Tatiana Zavodny, University of California, San Diego

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union engaged in a series of purges to rid the Communist Party of certain members. Throughout these two decades, thousands of people were falsely imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag system and many were killed for their supposed anti-government sentiments. Yevgenia Ginzburg, a university professor, was one of those falsely imprisoned. In her non-fiction novel, Journey into the Whirlwind, Ginzburg recounts her eighteen-year ordeal in the Soviet Gulag system and her treatment as a political prisoner. While Ginzburg’s novel was arguably influenced by numerous works of literature, this paper focuses solely on the influence of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. This work of Italian fiction is the first of three parts of the Divine Comedy and describes the speaker’s descent through hell. When reading these works, one will initially notice the structural similarity between Ginzburg’s nine prison stays and Dante’s nine circles of hell. This paper also examines the similarities between Ginzburg’s three initial interrogators and the three beasts encountered before entering hell in Dante’s Inferno. These are two of the most important aspects of this analysis and are discussed further throughout the paper. The argument provided here is intended to demonstrate only some of the similarities between Ginzburg’s novel and Dante’s work. Ginzburg, with all her literary knowledge, appears to have chosen Dante’s work to relate her journey to a wider audience and give a voice to so many others who suffered alongside her.

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Published: Tuesday, May 8, 2012