Emily Van Buskirk is associate professor in the Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. She is the coeditor of Lydia Ginzburg's Alternative Literary Identities and of a Russian edition of Ginzburg's blockade prose. She is editing a new publication of Ginzburg's Notes from the Leningrad Blockade.

"Particularly welcome is the queer studies dimension of the volume... Those coming to Ginzburg's work for the first time will particularly appreciate the informative biography of the author at the beginning of the book"--Choice "Any student of the twentieth century and its traumas, let alone Soviet literary history, should find Van Buskirk's book of extreme interest and value."--Marat Grinberg, Russian Review

• Acknowledgments vii A Note about Spelling, Transliteration, and Archival References ix Introduction 1 1 Writing the Self after the Crisis of Individualism: Distancing and Moral Evaluation 26 2 The Poetics of Desk-Drawer Notebooks 69 3 Marginality in the Mainstream, Lesbian Love in the Third Person 109 4 Passing Characters 161 5 Transformations of Experience: Around and Behind Notes of a Blockade Person 196 Conclusion: Sustaining a Human Image 222 Notes 231 Bibliography 323 Index 343

Emily Van Buskirk is associate professor in the Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. She is the coeditor of Lydia Ginzburg's Alternative Literary Identities and of a Russian edition of Ginzburg's blockade prose. She is editing a new publication of Ginzburg's Notes from the Leningrad Blockade.

"Particularly welcome is the queer studies dimension of the volume... Those coming to Ginzburg's work for the first time will particularly appreciate the informative biography of the author at the beginning of the book"--Choice "Any student of the twentieth century and its traumas, let alone Soviet literary history, should find Van Buskirk's book of extreme interest and value."--Marat Grinberg, Russian Review

• Acknowledgments vii A Note about Spelling, Transliteration, and Archival References ix Introduction 1 1 Writing the Self after the Crisis of Individualism: Distancing and Moral Evaluation 26 2 The Poetics of Desk-Drawer Notebooks 69 3 Marginality in the Mainstream, Lesbian Love in the Third Person 109 4 Passing Characters 161 5 Transformations of Experience: Around and Behind Notes of a Blockade Person 196 Conclusion: Sustaining a Human Image 222 Notes 231 Bibliography 323 Index 343