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

by Olga M. Cooke (Editor)

Overview

“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.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887191720
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	07/25/2023
Series:	The Real Twentieth Century
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

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. 

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. 

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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

“A timely multi-faceted collection of intra- and interdisciplinary research papers on the memoirs of the Gulag veteran Evgenia Ginzburg. Placing Ginzburg’s narrative in a number of contexts, tracing the author’s emotional and ideological arc, and offering unexpected insights, this volume fills in a gap in the scholarship and provides a basis and a stimulus for further academic conversation about one of the most impressive and influential accounts of life under Stalinist terror.”

 

— Leona Toker, author of Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors and of Gulag Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading

“Justifiably introduced by Barbara Heldt as comparable to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Evgenia Ginzburg’s landmark memoir of eighteen years in the Soviet Gulag system, Journey into the Whirlwind, has influenced generations of Gulag eyewitnesses as well as scholarship on Gulag writing, Soviet political repression, and the gendering of writing about repression. In this collection, Olga Cooke has brought together an impressive variety of approaches to Ginzburg’s and others’ writing by recognized scholars of Ginzburg’s work that will be required reading for future scholarship in the field. This thoroughly documented and elegantly edited volume serves the needs of both researcher and teacher, a welcome (and long-overdue) addition to our libraries.”

— Diane Nemec Ignashev, Class of 1941 Professor of Russian & the Liberal Arts, Carleton College (Northfield, MN)

From the Publisher

07/28/2023

Cooke's (Russian, Texas A&M Univ.; editor, Andrey Bely's Petersburg) collection of essays analyzes the Soviet writer Evgenia Ginzburg (1904–77) and her two-volume autobiography, Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. Ginzburg wrote remarkable accounts of life in one of Stalin's Siberian gulags, to which she was sentenced in 1937 for the bogus charge of "Trotskyism." Ginzburg's apparent crime was that she refused to denounce a colleague. While in the gulag, Ginzburg observed that her profound love of poetry provided "unseen separation from reality." In 1948, Ginzburg's son, novelist Vasily Aksyonov, was permitted to join his mother in the camp at Magadan. Descriptions of their reunion are poignant, but some readers may find Cooke's subsequent attention to Aksyonov to be excessive, compared to other relevant and bigger examinations about what happened to Ginzburg. For example, except for the book's introduction, there is little analysis, exploration, or context of Stalinism's brutal suffocation of the arts, which would have satisfied readers wanting a bigger look at the outcomes of Ginzburg's work and efforts. VERDICT A significant title for scholars of Soviet literature, but a less compelling book for those seeking the wider meaning of Ginzburg's fate in the 20th century.—Zachary Irwin

Library Journal