During the past few decades, an increasing number of memoirs and autobiographies of a wide range of individuals who lived in Russia and the Soviet Union have appeared in English translation. This memoir by a woman physician and educator whose life spanned the years before the 1917 Revolution and the Stalin era is a welcome addition to this literature. The author, Anna Zhukova Bek, grew up in an isolated mining village in Eastern Siberia where her father was the mine director. Anna excelled at her studies and was sent to a boarding school for girls in Irkutsk. After graduation, she studied medicine in France and St. Petersburg. During a year's exile for political activity in Siberia, she met her future husband (who also was considered politically unreliable by the tsarist authorities), and the couple worked there until the husband's death from typhus in 1915. After 1917, Anna became a well-respected professor at several Siberian universities, but her specialties (psychology and pedology) became politically suspect by the early 1930s, and she was forced to give up these positions. The editor's annotations and notes are very helpful and informative. Summing Up: Recommended. Public and general collections.October 2005
N. M. Brooks
New Mexico State University
The memoir's style is clear and the story is compelling. Furthermore, Rassweiler's introductions and annotations make the memoir usable for courses in Russian history, gender history, medical history, and general European history.July 2008
Michelle DenBeste
California State University Fresno