Nadezhda Durova: Russia's Cavalry Maid

Some of the most famous Russia's women – rulers and revolutionaries like Catherine the Great or Vera Figner – confidently wrote their memoirs, but these writings often have an official and self-justifying quality. Other women memoirists, less well-known as people, are known to us primarily because they decided to report their experiences. Recently, Evgeniia Ginzburg described her survival over eighteen years in Stalinist labour camps. Her books, called Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind , illuminate a whole period of history through the literary skill of an individual of determined will and humanity who acts as author and witness. Another, much earlier woman memoirist with an extraordinary tale to tell actually chose her years of physical hardship, preferring them to a life that for her would have meant even greater hardship, as an ordinary wife and mother from the provincial gentry of her time in Russia.