’d have to work. I didn’t have a good copy of the second volume, so I had to correct a makeshift copy. But I tried to correct at least the typos.” We recalled how upset she was with the 1967 edition, where there were lots of typos. We asked whether she was going to write about this trip. “What can I write about France that is new? How many Russian writers came to France, let’s see . . . But I have thought of something: ‘The Girl from Kolyma in Paris.’ Or I can call it: ‘From Kolyma to the Seine.’” Vasily Aksenov said: “At first Mama was overjoyed to be able to order breakfast in our hotel room. ‘Let’s ask for breakfast in the cell!’ But then she decisively refused: ‘No, no, I saw how they put the trays on the floor.’” She visited everyone, absolutely everyone (lowering his voice) . . . saw Nekrasov,36 Sinyavsky, Maksimov, Etkind.37 And everyone was very welcoming. Grisha Svirsky called, but could not come, because it was too expensive. “Our return train ticket was Paris-Moscow. But Vasya said: ‘Let’s drive to Cologne, to see Böll.’ They had become acquainted in the spring of 1970, when Böll came to Moscow with his wife. At first, he called her Mrs. Ginzburg, then Mrs. Evgenia, then finally just Eugenia or even Shenya. She said she had forgotten German, but was able to talk rather freely about the camps, about German books that she liked in her childhood. Then in 1970 Yevtushenko invited Aksenov, Akhmadulina, Voznesensky, Tanya Slutsky, Okudzhava, as well as Evgenia Semenovna to meet Böll for dinner. Then, as Vasya was looking 36 Viktor Nekrasov (1911-1987), a Russian writer and journalist, emigrated to France in 1974, where he became an associate editor of Kontinent. 37 Efim Etkind (1918-1999), a Soviet philologist and translation theorist, emigrated to France in the 1970s.

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for a taxi on the street, Böll said: ‘This was a visit with young people . . . But I can only name you as a really young person, wirklich young. You are younger than all of them, Zhenya.’ ‘I didn’t expect Heinrich Böll to compliment old ladies.’ ‘I do not know how to make compliments. That is the truth. I listened, watched, and thought: if I didn’t know any of these people at the table, and someone were to tell me that two of them spent a long time in jail, camps— guess who? I would never think it was you, Zhenya, or this bearded drunk . . .’” Each time he came to Moscow, they would meet like old friends. And in letters to us he would always convey his warmest greetings. “At first I was afraid: we have tickets from Paris, but we’re going to Cologne. But you quickly get used to everything there, and relax. And your fears go away. I agreed. But I was worried about being late: the train to Cologne was six minutes away, and we had so many suit cases . . . Heinrich calmed me down: ‘Zhenya, everything will be in Ordnung.’” In 1937, in Lefortovo, she considered herself dead; she expected to be executed: “I imagined the rest of the world then. I never saw it and will never see it.” She saw it. They met—Paris and the girl from Kolyma. And this is one of the unexpected happy twists that characterized her life and her prose. What changed in her? She felt the reality of fame. In 1967, her fame was distant. Even so, it turned her head a bit. But this time, perceived directly, everything she saw, heard, and sensed acted on her totally differently. She became softer. More generous. Closer to people. How did this happen? On the way from Paris? Or was it in anticipation of another inevitable path? Lev. After returning from France, she was full of energy almost until the middle of the winter. She complained less about her tiredness, about pains in the heart. We wanted to believe in a miracle, in the same way we believed in 1965 that Frida Vigdorova would be cured miraculously. In February, leg pains began. This had already happened in 1975. And then the doctors said that metastasis was taking place in the bones, in the joints. Then there was a brief period of improvement. She continued to live in Peredelkino. And two times a day she would come out on the porch. She would dress slowly, moaning. She would pull up her felt boots, without asking for help. “Don’t help, don’t help me, it’s easier when I do it myself. [. . .] Lord, what a cursed disease!” [. . .] But it was necessary for her to spar with people. She waved me away when I repeated that she should return to Paris, to find a cure this time, and that Carter had seriously decided to combine morality with politics. From the beginning of April, she could barely move. Yet at the time when she

Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Krutoi marshrut

was supposed to take a walk, she would get dressed and sit on the porch, all wrapped up in furs and blankets. Sarah would come over every day to cook, clean, and take her out for a walk. The doctors prescribed radiation again; they promised that this would remove the pain. She agreed, but only under the condition that she would remain in Peredelkino; that her son could take her for treatments every day and return her home. “I’ll perish without air. Air is my main medicine.” After the first treatments she felt better. We left for the south in April. When we returned within a month, she could not leave her Moscow apartment. We came to see her. It seemed that we hadn’t seen each other in years. In the twilight of her room, window curtains drawn, it was noticeable that she had lost weight. Her nose and chin were sharpened, and her cheekbones were more prominent. “See what they have done to me? You probably can’t recognize me. I’m afraid to look in the mirror. This is how these villainous doctors cured me. They’ve poisoned me with rays. They radiated me as though I had cancer. And now it’s clear that they’ve brought on radiation sickness. I can barely get up. I don’t leave the house. I can’t eat anything . . . Tell me about your travels. What’s going on in the world?” She barely listened to our stories. Again and again, she would talk about her pain. Then within three days she changed for the worse, even more than the previous month. The only recognizable parts were her eyes and voice. I kissed her hand, which had dry, thin skin over her thin bones. Raya also kissed her hand, for the first time. Almost every evening a small, gentle, gray woman, her lawyer friend, would come. She became her indefatigable nurse. Evgenia Semenovna was very attached to her. But sometimes she would get very upset when she would change shifts with Vasya. She didn’t want to part with her son, not even for an hour. And she wouldn’t allow anyone to stay for the night. “I can’t sleep if there’s someone else in the apartment.” But after she fell in the corridor when trying to reach her bathroom in the morning, and lost consciousness, she didn’t resist round-the-clock care. “I’m dying. God, why is it so painful? Have I not suffered enough? We thought my heart was bad, but why is my heart withstanding such torment? Anton always carried poison with him. What a fool I am to have forgotten about this. If you are real friends, get me some poison.” Having learned that she spoke about a priest, and hearing her complaints, I said: “Zhenya, perhaps prayer would help? Want me to bring a priest?” “A priest? But I’m Catholic. And I don’t want a strange priest. I want to pray in Russian, but there are no Russian Catholics.”

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“What’s wrong? Catholics and Orthodox have one God, one Christ. What is the meaning of Church differences for a real Christian? An Orthodox priest will gladly pray with you.” She turned to the wall, and kept silent a long time. And suddenly with her former voice, only a bit more low and strained, she said: “Maybe, let’s wait a bit?” “Zhenya, perhaps you didn’t quite understand me. I’m speaking about a prayer for good health. You know our friend Igor. This winter he was very ill. A few doctors had already declared his condition hopeless. So a priest visited him, and they prayed together. And Igor just visited us yesterday, and he would like to bring a priest to you.” “Good, good, but not right now. Later, when I feel better. Now an evil spirit has entered me. I hate everyone.” “So, prayer will help you banish the evil spirt and will help you recover.” “Recover? Don’t you see, I’m dying.” The priest Gleb Yakunin came within two days. She grew more peaceful. Either because of the prayer or because they started to inject pain killers. I did not get to speak to her again. When we would come over, she was unconscious. On the evening of May 24 it seemed as though she was getting better. She said: “Vasya, don’t forget to pay for the dacha. Maybe I can move in August. Maya, why aren’t you eating? Get some caviar in the refrigerator. Don’t open a new one, there is one already opened there.” On May 25th she died.

11

Interview with Vasily Aksenov1 Rimma Volynska and Olga M. Cooke

Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Greetings, Vasily Pavlovich. As you know we are getting ready to mark and celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Evgenia Semenovna’s birth. Vasily Aksenov. In fact, her patronymic was “Solomonovna” . . . the other she just made up. That was one of my mother’s “small fibs,” to deceive Soviet life. She thought that if her patronymic was “Semenovna” instead of “Solomonovna,” it would somehow make her life a bit easier. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. We would appreciate it if you could tell us a few things about your family: When was your mother arrested? Upon her arrest, where was your older brother, Alesha, taken? Where were you taken? How did you end up in an orphanage? Vasily Aksenov. After my mother’s arrest, my father remained in freedom for a few months, and, seemingly, in that period between my mother’s and father’s arrests, the birthparents of Alesha and Maya arrived. Maya was my father’s daughter. Most likely, Doctor Fedorov, that is, Alesha’s father, arrived first and took Alesha with him to his family in Leningrad. And then came Cecilia Yakovlevna, that is, my father’s first wife and Maya’s mother, who took her to Moscow. That’s how I ended up alone, with two women, my nanny by the name of Evfimia—that’s such a strange, most likely biblical, name, “nanny Fima”—that’s what we called her, and my grandmother was called Evdokia Vasilievna. These two village women remained with me; we were reduced to living in one room. Because of my father’s “bigwig” position, our family’s

1

This interview was published originally in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 39, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 9-36, and conducted by Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. It is reproduced here with the permission of the interviewers, and translated by Rimma Volynska.

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apartment consisted of five rooms, and, later on, I saw police come. And by the way, the police came to put the sealing wax on the doors of our apartment. First, they tied the doors with ropes, then they melted the wax, dipping the two ropes into the melted wax, and only then put the seal on it. That’s how the door was sealed shut. I was only a little child then, but I remember that process clearly; I was fascinated by this whole “sealing process” and observed all the details. They did, in fact, wax and seal one door of our apartment after another; first they did my father’s office, then the bedroom, then Maya’s and Alesha’s bedroom, then another room . . . then, to make a long story short, they left only one room unsealed, our former nursery, and that was the very room where I remained with my two little old ladies, my nanny and my grandmother. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So your father hadn’t been arrested yet? Vasily Aksenov. No, no, all of this took place after my father’s arrest. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. How much time passed between your mother’s arrest and your father’s? Vasily Aksenov. My mother was arrested in February, my father, I think, in July, as far as I know—the same month I was taken to the orphanage. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Can you describe how they took you away? Vasily Aksenov. I was subjected to a formal arrest. Later on, I observed arrests when I was grown up a bit and returned. It was my uncle who got me out of the orphanage. My neighbor was arrested the same way. Aunt Ksenia and I realized that in the case of my arrest, taking me from my home to the orphanage, they followed the protocol of a real arrest: a black car would arrive at night, and the night being quite light I saw it all. The cars used for the arrests were called “MK”’s, that is, Ford M-1’s; they were produced in the Ford factory in the town of Gorky. So, three people came out of such a car, two men and one woman, all three employees of NKVD. I don’t remember the woman’s face, but I do remember how she was dressed. She had a black three-quarter’s length leather jacket on, no uniform, just the black jacket. The men who arrived were also not dressed in a military fashion; perhaps they wore uniforms under their jackets— but that’s how I remember their dress. Apparently, they also brought a formal document for my arrest; my nanny and my grandma were not literate, and I, of course, was too small to read, so no one in my house could read the contents of that document. In any case, the female NKVD official approached my little bed and gave me a candy. “Vasya, get up,” she said affectionately, “let’s go and join your mommy and daddy.” And so I got up without any opposition and I started getting dressed. The men took me away and, as I was leaving, I clearly remember the following scene: my nanny and my grandmother standing next to one another and wailing, wailing the same way the simple peasant women

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stand and howl in Russia. And their wailing was echoing throughout the entire empty street. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Do you think that Aunt Fima and your grandmother understood what was actually happening to you and where you were being taken? Vasily Aksenov. I don’t know and I didn’t hear anything, but I’m sure that they were told that I was being taken to an orphanage and not to a prison; but still, it was staged as an arrest. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did they subsequently find out where they were taking you? Vasily Aksenov. They tried to find out from officials about my exact whereabouts. Later, they found out somehow. My aunt was looking for me, and someone else. But it was my grandmother’s son-in-law, Evgeny Mikhailovich Kotelnikov, who was, finally, given information about me. Kotelnikov was working for the Komsomol at the time. He was in the navy during the war, but then returned and worked for the union of the ministry of Tataria. He was a Party man, but a very pleasant and good person. I called him Uncle Zhenya. And so, most likely, he was given information about my whereabouts. In any case, in a day or two they found out that I’d been placed in a gathering center for “children of the arrested.” I remember seeing my grandmother through the window, first my grandmother, that is, my father’s mother, then I remember also seeing Aunt Ksenia, my father’s sister. They all brought me some kind of sweets. Seeing them was enough for me to understand that somehow I was being cared for by them. I was the youngest and the smallest of the kids at the orphanage. Most of the kids were older and were all pretty wild there; they were all fighting with one another and playing some very loud games. From that gathering center, all the kids were taken to some special orphanages. Together with two other kids, I was taken by train to Kostroma, under the supervision of a female NKVD worker. On the train, she kept me in a locked compartment, and, I remember, they even had sleeping cars . . . Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. You were taken to Kostroma—that far away? Vasily Aksenov. I can’t remember, but it seems there was a transfer station somewhere, perhaps in Moscow, because there is no direct transportation from Kazan to Kostroma. But they did deliver us there, to the orphanage, which was located somewhere on the outskirts of the town; and judging from how huge and how high the ceilings were in that building, I think that the orphanage must have been located in a building which had previously belonged to a church or a

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monastery. It was a very tall building, and I’m pretty certain that I saw images of the saints there, which, despite the stucco, were still visible on the walls. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So the children slept all together? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, tens of children. When I saw Konchalovsky’s film The Inner Circle,2 I was amazed that the director, without knowing my story, created a bedroom scene in the orphanage, which was identical to my visual recollection. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Do you remember how long you were in the orphanage? Vasily Aksenov. I think I was there around half a year. Because we rang in the New Year. There was a Christmas tree. Stalin had just issued his permission to put up Christmas trees for the New Year. Prior to that, the revolutionary government did not allow Christmas trees, because they were considered religious. So it was only in 1937 that people started putting up Christmas trees, but without any religious symbolism. Just like Santa Claus and Snow White. I remember a tall Christmas tree with toys around it. And the children did the traditional dance around the tree. I also remember that I owned one little thing, which was my little elephant. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And so, at the end of this six months’ period someone came to visit you? Vasily Aksenov. My uncle Adrian arrived, my father’s younger brother; he was a history lecturer at the university. He worked in Central Asia in the city of Stalinabad—today’s Dushanbe in the Tadzik Republic. He was fired from his job as the brother of an “enemy of the people.” But when Stalin coined his famous phrase that “Sons do not answer for the mistakes of their fathers,” my uncle demanded, with the help of this phrase, that I be returned. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Would the outcome have been different if your uncle had not demanded your return? Vasily Aksenov. It would be very different! As far as I knew, much later, as an adult in the post-Stalinist period, I found out that they were changing children’s identities in those orphanages. Children were issued new documents, new names. And they did everything in their power to make little children, especially, forget their own names and their parents. I could have forgotten all of that. It’s much harder to do that with seven-to-eight-year-old children, but with little ones they could change your identity.

2 Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1991 film The Inner Circle is about Stalin’s private projectionist, Ivan Sanchin. The scene Aksenov describes entails an orphanage which holds children of socalled “enemies of the people.”

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Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Then no one would have been able to find you. But you turned up in Moscow because you were taken from your grandmother’s, is that it? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, for sure. At first, my uncle brought me to the Kotelnikov family—that is, the daughter of my Aunt Ksenia, who married Evgeny Mikhailovich Kotelnikov. They already had children: there was Galya, who was two years my junior, and the newly born Shurik. It was a large and noisy family. Everybody was still young. There was Matilda, Aunt Ksenia’s daughter, or Motya, as everyone called her in country parlance. She was really beautiful and her husband, Uncle Zhenya, was so young. They were playing music on the gramophone, which had to be turned by hand. They played records with songs like: “Oh, Andriusha, should we live in sorrow, let the accordion play, play it all the way.” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So this was your family? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, but I wasn’t there for long; after a while, they took me to my grandmother’s. My grandmother had just suffered the loss of her husband, my grandfather. They’d had a large apartment before, a rather large room, which was part of a communal apartment. There were practically no separate apartments at that time. In that communal apartment my grandparents had been subjected to a raid conducted by NKVD-KGB because some neighbors denounced them for hiding gold. And they started breaking all the furniture, until they’ve found something, so they arrested my grandfather. And my grandmother was arrested as well. She was soon released, however, while grandpa was beaten. They beat him really badly. Later on, my father told me that he saw his own father in the prison yard. Grandfather became ill with severe consumption or tuberculosis, and he died right after his release. And so I came to live with my grandmother, who turned to stone from grief. She would sit on the bed and couldn’t do anything. She aged prematurely, and completely became like an ancient old woman from Judea. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Do you remember how she sat on the bed? Vasily Aksenov. Like this, with her arms crossed. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And there wasn’t anything she could do? Vasily Aksenov. No, it was as if she turned to stone. She couldn’t talk at all. So I demanded to be taken back to Karl Marx Street, back to the Kotelnikov family. Back to the family of my aunt, Aunt Motya, my Uncle Zhenya, the gramophone, the neighbors, and the yard. Everyone was running around, the noise, the children, the streetcars were running by. The place where I had lived with my grandmother was desolate, there was nothing going on there. The name of that street was Popov Hill, and it was, actually, not far from the prison.

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Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. You say that your grandmother was paralyzed with grief, but nonetheless she was able to help your mother. She corresponded with her, right? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, that was much later, right after the death of my grandfather. Maybe my grandmother snapped out of her stupor then a bit. My mother started to write to me too when I learned how to read. I was just a kid then and couldn’t do anything. But when I became a schoolboy, she wrote to me often. And I was able to write back. So she even attempted to edit my letters somehow by asking: “Why do all your letters sound the same?” My letters sounded like: “Mom, I am well. I am doing such and such . . .” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did you also receive some packages from your mother? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, I received packages, and they came during the war too. I can’t really remember the contents of the packages, but I do remember the boots. She once sent me a pair of good American boots. The fate of these boots is quite interesting. In 1945, my Uncle Zhenya returned from the Far East where he had served in the navy, but not on the front. He returned from the navy and he was still wearing navy clothing, a black greatcoat and a blue jacket, well—the typical postwar clothing. He didn’t have anything else! Whatever clothing he had before the war was sold during the war. We had to eat! My aunt would go to the market and sell clothing at the flea market. Bitter cold or not, she would sell clothing that belonged to other people so she’d earn 10 percent for herself from the sale. That’s how she was able to bring us bread. In other words, she would feed us. But when Uncle Zhenya returned from the navy, he returned empty handed. He got a job right away at the Council of Ministries of Tataria, but the problem was he had nothing to wear for his job. He took the stripes off his navy jacket, but his navy boots were much too heavy for his new job. What he did was take my boots, the boots my mother sent me in the care package, and he wore my boots to his job. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. He wore children’s boots? Vasily Aksenov. Not really children’s; they turned out to be big. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. When did you start asking yourself, or your grandmother, or the family, as to the whereabouts of your mother? Vasily Aksenov. They all tried to deceive me. I knew that they were all deceiving me, so I tried not to dwell on the subject. They would tell me that my mother and father were sent to the Far East. On a long-term business mission. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. They kept deceiving you for ten years? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, for ten years. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. But, still, you sensed something. Because . . .

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Vasily Aksenov. I found out about it in the most incredible way. I was digging through a trunk which I never saw open at home, and for that reason it drew my curiosity. I simply had to find out what was inside. One day, when no one was around, I opened it, started rummaging through it, and there amongst some junk I found a little box. I opened it and found a little drawer within it. And on opening it, I saw my father’s blue eye. Later on I wrote a short story: “My Father’s Blue Eye.” The thing was that my father indeed lost an eye in the civil war and he wore a prosthetic eye. After my father’s arrest, the spare prosthetic eye was at my aunt’s house. She saved it and hid it in the trunk. So my father’s eye lay on a piece of cotton wool and was staring straight at me. In that same trunk, I also found papers and documents and a newspaper The Red Tataria issued on the day celebrating the Soviet navy. In the newspaper, along with some picture about a “Lincoln Marat,” there was a report about the arrest of Pavel Vasilievich Aksenov, enemy of the people, sentenced to death for betraying the motherland, and for spying on behalf of foreign powers. The death sentence, the report concluded, could not be appealed. That was what I found in the trunk. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Was there any information about your mother? Vasily Aksenov. No, not hing about her . Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. How old were you when you found the trunk? Vasily Aksenov. About ten years old. But I never let on that I “knew.” The adults continued lying to me and I continued nodding in agreement. Yet I knew and understood everything that had happened. There were also some teachers in the school I attended who would say: “You are behaving badly, you are following your parents example, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Were the pupils in school saying anything along those lines? Vasily Aksenov. No, they never did, just the teachers. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So, altogether, you were without your parents for twelve years. Is that correct? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, f r om f our year s of age unt il I was sixt een. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Your mother writes in her memoirs that, on one hand, she had to go through hell to obtain permission for your reunion, and yet she was very anxious about the actual meeting with you. She, of course, had no idea what kind of person you had become or how you would relate to her. Yet she understood that the one thing you said made her realize you were her kindred spirit. The meaning of that phrase: “Mama, do not cry in their presence!” How did you even know that there was a “you” and a “them”? Vasily Aksenov. It was not a very clear realization on my part. I just simply did not like that family. I very much liked Nina Konstantinovna, the woman who

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chaperoned me. During our journey she kept to herself, didn’t speak or explain much to me. I do not know how she became acquainted with my mother. Perhaps my mother simply met her in a store. Nina Konstantinovna worked as a cashier in a store. Or perhaps someone introduced them to each other. But at any rate, she took upon herself to chaperone me to that place! It was, indeed, a heroic deed on her part. But what’s even more amazing is how this incident is described in my mother’s book, how my mother managed to obtain permission from the young Lieutenant Gridasova, the lover of the chief of Dalstroi. My mother tried to get permission directly from Gridasova, and Gridasova, the sentimental soul that she was, felt deeply moved, and we received permission. To my knowledge, that was the one and only permit of its kind ever issued. But there was a certain Lenya Titov in my class. A few years ago, I was on live television to answer questions from the audience. And I heard a question: “Vasya, my name is Lenya Titov, do you remember me? I was in the same class with you.” “Lenya,” I said, “of course, I remember you, how could I forget you?” And indeed, how could I have forgotten him, he was a most praiseworthy boy. I was convinced that he was either a civilian in a military establishment, or the son of a KGB agent. He was well-behaved, was always perfectly dressed, energetic, always a good student, cheerful, rode a bicycle. A guy without any socalled “background.” He was A-OK! But I found out that Lenya, like myself, was from a family of Gulag camp inmates. His father was a skiing champion of the USSR. He was shot. His mother was also a sports champion. She was sentenced to ten years in labor camps. When she walked out of prison she was still young enough to join the Kolyma cross-country ski team. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Was that meeting your happiest moment in life? How do you recall those years when you and your mother lived together? Vasily Aksenov. We lived this way together for two years. Within a year, my mother was arrested. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. She was taken to “Vaskov’s House”— Vasily Aksenov. Yes, it was a prison. “Vaskov’s House” was the unofficial name; the year was 1949. I was in class when this happened. I described it in detail in my novel The Burn. Someone’s face appeared at my classroom door and said: “Vasya, please come over here.” That face belonged to a person who was a socalled “witness to an arrest.” The officials always tried to “abide by the rules.” I walked out and this small woman said to me: “Come with me!” I said: “Where? What’s wrong?” I understood that something very bad was happening. “Come with me, come with me,” said the woman, probably afraid to say what was really happening. They sent her. And I followed this strange, very strange woman. She had the look of a cleaning lady or a yard woman. But what struck me was that

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there were signs of tuberculosis or syphilis on the skin of her face, when something is devouring your skin, as though there was insufficient skin. I followed that woman. I remember it was a wintry, sunny day, and across the street from my school stood an “M” car, that same kind of a car that took me away to the orphanage. And the woman said: “Go over there.” I approached the car and opened the door. People from the KGB (it no longer was the NKVD, but was called the KGB) were inside. One of them sat next to the driver, and in the back seat sat an old KGB agent. My mother had her hat on, a “hat with a propeller.” She looked like a lady. I sat next to her and she said: “Vasya, the worst has happened, they have arrested me for a second time.” That was what she said to me. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Do you think that her second arrest was, in fact, worse than the first one? Vasily Aksenov. No, it wasn’t, but that’s what she thought at the time. In actuality, it was better, not worse. I started sobbing. Tears started streaming down my face, and there was nothing I could do. I cried and cried and cried without being able to stop. The KGB agent, the greasy one in the front seat, all dressed up, a thoroughgoing young punk (they all dressed like this, in heavy coats with astrakhan fur collars, and leather caps), said: “What’s the matter now? Stop whimpering.” I found out later that they had actually come to arrest my mother in the kindergarten, where she had worked, and where she was singing about bunny rabbits and Santa’s helpers. “Stand up, children, stand around, stand around. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did they simply arrest her right in front of the children? Vasily Aksenov. They probably asked her to step out, then showed her the arrest warrant, and said that she was under arrest; put her in the car and took off. They wanted to take her back home first. They had to search the house. She asked them to stop at my school and get me first, and let me know. And so they went to get me first, and called me, and only then did we drive together to town, to the apartment, to the room where we all lived. We all walked in, they put an armed guard at the door, and the search began. My mother was sitting at the table, a round sort of table, and I was sitting too. I was no longer sobbing, but I still couldn’t compose myself. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. How did your mother react? Vasily Aksenov. My mother was actually quite calm. And every so often she would poke fun at one of the agents, calling him an “officer.” He answered: “I’m not an officer to you.” And what should I call you?” “Call me Citizen Investigator.” “Well, in my time, we’d call people like you an officer,” she would continue to joke. There was nothing to be found, yet they’ve managed to find something after all. In particular they found a Bible! This was Anton Yakovlevich’s German

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Bible. They took it. They also found a rosary with little crosses, which they also took. There was a reproduction of Raphael’s Madonna, which was hanging like an icon. “Is this is a religious object?” “But this is Raphael’s painting . . .” Then they also found about ten issues of the magazine America. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Was possession of it also a criminal offence? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, it, too, was a criminal offence. Because the magazine was not published anymore in Russia. During the war, they were published in Russian, and one could peacefully own them, but the year then was 1949, the year of the Cold War, so the America magazines were also confiscated. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did your mother expect to be arrested again? Vasily Aksenov. Well, there were rumors in town that a “second wave” of arrests had begun. And then it was made clear that the KGB was, indeed, arresting people in alphabetical order. My mother’s last name began with a “G”—that’s fairly close to the beginning; consequently, she was one of the first people to be taken. What happened later was that I went to the KGB to find out if I could bring a package for her? When I arrived, there was this big MVD building there. The KGB agents came to do “second wave” arrests in a smallish house, which looked like a nobleman’s residential house. So, I went there to receive permission to bring my mother a package and, by then, I was fully composed and in control of my emotions. Yes, I need to add one interesting detail: after I composed myself and sat alone, which by the way was a strange feeling of such utter loneliness midst all that misery, I continued waiting for Anton Yakovlevich to return. He came back all energized, with flushed cheeks from the cold outside. He sat down at the table, begun rubbing his hands to warm up, and asked me: “Vasya, where is Zhenya?” “Zhenya was arrested,” I replied. And he suddenly collapsed at that very table and started to sob, which made my sobbing appear to me quite trivial. He was shaking all over! He was simply in shock. But it was through his efforts that my mother was released from prison earlier than expected. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. But, in fact, wasn’t it you, who rescued your mother? She describes how her prison supervisor told her: “If only you knew how your son spoke with me! I was so moved.” Vasily Aksenov. That is correct. That supervisor was Jewish, by the way. Yes, Jews, by the way, softened on all the history of the revolution. They managed to soften that crap too. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So, how did Anton Yakovlevich rescue her? Vasily Aksenov. He rescued her very simply. Among his clients were the wives of major chiefs of the camps. And, undoubtedly, they had an influence. He spoke with them, and they all adored him. Anton Yakovlevich treated them

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with homeopathic therapies. Among these wives, for example, was Valentina Mikhailovna Pavlova, a pedagogical advisor and teacher of English. Her husband was General Pavlov, who commanded the uranium mines in Kolyma! The most horrific mines were uranium mines, not the gold mines. People there died within a mere half a year. Well, this Valentina Mikhailovna started to watch over me in my mother’s absence. She simply took care of me, so that nothing bad happened to me. She even sent me to the Komsomol headquarters, so that I become a member of the Komsomol! “Otherwise they won’t accept you into the university,” she said. And I answered: “How can I do this? Valentina Mikhailovna, you know where my parents are.” And she said: “Go there. No one will ask you about anything.” What it meant was that she did the preliminary work on my behalf to clear the way for me. So I went. And they said to me: “Sit down. Tell us about the success of the national liberation of the Chinese army.” I spoke to them with pleasure on the appointed topic. “Congratulations! You are now a member of the Komsomol (VKLSM)!” This is what she did. But, of course, her influence went further than that. In short, my mother’s prison term was reduced to a mere twenty-seven days. During this time I continued to bring her big care packages. As she sat in Vaskov’s House, there was a colonel (not a general, but a colonel. I’ve forgotten his last name). We chatted. So one day a strange thing transpired . . . They must’ve felt that all this would end soon, since there were no new accusations. This was all the same as in 1937. After twentyseven days, I was walking through the town with a friend of mine (a good guy, who was the son of a local hotel manager and, to be sure, a member of the KGB and VOXR). And suddenly we see a large group of locals walking towards us. And he says to me: “I see your mother walking!” “What are you saying, Felix.” “I’m not making it up, take a look yourself.” And, indeed, I suddenly saw my mother, walking home! Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Had she seen you? Vasily Aksenov. No, she hadn’t seen me yet. They just released her after twentyseven days. Just after she was released they forced her to sign that she would remain in Magadan forever. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. What did you do when you first saw her? Vasily Aksenov. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure I started running madly towards her. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. As for this great love, which one can experience only once in life, I’d like to cite from her memoirs: “Our love grew amid the stench of putrefying flesh, against the darkness of the arctic night. For fifteen years we marched together across all the abysses, through all the blizzards (2.116). Do you think she’d be able to survive this nightmare had it not been for that love?

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Vasily Aksenov. Yes, he [Anton Walter] saved her. That love, it was truly a romantic love; it was her one and only defense against all those camp monsters and camp guards. I am convinced that had it not been for Dr. Walter she would have simply perished in the camps. She writes in her memoirs about having actual enemies. Among those there was a woman called “Tsimmerman”—who was a real tyrant, as they say, a saltychikha (there is such an expression in the Russian language). There was such a serf master who exercised particular cruelty over her serfs in the eighteenth century. Her name, Saltykova, became a common noun. To be precise, that master of the camp prisoners [Tsimmerman] behaved like a serf owner and, in fact, as if the prisoners were her actual slaves. The slave owner system is not a serf system. Mama and Anton Yakovlevich said that I had to go to medical school, because in the camps doctors were saved. Labor camp doctors were, in actuality, the only people who had a realistic chance of coming out alive. That was the main reason why both my mother and Anton Yakovlevich urgently wanted me to study medicine; they thought that I would, eventually, also end up in a labor camp, so they wanted me to have the kind of profession that could save me. Which is what I did: I studied medicine. When I was sixteen years of age, it never even dawned on me that such old people could be in love. Although sometimes I would get suspicious that they were doing something. In particular, Anton Yakovlevich would say: “Go, Vasya. Why don’t you go to the movies.” And he would give me money for the movies, and, of course, I went with pleasure. We had a movie that was on for a long time. It was called A Dangerous Adventure, and no one among us knew it was the famous Stage Coach with John Wayne. And it had no subtitles. I saw it about fifteen times. I would watch this film, and when I returned I would see that both of them looked somewhat different. But, honestly, I paid no attention to that. Because it was something I couldn’t really grasp. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. He taught her many things . . . what was the most important thing that your mother learned professionally in the area of medicine? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, of course. But primarily in the religious, spiritual realm. He was a devout Catholic. In a way, unofficially, of course, he was a camp priest. Undoubtedly, he enlightened camp inmates in a religious sense, and my mother, in particular, since she was an atheist. In addition to her atheism, not only Communist atheism, she came from a family background of liberal Jewish intelligentsia. Her grandfather was a cadet by conviction, i.e., a Constitutional Democrat. He voted for the Miliukov party, and he and his family never attended a synagogue or a church. So since they were hardly religious, her family background being quite secular; she was a natural atheist by conviction.

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And suddenly, life brought her together with a kind of a religious man, whom, to my mind, she never imagined existed before her arrest and before the prisons. That is, not in the sense of ever existing, but inhabiting a human form. And suddenly she found herself in this milieu. This, by the way, is also in her book, when she saw Christian people such as Western Ukrainian and Catholic women, who displayed a particular stability in the camps. She did not remain indifferent to it. Looking back, I never saw her pray, but I know for certain that she became a religious person in a certain philosophical sense, after all the camps and everything. She embraced religiosity in a philosophical sense, not necessarily in an Orthodox or a Catholic, but in an ecumenical sense. When she was dying she asked to confess to an Orthodox priest, although she could have been just as much at ease with a Catholic priest. But back to Anton Yakovlevich; he was, actually, quite exceptional with his staunchness and his faithfulness to his religion. And, of course, he had a huge influence on her, and he also made a particular effort to impart his beliefs, his moral standards to her, and made similar efforts to impart his spiritual-religious beliefs to me too, which I understood only very vaguely. I’ve only experienced eschatological sensations explicitly. I wondered a lot about the phenomenon of death, and the strangeness of the phenomenon of life: Where do we come from and where to do we vanish after life? I wondered about the sense of it all. And he somehow tried to explain and answer my questions. He tried to explain that which, in essence, is unexplainable . . . but, nonetheless, he tried . . . Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And, probably, this is the reason he decided to go to Lvov after he was freed? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, yes—and, of course, she followed him, perhaps also having the same thing in mind, that is, to go to church. However, she didn’t do it frequently. Especially when he succumbed to illness after Kolyma, he would spend a lot of time in Catholic cathedrals. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did you go to Lvov with them? Vasily Aksenov. No, I never lived there, but I went to visit them several times there. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So, they lived there for just two years? Vasily Aksenov. Well, actually, they lived there a little longer, until Anton Yakovlevich’s death, and then about two-three years longer. Tonya, their adopted daughter, was also there. Do you remember this from the book? My mother raised and taught Tonya. She stubbornly insisted on teaching her piano. I think she must have remembered when she was forced to play the piano . . . So she very insistently taught Tonya how to play the piano.

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Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did your mother start writing her memoirs in Lvov? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, I believe so. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. At the end of the second volume she describes burning the original. Can you shed some light about how it actually happened? Vasily Aksenov. She did, indeed, burn her manuscript, when the text was circulating in samizdat. According to reports, word was spreading in samizdat that some five thousand typewritten copies were already circulating. That’s information from the professional samizdat distributors, who claimed that approximately five thousand copies of Journey into the Whirlwind were already in circulation. Of course, they didn’t know for sure, but they thought this was the case. She was very afraid, and not without reason; she was afraid that there would be a search again, and that they would again arrest her, but this time for something serious! When they arrested her the first time, it was for no reason— there wasn’t anything! In fact, when Journey into the Whirlwind first appeared in Italy, it was simultaneously published by the Mondadori publishing house in both Italian and the original Russian. The KGB’s chairman, Semichastnyi, proclaimed the following in Izvestiia: “Ginzburg has published her explosive text abroad. The book came out there. Therefore, we are seriously considering revoking her rehabilitation.” What he meant to say is that she is going to be arrested. Again! Having found out about this, my mother said: “If they come to get me again, I won’t be able to bear it, I will die.” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. What was she thinking when she said: “I won’t be able to bear this, I will die . . .” Maybe suicide? Vasily Aksenov. I can’t rule that out, but perhaps this would more likely mean that her heart would give out, from fear. But, in reality, what saved her was that the liberals of that time, who were plentiful already in the Central Committee and in various journals (among them the journal Iunost′, where I served on the editorial board), the liberals already at that time had a distinct say-so in society. One of the chief editors of my journal Iunost′ was Mary Lazarevna Ozerova. She told me: “I shall have a talk with Igor Chernovets.” And then she said: “Go and see him now, he’s waiting for you.” I actually had to go to the headquarters of the Central Committee of the CPSS and say that I had an appointment with Chernovets himself. Chernovets was a very important figure in the Department of Culture in the Central Committee, and so I had a fairly long talk with him, and he let me know that they were trying to muffle my mother’s case. Then a journalist appeared from the Italian communist newspaper Unita to interview my mother. In the course of that interview, as was formerly agreed, my mother said that she

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has no intentions of compromising anyone in her country, and that she has not given her consent to the publication of her work; if the work has already been published, then it was done without her knowledge or consent. And, amazingly, that statement sufficed to close her case; but in reality it was, of course, not just her statement, but the result of concerted efforts of the liberal wing of the Party. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. You mentioned that you were on the editorial board of the journal Yunost’, and that some of your mother’s stories were published there without her being a member of the Writers’ Union. Was this important for her? Did she ever strive to become a member of the Union of Soviet Writers? Vasily Aksenov. In order to become a member of the union, you had to have a published book. It was, after all, an ideological, as well as a professional organization. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And she didn’t have this book! Vasily Aksenov. Indeed, she had a book, a wonderful and a famous book, but everyone had to pretend that there was no book. Such a situation was quite typical for the Soviet publishing scene in the ’60s. Let me give you an example: the most famous singer in all of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Vysotsky, had never had an official poster advertisement, so he was not officially considered a singer; but, in fact, he was, a singer! Same thing with Ginzburg, author of a magnificent book—she was considered a “beginning” writer, who brings her stories for publication to the magazine Iunost′. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. But it was through samizdat that all the writers in Soviet Russia were reading the memoirs . . . Vasily Aksenov. Yes, of course! All the liberal-thinking writers respected and adored her, and tried to show respect for her. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And what did Solzhenitsyn say? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, Solzhenitsyn accepted her. My mother spoke about this meeting very interestingly. He invited her to dinner. She came over for dinner and said: “Never in my life did I have a worse meal!” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And who prepared it? Vasily Aksenov. I couldn’t tell you; maybe he made it himself. But they had an interesting conversation. He asked: “Evgenia Semenovna, how old are you?” And she told him. And Solzhenitsyn asked: “Are you in good health?” And Ginzburg said: “More or less.” And Solzhenitsyn asked: “How many pages do you write a day?” Ginzburg answered: “When I write, I write about five pages a day.” He was writing all of her answers down and calculating how many years, and how many pages. Then he said: “Well, let’s say you’ll live another fifteen or even eighteen years. That means you need to write five pages per day, not four

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as you do. You must write about everything, so that everything is saved for posterity and your memory is preserved.” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. About Solzhenitsyn . . . One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published and Alexander Tvardovsky supported him. While she was writing Journey into the Whirlwind, she, too, was counting on Tvardovsky’s support. We don’t know the details of that story. Vasily Aksenov. Everyone tried to talk Tvardovsky into publishing Journey into the Whirlwind, but he didn’t want to. Alexander Tvardovsky didn’t like the work. Perhaps the reason lay in my mother’s reference to the fact that those of us who had been Communists remained Communists. This was one of her little tricks. But he took this seriously. He was keeping score with these people. He didn’t like these folks, you understand. After all, my mother belonged to the left wing of the Communist Party. Leaning more towards the Trotsky orientation. In fact, my mother was a Trotskyite. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Vasily Aksenov. Well, in her youth, she was a real Trotskyite. But that fact was not known to these creeps. She was, however, a genuine member of the underground Trotskyite organization. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did she disseminate leaflets? Vasily Aksenov. She told me that once or even twice she was sent to Kharkov University, to be precise. As a student, she would arrive at Kharkov University with bundles of leaflets, and she would distribute them around the lecture halls. All of her life she had sympathized with the left wing of Trotskyites. In Kazan, she belonged to the establishment—the Party elite, that is. So the local Tartar Party leaders felt distrust and antipathy to such people as herself—because she read the poetry of different poets, and loved foreign authors, and she was erudite, and she spoke foreign languages, such as French and German. Naturally, she was attracted to such people; for example, in her book she talks about Professor Elvov. Professor Elvov was, in fact, a member of the opposition. He was an actual member of the Trotskyite opposition, and was sent to Kazan by the opposition. He was in exile there and, consequently, he was being observed by NKVD. He befriended my mother, and she really took her friendship with him seriously. I remember seeing his portrait, maybe she got it somewhere, I don’t know where, or perhaps Aunt Natasha showed it to me. He looked like a typical leftist intellectual of the 1930s. He wore small metal-rimmed glasses, his hair was also combed in a certain way . . . exactly like Isaac Babel’s. He was this kind of person. He was also highly knowledgeable, like G. Lukács who represented the Western orientation of Marxism. And he was a jovial man, too. He even danced with my mother. They would play a record of “How Do You Do

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Mr. Brown,” dancing the charleston together. So that association with Professor Elvov followed her case for a multitude of years, even when she was no longer tied to Trotskyites. Yet her attraction to that milieu never stopped. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. That Professor Elvov who came to say goodbye to your mother, came to warn her before his arrest of the misfortune that lay ahead, but she, of course, could not believe him that such a horrible moment in history was upon them. Vasily Aksenov. Incidentally, in Magadan, she had again somehow managed to surround herself with similar kinds of people, consisting of Germans, who were former members of the Comintern, who also ended up in prison. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Can you tell us a bit more about your mother’s “salon” in Magadan and in Moscow. You mentioned that your mother was like a magnet, attracting people to herself. Vasily Aksenov. Indeed, she had a penchant for creating a salon wherever she would appear. I always said that I’m not ruling out the possibility that even in the camp barracks she maintained a type of salon. When I came to Magadan, I saw it with my own eyes. I sat there right next to them and listened to what they said. I was simply flabbergasted! I never thought that there could be such people in the Soviet Union. They seemed not to have been afraid of anything. They had lived through everything already, all the camps, and they didn’t think about a second wave of arrests. They didn’t even think there would be a second wave. They’d say, “What more can be done to us?” “They have done it all to us, and we have nothing more to lose.” To quote to you for example the words of Dr. Umansky, who was my math tutor. He called me “Half Israelite!” “You are Half-an-Israelite,” he’d say, and, “I am a complete Zionist,” and, “The only thing I dream about is to die in Israel.” He spoke like this for everyone to hear. He lived in a horrible dormitory with some former camp inmates. All he had there was a small bunk bed, like everyone else who was freed. He worked as an anatomical pathologist in the local hospital. He would walk through the whole town to Zhenya’s through the worst blizzard, through the frost; he’d walk in and the icicles would be hanging from his moustache. The whole scene of the salon, which was filled with those smart Jewish intellectuals, had an aura of Freudianism. He was constantly writing poems, and my mother cited those poems. I can’t remember now whether this is in my mother’s book. As soon as he’d enter, he’d start reciting his poems: “Lucretius Carr is worthy of our praise; he was the first to uncover nature’s secrets.” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did he survive? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, he survived. They did not arrest him again, but he died there. He was old and ill. I know he had two daughters somewhere, living on the

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mainland. I don’t think he got to see them. There were, of course, so many other people: Germans, and there was even one Italian there, who was also a former Communist. All these people were former Communists. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did they all lose their faith in Communism? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, the majority of them had a very cynical attitude towards Communism now, yet there remained a few among them who . . . Take a certain Gertruda: she worked in the cloakroom of the theatre, but, in fact, she was a professor of Marxism. Like all other camp inmates, she walked around dressed in quilted trousers. Gradually, people like her were selected to go back to their original countries. All this was happening while Stalin was still alive. Evidently, the GDR was short of party apparatus workers, and so they had sent an official request to select some former camp inmates and send them back to the GDR. Gertruda was one of those people, and there were other people, too, from among my mother’s circle of friends who were chosen to go back to their country of origin. Many years later, after Stalin’s death, and after my mother’s rehabilitation, she once came to visit me in Moscow from Lvov, and she told me: “You know what? Gertruda is here. She found me and called, saying she wanted to meet the two of us!” I was a young writer then. She was living in Hotel Ukraine, so my mother and I went to the hotel to see her. The person who opened the door was unrecognizable. She had a fashionable hairstyle, a stylish haircut, a fashionable dress, with a billowing skirt emphasizing her waist—which was in vogue in the ’50s. And that hoola-hoop dancing woman was the same Gertruda who was a desperate Marxist and a professor at a writer’s institute in Leipzig. That was Gertruda! Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did she know anything about Journey into the Whirlwind? Vasily Aksenov. No, she evidently had no idea. When she spoke, she seemed to boast about her achievements. She’d say: “Zhenya, when I came to Berlin all the scum there surrounded me to find out about our situation in Kolyma. But I did not tell them anything; instead, I wrote an article entitled “Sick fruit of the sick tree” . . . and, consequently, some of those people were later arrested themselves. Can you imagine!” Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did she really say that? Vasily Aksenov. Yes! Then she asked me: “And you, Vasya, you’re a young writer. I heard about you. What German literature are you reading?” So, I said, “Yes, I’m currently reading Heinrich Böll.” In fact, there was a craze for Heinrich Böll at the time. And she said: “Have you gone crazy! How can you read that Catholic and reactionary writer”?

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Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. If she only knew that Heinrich Böll had already written a forward to your mother’s translation! Vasily Aksenov. Indeed! Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Perhaps we could change topics and move to questions about Journey into the Whirlwind. In the epilogue to the second edition Evgenia Solomonovna says: “It was perfectly clear to me that I owed this [the book’s success] not to any special literary merit in the book but solely to its truthfulness” (2.420) Do you think that the first volume was less truthful because of its literary qualities, or because of its internal censorship? Vasily Aksenov. I don’t think this was connected with either direct censorship or internal censorship, but simply due to the feeling of the time. A lot of time transpired between the first and second volumes. The whole situation around her had radically changed. When she was writing volume one of her book, it was in the aftermath of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party. The anti-Stalinist sentiments were quite clear and palpable among the members of the Central Committee, Khrushchev’s leadership, in particular. She sensed that the leadership intended to publish labor camp testimonies, so she started thinking about the publication of her own work. Consequently, she attempted to anticipate her hidden faith in the idea of real Communism. So, yes, this is a typical example of one her ideas of a small trick: to say that the real Communists survived, that faith in Communism was preserved, and that we will achieve a new bright Communism. Things like that. But, in fact, her readers were overcome not by her “communist optimism,” but by witnessing the hell she went through. Moreover, she was completely alone at that time. There wasn’t anyone around her when she started writing the second volume, and she wasn’t surrounded by a literary group that could support her. I believe that if, at the time of her writing, she had been surrounded by such people as the Kopelevs, or Kaverin, or some other literary liberals, if that had been the case then, she would have expressed herself differently then. No one knew Solzhenitsyn then, because any phenomenon like his work would have opened the boundaries of permissible literary expression. To be exact, by the time she was writing volume two of her work, those “boundaries of the permissible” had already been moved, and she herself had changed. By that time, she no longer held onto any illusions. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had happened already, which we considered an extreme crisis in Communist ideology. The end of Communist ideology. Because up until the invasion of Czechoslovakia, we, writers belonging to the younger generation, thought that a different kind of socialism was still possible! Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. You mean socialism with a human face?

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Vasily Aksenov. Or rather with a human ass. So yes, by the time she was writing the second volume, she was already a different person. There were already different people surrounding her, and therefore there was more self-confidence in her and less fear. She wasn’t afraid as much. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Speaking of the second volume, she blames herself in it for many things that had transpired. Vasily Aksenov. Yes, she frequently repeated, “What a fool I was, what a fool!” And even in Magadan she would keep saying: “If you only knew what a fool I was.” And, of course, I think she had in mind . . . Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So she never did become a member of the Party, right? And never even tried? Vasily Aksenov. Oh, she became a Party member all right! As soon as they rehabilitated her, they reinstated her into the Party. She even attended the Party meetings of the house management committee. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Was this a small trick? Vasily Aksenov. And how! This was a big small trick! Every time she would return from one of those Party meetings, she’d mimic the idiots who were there. Some old colonels sat there and said: “Yes, this departs from the general line of the Party!” But, nonetheless, she considered that, had she not done that, she would not have been fully rehabilitated. As a certain Kuksin, one of the secretaries of the Central Committee, once said: “What is the difference between a Catholic and a Communist? A Catholic believes in resurrection after death, and we Communists believe in rehabilitation after death!” This secretary was a very cunning person. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Let’s talk about the role of literature . . . I’m citing: “I reflected once again on the power which literature exerts on us in that state of spiritual composure which prison life induces, and which makes us strive, devoutly and humbly, to drink in an author’s words to the full. I have never loved human beings so devotedly as in those months and years when, cast away in the inhuman land and imprisoned behind stone walls, I absorbed every line of print . . .” (1.228). How can one combine that which is essentially incompatible? How can one live with such contradictions? How can one love in the conditions of such utter oppression? Vasily Aksenov. Speaking frankly, I don’t know. It is unknown territory for me. My mother, despite everything, had a positive outlook on things. After all, she belonged to that generation of positivism, and that would be forever indelible for her. She did not live in the realm of metaphysics. She did not feel human existence in terms of a nightmare. With that in mind, I think she was an excellent candidate to carry out a Catholic deed. This, of course, is amazing, because she believed in people, in an atmosphere of almost complete loss of everything

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spiritual, and where only your own scary or pathetic bio mattered. To believe in man after all this! But, nevertheless, after all, she obviously meant the spiritual more than the bodily. And if we talk about the fact that a person [appeared] (my own opinion on the question as to why the human race exists at all), the only purpose of its [the human race’s] existence is improvement, that is, a departure from original sin. Right? To put it mildly, or figuratively speaking, a departure from the mortal body entering some other phase, less associated with a bodily prison, and more with some initial idea that we do not know. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Surely, she felt this way with the help of Anton Yakovlevich? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, I believe that was totally possible. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Here’s another question about genre. Some critics have written that your mother created a stylistic hybrid of sorts, in that her memoirs encompass elements of the novel, as well as documentary prose. Especially when they write about irony in the memoirs. Do you agree with this? Vasily Aksenov. I do not totally agree, because, after all, this is not documentary prose! There are no documents here! Not even any letters. But novelistic elements appeared in her work, because life was so much more horrible than any imagined novels. Writers are usually in search of some moving plots, but these plots constantly surrounded my mother and Anton Yakovlevich, and there was no need to conjure them up. They simply existed. Take an example from one of the volumes, when my mother and Anton Yakovlevich were walking toward each other several kilometers through the most blinding blizzard. You have a good example of a life-threatening moment, and yet these horrific collisions of life become novelistic material. So you simply remember, and these remembrances become material for your book. This is much more powerful than any novelist’s fictional plot. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Among novelistic traits, there are distinct elements of what can be called a bildungsroman. When your mother starts on her journey, she has a kind of inner naivete, but by the time the journey concludes, she has reached a different spiritual level due to all the suffering she had to go through. Do you see this as a novelistic trait? Vasily Aksenov. Of course, any novel will necessarily have elements of the biographical and autobiographical; one simply can’t avoid this. If we speak of her work not as a commercial object on the book market, but as a work with strong spiritual undertones, then we, indeed, observe the following equation: her path begins with a cathartic shock, then she continues on her trail of tears reaching the point of complete crisis, and she exits that path having passed through a spiritual catharsis.

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Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Lately, some critics have spoken of Evgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs as “female autobiography.” That is, treating it as a special genre. Do you agree with this? Vasily Aksenov. We’ve touched upon this topic a bit above, but I would say that the book has some elements of girlhood in it. Virginity, in the sense of spiritual cleanliness and absence of any vice. When you look at the reality of what, in fact, took place in those camps—i.e., in the women’s zone—it’s quite strange. Everyone is talking about it now, and you see it on the screen. Recently, I saw a film called Koma, the title being taken from the first and last syllable of Kolyma, so you get Koma. Koma is what they called Kolyma. This is a film about the female zone. But you can’t really find those elements of violence and horror in my mother’s book. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Why are there elements of female violence that she managed to evade? Vasily Aksenov. Yes, thank God she does manage to avoid the violations, only because she was under the protection of some medical personnel, i.e., Anton Yakovlevich and certain other people. Nonetheless, she knew and saw it all; she knew what was going on there—the monstrous decay of human beings. She chose not to speak about it. Because, from her point of view, there are literary themes. I already spoke about this, that she always called herself a “person of the nineteenth century.” She’d say that when writers turn towards the erotic and sex in their novels, they’re essentially talking about the same thing that Ivan Turgenev chose to remain silent about. My mother remained silent about what today’s writer would focus on and start salivating about. She thought that contemporary writers write about that which is unspeakable in order to create a hyperbolic theatre of horror. She wanted to see a certain “light at the end of the tunnel” in a spiritual sense. To a great extent, she was a young admirer of Pasternak. This remained with her. This is her quite natural artistic quality. Why Pasternak, you’ll ask, why not Akhmatova? Pasternak was an “illness,” you might say, from her early youth. She constantly cited his poems, the poems of his early phase, when you are captured by the charm of the visible world. My mother was precisely like that: she’d sometimes catch her breath and say, “Look, how beautiful our Kolyma is.” Sometimes this world is beautiful. For example, in spring or summer, when the hills would get covered with berries of all kinds; all around, they become red, or all purple. And the sea! The geography is overwhelming. The land is overwhelming: Chukotka, Alaska, Kamchatka, Kolyma. The world of those huge lands, far oceanic horizons and sunsets. My mother would look at all of this and say: “My God!” She also adored the poetry of Igor

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Severyanin—that worshipper of beauty, and she’d cite his poetry with the necessary idiosyncratic ironic intonation. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Did she like your avant-garde style? Vasily Aksenov. She was “suspicious” about my style of writing, to say the least. She would even say to me: “Oh, Vaska, there you go again! . . . Up to something again,” and so on and so forth . . . Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. A question about your mother’s book belonging to female autobiography: Do you agree with the categorizations of such critics as Deming Brown or Marc Slonim, that works by Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov truly represent Gulag literature, whereas Evgenia Ginzburg’s book is more in the category of memoiristic women’s autobiography? Isn’t it a gross underestimation, because, in fact, in Ginzburg’s book the Gulag world is truly represented. Vasily Aksenov. Well, even in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich there is a lot about the world of the Gulag which is left out. Certain things are not being given their proper name, too, because he was adjusting his material for this or that publishing house. And it must be noted that Solzhenitsyn tried not to represent the totality of that inferno. In that regard, Shalamov went much further. Yet when my own father was talking about what really went on in the camps, he’d reveal the whole realm of unfathomable sexual violence inflicted, not only on women, but also on men. Monstrous violence! Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Isn’t this fully addressed in Journey . . .?” In both volumes you have this whole nightmare of the Gulag world. For this reason, it is incorrect to call . . . Vasily Aksenov. No, not completely! Just by nature of who she was, she always leans towards idealization of some sort. She managed always to find people who were, in fact, good people. Even at the moment of her second arrest, she managed to see the good in people. Like sitting in the car with those two repulsive guys, one of whom I hated. I would see him many times on the streets in town; for me, he was simply the embodiment of evil. I would have shot this scoundrel, if only the conditions were right. And yet my mother, for some reason, said he was a good man. You won’t find this in her book, but she said that he isn’t that horrible a man, that he did have a human dimension. In my mind, there was nothing human in him whatsoever. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. What significance does your mother’s book have for you? Vasily Aksenov. I love to sometimes pick up Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and simply read it to get into a better mood. This is the way I feel about Journey . . . It represents the most amazing brightness. What I derive from it is not the horror, but its brightness. I myself find it surprising that no matter what she wrote,

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I read it and recall it with a smile; I recall how she talked about it, how she committed all that to paper. For me, this is a source of light, and I would say it is like charging a battery. And I recognize that the book she wrote is a work of colossal significance; and the very fact that the book avoids horror and defilement constitutes its very strength. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. How do American students react to [the memoir]? Do they think that she finds human qualities in people, miracles, and optimism after all, amidst the hell and horrors? Vasily Aksenov. Indeed, you said it wel l . Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Do you think these memoirs had, or perhaps still have, a huge impact on your own creative path? Vasily Aksenov. A large impact, no doubt. For me, this journey as a sixteenyear-old across the world to Kolyma, and being reunited with my mother, was, perhaps, the most powerful experience of my lifetime. Later on, there were other significant journeys that changed my life but, definitely, this was one of the most significant. And, in addition to that, my mother and I went through torture in Magadan. I don’t believe my mother and I ever told each other that we had to write about it. But now, when I see that part of our lives in the form of a book, and that the book has crossed the world and has been read in every language of the world, that is, of course, a magnificent feeling. A very powerful feeling. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Yet your mother did receive a great reward before her death? You travelled together to France, and even though she was not acknowledged here, she was recognized there. Vasily Aksenov. She was recognized indeed! At a special PEN Club reception given in her honor, strange as it may sound to you. She seemed a bit embarrassed and a bit fearful there. She must not have expected that the most prominent living writers in France would be there and speak of her and her book with such deep admiration. I have a mental picture of her standing there at that reception next to Pierre Emanuelle and smiling with such shyness, as if she was a debutante. Everyone was also charmed at how well she knew French; yet she was too overwhelmed to speak much there. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And after that did you both travel on to Italy? Vasily Aksenov. Actually, we went on to Nice afterwards. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. When were you told that an Italian film had been made? Vasily Aksenov. Not there, I believe. I think while we were still in Moscow. Someone had arrived from Italy and related to us that such a film had been made, but that it was hissed by the audience . . .

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Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. You mentioned that during your mother’s illness a miracle took place. Vasily Aksenov. Yes, she got very ill, her cancer was diagnosed as inoperable. The doctors gave us no hope, the cancer was too advanced. She found it almost impossible to walk, as the cancer metastasized in her bones. Professor Rozanov of Botkinsky Hospital, one of the best clinics in Moscow, said that, unfortunately, she had only a few months left to live. And then all of a sudden we started receiving [Norform] through the Solzhenitsyn Aid Foundation for the Victims of Repression and Dissidence. This de facto underground organization obtained a medication called Norform on my mother’s behalf —a hormonal preparation. She started taking it and before our very eyes a miracle started to occur. The X-rays started showing a remission, and my mother started walking. It all went away. It was an astounding miracle! And that was precisely the time when we set off for France. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. And did your mother continue taking the medication? Vasily Aksenov. Unfortunately, she started neglecting to take the medication. For some reason, she developed a dislike of it. She began to forget to take it regularly, and then she stopped getting her refills. And no matter how much pressure I put on her, she would say: “Stop it, stop it, don’t talk nonsense.” When we returned from our travels a month and a half later, the disease made a comeback. From that point on, her cancer progressed quickly; the decline became inexorable. Nevertheless, she was in a superb mood; she was very much preoccupied with getting everyone presents. She had a huge list of her closest friends, and she couldn’t stop buying and buying things for them. She kept saying: “This will be for Georgy Ivanovich, this for Julius Osipovich, this for Klarochka, that for Ninochka, and so on and so forth. It was really an insane amount of gifts, which resulted in a monstrous amount of luggage, something indescribable. I’d say to her: “We still have to go to Cologne to visit with Heinrich Böll.” I’d loaded up my station wagon in such a way that I didn’t see what was in the trunk! So we arrived in Cologne, and my mother continued walking and shopping and buying presents for her Muscovites. Because Muscovites do not have anything! That’s right! No such things were to be found in Moscow! Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. Our last question concerns your mother’s legacy. Her “circle of friends” was responsible for disseminating your mother’s book in samizdat. So despite the fact that it was not officially published in the Soviet Union, or rather because of it, the impact of the book was immense. Would you agree that the real legacy of her book is that it forced its readers to reevaluate the validity of the whole system?

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Vasily Aksenov. The book is considered a classic of Gulag literature. The fact that this classic is everywhere around the world is simply indisputable. No one can argue with this. One may not be pleased. Another person may like it more or less. But it is a fact. It is such a given that, naturally, the book has exerted a great influence. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. But could you narrow down your answer to the book’s impact vis-à-vis that which had happened in Russia? Did such literature have a significant role in formulating its readers’ worldview? Vasily Aksenov. Of course. First, in the early ’90s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an inundation of publications which were previously prohibited. And because of this process of inundation readers were looking to fill their hunger for novelty. Some time had to pass for the readership to start seeking artistic and spiritual merits in the works they read. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. So, these memoirs provided an impetus for thinking people, who thought that when the memoirs revealed the whole truth it was impossible to remain and live in such a system. Vasily Aksenov. Yes, of course, all this made a huge impact. Little by little, all this played a role. We all had our own input in the demolition of the mighty and powerful Soviet Union. Olga Cooke and Rimma Volynska. We want to express our deep gratitude for this interview, Vasily Pavlovich. Vasily Aksenov. And I want to thank you.

Photographs

FIGURE 1.  Ginzburg. Photographer: Alexander Less, TASS.

FIGURE 2.  With her son, Vasily Aksenov.

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FIGURE 3.  With her second husband, Pavel Aksenov, and son, Vasily Aksenov.

FIGURE 4.  With her third husband, Anton Walter.

Photographs

FIGURE 5.  With Vasily Aksenov, her adopted daughter, Antonina Aksenova, and Anton Walter.

FIGURE 6.  With Aksenov and Antonina Aksenova, in Magadan in 1954.

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FIGURE 7.  With Vasily Aksenov.

FIGURE 8.  With Vasily Aksenov.

Photographs

FIGURE 9.  With Vasily Aksenov, Antonina Aksenova, and Anton Walter.

FIGURE 10.  With her daughter, Antonina.

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FIGURE 11.  Elgen barracks, where Ginzburg lived during captivity. Photographer: Ivan Panikarov.

FIGURE 12.  Ginzburg, several years before death.

Photographs

FIGURE 13.  Ginzburg.

FIGURE 14.  Scene from the stage adaptation of Krutoi marshrut, Sovremennik Theater in Moscow.

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Index A

Adler, Nancy, 47n35 Aldan-Semenov, Andrei, 27n26 Adamova-Sliozberg, Olga, 1n1n, 118 Akhmadulina, Bella, 139n1, 171 Akhmatova, Anna, xxii, 84n5, 85, 102, 141 Aksenov P. V., xiii, xvi, xxix, 26n24, 43, 57–58, 67n25, 72, 76, 114, 116, 139n1 Aksenov, Vasily, xi, xiii, xvi, xviii, xxiv–xxix, 21, 32, 39, 43, 57–58, 62, 72, 76, 81–83, 85–99, 112, 114, 116, 123, 126, 139–47, 149, 152–153, 171 Aksenova, Antonina, xviii–xix, xxix–xxxii, 29, 44, 60n6, 74n32, 76–78, 112, 115, 120, 125–26, 151, 160, 163, 170, 187 Alaska, 140 Aleksei Mikhailovich, tsar, 3 Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, 19, 20n5, 60 Alexopoulos, Golfo, 71n28 Alliluyeva, Svetlana, 156n17 Alyosha, xvi, xviii, 67–68, 74–78, 84, 103, 112, 114–17, 119–25, 151 America, 140 Améry, Jean, 134 Applebaum, Anne, 35 Arkhangelsk, 43 Artwińska, Anna, xxviii Assmann, Jan and Aleida, 51 Auschwitz, 1 Avvakum, Archpriest, xxvii, 3, 32

B

Baby Yar, 161 Bakhtin, Michail, 24 Barton Johnson, D., 85n7, 87n11 BBC, 155 Beliakova, Arina, 83 Belichye, xviii Belyi, Andrey, 99n42 Berg, Rika, 105 Bierut, Bolesław, 43 Bitov, Andrey, 93n30 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 5 Blok, Alexander, xiii–xxii, xxii, 85, 103

Bobińska, Helena, 42n24 Böll, Heinrich, xx, xxii, xxiv, 84, 150, 164–65, 171–72, 192–93, 199 Bolsheviks, 8, 30 Brecht, Bertold, 168–69 Brezhnev, Leonid, 53, 105n4 Brodsky, Joseph, 99n40, 139n1, 152n4 Brombert, Victor, 4–5 Brown, Edward, xx Bruno, Julian, 42n24 Budzyńska, Celina, xxviii, 36–37, 39–46, 47n37, 48–55 Budzyński, Stanisław, 42–43 Bukharin, Nikolai, 164 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 97–98, 99n42 Bürger, Peter, 91, 93n31 Burn, The (V. Aksenov’s novel), xxix, 81–83, 86–90, 92, 94, 97–99, 182 Butyrki, prison, 15, 103, 163 Byron, George Gordon, 4, 13, 17

C

Carpathian Mountains, xix, 163 Carson, Rachel, x–xi Cellini, Benvenuto, xxviii, 3 Chagalls, 171 Chakovsky, Alexandr, 171 Che Guevara, 157 Chekhov, Anton, 88 China, 156–157 Chou En Lai, 157 Chukovskaya, Lydia, xxi, 60 Chukovsky, Kornei, xv, 33, 83n4, 105 Clark, Katerina, 25–26 Clement of Alexandria, 7 Cologne, 150, 170–72, 199 Congo, 96 Corday, Charlotte, 16 Crankshaw, Edward, xix, xxx Crimea, xviii, 87, 96, 152 Cuba, 156 Czapski, Józef, 37 Czechoslovakia, invasion of, 87, 193

Index

D

Dalstroi, xviii, 124, 182 Daniel, Yuli, 155, 158 Dante, xxii Daugava, XV Decembrists, 4 Desmoulins, Madame, 16 Detizdat, 105 Diakov, Boris, 9, 27n26 Dickens, Charles, xxii Dikovitsky, XVI Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 147, 162 Dontsov, 13 Dostoevsky, Fedor, xxviii, 3–4, 141 Duda, Kathryn, xvn10, xxix Dumas, Alexandre, xxviii, 4

E

Edelman, Marek, 109–110 Efimiva, Nina, 98n35 Efron, Ariadna, 1n1 Ehrenburg, Ilya, xv, 33 Elgen, xvii, 77, 108, 120, 123–24, 145 Eliade, Mircea, 5 Emmanuel, Pierre, 170 England, 96 Erofeev, Venedikt, 93n30 Etkind, Efim, 171

F

Faucher, Leon, 8 Fedorov, Dmitry, xvi, 43, 114, 121 Feldman, Shoshana, 103n2 Fellini, Federico, 90 Feuchtwanger, Leon, 158 Figes, Orlando, xxv Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 26, 28 Ford, Henry, xi France, xix, 151, 156, 171–72, 198–99 Frankl, Victor, xxx, 101–5, 107, 109, 111–12 Franko, colonel, 124

G

Galanskov, Yuri, 158 Galler, Meyer, 101, 111 Ganglevskaya, Zora, 150 Gavrilov, Andrei, xxvi Geffroy, Gustave, 5 Gerаsimova, Valeria, 68 Germany, xxix, xxxi, 60, 156 Gestapo, 30 Ginzburg, Solomon and Rebecca (parents of E. Ginzburg), xvi Glinka, xxx, 101

Glinka, Elena, 108–9 Gogol, Nikolai, 99n42, 147 Gomułka, Władysław, 52 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 20 Gorbanevskaia, Natalia, 91 Gore, Wit, xxiii Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), xi Gorky, Maksim, 7, 59n5 Griboedov, Alexander, xxiii, 103 Gridasova, Alexandra, xviii, 124 Grigorenko, Pyotr, 33 Gulag, xi, xiii, xix, xxin32, xxiv, xxvi–xxxi, 2–5, 7–10, 12, 14, 18–21, 23–25, 28, 35–46, 48, 54–55, 60, 63, 76, 81–85, 87, 95, 99, 102, 104–15, 120, 125–27, 134, 137, 140, 142, 144, 182, 197, 200 Gulag Archipelago, The (novel of A. Solzhenitsyn), 3–4, 37, 107, 165 Gulags, xiv, 35–36, 44–45, 47, 55 Gumilev, Nikolai, xxii, 141

H

Hamsun, Knut, xxv Hartman, Anne, 25n18 Heldt, Barbara, xvi, xxi, xxiv–xxv, 22n8, 40n20, 115 Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw, 37 Herzen, Alexander, 171 Hirsch, Marianne, 86, 94 Hochschild, Adam, xxvi Holmgren, Beth, xx–cxiv, 78 Holocaust, 86, 109, 134 Horace, xxii Hugo, Victor, xxviiI, 4 Huizinga, Johan, xxx, 135–36

I

Ibsen, Henrik, 3 Il’ichev, 90 Inber, Vera, 29 Indonesia, 158 Ioffe, Maria, xx Ionesco, Eugene, 170 Italy, XV, 98, 156 Ivanov, Georgy, 170n35

J

Japan, 143 Jews, 42–43 Joffe, Nadezhda, 118

K

Kalinin, Mikhail, 106–7 Karepova, Julia, xvii, xxxii, 103

209

210

Index

Karol, K. S, 156–159 Kaverin, Veniamin, xv, 33 Kazan, xiii, xvi, xix, 1–2, 12, 15, 23, 43, 67, 102, 119–20, 141–42, 146, 153, 159, 161, 177, 190 Kelly, Catriona, xx KGB, xxvi, 105, 146, 155, 164, 179, 182–85, 188. See also NKVD Kharkhordin, Oleg, 30, 32 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 85n7 Khrushchev, Nikita, 9, 47, 79, 82, 89–91, 155 Kirov, Sergei, xiii, 11, 68 Klose, Kevin, 99n39 Kolář, Pavel, 47 Kolchevska, Natasha, xxii, xxviii, 58, 64, 86 Kolyma, xv, xvii–xxiii, xxv, xxviii, 1, 12, 18, 44, 57, 72–73, 81, 102, 108, 115–16, 120, 123–24, 140, 145, 149, 151, 159, 164, 171–72, 182, 185, 187, 192, 196, 198 Komsomol, 15, 28, 147, 177, 185 Konchalovsky, Andrei, 178 Kopelev, Lev, xix, xxxi, 60 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 93n30 Korzhavin, Naum, 164 Kostroma, 114, 177 Kotelnikov, Evgeny, 177, 179 Kotiaeva, Antonina, 29 Kozlov, Denis, 62 Kristeva, Julia, xxx, 131–32, 137 Krutoi marshrut. See Whirlwind Krylova, Anna, 28–29, 34 Kuznetsov, Eduard, 91

L

Lahusen, Thomas, 29n27 Lefortovo, 172 Leningrad, xv, xviii, xxx, 11, 25, 42, 68, 76, 84, 90, 112, 114, 121–22, 124, 141, 146. See also Petersburg Levi, Primo, 1, 134–35 Levinas, Emmanuel, xxx, 132 Life of Ivan Denisovich (novel of A. Solzhenitsyn), xiv, 2, 10, 61 Łódź, 43 Lovelace, Richard, 3 Lvov, xviii–xxxi, xxxi, 44, 141, 151–55, 160, 162 Lydia, XXI, 60, 72

M

MacKinnon, Elaine, xxx Magadan, xvii–xxiii, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, xxxi, 1, 24, 44, 65, 68–69, 74, 76–78, 81–85, 92,

95–96, 102, 110, 112, 115, 120, 122–26, 140–41, 143–45, 163, 185, 191, 194, 198 Maksimov, Vladimir, 91, 164, 171 Maleevka, 154 Malenkov, Georgy, 142 Mandelshtam, Nadezhda, xxi, 20n3, 60 Mandelshtam, Osip, xxii Manège exhibition, 89, 91 Mannheim, Karl, 49n39 Mao Zegong, 157 Marshak, Samuil, 105 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 85n7, 103, 144n20, 160 Marx, Karl, 158 Mary, Queen of Scots, 16, 124 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 103, 160 McLean, Hugh, 6 Medvedev, Roy, xiv–xix, xix, 60, 154–55, 160, 164 Messerer, Boris, 139n1 Metropol collection, 98 Metternich’s regime, 4 Meyer, Priscilla, 97n34 Michelangelo, xxii Mickiewicz, Adam, 4, 6, 13n23 Mikhailova, Klava, 162 Milan, 2, 44 Minsk, 108 Mont Saint-Michel fortress, 5 Moscow, xv–xix, xix, xxix, xxxi, 12, 15, 24, 42–44, 60, 68, 83, 87, 90, 95–96, 106, 116–17, 124, 141, 144, 152–154, 156, 160, 162, 168, 171 Motyleva, Tamara, 169 Mrozik, Agnieszka, 42n22, 52

N

Nazis, x, 156 Nazism, x, 101 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 16, 103, 162 Nekrasov, Viktor, 83n4, 171 Nice, 170–71, 198 NKVD, 1–2, 13–15, 42–43, 114, 117, 176–77, 179, 183, 190. See also KGB Nora, Pierre, 51

O

Odoevtseva, Irina, 170 Okhotsk, sea of, xvii Okudzhava, Bulat, 172 Orenburg, 151 Origen, 7 Orlova, XXXI, 60

Index

Orlova, Raisa, xix, xxxi Oushakine, Seregei, xxviii, 22–24, 32–33

P

Pallon, Viacheslav, 10 Panova, Vera, xv, 33 Paperno, Irina, 20n3, 22n9, 58 Paris, xxxi, 99n40, 150, 155, 157, 170¬–72 Parthé, Kathleen F., 96n33 Pasternak, Boris, xxii, xxiv, 85, 99n42, 136– 137, 141, 152, 160 Paustovsky, Konstantin, xv, 33, 83n4 Pavlova, Valentina, 185 Pellico, Silvio, 3–5 PEN Club, xix, xxxi, 14, 21, 130, 170, 198 Peredelkino, 163 Perm, 162 Petersburg, 42, 147. See also Leningrad Pilyar, Yurii, 2, 27n26 Pisarev, Dmitry, 3 Pitkovskaya, Bronislava, 13–16, 18, 30 Plato, 6 Pleşu, Andrei, xxx, 130–31, 137 Plisetskaia, M. M., 83n4 Podolskaya, Evgenia, 14–16, 18 Poland, 38, 42–43, 46, 49, 54, 56, 156 Polevoi, Boris, XV, 2, 18, 63–64 Popescu-Sandu, Oana, xxx Preobrazhensky, Sergei, 63 Proffer, Carl, 23 Proust, Marcel, xxiii Pushkin, Aleksander, xxii–liii, 17, 103, 136

R

Raphael, 152, 184 Razgon, Lev, xxx, 101, 104–7, 112 Rolland, Romain, 158 Romanticism, 4 Ronen, Omry, 98n37 Rostov, 142, 156 Rouas, Claude, 170 Russia, x, xv, xxxi, 4–5, 20, 25, 30, 45, 49–50, 54, 56, 96, 102, 105, 143, 161 Ryazan, 96, 153 Rybinsk, 57 Rykov, Aleksei, 164

S

Sabler, Solomon, 87 Sakharov, Andrei, 60, 83n4, 155 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 157 Schiller, Friedrich, xxviii, 4 Schumann, Robert, 167 Semichastnyi, Vladimir, 155–56

Severyanin, Igor, 137, 141 Shalamov, Varlam, xix, xxviin14, 1n1, 37, 60, 86n10, 101, 110n14, 112 Shapovalov, Veronica, 21, 29n29 Shelest, Georgy, 27n26 Shirokova, Katya, 15 Shostakovich, Dmitry, 161 Shub, Anatole, 99n42 Siberia, xv, 25, 81, 136, 140 Siniavsky, Andrey, xxin32, 88, 89n20, 155, 158, 171 Slavutskaya, Wilhelmina, 151 Slezkine, Yurii, 79 Slutsky, Tanya, 171 Smoktunovsky, I. M., 83n4 Socrates, 6 Solovki camp, 7, 59n5 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, xiv–xix, xix, xxvii, xxxi, 2–5, 9–11, 27, 33, 37, 41, 55, 60–61, 107, 112, 150n2, 153, 158, 160, 164–65, 189–90, 193, 197, 199 Soviet Union, xv, xix, xxxi, 2, 20, 32, 44–46, 79, 89, 98, 106, 140, 189, 191, 199–200. See also USSR Spielberg prison, 4 Stalin, Joseph, xi, xiv, xix, xxix–xxx, 1, 3, 9, 11–13, 17, 22, 32, 44–46, 48, 54, 60, 71, 82, 85, 90, 95–96, 98, 104–5, 114, 122, 126–27, 144, 147, 150, 156–57, 161, 178, 192 Stalina, Svetlana, 156 Stalinism, xiii, xxvi, xxix, 44–48, 53, 55, 59, 66, 71, 79, 83, 101, 126–27, 159 Stendhal, 4 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, x–xi Sucharski Tadeusz, 38n8 Svirsky, Grigory, 154, 171

T

Tairulnitsky, colonel, 122, 125 Talagi camp, 43 Taskan, 122 Tasso, Torquatto, 17 Tatarstan, 146 Temnikov camp, 43 Thun-Hohenstein, Franziska, 47n37, 53 Thunderjet, Patrick, 98 Tiutchev, Fedor, xxin33, xxii, 103 Todorov, Tzvetan, xxx, 134 Togliatti, Palmiro, 156 Toker, Leona, xxvi, 38, 50, 60–61 Tołczyk, Dariusz, xxii, xxvii–xxxii, 54–55, 59n5 Tolstoy, Leo, xxii, xxviii, 4, 16

211

212

Index

Torańska, Teresa, 43, 45 Trawiński, Zygmunt, 42 Trubetskaya, Katya, 162 Tsareva, Nadya, 162 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 1n1 Tula, 153 Tych, Feliks, 43n26 Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, xiv–xv, 2, 61–62, 190 Twenty-Second Party Congress, xiv, 10, 20–21

U

Updike, John, 98n39 USA, 156 USSR, xxviii, 10, 42, 46, 84, 98, 114, 147, 182. See also Soviet Union

V

Vietnam, 158 Vigdorova, Frida, 33, 151 Vladivostok, xvii, xxiii, 124 Vlady, Marina, 83 Volga, 161–62 Volkonskaya, Masha, 162 Volovich, Khava, xxx, 101, 110 Volynska, Rimma, xxx–xxxii Vorkuta, 149, 164 Voroshilov, Kliment, 142 Vozhael, 106

Voznesensky, Andrey, xv, 33, 90, 161, 171 Vysotsky, Vladimir, 189

W

Walter, Anton, xvii–xix, xxiv–xxv, xxxi, 31, 44, 58, 60, 74, 77–78, 111–12, 121–22, 126, 150, 152, 160, 186 Warsaw, 42 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 109 Weill, Kurt, 168n32 Whirlwind (Krutoi Marshrut, a book by E. Ginzburg), xiii¬–xiv, xix, xxxi, 2, 12–13, 18–27, 29, 31–32, 36–37, 44–45, 47, 54–55, 57–58, 60–64, 67, 69, 71, 78, 81, 111, 120, 129, 131, 139–40, 143, 150–51, 154–56, 160–61, 163–64, 170, 188, 190, 192–93

Y

Yalta, 88 Yaroslavl, xvii, 16, 43, 102–3, 122 Yevtushenko, Evgeny, xiv–xxv, 33, 156, 161, 171

Z

Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 152 Zholkovsky, Alexander, xxvn41, 25 Zverev, Aleksey, 92