Lidiya Ginzburg - biography

Lidiya Yakovlevna Ginzburg (Russian: Ли́дия Я́ковлевна Ги́нзбург; March 18, 1902, Odessa, Russian Empire - July 17, 1990, Leningrad, USSR) was a major Soviet literary critic and a survivor of the siege of Leningrad. She was often at odds with the Soviet literary establishment and a good deal of her writing had to be kept in the desk drawer.

She was born in Odessa in 1902 and moved to Leningrad in 1922; there she studied at the State Institute for Art History, where she was first a student and then a colleague of Yury Tynyanov and Boris Eikhenbaum, two of the major figures in Russian formalism.

Ginzburg survived the purges, the 900-day Leningrad blockade, and the anti-Jewish campaigns of the 1950s and became a friend and inspiration to a new generation of poets like Alexander Kushner.

Eventually she was able to publish her critical works, which include On the Lyric and On Psychological Prose, but Blockade Diary did not appear until 1984 when it was published in the journal Neva. On Psychological Prose was published in English by Princeton, and Blockade Diary was translated by Alan Myers and published by Harvill in 1995.