In some places the translation obscures details that may matter to a specialist. This makes for a readable text, but it may frustrate some specialists: it is never clear when a survivor’s words are transmitted exactly and when a story has been reworked or paraphrased. As this description perhaps suggests, Dressed for a Dance in the Snow contains carefully constructed historical narratives as opposed to raw interviews. Whole documents (letters, poems, the texts of songs) are at times interpolated into the text. At times, Zgustova’s voice interrupts the flow of a woman’s story to add additional reflections or information, but often the women appear to speak without interruption. Chapters are often framed with short introductions describing the woman’s apartment or her interactions with Zgustova. Zgustova does a good job rendering each woman’s story as a clear and coherent narrative. Punitive psychiatric confinement after participating in a demonstration protesting the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Irina Emelyanova, the daughter of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s lover, who received a camp sentence in 1960 for her role in the “economic crime” of receiving foreign currency -royalties from the publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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