Lidiya Yakovlevna Ginzburg ' onMouseout='HidePop("18649")' href="/topics/Odessa">Odessa

Odessa

Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

, Russian Empire

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

 - July 17, 1990, Leningrad

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

, USSR) was a major Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 literary critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

 and historian and a survivor of the siege of Leningrad

Siege of Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad, also known as the Leningrad Blockade was a prolonged military operation resulting from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad, now known as Saint Petersburg, in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. It started on 8 September 1941, when the last...

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She was born in Odessa in 1902 and moved to Leningrad in 1922. She enrolled there in the State Institute of the History of the Arts, studying with Yury Tynyanov

Yury Tynyanov

Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov was a famous Soviet/Russian writer, literary critic, translator, scholar and screenwriter. He was an authority on Pushkin and an important member of the Russian Formalist school.-Life and work:...

 and Boris Eikhenbaum, two major
figures of Russian Formalism

Russian formalism

Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...

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Ginzburg survived the purges, the 900-day Leningrad blockade, and the anti-Jewish campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s and became a friend and inspiration to a new generation of poets, including Alexander Kushner

Alexander Kushner

Alexander Semenovich Kushner is a prominent Russian living poet from Saint Petersburg.- Biography :Kushner was born in Leningrad into a Russian-Jewish family; his father was a military engineer. He graduated from Herzen University, and later, between 1959 and 1969, taught Russian literature....

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She published a number of seminal critical studies, including "Lermontov's Creative Path" ("Tvorcheskii put' Lermontova," 1940), "Herzen's 'My Past and Thoughts'" ("'Byloe i dumy' Gertsena," 1957), On Lyric Poetry ("O lirike," 1964; 2nd exp. ed. 1974), On Psychological Prose ("O psikhologicheskoi proze," 1971; 2nd rev. ed., 1977), and "On the Literary Hero" ("O literaturnom geroe," 1979). "On
Psychological Prose" was published by Princeton University Press in 1991 in an English translation and edition by Judson Rosengrant, and "Blockade Diary" ("Zapiski blokadnogo cvheloveka," 1984), her memoir of the siege of Leningrad (8 September 1941 - 27 January 1944), was published by Harvill in 1995 in translation by Alan Myers.