Book Review: Dressed for a Dance in the Snow

Never completely rehabilitated, they remembered their years of captivity with horror, but many also told me their lives would have been incomplete without that experience.

It was hard for me to accept this. However, as the conversation continued… I began to understand. What these women found in the Gulag was their hierarchy of values, at the top of which were books and invulnerable, selfless friendship.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “Bless you, prison, for being in my life!” in The Gulag Archipelago, I took this is a Solzhenitsyn-specific eccentricity, so it surprised me to see this attitude again in Monica Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag. Yet it is, as Zgustova comments, the majority view of her interviewees. (Of course nine interviewees is a pretty small sample size.)

Susanna Pechuro (whom I quoted yesterday, being scolded by a teacher because “Sadness is decadent!”) comments, “The work camp was my most important lesson. Those hard, bitter years were my best school, a school that would help me throughout the rest of my life. I can’t imagine my life without the camps. More than that: if I had to live my life over, I would not want to avoid that experience. Why? Because the most horrible struggles led to the strongest of friendships. There’s no place for that kind of bond in normal life. It takes the most extreme situations to create that kind of love and solidarity.”

But Elena Korybut-Daskiewicz dissents. “The Gulag was a waste of time, of health, of energy. Human beings are made to search for happiness and beauty, to do something that is fulfilling. To say the experience of the Gulag is essential to learning about life just seems perverse, even though I understand why they say that: my companions miss the friendships that became so close in the Gulag. However, when you live in freedom, you can also form great friendships… In my experience, nothing made the Gulag worthwhile.”

Galya Safanova, born in the gulag, comments that her mother had her in order to give her life a sense of meaning again when she had lost hope. She shows the author books that the adult inmates made for her decades ago: “Little Red Riding Hood, with pages in different shapes and sizes, sewn by hand. On each page there are drawings made with colored pencils… “Each of these books made me so happy!” Galya exclaims. “When I was a little girl, these were the only form of culture I had. Look, I’ve kept them all my life! They are my greatest treasure.”