History
Orlando Figes
Just Send Me Word: Love and Survival in the Gulag
11:30am | Saturday 15 September 2012Tickets: | Duration: | Venue: |
£N/A | 1 Hour | St Mary Magdalene Church |
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This was an Oxford Literary Festival 2012 Event.
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Orlando Figes tells the remarkable story of Lev and Sveta, a Muscovite couple who were first separated by the Second World War and then when Lev was sent to the Gulag on arbitrary charges. Amazingly, Lev and Sveta were able to smuggle letters to each other and occasionally meet during Lev’s ten years in an Arctic camp. The entire correspondence, the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found, has survived. Figes was given access to thousands of letters and interviewed the couple, then in their nineties, for Just Send Me Word. It makes for a fascinating and agonising account of life in Stalin’s Russia. Figes will talk about the book and introduce some of the letters, which will be read by actors.
Figes is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. His previous works include Peasant Russia, Civil War, A People’s Tragedy, Natasha’s Dance, The Whisperers and Crimea.