218 pages ; 22 cm.

The classical philologist and cultural theorist Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (1890-1955) left a huge corpus of autobiographical 'notes' that remain unpublished. The story of a life that coincided with a revolution, two world wars and terror is an everyday chronicle written by a researcher who sought to understand and explain to the reader of the future the form of government under which she happened to live. Irina Paperno set herself the task of not only creating a guide to the pages of Freidenberg's chronicle, but also reconstructing the political theory of Stalinism which O. M. Freidenberg consistently (although not always explicitly) developed in her 'Notes' - a theory comparable to that of Hannah Arendt. The book is addressed not only to scholars in the humanities, but also to a general reader who ponders how people live when power penetrates "into the very heart of a person, suffocating and pursuing him everywhere, even in private, even at night, even in his innermost self."

Russian

February 15, 2024

Includes bibliographical references.