TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Irena Veisaitė & Aurimas Švedas

1967 book Journey Into the Whirlwind , which made a profound impression on me. Ginzburg and her husband were intellectual communists, but, in 1937, her husband Pavel Aksyonov was arrested. 25 Certain that he was innocent, Ginzburg—just like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial—went from one bureaucratic office to another explaining that there had been an error, that her husband was not an enemy of the people. Eventually, she too was arrested and she spent many years in the gulag. In speaking about her own and others’ suffering, she comes to the following conclusion (I am citing from memory): “How fortunate that I became a victim rather than an executioner.” The fact that the Holocaust was our common tragedy, and one for which I feel a degree of responsibility, is illustrated by the contradictory emotions I 25 Vasily Aksyonov (Rus. Василий Аксёнов, 1899–1991)—writer, one of the most famous representatives of the “Sixties Generation,” son of Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg. Jevgenia Ginzburg’s (Rus. Евгения Гинзбург, 1904–1977) 1967 memoir Крутой маршрут , written in 1967 (second volume 1975–1977)—one of the first literary texts to descibe the Stalinist repressions. The book was first published in Milan from audio recordings prepared by Ginzburg; it was distributed in the Soviet Union in samizdat format. Pavel Aksyonov (Rus. Павел Аксёнов, 1899-1991)—Soviet Communist Party figure. Arrested in 1937 based on falsified claims and condemned to death. His sentence was communted to imprisonment in a gulag in 1939; spent 18 years in Inta gulag and in exile in the Krasnoyarsk region. Rehabilitated in 1956.

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