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“A Mind Purified by Suffering": Evgenia Ginzburg’s "Whirlwind" Memoirs represents the first book on one of Russia’s most important classics of Gulag literature. Ginzburg’s memoirs of her eighteen-year ordeal through Stalinist concentration camps, Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, place her in the company of Russian writers, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. The contributors address Ginzburg’s Gulag experience through various vantage points, covering such topics as: memory, trauma, motherhood, love, survival strategies, and metafictional structures. The volume also provides a history of prison camp writings, capped with her biography, analysis of her correspondence with her son, Vasily Aksenov, and an interview with him.
“[This book] provide[s] important knowledge and insights into women’s experiences in the Gulag and as Gulag survivors. Cooke’s volume feeds the mind.”
—- Denise J. Youngblood, Association for Women in Slavic Studies
“This collection is an essential contribution to the literature on Evgenia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut, and the Soviet Gulag. These chapters offer a fresh look at a classic text, seeking to deepen and broaden our understanding of one of the most influential works in the Gulag literary canon. The collection reminds us of Ginzburg’s importance while offering new and productive ways to understand the richness of her work, relationships, and legacies.”
— Alan Barenberg, Texas Tech University, author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta and co-editor of Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies
“The eleven contributors to this volume—leading scholars on Evgenia Ginzburg—succeed in providing their readers with insight into the personality, life, and writings of this most prominent of Gulag memoirists… [T]his is a study of humanity—of ‘a virtue linked with altruistic ethics derived from the human condition’ (Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification 34)—and of the individual’s capacity for preserving it under the most adverse, inhuman and inhumane, circumstances. The volume will thus be of interest… to human beings in general, especially now, when the memory of Stalinism’s crimes against humanity is being obliterated and the voices of its victims suppressed.”
— Anastasia Kostetskaya, University of Hawaii, SEEJ
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), and Gulag Studies. In addition to her publications on Ginzburg, Bely, and Gulag literature, she is completing a book on Bely’s correspondence.
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Barbara Heldt
Introduction
Olga M. Cooke
Contributors
1. A Cruel Journey of the Soul: the Initiation of Evgenia Ginzburg
Dariusz Tołczyk
2. Mimetic Resistance in Evgenia’s Ginzburg’s Krutoi marshrut
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: Re-Conceiving 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
7. “Up to Their Old Tricks Again? Taking Mothers from Their Children?” Evgenia Ginzburg as a Mother in the Stalinist Gulag
Elaine MacKinnon
8. Ethics, Play, and Poetry in the Interval: Evgenia Ginzburg’s Struggle to Survive in the Whirlwind
Oana Popescu-Sandu
9. A Winter Coat for Vasya: The Evgenia Ginzburg-Vasily Aksenov Correspondence (1948–1976)
Rimma Volynska
10. Evgenia Ginzburg at the End of Krutoi marshrut
Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova
11. Interview with Vasily Aksenov
Rimma Volynska and Olga M. Cooke
Index