A worthy addition to the literature of the gulag that also features intimate glimpses of the author of Doctor Zhivago.
Oral histories of women imprisoned by the Soviets in the gulag or elsewhere, often startling in their lack of self-pity.
Far fewer women than men were sent to Stalin’s forced labor camps, and the imbalance has led to a corresponding gap in eyewitness accounts by female prisoners. Barcelona-based writer and translator Zgustova (The Silent Woman, 2014, etc.) offers partial redress in her oral histories of nine women, eight sent to the gulag and one to a horrific psychiatric prison. The best-known is Irina Emelyanova, exiled to Siberia with her mother, Olga Ivinskaya, who was the intimate companion of Boris Pasternak and inspired Lara in Doctor Zhivago. Her vivid account reveals less about the camps than about the novelist who rejected the Nobel Prize under pressure from the Soviets (he feared reprisals against her mother if he accepted). Actor Valentina Iyevleva is tragically representative of others: After her father was executed as an “enemy of the people,” she ended up in a Siberian camp where women, even if pregnant, worked as loggers in deep snow, “often up to our waists or higher,” in temperatures as low as 50 below zero, on starvation rations. Small acts of friendship or kindness could determine who survived the brutal conditions. Born in the gulag, Galya Safonova still has the books prisoners made for her from hand-sewn scraps, including a version of Little Red Riding Hood: “They are my greatest treasure.” The most startling accounts come from women who say matter-of-factly—with no apparent self-pity—that their suffering had benefits. “If I had to live my life over, I would not want to avoid that experience,” says Susanna Pechuro, who did more than five years’ time for anti-Stalinist activity. The bitter experience helped after her release: “A person can turn into a monster in the camps, but if you come out of a camp and you don’t become an ogre, you know that nothing in life can hurt you. You are armored.” This rare collection shows the terrible cost of that armor.
A worthy addition to the literature of the gulag that also features intimate glimpses of the author of Doctor Zhivago.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-177-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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