Woman and Time: Twentieth-Century Female Ego-Narratives.

Abstract

The article deals with the ways in which the memoirs of Il'ia Ehrenburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Emma Gershtein, and Raisa Orlova testify to their authors’ life during the Stalinist terror and to the fates of their contemporaries who fell victim to persecutions. Ehrenburg compared his having avoided arrest during the years of terror to having drawn a lucky lottery ticket: indeed, though each of the four memoirists took various measures to escape repressions, a great deal depended on sheer luck.

The article focuses on the areas where the memoirists concurred with the ideology of the Soviet system. These are issues that Lidiia Ginzburg called ‘areas of identification’ or ‘points of compatibility’, that is, aspects of the Soviet reality with which even the critics of the regime consented, feeling a genuine inner need to cultivate such consent. Ehrenburg alternates his spare account of the Great Terror with that of his struggle against fascism and his participation in the Soviet promotion of the international peace movements: he had, as it were, to choose his fights (though he downplays the wisdom of his conduct during the antisemitic campaign of Stalin’s last years). The memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose canonical status has recently been undermined, and of her former friend Emma Gershtein, likewise not immune to criticism, take the position that is the duty of intellectuals to maintain cultural treasures through the worst of times. By contrast, the memoirs of Raisa Orlova are a puzzled soul-searching confession of a former committed Stalinist who eventually shed her dogmatic beliefs and became a dissident.