Journey into the Whirlwind by way of L’viv

The lecture will discuss the making of three distinguished, but very different female authors who are connected to the city of L’viv. In 1893, the Norwegian writer Dagny Juel married the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski and became a decadent cultural hero whose writings and life would be profoundly affected by fin-de-siecle apocalyptic ideas: the city of L’viv would play an important part in her stormy biography. Debora Vogel, an Austrian Jewish writer, survived the collapse of her homeland (the Habsburg Empire) when she was 18, but the new geopolitical situation brought new opportunities: study at the philosophical faculty of L’viv university (which had not accepted women prior to World War I), a doctoral defence in Kraków, and a profound rethinking of the opposition between innovation and tradition. She learned Yiddish as an adult and began to write decidedly modern text in poetry and prose, publishing on two continents, and became the co-founder and an intellectual driving force behind the avant-garde ‘Artes’ group. She was killed in L’viv together with her mother, husband and son during the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1942. Evgenia Ginzburg came to Soviet L’viv after 18 years of Gulag and exile. It was in L’viv that she wrote her autobiographical novel Journey into the Whirlwind, which, in its powerful descriptions of the suffering of a woman in a totalitarian system, had no contemporary equivalents in European literature. The text was published in Italy the original, and then in several translations, 10 years before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The talk will discuss these women’s legacy in various cultures, the connections their writings have with the genius loci of L’viv and Galicia, and examine how their works became a field of battle with difficult times.