My dissertation, Reality in Search of Literature: Lydia Ginzburg's In-Between Prose, represents the first full-length study of the fragmentary notes, essays, and narratives of Lydia Ginzburg (1902-1990), a literary scholar who developed intellectually under the Russian Formalists. I see Ginzburg's prose as a scholar's intervention in the crisis of the novel that loomed over the opening decades of the twentieth century. In her scholarship, she showed how "in-between literature" (memoirs, diaries, letters, documentary prose) could capture new notions of character and personality more directly than established belletristic forms. In her writing, she sought to respond to modern concepts of personality, to document historical change, and to continue the ethical traditions of nineteenth-century Russian prose in a radically different context. I study how Ginzburg's prose moves fluidly among genres, combining analytic techniques with novelistic designs in the treatment of documentary material. I bring into dialogue the two intimately related spheres of her output, scholarship and prose, which had to remain officially separate from one another during most of her lifetime. For the six decades when Ginzburg wrote without an audience, her notebooks acted as a laboratory for self-analysis and as an imaginary social space, connected to the literary past and to future readers.
In chapter one, on the subject of writing and ethics, I argue that Ginzburg's methods of analyzing the self from the position of observer, designed to respond to the crisis of individualism, orient her prose away from traditional autobiography. In chapter two, I explore the relationship between notes, essays, and the novel--the inherent moveability of Ginzburg's texts, and the latticework of nodes and structures created by her analysis and generalization. In chapter three, I explore how her social-scientific analyses of her contemporaries reflect and reinforce her own self-image. In chapter four, I trace the genesis and rhetorical effects of Ginzburg's use of the third-person singular (wherein self becomes other), in unpublished writings about love and sexuality. In the fifth and final chapter I use her narratives about the Leningrad Blockade as a case study to demonstrate the simultaneity of autobiography, historiography, and fiction in Ginzburg's prose.
