Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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She writes so well: a light, beautiful, elegant kind of writing. Its main message is that what you have at the end of your life is not the result of the circumstances in which you’ve been living but of what is inside you and what you did with that. She tells you about the people she met and the friends she made. Most of them are dead because she was in her 90s when she wrote the book. She talks about bad people, too, but they are not the main characters, the heroes of the book, because, although she spent over 20 years in prison, it was not a bad place, because there were such stories, such friendships, such wonderful people.
Tell us about Olga Sliozberg’s The Journey.
Well, I absolutely adore this gulag memoir. It’s special. I don’t normally read this sort of literature because it’s so gloomy and actually quite dull, this monotonous suffering and nothing else. Usually, if you do read this kind of book, you certainly don’t want to reread it. But this is completely different.
Why?
She writes so well: a light, beautiful, elegant kind of writing. Its main message is that what you have at the end of your life is not the result of the circumstances in which you’ve been living but of what is inside you and what you did with that. She tells you about the people she met and the friends she made. Most of them are dead because she was in her 90s when she wrote the book. So she was probably the only witness in the world to tell about these people and the friends who supported her. She talks about bad people, too, but they are not the main characters, the heroes of the book, because, although she spent over 20 years in prison, it was not a bad place, because there were such stories, such friendships, such wonderful people.
Who was she and how did she come to be in prison?
She was just an ordinary woman born into an intellectual family, married to a man for whom she got into trouble, a scientist, a professor. It was the usual story. When the purges started in the early 30s she was sure that it was only bad people, traitors, spies, who were being sent to prison. She started to hesitate when she heard that her housekeeper, who was a peasant woman, whose whole family died because they’d been taxed in the dispossession of the kulaks. She went to her husband and he said, well, it’s such a difficult time now in the history of our young country that inevitably some mistakes occur. You can’t blame the system for that. It’s unfortunate but you can’t blame our beautiful young country. And then six months later the husband is arrested one night and, as she discovered in the 1950s, was shot. And then she herself was arrested, leaving behind her very young children – a boy aged two, a girl aged six – though luckily their grandparents looked after them. She returned as an old woman 20 years later. I love this book and I hope it gets a translator. She died in 1991, you know, the year the Soviet era ended. I wish I’d met her.
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Dr Lyubov Vinogradova was born in Moscow in 1973. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Academy and later defending a PhD in microbiology, she took a second degree in foreign languages, choosing English and German. In 1995 she was introduced to Antony Beevor and helped him research Stalingrad. Since then she has worked on many other research projects with Antony Beevor and other English-speaking writers and also her own projects. She is the co-author (together with Anthony Beevor) of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army. She says American victims of the Great Depression came to Russia to find jobs and support their families in the 1920 and 30s. ‘The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy.’
