"Passing Characters" is the first scientific publication of the prose of 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 fruitful period of her literary activity. Most of the works collected here are published for the first time, including a story about the death of the siege, which remained unknown even to the people closest to the author for almost seventy years, an early version of “Notes of a Siege Man,” reflections on Soviet literature, an article on the self-awareness of a Russian intellectual of Jewish origin in the context of a growing anti-Semitic campaign and much more. There is no doubt that if Ginzburg’s wartime prose had become available to the reader when it was written, our ideas about the history of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century would have been radically different.