“This last year of my first life, abruptly cut off in February of 1937, has been surprisingly contradictory for me,” Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg writes in her memoirs that were recently published in Milan in Russian under the title Krutoi Marshrut [Into the Whirlwind]...

The jail sentences imposed in 1966 by a Soviet court on the novelist and critic Andrej Sinjavskij and his less well known friend and associate Julij Danièl’ probably brought to a close two of the most interesting careers in the history of Soviet literature...