Alessia Brombin

With this paper I intend to outline, with a comparative approach, the spiritual experience of suffering in two 20th-century female authors who admirably described the impact that World War II and the Russian Revolution had on their lives respectively. On the one hand, Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), a Dutch Jewish writer who was a victim of the Holocaust, and Iulia de Beausobre (1893-1977), an author of Russian origin who was a refugee in England. Different lives in similar contexts, one Dutch and the other Russian, one tied to a complex network of family and emotional relationships seasoned by personal contradictions and the looming threat of war, the other, after her release from a seven-year imprisonment in the ‘Gulag’ concentration camps of the Soviet Union, treasured the experience and summarised it in her autobiography “The Woman Who Could Not Die” (1938) in the pamphlet “Creative Suffering” (1940). They suffered abuse and violence very close together. Their existences were punctuated by suffering, but they were able to rework, according to their respective faiths, their suffering and draw great lessons from it, which have been bequeathed to us.

Suffering runs through all human life. Iulia de Beausobre, speaking in London in the dark days of 1940 from her experience of isolation and exile, describes how the Russian people learned to respond to suffering. She starts from the basic premise that suffering can be used creatively, in the power of Christ’s victory.

In Etty Hillesum, there is an evolution of the meaning of suffering according to the progress of her own spiritual growth; in her life she was able to gather and integrate experiences, maturing an understanding of suffering by linking it to that of others; for her, recognizing her own and others’ pain meant strengthening her trust in God. Suffering was seen as a source from which to draw the strength to overcome obstacles.

For Etty, suffering is a “potential for humanisation”; for Iulia, suffering is “participation”. In this talk, we will examine the respective views of the authors, trying to draw parallels and points of contact.