Word: ginzburgs
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WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND by Eugenia Ginzburg; Translated by Ian Boland Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 423 pages...
...country's intellectual and spiritual resources. At the same time, poetry had the power to console Stalin's victims, as has been amply documented in the writings of survivors of Stalin's gigantic Gulag of prisons, camps and places of exile. A compelling example is Eugenia Ginzburg's description of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison in Yaroslavl. A former schoolteacher and an ardent Communist, Ginzburg was arrested in 1937, like millions of other innocent citizens caught up in Stalin's Great Terror. Lying in a glacial underground punishment cell, where rats scuttled past...
That haunting passage is from Journey into the Whirlwind, the first volume of Ginzburg's memoirs, published in the U.S. in 1967. There, she began recounting the 18 years she spent in the Gulag, mostly in the Arctic death camps of Kolyma. In this, the second volume, Ginzburg, who died in 1977, picked up her story about "the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...
Evil abounds in the world evoked by Ginzburg. The Kolyma region where she was ultimately imprisoned was the largest and most terrible of the Stalin-era concentration-camp complexes, stretching a thousand miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called Kolyma "the pole of cold and cruelty." It was a place of massacre, where 3 million died, the men digging for gold under the permafrost, the women felling trees at temperatures of -56° F. Young men dispatched to the mines quickly succumbed to tuberculosis. Ginzburg, who acted for a time as a medical...
WHEN ASKED FOR his nationality at his 1978 trial, poet Alexander Ginzburg replied "prisoner." Almost any Russian could say the same and Joshua Rubenstein's Soviet Dissidents examines those who do. They are most often those who come to politics only out of necessity and in defense of personal freedom. They are artists, religious practitioners, displaced nationals and often they are the young. In a country whose older population remains depoliticized, frozen by memories of Stalin's official terror, they are the exceptions. They are the ones who believe that ideas cannot be murdered with bullets, imprisonment or exile...