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Genre

Journey into the Whirlwind is a memoir, an historical account, and an example of reportage.

Narrator

Eugenia Ginzburg is the memoir’s narrator and protagonist.

Point of View

The entire story is told in the first person by Ginzburg, who observed it all and recounts the events of her incarceration with an astonishing memory for detail and dialogue. At several points along the way, Ginzburg tells stories that she has herself been told by fellow inmates, but these are brief interruptions of her own personal history.

Tone

The tone of Journey into the Whirlwind is reflective, journalistic, philosophical, and sentimental at times and objective at others.

Tense

The memoir is told in the past tense.

Setting (Time & Place)

The narrative goes mid-1930s through the mid-1940. It is various parts of Russia: the author’s town of Kazan, the Russian city of Moscow, the prison at Yaroslavl, and the prison camps at Vladivostok, Magadan, and Elgen.

Major Conflict

Ginzburg’s arrest in 1937, her interrogation at Black Lake, and her trial, sentencing, imprisonment, and reassignment to the corrective labor camps of Eastern Russia are the major conflicts.

Rising Action, Climax, and Falling Action

As Ginzburg’s book is a memoir, not fiction, it cannot be said to follow a deliberately artistic narrative structure involving rising action, climax, and falling action. Instead of these three discrete elements, Ginzburg’s text—true to her real experiences—has many moments of building suspense, many climaxes, and many consequences.

Ginzburg’s two years of solitary confinement serve as a type of rising action, and the resulting climax is Ginzburg’s reassignment to a corrective labor facility and the month-long train journey into Siberia, at the end of which she finds herself in Kolyma. The falling action, which occurs over the brief span of two pages, is her reassignment to the gentler job of medical attendant.

Foreshadowing

As this work is autobiographical and historical, foreshadowing does not appear in the typical sense, though there are several significant coincidences.

Julia Karepova, a fellow passenger in the Black Maria in an early section of the book, later becomes Ginzburg’s cellmate at Yaroslavl. Major Yelshin, who is so cruel to Ginzburg during her interrogation, becomes a prisoner at Kolyma while Ginzburg is working in the kitchen.

Perhaps the most overt example of autobiographical foreshadowing is when Professor Elvov tells Ginzburg that he is being arrested and that he is sorry for causing her trouble because of their association. Although Ginzburg protests at the time and cannot understand why she should be worried, it is her association with Elvov that eventually dooms her.

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