The Russian Memoir: History and Literature

Lidiia Ginzburg: Images of the Intelligentsia

Jane Gary Harris Lidiia Ginzburg: Images of the Intelligentsia LIDIIA IAKOVLEVNA GINZBURG, recognized today as one of the most prominent scholars, distinguished writers, and reliable witnesses of the Leningrad intelligentsia, is best known outside Russia for her theoretical writings and scholarly studies of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury narrative prose and lyric poetry.1 From the very beginning of her career, however, Ginzburg chose to identify herself broadly as a “litterateur ” or “literary professional”: “Literary science cannot develop out of itself alone, external stimuli and association with other realms of thought are required . . . For those of us who do not view ourselves primarily as literary historians or literary theorists, but as having broader interests—who see ourselves rather as littérateurs, as literary professionals—that lack of nourishment is fatal.”2 Public recognition of this remarkable personality and her literary accomplishments came only in the last decade of her life, in the 1980s, when she herself was in her eighties. Only then was Ginzburg able to reveal herself as a creative writer, a master practitioner of the genres of “life writing,” for which she established new principles of analysis and which she practiced as new forms of contemporary prose. In a 1988 interview , she explained her interest in life writing as part of the “evolving literary process”: “In contemporary prose the sense of the author’s presence is developing space. . . . You take up a pen for a conversation about life—not to write an autobiography, but to express directly your own life experience, your views on reality. . . . This is one of the paths of future literary development . . . the path I prefer” (emphasis added).3 Indeed, Ginzburg’s lifelong contemplation of the correlations between reality or “lived experience” and literary creation provides the key to all her writing, above all, to her own wide-ranging art of the zapis’ (journal entry), which included the vast range of genres of self-expression, from poignant self-analyses, simple anecdotes, recorded conversations, to lengthy philosophical and memoiristic essays, among other things. Major literary influences on her writing include Michel Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lev Tolstoy , Petr Viazemskii, Osip Mandelstam, and Marcel Proust, uniquely complex practitioners of self-reflexive and self-critical analytical prose. 5 Lidiia Ginzburg was born into a middle-class assimilated Jewish family of the Odessa intelligentsia on March 5 (18), 1902, and died in her beloved adopted city of Leningrad on July 15, 1990. She summarizes her own biography against the background of Soviet intellectual and cultural life in a decade-by-decade assessment of the Russian intelligentsia in its twentiethcentury incarnation in two linked cultural memoirs or memoiristic essays dating from 1979 to 1980: “Pokolenie na povorote” (“The Turning Point of a Generation,” 1979) and “‘I zaodno s pravo-poriadkom’” (“‘At One with the Prevailing Order,’” 1980). These cultural memoirs of 1979 to 1980 are the subject of this chapter. Here Ginzburg fills out her skeletal biography by interrogating it in the context of the behavior of the postrevolutionary intelligentsia. She bases her analyses both on the experience of her own thinking as typical of her generation and on the social, historical, psychological , and aesthetic conditions that she perceived as exerting pressure on that thinking, among which are the literary and cultural formations inherited from the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia. Thus, this reading theorizes the memoirs of 1979 to 1980 as a unique effort to examine a life, not as conventional autobiography or memoir, but as a semiotic model of the social and psychological behavior of the intelligentsia during the various phases of Soviet Russian intellectual and cultural history from the 1920s to the Thaw. In the process Ginzburg provides a cultural and philosophical assessment of the behavior of the Soviet intelligentsia, her own life serving as a “variant” on that model. The writing of these memoirs is highly significant for Ginzburg’s own self-cognition and self-representation, standing as a major effort on her part to connect with the younger, post-Stalinist generation , her addressee. Indeed, at the conclusion of the second memoir, she problematizes biography with reference to her own experience, questioning how much of life is consciously self-willed, and how much is conditioned by forces beyond one’s control. The memoirs of 1979 to 1980 were selected for analysis for several reasons. In addition to summing up Ginzburg’s biography in her own words, they culminate earlier efforts at cultural memoirs of friends and colleagues begun in the 1960s as a means to repudiate the official version...