Reality in Search of Literature: Lydia Ginzburg's Documentary Prose

FAIN: FT-60947-13

Emily Stetson Van Buskirk
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

I propose to complete the first monograph in any language on the writings of Lydia Ginzburg (1902-90), an influential Russian thinker, literary scholar and creative writer, with the larger aim of shedding light on the much-discussed problem of the crisis of the subject and individualism in the 20th century. For seven decades, Ginzburg wrote prose fragments that document, analyze, and contemplate the life of the intelligentsia, while combining the genres of autobiography, fiction, and essay. My work will follow Ginzburg's pursuit of the connections between notions of the self and narrative forms, between human personality and literary character. I draw on archival materials in order to trace, in these inherently unfinalizable narratives, the genesis of Ginzburg's concepts of the self and their representations.

Associated Products

Lydia Ginzburg's Prose: Reality in Search of Literature (Book)
Title: Lydia Ginzburg's Prose: Reality in Search of Literature
Author: Emily Van Buskirk
Abstract: 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 desk drawer, in which she analyzed herself and other members of the Russian intelligentsia through seven traumatic decades of Soviet history. In this book, the first full-length English-language study of the writer, Emily Van Buskirk presents Ginzburg as a figure of previously unrecognized innovation and importance in the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Based on a decade’s work in Ginzburg’s archives, the book discusses previously unknown manuscripts and uncovers a wealth of new information about the author’s life, focusing on Ginzburg’s quest for a new kind of writing adequate to her times. She writes of universal experiences—frustrated love, professional failures, remorse, aging—and explores the modern fragmentation of identity in the context of war, terror, and an oppressive state. Searching for a new concept of the self, and deeming the psychological novel (a beloved academic specialty) inadequate to express this concept, Ginzburg turned to fragmentary narratives that blur the lines between history, autobiography, and fiction. This full account of Ginzburg’s writing career in many genres and emotional registers enables us not only to rethink the experience of Soviet intellectuals, but to arrive at a new understanding of writing and witnessing during a horrific century.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10619.html
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780691166797
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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