Just Send Me Word
Published in 2012, Just Send Me Word is a true love story based on 1,246 letters smuggled in and out of the Pechora labour camp between 1946 and 1955. The letters were exchanged between Lev Mishchenko, a prisoner in Pechora, and Svetlana Ivanova, his girlfriend in Moscow. There are 647 letters from Lev to Svetlana; and 599 from her to him. They form part of a family archive discovered by the Memorial Society and delivered in three trunks to their Moscow offices in 2007 . The letters are the largest known collection of private correspondence from the Gulag, according to Memorial 'A Note From Memorial' in Just Send Me Word, p. 297.
Figes was given exclusive access to the letters and other parts of the archive to write Just send Me Word, which is also based on interviews with the couple, when they were in their nineties, and the archives of the labour camp itself.Figes raised the finance for the transcription of the letters, which are housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow and will become available to researchers in 2013. According to Figes, 'Lev's letters are the only major real-time record of daily life in the Gulag that has ever come to light.' .
The book tells the story of Lev and Svetlana who met as students in the Physics Faculty of Moscow University in 1935. Separated by the Second World War in 1941, when Lev was enrolled in the Red Army, they made contact in 1946, when he wrote from Pechora. Figes uses the letters to explore conditions in the labour camp and to tell the love story, ending in 1955 with Lev's release and marriage to Svetlana. The book documents five illegal trips made by Svetlana to visit Lev by smuggling herself into the labour camp.
The title of the book is taken from the poem 'In Dream' by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D.M. Thomas: 'Black and enduring separation/I share equally with you/Why weep? Give me your hand/Promise to appear in a dream again./You and I are like two mountains/And in this world we cannot meet./Just send me word/At midnight sometime through the stars.
Writing in the Financial Times, Simon Sebag Montefiore called Just Send Me Word'a unique contribution to Gulag scholarship as well as a study of the universal power of love.' Several reviewers highlighted the book's literary qualities, pointing out that it 'reads like a novel' .
Just Send Me Word is scehduled for publication in German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish.
Read more about this topic: Orlando Figes
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