Logo
  • Register
  • Login
    •  
      Język Polski   English
    baner
    Published : 2025-10-14
    Vol. 73 No. 7 (2025)

    «Stinky, Provincial, Dragging Swamp». Military Evacuation to Yelabuga, Chistopol’ and Tashkent in the Diaries and Letters of Georgy Efron (1941–1943)

    Jolanta Brzykcy

    https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9563-0723

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh257307.3

    Abstract

    The subject of the research in this article is Georgy Efron’s diaries and letters from 1941–1943. The aim of the analysis is to reconstruct the images of the wartime evacuation of the son of Marina Tsvetaeva from Moscow, threatened by German troops, and his stay in Yelabuga, Chistopol’ and Tashkent in 1941–1943. The author’s notes and letters reveal that two years he spent in the Tatar and Uzbek SSR were marked not only by the trauma of his mother’s suicide, but also by extremely difficult living conditions, constant hunger, extreme loneliness and serious disease. In the primitive conditions of the Soviet provinces, Efron, who had literary ambitions, was also deprived of the opportunity to continue his education at an adequate level and to develop his broad cultural interests. The analysed egodocuments expose the myth of the wartime evacuation in Tashkent, which functions to this day in the Russian public consciousness, as a period of the Soviet intelligentsia’s fraternisation with the Uzbeks and the heroic sacrifice and unity of both peoples in the fight against the German invaders.

    Keywords:

    Georgy Efron, egodocuments, Great Patriotic War 1941–1945, evacuation to Yelabuga Chistopol’ and Tashkent, myths of the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945



    Details

    References

    Statistics

    Authors

    Download files

    pdf (Русский)

    Altmetric indicators


    Cited by / Share


    Licence


    Roczniki Humanistyczne · ISSN 0035-7707 | eISSN 2544-5200 | DOI: 10.18290/rh
    © The Learned Society of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin & The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities

    Articles are licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)