“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]...

Among the heaps of memoirs and reminiscences, a pearl is finally found – Lydia Chukovskaia’s “The Deserted House.”Written in Maupassant-like style of La Vie d’une Femme, it dives into the life of a mother, a widow living in the Soviet times of trouble in the late 1930s...