Notes from the Blockade

ISBN-13: 9780099583387 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 240 str.

Lidiya Ginzburg; Alexander Kushner

Opis

From her experience as a survivor of the 900-day siege of Leningrad, Lidiya Ginzburg has created a remarkable hero in whom she distills the experience of life under siege. Though she depicts the harrowing conditions, the reader takes away an impression of the dignity, vitality, and intellectual resilience of the thinking mind as it makes sense of extreme experience. This classic work of documentary fiction, reminiscent of Primo Levi and Albert Camus, will be the first introduction of a major 20th-century Russian writer to many English-language readers.

Recenzje

Most Leningraders had suffered enough for one lifetime (the first world war, the civil war, the winter war, two famines and two major waves of political terror) when in June 1941 the Nazis blockaded all supply routes to their city. Some 750,000 civilians died of cold and hunger. Lidiya Ginzburg's Notes from the Blockade is a classic account of the siege Guardian

O autorze

Lydia Yakovlevna Ginzburg was born in Odessa in 1902, and moved to Leningrad in 1922, where she studied at the famous Institute for Art History as a student and later as a colleague of Victor Shklovsky, Yury Tynianov and Boris Eikhenbaum, the major figures of Russian Formalism. She survived the purges, the 900-day siege of Leningrad and the anti-Semitic campaigns that followed the war to become, in the 1960s-'80s, a friend and inspiration to a younger generation of Petersburg literary scholars and poets, including Alexander Kushner and Elena Shvarts. She was a prominent cultural figure in the years of perestroika, when she began to publish notes and essays that she been writing for the 'desk drawer' starting in the 1920s. Her books include venerated works of literary scholarship such as On Lyric Poetry, On Psychological Prose (published in the English translation from Princeton University Press) and On the Literary Hero. The collection of her prose that appeared in her lifetime, Person at a Writing Table (1989), and which contained Notes from the Blockade, as well as posthumous editions, have established Ginzburg as innovative author of what she called 'in-between' genres - notes, essays, and fragmentary narratives - that describe and analyse the human experience of a historically catastrophic era spanning much of the twentieth century. Lydia Ginzburg died in 1990.

Lydia Yakovlevna Ginzburg was born in Odessa in 1902, and moved to Leningrad in 1922, where she studied at the famous Institute for Art History as a student and later as a colleague of Victor Shklovsky, Yury Tynianov and Boris Eikhenbaum, the major figures of Russian Formalism. She survived the purges, the 900-day siege of Leningrad and the anti-Semitic campaigns that followed the war to become, in the 1960s-'80s, a friend and inspiration to a younger generation of Petersburg literary scholars and poets, including Alexander Kushner and Elena Shvarts. She was a prominent cultural figure in the years of perestroika, when she began to publish notes and essays that she been writing for the 'desk drawer' starting in the 1920s. Her books include venerated works of literary scholarship such as On Lyric Poetry, On Psychological Prose (published in the English translation from Princeton University Press) and On the Literary Hero. The collection of her prose that appeared in her lifetime, Person at a Writing Table (1989), and which contained Notes from the Blockade, as well as posthumous editions, have established Ginzburg as innovative author of what she called 'in-between' genres - notes, essays, and fragmentary narratives - that describe and analyse the human experience of a historically catastrophic era spanning much of the twentieth century. Lydia Ginzburg died in 1990.