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"A Mind Purified by Suffering: " Evgenia Ginzburg's "Whirlwind" Memoirs is the first book on Ginzburg's
Journey into the Whirlwind and
Within the Whirlwind, covering such topics as: memory, trauma, motherhood, love, survival strategies, and metafictional structures. It also provides a history of prison camp writings, her biography, and an interview with her son Vasily Aksenov.
List 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
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.
Summary
“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.
