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It’s penal servitude—what bliss!

This exclamation appears in Part One, Section 30, and is one of the most important phrases in the book. Ginzburg borrows the line from a poem by Boris Pasternak called “Lieutenant Schmidt.” The entire passage, which Ginzburg includes, reads: “The indictment stretched, mile on mile, / Pit-shafts mark our weary way. / We greet out sentence with a smile— / It’s penal servitude! What bliss!”

Pasternak’s poem is understandably appealing to Ginzburg after her own experience before the military tribunal and her ten-year prison sentence. Because she was anticipating a death sentence, she does indeed feel that a term of penal servitude is “bliss” in comparison. Ginzburg, like Pasternak, smiles when she hears her sentence. Moreover, her own text, in the wake of her sentence, is punctuated with exclamation points. Ginzburg even takes Pasternak’s line as the title of a subsection because she feels so closely allied to him and his own experience of sentencing.

After the initial appearance of the quotation, Ginzburg takes up Pasternak’s quotation as a refrain. She uses it again most notably at the start of her train journey to Kolyma. Her reassignment to the labor camp is, at least while it is still in the future, an antidote to the stifling inactivity of solitary confinement. One of the horrors of the prison enclosure at Yaroslavl is that is restricts the inmates’ access to fresh air and sunlight, so much so that Ginzburg starts to fantasize about being outside in the open air. Thus there is at least some earnestness to her quotation, “Penal servitude—what bliss!” Of course, through the lens of history, and through Ginzburg’s own knowledge of what actually happened, the quotation is also dripping with irony. There is certainly nothing blissful about the work Ginzburg does in the prison camps. In fact, while serving out the rest of her sentence, Ginzburg thinks back to her days in solitary confinement with “affection.” In that respect, Pasternak’s quote, as used by Ginzburg, symbolizes the ignorance that is bliss to the prisoner who does not know what is coming.

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