Lydia Ginzburg (1902–1990) is an author whose innovation and place in the literary landscape of the twentieth century is still not fully appreciated. An outstanding philologist, author of fundamental works on Russian literature, L. Ginzburg gained worldwide fame thanks to “Notes of a Siege Man.” However, she considered her main achievement to be prose texts written on the table and practically not published during her lifetime. The task that Ginzburg the prose writer sets for himself is to create a type of writing that is adequate to the catastrophic 20th century and to a new historical subject who finds himself in a situation of collapse of previous individualistic and humanistic value systems. The study, which was the result of ten years of work in the L. Ginzburg archive, examined previously unknown manuscripts and provided new valuable information about her life. The author analyzes in detail the intellectual project of L. Ginzburg, which does not fit into traditional genre conventions and blurs the boundaries between history, autobiography and artistic writing. A project at the center of which is the main question of the 20th century: “how to survive without losing the image of humanity.”