Yevgenia Ginzburg/Vasily Aksyonov : The Invention of the Recent Past

Three events mark the end of the Thaw in the Soviet Union: the fall and “voluntary” resignation of Nikita Khrushchev in 1965, the trial of the writers Sinyavskii and Daniel (1966) and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.The inglorious end of the sixties was a turning point for the Soviet intellectuals. My focus is on a pair of writers, a mother and son, Yevgenia Ginzburg and Vasily Aksyonov. Each of them began their investigations on the Soviet present and past in the 1960s. At that time Vasily Aksyonov published his works with great public success. His mother Yevgenia Ginzburg had strong hopes that the first book of her memoirs of imprisonment in the Stalinist camps (Krutoi marshrut I/“Into the Whirlwind”) could be published in the ussr and made available to Soviet readers. But by the end of the sixties, she had to face the fact that her research results would not become a part of the official Soviet cultural memory. The second book of her memoirs (Krutoi marshrut ii/“Within the Whirlwind”) was written solely for unofficial, confidential distribution. Even her very successful son had now come to terms with the publication ban. 1969 he began writing “The Burn” (Ozheg) “in anger and desperation.” Both texts, Ginzburg’s “Within the Whirlwind” and Aksyonov’s “The Burn,” are strongly related to each other in the biographical and intertextual. Living within the Soviet cultural space but outside the official Soviet communication Ginzburg and Aksyonov confront the Marxist narratives and the Soviet anthropology (“the new Soviet man”) with the psycho-analytical and theological discourses. In doing so, they invent in their writings not only a new semantics, but also a new language that can describe phenomena that elude the grasp of the descriptive language of the official politics and historiography.