Lidiia Iakovlevna Ginzburg is best known outside Russia for her theoretical writings and scholarly studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative prose and lyric poetry. Only in the 1980s did she begin to gain recognition as the most distinguished theorist of "life writing"--a field that encompasses autobiography, biography, letters, diaries, and memoirs--in Russian literary studies. Between 1982 and 1993 Ginzburg, and later her literary executor, Aleksandr Kushner, made large parts of her journal available for publication, revealing a master practitioner of the genres of life writing--what she first termed the "intermediary genres" and later the "direct conversation about life." While perfecting her mastery of the journal, including the entire gamut of life-writing genres--the essay, quasi-fictional prose, and even the art of conversation--Ginzburg simultaneously established new principles of analysis for materials not previously considered "aesthetic" and reassessed the aesthetic qualities of materials not previously considered "literature." Appreciation of both the processes...