“Episodes: Solzhenitsyn and Ginzburg”

The documentary photo exhibition, which opened on March 28 at the Lontskoho Street Prison National Memorial Museum of Occupation Regimes’ Victims, is devoted to selected episodes from the lives of the Russian writer, poet, civic activist, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Russian memorialist Yevgenia Ginzburg, who authored Journey into the Whirlwind which is considered to be among the first literary works to describe the Stalin-era repressions. The museum has told The Day that the current event is the second time that the photosets go on display, as “Episodes: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yevgenia Ginzburg” exhibition was held before, at the Museum of Modern Art in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in 2012. Marking the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death, the exhibition’s Lviv-born curator Ihor Vvedensky lent the photographs to his hometown.

The “Episodes” exhibition includes two photosets. First of them was shot by Yurii Belov who photographed Solzhenitsyn during his public speeches in August and September 1994, just after the writer’s return to Russia. The second series came from a few photo shoots of Yevgenia Ginzburg which were held from 1963-65 in her Lviv apartment at 8 Shevchenka Street by the photographer Oleh Vvedensky, who was friends with Ginzburg’s son Vasily Aksenov, a Russian writer of the Sixtiers generation. On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening at the Lontskoho Street Prison Museum, Ginzburg’s stepdaughter Antonina Aksenova, now living in Germany, will visit Lviv.

By the way, it was during Lviv period of her life that Ginzburg wrote the first chapters of her memoirs Journey into the Whirlwind (according to some sources, the early version was named Under the Shadow of Lucifer’s Wings), describing her sufferings in Stalin-era prisons, labor camps and internal exile that lasted for almost two decades. Let us recall that Ginzburg (1904-77), a historian by training and Candidate of Science in History, was arrested in 1937. She was accused of involvement in a Trotskyite terrorist organization and sentenced to ten years in prison, followed by five years of deprivation of civic rights. She served her sentence in Butyrskaya prison, Yaroslavl prison for political criminals, and the Kolyma labor camps in Elgen, followed by the eight-year-long internal exile.

The exhibition at the Lontskoho Street Prison Memorial Museum at 1 Bandery Street in Lviv will continue until April 28, admission is free.