The Russian writer Lydia Ginzburg (1902-90) is best known for her Notes from the Leningrad Blockade and for influential critical studies, such as On Psychological Prose, investigating the problem of literary character in French and Russian novels and memoirs. Yet she viewed her most vital work to be the extensive prose fragments, composed for the d

Acknowledgments vii A Note about Spelling, Transliteration, and Archival References ix Introduction 1 1 Writing the Self after the Crisis of Individualism: Distancing and Moral Evaluation 26 2 The Poetics of Desk-Drawer Notebooks 69 3 Marginality in the Mainstream, Lesbian Love in the Third Person 109 4 Passing Characters 161 5 Transformations of Experience: Around and Behind Notes of a Blockade Person 196 Conclusion: Sustaining a Human Image 222 Notes 231 Bibliography 323 Index 343

"This pathbreaking book, the first full-length intellectual biography of Lydia Ginzburg in any language, distills a decade of archival research into a courageous intimate portrait. Ginzburg was an outsider. A nonconforming Formalist, a lesbian, Jew, and principled atheist, she was above all a survivor. Rejecting individualism as outmoded while disdaining nihilistic or postmodernist solutions as puerile, she devised distanced, cerebral, nonromanticized genres of self-expression to transform her traumatized century into a sort of literary wisdom."—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

"Lydia Ginzburg, the most brilliant student of the Russian Formalists, kept a low profile during the Stalin era, but then reemerged, first as one of Russia's greatest literary historians and theoreticians, then, in post-Soviet times, as a no less powerful writer. Emily Van Buskirk has combined exhaustive archival research with rare literary sensitivity to explore Ginzburg's nonscholarly creativity. Van Buskirk's chapters on lesbian love, on ‘in-between genres,' and on the transformation of experience, capture the most profound, daring, and innovative aspects of Ginzburg's legacy. This elegantly written book is indispensable for anyone interested in modern Russian culture and in the survival of the human image under barely describable duress."—William Mills Todd III, Harvard University

"This excellent and important book—the first about Lydia Ginzburg—is eloquent and consistently illuminating. To her unparalleled knowledge of Ginzburg's writing, Emily Van Buskirk joins fine powers of insight and rhetorical control."—Andrew Kahn, University of Oxford

"Based on both published writings and a personal archive, this study adds a new figure to the literary landscape of the twentieth century: a highly unusual author whose name is known to every Russian intellectual. As one reader put it, ‘Ginzburg gave us the language for understanding ourselves and our milieu.' In her pioneering book, Van Buskirk presents Ginzburg's unique autobiographical writings: a lifelong project of keeping records of her times."—Irina Paperno, University of California, Berkeley