“[Zgustova’s] encounters with magnificent elderly women in Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and London are testimony to the institutionalized sadism, deceit, and arbitrariness of the Soviet years…Engagingly, many choose to speak less of themselves than of fellow inmates…As one narrative nestles inside another, you can almost feel that living network of Russian cultural survival, which is a matter of friendship and love and learning poems by heart.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Vivid…startling…A worthy addition to the literature of the gulag that also features intimate glimpses of the author of Doctor Zhivago.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A revelatory attestation to humanity’s highest powers.”
—Foreword Reviews

“A woman keeps a secret diary to describe the magnificent Siberian landscape around her. A man chooses to take his violin instead of his coat into exile with him. Prisoners tell one another fairy tales as they work in the mines. In her book, Monika Zgustova offers a perfect gift, the gift of sensitive listening, to her nine narrators, and as we hear their voices, by turns matter-of-fact, poignant, and powerful, we see the darkest years of Soviet history illuminated, again and again, by small yet radiant flashes of humanity, of art, of beauty.”
—Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov

★Originally published in Spanish. English, Czech, Arabic, Polish and Romanian translation rights sold.
★Named a Notable Translated Book of the Year by World Literature Today.
★A poignant and unexpectedly inspirational account of women’s suffering and resilience in Stalin’s forced labor camps, diligently transcribed in the kitchens and living rooms of nine survivors.

Monika Zgustova is an award-winning author whose works have been published in more than ten languages. She was born in Prague and studied comparative literature in the United States (University of Illinois and University of Chicago). She then moved to Barcelona, where she writes for El País, The Nation, and CounterPunch, among others. As a translator of Czech and Russian literature into Spanish and Catalan—including the writing of Havel, Kundera, Hrabal, Hašek, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Babel—Zgustova is credited with bringing major twentieth-century writers to Spain. Her book Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag (Other Press, 2020) was a World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year.

The pain inflicted by the gulags has cast a long and dark shadow over Soviet-era history. Zgustová’s collection of interviews with former female prisoners not only chronicles the hardships of the camps, but also serves as testament to the power of beauty in face of adversity.

Where one would expect to find stories of hopelessness and despair, Zgustová has unearthed tales of the love, art, and friendship that persisted in times of tragedy. Across the Soviet Union, prisoners are said to have composed and memorized thousands of verses. Galya Sanova, born in a Siberian gulag, remembers reading from a hand-stitched copy of Little Red Riding Hood. Irina Emelyanova passed poems to the male prisoner she had grown to love. In this way, the arts lent an air of humanity to the women’s brutal realities.

These stories, collected in the vein of Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning oral histories, turn one of the darkest periods of the Soviet era into a song of human perseverance, in a way that reads as an intimate family history.