"A Mind Purified by Suffering"

“[This book] provide[s] important knowledge and insights into women’s experiences in the Gulag and as Gulag survivors. Cooke’s volume feeds the mind.”

—- Denise J. Youngblood, Association for Women in Slavic Studies

“This collection is an essential contribution to the literature on Evgenia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut, and the Soviet Gulag. These chapters offer a fresh look at a classic text, seeking to deepen and broaden our understanding of one of the most influential works in the Gulag literary canon. The collection reminds us of Ginzburg’s importance while offering new and productive ways to understand the richness of her work, relationships, and legacies.”

— Alan Barenberg, Texas Tech University, author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta and co-editor of Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies

“The eleven contributors to this volume—leading scholars on Evgenia Ginzburg—succeed in providing their readers with insight into the personality, life, and writings of this most prominent of Gulag memoirists… [T]his is a study of humanity—of ‘a virtue linked with altruistic ethics derived from the human condition’ (Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification 34)—and of the individual’s capacity for preserving it under the most adverse, inhuman and inhumane, circumstances. The volume will thus be of interest… to human beings in general, especially now, when the memory of Stalinism’s crimes against humanity is being obliterated and the voices of its victims suppressed.”

— Anastasia Kostetskaya, University of Hawaii, SEEJ

“A timely multi-faceted collection of intra- and interdisciplinary research papers on the memoirs of the Gulag veteran Evgenia Ginzburg. Placing Ginzburg’s narrative in a number of contexts, tracing the author’s emotional and ideological arc, and offering unexpected insights, this volume fills in a gap in the scholarship and provides a basis and a stimulus for further academic conversation about one of the most impressive and influential accounts of life under Stalinist terror.”

 

— Leona Toker, author of Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors and of Gulag Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading

“Justifiably introduced by Barbara Heldt as comparable to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Evgenia Ginzburg’s landmark memoir of eighteen years in the Soviet Gulag system, Journey into the Whirlwind, has influenced generations of Gulag eyewitnesses as well as scholarship on Gulag writing, Soviet political repression, and the gendering of writing about repression. In this collection, Olga Cooke has brought together an impressive variety of approaches to Ginzburg’s and others’ writing by recognized scholars of Ginzburg’s work that will be required reading for future scholarship in the field. This thoroughly documented and elegantly edited volume serves the needs of both researcher and teacher, a welcome (and long-overdue) addition to our libraries.”

— Diane Nemec Ignashev, Class of 1941 Professor of Russian & the Liberal Arts, Carleton College (Northfield, MN)