Till My Tale is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian & East European Studies)

Till My Tale is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian & East European Studies)

by SimeonVilensky (Editor)

Synopsis

During the Soviet era, millions of Soviets - Socialist Revolutionaries, peasants, ordinary citizens, Bolshevik party activists and university students - were denounced, arrested, and imprisoned on fabricated charges of conducting 'anti-state' activities. Till My Tale Is Told recounts the testimonies of women whose family lives and careers were brutally disrupted by the nightmare of false accusation, torture, humiliation, hunger, and unspeakable deprivation. The women in this book were fortunate: unlike several million others, they survived. Published in Moscow in 1989, the narratives collected in this volume were written illegally and for many years hidden away from public view. Although in 1956 political prisoners began to be officially rehabilitated and declared innocent, their writings were repressed as 'slandering the Soviet system'. Although most of the authors were arrested in the Great Purges of the 1930s, the selections span the entire history of the Gulag Archipelago from the 1920s to the late 1940s, adding another sixteen distinctive voices to the accounts published in the west by Yevgenia Ginsburg and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

$27.76

Quantity

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 366
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
Published: 30 Aug 2001

ISBN 10: 1860495559
ISBN 13: 9781860495557

Media Reviews
'A fascinating, brave and in many ways heartening book' TLS 'It is probably the most gripping and detailed addition to the famous fundamental work by Solzhenitsyn. This book should be read by everybody in this country, which was lucky not to experience the horrors of a totalitarian regime' Oleg Gordievsky, THE SPECTATOR 'We have heard less from women in the Gulag than from men, and this book admirably supplies a lack. How extraordinary it is that compassion and tenderness may flourish in the cruellest conditions; how stubbornly and bravely people survive them. This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one' Doris Lessing 'An extraordinary book, as haunting as it is gripping.' DAILY EXPRESS 'This eye-opening book provides a compelling, richly textured picture of the human consequences of Stalinist crimes.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Vilensky, himself a camp survivor (and a poet with an excellent ear for language), chose his excerpts well. Although these stories are linked by the gender of the writers, they are still as diverse as they could possibly be: not one feels repetitive, not one is dull. This book offers the English reader the chance to sample some of the best of the enormous, mostly untranslated Gulag memoir literature.' LITERARY REVIEW
Author Bio
Simeon Vilensky, a former political prisoner and a writer and poet, is founder of Vozvrashchenie, an organisation in Moscow dedicated to preserving and publishing testimonies of Stalin's victims and aiding camp survivors.