The Poetics of Desk-Drawer Notebooks

This chapter discusses the heterogeneity and flexibility of Ginzburg's notebooks, examining what happens when a “note” ( zapis ') migrates from one composition to another and acquires new neighbors. It explores her “theory of the note” in her early scholarship on Pyotr Vyazemsky (1925–26, 1929) and in her article “On Writers' Notebooks”—her first scholarly reflections on in-between prose, later to become the area of her most significant contributions to literary scholarship. Ginzburg's early scholarship, and the inception of her notebook project in 1925, coincided with a perceived crisis in the novel and a rising interest in documentary literature. A focus on the late 1920s will allow us to trace how Ginzburg's notebooks were shaped by this crisis and sought to emerge from it.