Winner of the 2017 AATSEEL Prize for the Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesParticularly welcome is the queer studies dimension of the volume. . . . Those coming to Ginzburg's work for the first time will particularly appreciate the informative biography of the author at the beginning of the book
[Ginzburg] would be pleased by the scholarly effort this book represents and care shown in clarifying her archive, in re-ordering misplaced or even ‘lost' materials, and fascinated by the attempts to glean meaning[s] from every last fragment of her notes and jottings to ‘place’ her in her social, psychological, and historical frames.---Jane Gray Harris, Slavic Review
Co-Winner of the 2016 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association
Any student of the twentieth century and its traumas, let alone Soviet literary history, should find Van Buskirk's book of extreme interest and value.---Marat Grinberg, Russian Review
"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
"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
"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
"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
This book represents meaningful research in the most profound sense of the word, and for that we owe the author a debt of thanks.---Sarah Pratt, Slavic and East European Journal
