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eration. Her first husband, Pavel Aksenov, a
leading member of the Tatar province
COMMU
-
NIST PARTY
, was arrested in 1937 at the height of
the Great Purge. Ginzburg was arrested soon
after as the wife of an “enemy of the people” and
began a long journey through various camps in
the GULAG, especially in the remote area of Mag-
adan on the Sea of Okhotsk. She was released
and rehabilitated in 1955. Drawing entirely from
memory, she began drafting her manuscript in
1959, while writing articles and educational
materials to support herself. By 1962, she had
completed over 400 typescript pages. The maga-
zine
Yunost
(
Youth
) published a few excerpts, but
with a growing freeze refused to publish the
entire manuscript. Circulated through the
samiz-
dat
network, Ginzburg's memoirs struck a deep
chord among its readers. A first volume was
published in English to great acclaim as
Journey
into the Whirlwind
(1967), and a second followed
in 1979 as
Within the Whirlwind.
They were finally
published posthumously in the Soviet Union in
1988 in
Yunost,
the same journal that had
refused them two decades earlier. Her son, Vasili
AKSENOV
, who had been separated from his par-
ents at the age of four, joined her in Magadan in
the early 1950s and went on to become a promi-
nent Soviet novelist.
admired and feared as the star of St. Petersburg
literary life and intrigue in the last decade before
the revolution. She welcomed the
FEBRUARY REV
-
OLUTION
and was disheartened by the Bolshevik
victory in October, which she condemned as a
victory of the vulgarity she had always despised.
She left Russia in 1919 with Merezhkovskii for
Poland, then settled in France. In Paris, she con-
tinued her role as literary salon hostess (the
Green Lamp) and wrote bitterly anti-Bolshevik
pieces in the émigré press. She wrote a biography
of Merezhskovskii after his death in 1941. Her
prerevolutionary diaries, published much later
in Paris, reveal perplexing sexual confusion. She
considered herself the mentor of both Bely and
BLOK
. Her memoirs and correspondence reveal a
sharp intellect and a sardonic malicious sense of
humor. A collected edition of her poetry was first
published in Munich in the 1970s.
Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich
(1804-1857)
composer
The first Russian composer to break from imita-
tion of Western traditions, Glinka is generally
considered the father of Russian music. A stu-
dent of the Irish composer and pianist John
Field, who moved to Russia in 1802, Glinka first
made his name as a pianist and singer. He stud-
ied in St. Petersburg and Berlin. Well traveled in
Russia and abroad, he enjoyed the friendship of
GRIBOEDOV
,
PUSHKIN
, Zhukovskii, and Mick-
iewicz, and the acquaintance of leading com-
posers like Berlioz, Liszt, and Mendelssohn. His
fame rests primarily on two operas,
Ivan Susanin,
A Life for the Tsar
(1836), which is the first exam-
ple of the introduction of Russian themes into
his music, and
Ruslan and Liudmilla
(1842),
based on a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin. He also
wrote songs, chamber works, and music for
piano, and two orchestral works that play on
Spanish themes. Although he spent much time
in western Europe, his pioneering use of nation-
alist themes, Oriental themes, and Russian folk
songs most influenced later generations. Among
them were the members of the Moguchaya
Gippius, Zinaida Nikolaevna
(1869-1945)
writer
One of the leading representatives of Symbolist
poetry and the Silver Age, Gippius was born in
Tula province, the daughter of a government
official, and grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia. She pub-
lished her first poems at the age of 19 in the
journal
Severnyi vestnik
(
Northern Herald
). A
member of the Religious and Philosophical Soci-
ety, she wrote metaphysical poems, as well as an
important novel,
The Devil's Puppet
(1911). Her
marriage, of over 50 years, to another Symbolist
poet, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, formed one of the
more remarkable partnerships in Russian litera-
ture. A talented poet and literary critic, she was
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