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

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.