Lidiya Yakovlevna Ginzburg (russian: Ли́дия Я́ковлевна Ги́нзбург; March 18, 1902,

Odessa Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

– July 17, 1990,

Leningrad Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

) was a major

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

literary Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to ...

critic A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or governmen ...

and historian and a survivor of the

siege of Leningrad The siege of Leningrad (russian: links=no, translit=Blokada Leningrada, Блокада Ленинграда; german: links=no, Leningrader Blockade; ) was a prolonged military blockade undertaken by the Axis powers against the Soviet city of L ...

. She was an inspiration to a new generation of poets.

Biography

She was born in Odessa in 1902 and moved to Leningrad in 1922. She enrolled there in the State Institute of the History of the Arts, studying with

Yury Tynyanov Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov ( rus, Ю́рий Никола́евич Тыня́нов, p=ˈjʉrʲɪj nʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪtɕ tɨˈnʲænəf; October 18, 1894 – December 20, 1943) was a Soviet writer, literary critic, translator, scholar and scr ...

and

Boris Eikhenbaum Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum ( rus, Борис Михайлович Эйхенбаум, p=ɨjxʲɪnˈbaʊm; 16 October 1886 – 2 November 1959) was a Russian Empire and Soviet literary scholar and historian of Russian literature. He is a repre ...

, two major figures of Russian formalism. Ginzburg survived the purges, the 900-day Leningrad blockade, and the anti-Jewish campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s and became a friend and inspiration to a new generation of poets, including

Alexander Kushner Alexander Semyonovich Kushner (russian: link=no, Алекса́ндр Семёнович Ку́шнер) is a Russian poet from Saint Petersburg. Biography Kushner was born in Leningrad into a Russian-Jewish family; his father was a naval eng ...

. She published a number of seminal critical studies, including "Lermontov's Creative Path" ("Tvorcheskii put' Lermontova," 1940), "Herzen's 'My Past and Thoughts'" ("'Byloe i dumy' Gertsena," 1957), ''On Lyric Poetry'' ("O lirike," 1964; 2nd exp. ed. 1974), ''On Psychological Prose'' ("O psikhologicheskoi proze," 1971; 2nd rev. ed., 1977), and "On the Literary Hero" ("O literaturnom geroe," 1979). ''On Psychological Prose'' was published by

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...

in 1991 in an English translation and edition by Judson Rosengrant, and "Blockade Diary" ("Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka," 1984), her memoir of the siege of Leningrad (8 September 1941 - 27 January 1944), was published by Harvill in 1995 in translation by Alan Myers.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ginzburg, Lidiya 1902 births 1990 deaths Writers from Odesa People from Kherson Governorate Odesa Jews Ukrainian Jews Russian literary critics Russian women critics Women literary critics Soviet women writers Soviet historians 20th-century Russian women writers Soviet women historians Soviet literary historians Women literary historians Writers from Saint Petersburg