Put’ (O. Adamova-Sliozberg)

 “The Path” by Olg’a Adamova-Sliozberg. Photos from the personal archive. Source:https://takiedela.ru.

Title:
Put’ [The Path]

Author: Ol’ga L’vovna Adamova-Sliozberg (1902-1991)

Years of writing/editing: (1936) 1946-1969

First publication: 1989

Journal: “Druzhba Narodov”

Place of publication: Moscow (journal)

Description:
Under the title Put’ (The Path, Ol’ga L’vovna Adamova-Sliozberg collected her memories of imprisonment in Stalinist prisons and camps. The story of her troubled personal history is intertwined with the equally troubled collective history of the period from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s. These intimate writings describe the writer’s various experiences in concentration camps between 1936, when she was first arrested, and 1949, when she was finally released, and her struggles to return to a normal life after her experience. The story begins with the arrest of Adamova-Sliozberg’s first husband – Iudel’ Rumivovich Zakgeim – a professor at Moscow University, one of the first victims of Stalin’s great purges, who was shot a few months after his imprisonment (4th October 1936). His reputation was rehabilitated after Stalin’s death (19th May 1956). Immediately after her husband’s arrest, Ol’ga L’vovna was also imprisoned (27th April 1936) and taken to the Lubyanka. She was sentenced to 8 years’ hard labour and banned from exercising her political rights for 4 years. From 1936 to 1938 she was interned at the Solovki. From 1939 to 1944 she was transferred to various prisons (including Kazan’ and Suzdal’), until she arrived at Kolyma and finally at the Magadan labour camp, where she worked in squads of forced labour. On 27th April 1944, Adamova-Sliozberg regained her freedom, but a few years later she was arrested again (29th August 1949) and this time was transferred to Butyrka prison, north of Moscow, until the end of October of the same year. At the end of 1949, having been released for the second time, Ol’ga L’vovna returned to live with her second husband, Nikolai Vasil’evich Adamov, but this second attempt to have a normal life was interrupted in 1951, when he too was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. After Stalin’s death (1953), however, her husband was released and after a few years was rehabilitated (12th December 1957). The author was also rehabilitated in 1956, after a long bureaucratic-administrative process, which is described in the book (cf. Hutton 2015).
The first-person narrative, through which Adamova-Sliozberg recounts these painful events, is also interwoven with the voices – almost all female – of other victims who shared the experience of Stalinist political persecution (cf. Magnanini 2004). This recovery of memory through testimony was a long and painful process that engaged the author from 1946 to the end of the 1960s, although her work was only published in the USSR in 1989. However, although the actual writing began in the late 1940s, the author herself backdated the date of composition of the work to between 1936 and 1937, when, in captivity at the Solovki, she began to compose the first chapters in her mind, beginning a process that would last for a decade, until she was able to fix on paper the memories of those terrible days (cf. Gullotta 2010-11: 240-241; Pieralli 2013: 233-235). Although the first official Soviet version of the work was printed in 1989 – first in the pages of the magazine “Druzhba Narodov” and then in a miscellaneous volume, published by the Vozvrashchenie publishing house, entitled Dodnes’ tiagoteet. Otryvki iz vospominanii, stikhi i pis’ma zhenshchin, pobyvavshikh v kontslageriakh (Fragments from the memoirs, verses and letters of women imprisoned in concentration camps) – it had reached a wide readership long before this, when it began to circulate in samizdat (1956). The memoirs collected in the volume entitled Put’ were only published in Russia in the post-Soviet era, again by the Vozvrashchenie publishing house in Moscow (1993), which specialised in publishing verse and memoirs by victims of Soviet political repression. In 1992 the Moscow publishing house published a collection of verses dedicated to the concentration camp experience, again by the same author and with the same title (cf. Fici 2013: 62-63). The first and only Italian version of Adamova-Sliozberg’s memoirs in prose came out in 2003 in a translation by Francesca Fici published by the Florentine publishing house Le Lettere under the title Il mio cammino 1936-1956. Giorno dopo giorno, il drammatico racconto in prima persona di una donna internata nei gulag staliniani.

Ilaria Sicari
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Iris Karafillidis

Russian Editions

• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, “Druzhba Narodov”, 7 (1989) [censored edition].
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, in Dodnes’ tiagoteet. Otryvki iz vospominanii, stikhi i pis’ma zhenshchin, pobyvavshikh v kontslageriakh, Vol. 1, Vozvrashchenie, Moskva 1989: 6-123 [miscellaneous volume edited by S. Vilenskii, censored edition].
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Poety uzniki Gulaga (Malaia seriia), Vozvrashchenie, Moskva 1992.
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Vozvrashchenie, Moskva 1993 [with a preface by N. Korzhavina, edited by S. Vilenskii, first complete edition].
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Vozvrashchenie, Moskva 2002 [edited by S. Vilenskii, second edition].
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Vozvrashchenie, Moskva, 2009 [with a preface by M. Chudakova, edited by S. Vilenskii, third edition].
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Vozvrashchenie, Moskva 2015 [with a preface by M. Chudakova, edited by S. Vilenskii, fourth edition].
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Izd. Corpus, Moskva 2018.
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Put’, Izd. Corpus, Moskva 2019.

Translations

• Adamova-Sliozberg O., Il mio cammino 1936-1956. Giorno dopo giorno, il drammatico racconto in prima persona di una donna internata nei gulag staliniani, traslanstion and edition by F. Fici, Le Lettere, Florence 2003.
• Adamowa-Sliosberg O., Mein Weg, in N. Kamm (ed.), Weggersperrt. Frauen im Gulag, transl. und N. Kamm, Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2009: 11-118.
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., My Journey: How One Woman Survived Stalin’s Gulag, transl. by K. Gratwick Baker, Northwestern UP, Evanstone 2011.

Bibliography

• Adamov N., biographical file on the database of victims of Soviet political repressions “Otkrytyi spisok”, https://ru.openlist.wiki/,  online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., biographical file on the database “Vospominaniia o GULAGe i ikh avtory” (Memories of the GULAG and its authors), https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=author&i=1255, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., biographical file on the database of victims of Soviet political repressions “Otkrytyi spisok”, https://ru.openlist.wiki/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Adamova-Sliozberg O., biographical file in M. Barbakadze (ed.), Antologiia samizdata, http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/adamova/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Fici F., Olga Adamova-Sliozberg. Per non dimenticare, “DEP. Deportate, esuli, profughe”, 22 (2013): 62-68.
• Gullotta A., Il samizdat e il tema della repressione sovietica: una ricostruzione storica tra criticità e punti di domanda, “eSamizdat”, VIII (2010-2011): 239-246.
• Hignett K. et al. (eds.), Woman’s Experience of Repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Routledge, New York 2018.
• Hutton Marcelline M., Olga Sliozberg, in Resilient Russian Women in the 1920s and 1930s, Zea books, 2015: 303-306.
• Magnanini E., Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, Il mio cammino [recensione], “DEP. Deportate, esuli, profughe”, 1 (2004): 173-176.
• Pieralli C., La lirica nella “zona”: poesia femminile nei GULag staliniani e nelle carceri, in A. Alberti, G. Moracci (eds.), Linee di confine. Separazioni e processi di integrazione nello spazio culturale slavo, Firenze UP, 2013: 221-246.
• Pieralli C., The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners (1921-1939): a historical-typological framework, in A. Alberti, M. Garzaniti, M. Perotto, B. Sulpasso (eds.), Contributi italiani al XV congresso internazionale degli slavisti, Firenze UP, 2013: 387-412.
• Vilensky S. (ed.), Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, Indiana UP, Bloomington 1999: 1-86.
• Zakgejm Iu., biographical file on the database of victims of Soviet political repressions “Otkrytyi spisok”, https://ru.openlist.wiki/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).

Filmography

• Goldovskaia M. , Vlast’ Solovetskaia. Svidetel’stva i dokumenty, Mosfil’m, Moskva 1988, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNvYLTvy1jI, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).