Blog 15: Journey into the whirlwind / Eugenia Semyonova Ginzburg

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Jordan Miles 

Blog 15: Journey into the whirlwind / Eugenia Semyonova Ginzburg

Eugenia Semyonova Ginzburg's memoir, Journey into the whirlwind, discusses her life story where she was a teacher journalist, and a member of the Communist Party of the USSR.  Eugenia experienced Plenty of mistreatment due to false accusations throughout her life. She was arrested for being accused of terrorist counter-revolutionary activity.  She endured much pain as a mother of two children, knowing she did nothing wrong and was innocent. She spent 18 years in prison before she could be with her family again.  Throughout her life, she has demonstrated a considerable level of resilience and determination. She knows through it all that she deserves justice because she did not commit any wrongdoings. One quote she wrote on page 313 was, “I knew I should not sleep until I had repeated some poem over to myself 10 or 100 times I chose Michelangelo's line,  “Sweet It Is to sleep sweeter to be a stone.  in this dread age of Terror and shame,  Thrice blessed is he who neither sees nor feels.  leave me then here,  and trouble not my rest.” Think she resonated a lot with this quote because it has to do with her current state of life where being asleep and compared to a stone is better than being awake and having to deal with how horrible her current environment and situation are.  being asleep is like an escape from this reality and people who cannot see or feel are lucky because of how painful it is to be able to at this time. The amount of pain she had to live through seemed unbearable and she showed so much strength to be able to bare it. 



Comments

  1. savannah shockleyMarch 3, 2023 at 6:43 AM

    The comment you made about the quotes resonating with her in that particular moment of her life is interesting to me. They do encompass a lot of what she is going through during a dark time in history. However, I do feel like her having those human connections while in the prison did keep her out of losing her humanity completely/losing all hope.

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