GINZBURG, EVGENIA SEMENOVNA

(1904–1977), Stalin-era memoirist.

Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg was one of the most well-known and respected memoirists of Josef Stalin's purges and life in the Soviet Gulag. She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moscow. She became a teacher and party activist in Kazan. She married Pavel Aksenov, a high-ranking party official in Kazan, and the couple had two sons. The eldest, Alyosha, would die during the Siege of Leningrad; the younger, Vasily, became a noted writer in his own right. In 1937 both Ginzburg and her husband were arrested. Ginzburg spent the next two years in solitary confinement before being sent to a labor camp in Kolyma. While in the camps, she undertook a variety of work, including nursing, and she met Anton Walter, a fellow prisoner who worked as a doctor. He became her second husband. In 1947 Ginzburg was released from captivity but chose to stay in the Magadan area to wait for Walter to finish his allotted prison sentence. She began teaching Russian language and literature. Ironically many of her students at the time worked for the security services. Ginzburg was rearrested in 1949. In 1955 she was released again. This time Ginzburg was allowed to return to Moscow and was officially rehabilitated. She began to write pieces for such Soviet periodicals as Youth (Yunost ), the Teacher's Newspaper (Uchitelskaya gazeta ), and the News (Izvestiya ). Despite her rehabilitation, Ginzburg's background still made her a bit suspect in the eyes of the authorities, so she never joined the Soviet Writers' Union. In 1967 the first volume of her memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind, was published in Italy. The book covers the 1934–1939 period of her life. In it, she describes how her mentality as a devoted party member changed once she realized the extent of the Purges, and she notes the kinds of things people had to do to survive their imprisonment. In Ginzburg's case, for instance, she took great solace from her vast knowledge of Russian poetry, and she would recite it at length for her fellow prisoners. The second volume of her memoirs, Within the Whirlwind, was published abroad in 1979 and describes her remaining years in prison as well as her life in Magadan and her eventual return to Moscow. There is a distinct difference in tone between the two volumes, with the second book being much harsher and honest in its criticisms. Many scholars have speculated that Ginzburg knew by then that her memoirs would not legally be published in the Soviet Union during her lifetime and that she chose not to temper her language in the hopes of publication. Both volumes of memoirs have been translated into an array of languages, and they remain among the best, most widely read accounts of Soviet prison life. In the Soviet Union, the books circulated widely in samizdat form among the dissident community and, finally, in 1989 they were published officially.

See also: dissident movement; gulag; purges, the great

bibliography

Heldt, Barbara. (1987). Terrible Perfection. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Kelly, Catriona. (1994). A History of Russian Women's Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kolchevska, Natasha. (1998). "A Difficult Journey: Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women's Writing of Camp Memoirs." In Women and Russia: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kolchevska, Natasha. (2003). "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: Northwestern University Press.

Alison Rowley