Social Science Research Council

"Boundary Literature: Personal, Aesthetic, and Historical Dimensions"

My dissertation will treat the writing of Lydia Ginzburg, a figure best known as a literary scholar, but whose writings straddle traditional boundaries between critical, autobiographical, fictional, and historical discourses. Ginzburg's reputation has begun to be reappraised with the publication of her notebooks, composed over a period of more than six decades but confined to the desk drawer until the 1980s, when the political climate finally allowed for their gradual release. Ginzburg published increasing portions of her notebooks until her death, and while more have emerged posthumously, much remains to be explored. The notebooks, which form an un-self-centered autobiography, try to fix in words the patterns of individual and social (collective) life in Leningrad from the 1920s through the Stalinist purges and the Blockade, and into the years of perestroika. In all her writings, Ginzburg perceived life as infused with aesthetic structures and crafted behaviors that are typically the stuff of fiction. Considering Ginzburg as a scholar-writer, I will study the substantial crossover between her scholarly examination of literature and her writerly examination of life, demonstrating the inseparability and fluidity of these two spheres. The combination of diverse disciplines within works of Russian literature is a well-established feature of the tradition. I plan to study the particular ability of the notebook genre (a fragmentary form) to inhabit and investigate intersections between individual and general history, as I explore Ginzburg's notebooks within a Russian tradition of similar works (beginning with those by Viazemsky, Herzen, and Tolstoy), which Ginzburg herself studied. Examples of boundary literature, from Russia and beyond, will allow me to consider larger questions of the relationships between: fact (or history) and fiction, sociology and literary scholarship, and more broadly, literature and life. I plan to spend 8 months in St. Petersburg and 1 month in Moscow. My research, sponsored by the SSRC and by the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, will involve archival work as well as interviews and meetings that help me learn more about Ginzburg's cultural milieu.