About the book: 2023 / Classical philologist and cultural theorist Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (1890–1955) left a huge corpus of autobiographical “notes”, to this day day not published. The story of a life that coincided with a revolution, two world wars and terror is an everyday chronicle written by a researcher who seeks 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 the chronicle, but also reconstructing the political theory of Stalinism, which O. M. Freidenberg consistently (though not always explicitly) developed in her “Notes” - a theory comparable to that Hannah Arendt created it in another form. 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 deepest self.” Irina Paperno – philologist, cultural historian, professor at the University of California at Berkeley.