The second volume of Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoir of Stalinist imprisonment begins where Journey into the Whirlwind leaves her: alive, barely, within the forced-labour camps of Kolyma.

The machinery of terror is no longer approaching or being explained; Ginzburg records hunger, disease, exhausting labour, petty privilege, corruption all whilst the prisoners attempt to preserve some remainder of themselves. 

Though there are many chroniclers of the Gulag, her attention to the camp is more formed as a complete social world. She watches how power reproduces itself at every level, from the state down to the cook, foreman or toolsetter; how small comforts become currencies; and how people can move between generosity, cowardice and cruelty without becoming tidy moral examples. Poetry, memory and conversation are not decorative consolations here but ways of preventing the regime from fully occupying the mind.

Originally written in Russian and published posthumously, this volume was translated into English by Ian Boland and introduced by Heinrich Böll. Read together, Ginzburg’s two memoirs constitute one of the major literary records of the Soviet camp system.

First Harvest paperback edition, 1982. Moderate rubbing and creasing to covers and spine; internally clean and firmly bound.