A DIFFICULT JOURNEY: EVGENIIA GINZBURG AND WOMEN’S WRITING OF CAMP MEMOIRS

A combination of spiritual autobiography, personal testimony, and Bildungsroman, Evgeniia Ginzburg’s six-hundred page narrative, which ends with these words, is one of the best known and most widely read accounts of the Stalinist labour camps. Often mentioned in historical and literary surveys² and widely assigned to students of twentieth-century Russia, recently Whirlwind has attracted critical attention for its place in Russian cultural and social history and as a major work in the tradition of Russian women’s autobiographical or memoir literature.³ I will examine Ginzburg’s account of her eighteen years of incarceration and exile in the Soviet Gulag of Kolyma, Magadan