“A Mind Purified by Suffering”: Evgenia Ginzburg’s “Whirlwind” Memoirs

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.