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Evgeniia Ginzburg, the Romantic Prison, and the Soviet Rhetoric of the Gulag

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Evgeniia Ginzburg, the Romantic Prison, and the Soviet Rhetoric of the Gulag DARIUSZ TOLCZYK (Charlottesville, VA, USA) POLITICS OF RESURRECTION: EVGENIIA GINZBURG, THE ROMANTIC PRISON, AND THE SOVIET RHETORIC OF THE GULAG On February 15, 1937, Evgeniia Ginzburg, a Communist Party activist and lecturer of Marxism-Leninism in Kazan', was arrested by the NKVD. The fabricated charge pinned on her was that of the "counter-revolutionary Trot- skyist terrorism" - a routine formulation generously used by the operatives of Stalin's Great Terror. Although she faced the possibility of the death penalty, Ginzburg was sentenced to ten years of solitary incarceration - the verdict to which she, according to her own admission, responded with almost ecstatic relief. After 730 days spent in various prisons, she was sent to serve the rest of her sentence in the penal labor camps of Kolyma. She survived her sen- tence only to be arrested again in 1949, two years after her release from the camp. This time she was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in confined settlement in Magadan, the capital of the Kolyma region. It was not until 1955, two years after Stalin's death and eighteen years after her initial arrest, that she was released. Soon after, she embarked on the project aimed at ful- filling the desire which, in her own words, "was the main object of [her] life throughout those eighteen years"2 ; the same desire which Primo Levi, a survi- vor of Auschwitz, describes as "an immediate and violent impulse, ... com- peting with other elementary needs" of the prisoners in the camp, namely "the need to tell ... [the] story to 'the rest,' to make 'the rest' participate in it."3 The result was Ginzburg's GULag memoir, Krutoi marshrut. She submit- ted the first volume of the book for publication in the Soviet Union during the short period in the early 1960s when, following the appearance of Solzhenit- syn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the theme of the GULag was allowed, briefly and on a selective basis, in the Soviet public discourse. But her work was rejected by each of the two Soviet literary journals to which she 1. This fate was not uncommon among Stalin's victims: for instance, Ariadna Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva's daughter, and Olga Adamova-Sliozberg were re-arrested in the same year, 1949; Varlam Shalamov, the author of The Kolyma Tales, was re-sentenced twice while in the camp. 2. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 417. 3. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1971), p. 9. turned. Novyi mir had just published "One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso- vich" and the journal's editor, Aleksandr Tvardovskii hoped to be able to print a "softened" version of The First Circle. Boris Polevoi's lunost' chose, instead, to publish Boris Piliar's politically safer novel about the GULag, Liudi ostaiutsia liud'mi [People Remain People]. Rejected by Soviet publish- ers, Ginzburg's manuscript circulated in samizdat and, in 1967, was published abroad. She spent practically the rest of her life writing - now with no more hope of publishing, in the Soviet Union - the second volume of the memoir, fmally published in Milan in 1979. "The collection of material for this book began from the moment when I first crossed the threshold of the NKVD's In- ner Prison in Kazan'," she says, referring to the whole memoir iri the Epi- logue to its second volume. "All those years [in prisons and camps] I had no opportunity to write anything down, to prepare any preliminary sketches for a future book. All that I have set down has been written from memory."4 But memory, in order to be transformed into autobiography, must pass through a filter of narrative priorities - a hierarchy of themes, motifs, and paradigms set by the author in his attempt to establish and define a unique, personal connection between his present and former states of consciousness. In the Epilogue to the second volume of Krutoi marshrut, Ginzburg reflects on what she views as the central theme organizing the "material" of her mem- ory of the GULag. She refers to her experience of prisons and camps in terms of the story of "the heroine's spiritual evolution, the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who has tested unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."5 "It is this cruel journey of the soul," Ginzburg writes, "and not just the chronology of my suf- ferings that I want to bring home to the reader."6 Thus, Ginzburg's reader is invited to view her harrowing testimony as a story of spiritual transformation and ascent, of which the GULag becomes a catalyst. Ginzburg is by no means unique in viewing Stalin's prisons and camps in these terms. In the chapter of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) entitled "Voskhozhdenie" [The Ascent], Solzhenitsyn writes: It has been known for many centuries that prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being. The examples are innumerable - such as that of Silvio Pellico.... In our country they always mention Dostoevsky in this respect. And what about Pisarev? ... [T]hese transformations always proceed in the direction of deepening the soul. Ibsen wrote: "From lack 4. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, p. 417-18. 5. Ibid., p. 423. 6. Ibid. .
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