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This chapter discusses the heterogeneity and flexibility of Ginzburg's notebooks, examining what happens when a “note” (zapis') migrates from one composition to another and acquires new neighbors. It explores her “theory of the note” in her early scholarship on Pyotr Vyazemsky (1925–26, 1929) and in her article “On Writers' Notebooks”—her first scholarly reflections on in-between prose, later to become the area of her most significant contributions to literary scholarship. Ginzburg's early scholarship, and the inception of her notebook project in 1925, coincided with a perceived crisis in the novel and a rising interest in documentary literature. A focus on the late 1920s will allow us to trace how Ginzburg's notebooks were shaped by this crisis and sought to emerge from it.

This chapter explains the concept of post-individualist prose as a pointed departure from nineteenth-century Realism. This is a fragmentary, documentary literature that restricts itself to the realm of “fact,” while being free to range outside the conventions of established genres. The post-individualist person's primary dilemma is a crisis in values, and Ginzburg treats writing as an ethical act. The chapter considers how writing serves as an “exit from the self,” a process by which the self becomes another, leaving behind the ego. It then turns to two of Ginzburg's narratives (“Delusion of the Will” and “A Story of Pity and Cruelty”), which concern the dilemmas of moral action in response to the death of a loved one. The traumatized subject uses techniques of “self-distancing” to deal with his or her sense of self and of the past by constructing a complete and responsible self-image, embedded within a social milieu, and then trying to connect it with his or her actions. Ginzburg's techniques of “self-distancing” are examined side-by-side with Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (“estrangement”) and Bakhtin's vnenakhodimost' (“outsideness”).

This introductory chapter begins with a review of the works of Lydia Ginzburg. Ginzburg came of age soon after the Revolutions of 1917 as the most talented student of the Russian Formalists. For seven decades, she wrote about the reality of daily life and historical change in Soviet Russia. Yet in the English-speaking world, she is still known primarily as a literary scholar and as a “memoirist” of the siege of Leningrad during World War II. The chapter then sets out the book's focus, namely to investigate Ginzburg's concept of the self in the wake of the crisis of invidualism: a self that is called “post-individualist.” An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented followed by a biographical sketch of Ginzburg.

This chapter focuses on Ginzburg's notes about others. In particular, it examines her character analyses from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1970s, where she tries to explain history through character and character through history. Following the model of two literary landmarks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Herzen's My Past and Thoughts (published in installments beginning in 1854), and Mandelstam's The Noise of Time (1928)—she tells not life stories, but stories of personality in which history is reflected. At a time when the official doctrine of Socialist Realism and the strict censorship regime had cut off any genuine intercourse between literature and life, Ginzburg's sketches constitute a gallery of portraits of her contemporaries, and a valuable literary history of her social group. They also represent a defense of “true” intelligentnost' (an orientation toward higher cultural and social values, ideals, and willingness to suffer for these) against the easy lamentations and lacerations unleashed and made more socially permissible by oppressive circumstances.

This chapter treats Notes of a Blockade Person, a heterogeneous narrative in multiple parts that is not only Ginzburg's most important and famous “single” work, but also her most misinterpreted in terms of its genre—it is often taken for a diary or memoir. It conducts a detailed exploration of the layers of this palimpsest in order to identify more precisely the genre of Notes, an undertaking that crystallizes the central features of Ginzburg's writings as investigated throughout this book. Her techniques of self-distancing create a third-person narrative about a slightly generalized other, in a well-defined historical situation.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book, while drawing on Ginzburg's own theories of in-between prose, has aimed to shed light on unexpected relationships among her choice of genres, her rhetorical strategies, and her search for a so-called post-individualist self. This book has also brought to light several paradoxes attending Ginzburg's creations. The remainder of the chapter expands on a few of these paradoxes that have been only implicit until now. Ginzburg was rather skeptical about the individual writer's ability to transcend the discourses and conditions of her time—and in fact, she saw this rootedness in the present as a positive sign of the individual's connection to his or her culture. At the same time, in many ways she appears to have cultivated an alternative ethics and way of writing, strongly connected to the tradition of the intelligentsia and the literary giants of the previous century such as Tolstoy and Herzen.

In the 1960s, Snow’s cultural celebrity led to many trips to the United States and the Soviet Union. Much in demand as a lecturer on science and the humanities, Snow was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Wesleyan University. Resentful of her subordinated status as ‘Lady Snow’, Pamela nevertheless accompanied him on his travels. In the Soviet Union they were treated as honoured guests and enjoyed many visits to the dachas of leading Russian writers and intellectuals. Their support of Russian writers, however, led to attacks upon them as fellow-travellers. Pamela based her comic novel about American academic life on her time at Wesleyan University (Night and Silence, Who is Here?), and during the 1960s she became a regular and vibrant contributor to various BBC cultural programmes, primarily with the remit of reporting on current fiction.