Nina Ivanovna Gagen-Torn holds a prominent place among authors of women's "camp" prose (alongside E. Kersnovskaya, E. Ginzburg, T. Petkevich), in whose diaries and memoirs the fates of people who became victims of Stalin's repressions are reflected. A renowned scholar who was at the origins of Soviet ethnography, N. I. Gagen-Torn was also a talented poet, writer, and memoirist. Her youth and student years were marked by the Silver Age and the early years of the Soviet republic; she had the opportunity to hear Alexander Blok read his poems, participated in seminars by Andrei Bely, and attended meetings of the famous Volfila (Free Philosophical Association), which became the center of spiritual life in Petrograd in the 1920s. At the peak of her academic work, in 1936, she was arrested and sentenced to five years in the Kolyma camps. Two small daughters were left at home. After her release, she managed to defend her dissertation — and received another term, another five years in the camps, and then exile… But no matter how severe the trials were, N. I. Gagen-Torn managed to preserve both her willpower and mental clarity, her keen interest in the world, and her desire to tell about her experiences, "so that there would remain at least a thin trace, like the footprint of a little hare on the sand by the river, in the vast sands of Eternity." In addition to her memoirs, the publication of which became possible only in 1994, after the author’s death, the edition includes poems written at different times in her life, as well as excerpts from her diaries and letters prepared by Galina Gagen-Torn, as well as an introductory article by Marietta Chudakova.
