Blockade Diary by Lidiy Ginzburg

Blockade Diary by Lidiy Ginzburg

The 900-day siege of Lenningrad (1941-440 was one of the turning points of the Second World War. It slowed down the German advance into Russia and became a national symbol of survival and resistance. From her own experience as a survivor of the blockade and using facts, conversations and impressions collected over the years, Lidiya Ginzburg has created a remarkable everyman hero in whom she distils the collective experience of life under siege. Though the author may depict, often painfully, the hunger and harrowing conditions of that period, the reader takes away a different impression: the dignity, vitality and intellectual resilience of the thinking mind as it records and makes sense of extreme experience. This first translation of a classic work of documentary fiction, reminscient of the work of Primo Levi and Albert Camus, introduces a major twentieth-century Russian writer to English-language readers.

Lidiya Ginzburg (1902-1990), a respected Russian literary critic, was often at odds with the Soviet literary establishment and much of her writing had to be confined to the 'desk drawer'. She was born in Odessa in 19022 and moved to Leningrad in 1922 where she studied at the State Insitute for Art History. She survived the purges, the blockade and the anti-Semitic years of the 1950s to become a friend and inspiration to the postwar generation of Petersburg poets, including Joseph Brodsky and Alexandr Kushner. Eventually in 1960s and 70s she was able to publish her literary criticism and theory, but it was not until 1984 that Ginzburg published Blockade Diary in the journal Neva. She died in 1990.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781860460333
ISBN 10	186046033X
Title	Blockade Diary
Author	Lidiy Ginzburg
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	1995-07-20
Number of pages	130
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.