Ginzburg, Evgeniia Solomonovna (1904 - 1977)	Krutoi marshrut. Kniga pervaia [-vtoraia] New York, Possev-USA,1985. 432 p.,portr, photographic plates, 350 p., portr., photographic plates.	€95,00

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8 vo, original covers designed by Vagrich Bakchanian. Two volume set. GOOD TO VERY GOOD. Minor wear of time, some creases on front and back covers. The best second edition with a preface by a famous Russian writer Vasilii Aksenov (1932-2009), author´s son. Edition limited to 1000 copies. Evgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg was a Russian author who served an 18-year sentence in the Gulag. Born in Moscow, her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg (a Jewish pharmacist) and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg. In 1920, she began to study social sciences at Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy. She worked as a rabfak teacher. In 1934, Ginzburg was officially confirmed as a docent (approximately equivalent to an associate professor in western universities), specializing in the history of the All-Union Communist Party. After becoming a Communist Party member, Ginzburg continued her successful career as educator, journalist and administrator. Persecution Following the assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov on December 1, 1934, Ginzburg, like many communists, was accused of participating in a 'counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group,' this one led by Professor N. N. El'vov and concentrated in the editorial board of the newspaper Krasnaia Tatariia where she was employed. After a long fight to keep her party card, she was expelled from the party, officially excluded on February 8, 1937. Then, on February 15, 1937, she was arrested, accused of engaging in counter-revolutionary activity in El'vov's group and concealing this activity. Because she was a party member throughout this alleged activity, she was also accused of 'playing a double game.' From the day of her arrest, and unlike most of those around her, she forcefully denied the NKVD's accusations and never accepted any role in the supposed 'counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization.'As recorded in her initial interrogation, when asked whether she recognized her guilt, she responded 'I do not acknowledge it. I have not engaged in any Trotskyist struggle with the party. I have not been a member of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization.' Her parents were also arrested but released two months later. Her husband was arrested in July, sentenced to 15 years of 'corrective labor,' and his property confiscated under Articles 58-7 and 11 of the RSFSR Ginzburg experienced at first hand the infamous Lefortovo and Butyrka prisons in Moscow, and the Yaroslavl 'Korovniki'. She crossed the USSR on a prison train to Vladivostok and was put in the cargo hold of the steamer Jurma whose destination was Magadan. There she worked at a camp hospital, but was soon sent to the harsh camps of the Kolyma valley, where she was assigned to so-called 'common jobs' and quickly became an emaciated dokhodiaga ('goner'). A Crimean German doctor, Anton Walter, probably saved her life by recommending her for a nursing position; they eventually married. Anton had been deported because of his German heritage. In February 1949, Ginzburg was released from the Gulag system, but had to remain in Magadan for five years. She found a position at a kindergarten and began to write her memoirs in secret. However, in October 1949, she was arrested again and exiled to the Krasnoyarsk region, but (at her request) her destination was changed to Kolyma at the last minute. No reason was ever given for this second arrest and exile. After conversion of her status from detained to exiled, she could marry a doctor of the same fate, Anton Walter. The couple adopted an orphan detainee girl, Antonina, later an actress (Antonina Pavlovna Aksenova, sibling sister of Vasili Akseonov). After Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 and following Ginzburg's repeated, vigorous appeals to various authorities to have her case reconsidered, she was released from the exile and allowed to return to Moscow. She was rehabilitated in 1955. She returned to Moscow, worked as a reporter and continued her work on her magnum opus, her memoir Journey into the Whirlwind. She finished the book in 1967 but was unable to publish it in the USSR. The manuscript was then smuggled abroad and published in 1967 by Mondadori in Milan and Possev in Frankfurt am Main;it has since been translated into many languages. Eventually, her memoir was divided into two parts, whose Russian titles are 'Krutoi marshrut I' and 'Krutoi marshrut II'. She died in Moscow, aged 72. Film A Ginsburg biopic, titled, Within the Whirlwind was filmed by director Marleen Gorris in 2008. The film features actress Emily Watson as Evgenia Ginzburg, with Pam Ferris and Ben Miller in other roles. It was released in 2010. See: Evans Clements, Barbara A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomington, 2012, p. 235; A. L. Litvin (comp.) Dva sledstvennykh dela Evgenii Ginzburg (Kazan´, Taves, 1994); Rydel, Christine Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Prose Writers Since WWII (Thomson Gale, 2005, p. 89.