"Passing Characters" is the first scholarly edition of the prose by Lydia Yakovlevna Ginzburg, an outstanding Russian writer, thinker, and literary historian. The collection includes her "narratives," essays, and notebooks from the war years, which became the most productive period of her literary activity.

Most of the works gathered here are published for the first time, including a story about a death during the blockade, which remained unknown even to the author's closest associates for almost seventy years. It also includes an early version of "Notes of a Blockade Person," reflections on Soviet literature, an article on the self-awareness of a Russian intellectual of Jewish origin during the increasing anti-Semitic campaign, and much more.

There is no doubt that if Ginzburg's wartime prose had reached readers when it was written, our understanding of the history of Russian literature in the second half of the 20th century would be radically different.