The dramatic narration of eighteen years of prisons, camps and exiles shocks with its merciless truthfulness, causes the deepest respect for the strength of the human spirit, which these terrible trials did not break. The novel-autobiography of the journalist Evgenia Ginzburg (1904–1977) "The Steep Route" is a document of the era, honestly and mercilessly telling about Stalin's repressions, and about what helped to survive in a world of humiliation, torture, cold, hunger and death.