Description
Book SynopsisKnown in her lifetime primarily as a literary scholar, Lydia Ginzburg (1902–1990) has become celebrated for a body of writing at the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and sociology. In highly original prose, she acted as a chronicler of the Soviet intelligentsia, a philosopher-cum-ethnographer of the Leningrad Blockade, and an author of powerful non-fictional narratives. She was a humanistic thinker with deep insights into psychological and moral dimensions of life and death in difficult historical circumstances.
The first part of this book is a collection of essays by a distinguished set of scholars, shedding new light on Ginzburg’s contributions to Russian literature and literary studies, life-writing, subjectivity, ethics, the history of the novel, and trauma studies. The second part is comprised of six works by Ginzburg that are being published for the first time in English translation. They represent a cross-section of her great themes, including Proustian notions of memory and place, the meaning of love and rejection, literary politics, ethnic and sexual identities, and the connections between personal biography and Soviet history. Both parts of the volume aim to explore, and make accessible to new readers, the gripping contribution to a broad set of disciplines by a profoundly intelligent writer and observer of her times.
Trade Review«This book, with superb essays about various aspects of [Lidiya Ginzburg] by Sergei Kozlov, Alexander Zholkovsky, Caryl Emerson, Andrei Zorin, Emily Van Buskirk, Andrew Kahn, Irina Sandomirskaia, Kirill Kobrin, Stanislav Savitsky, Laurent Thevonot and Alyson Tapp plus translations of some of her important prose pieces is a wonderful testament to an essential writer.» (Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine January 2013)
Table of ContentsContents: Sergei Kozlov: Lydia Ginzburg’s Victory and Defeat – Alexander Zholkovsky: The Red and the Gray (Appendix: «Between Genres») – Caryl Emerson: Lydia Ginzburg on Tolstoy and Lermontov (with Dostoevsky as the Distant Ground) – Andrei Zorin: Ginzburg as Psychologist – Emily Van Buskirk: Varieties of Failure: Lydia Ginzburg’s Character Analyses from the 1930s and 1940s – Andrew Kahn: Lydia Ginzburg’s «Lives of the Poets»: Mandelstam in Profile – Irina Sandomirskaia: The Leviathan, or Language in Besiegement: Lydia Ginzburg’s Prolegomena to Critical Discourse Analysis – Kirill Kobrin: To Create a Circle and to Break It («Blockade Person’s» World of Rituals) – Stanislav Savitsky: Reflection as an Ethical Value (Lydia Ginzburg’s «The Thought that Drew a Circle») – Laurent Thévenot: At Home and in a Common World, in a Literary and Scientific Prose: Ginzburg’s Notes of a Blockade Person – Alyson Tapp/Emily Van Buskirk: Narratives and Essays by Lydia Ginzburg – Alyson Tapp: Ginzburg’s «Rational Impressionism»: A Translator’s Note on «The Return Home».
