All Our Past Days is a novel by Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, first published in 1952. Some time ago, Ginzburg began to be republished in the West – the most famous contemporary writers described her as an icon of women’s literature, which they themselves looked up to. The feminist theme is the most important in her work, but in the 2020s the Russian reader may be primarily interested in the anti-war historical layer of the narrative. At Meduza’s request, literary critic Alex Mesrobov reflects on Ginzburg’s fate—and how the life lessons she learned are embodied in her prose. A translation of this novel into Russian was published in subscription editions.
Natalia Ginzburg is the go-to author of all your favorite writers of the 21st century. Sally Rooney called “All Our Old Days” “Perfect romance”“Maggie Nelson wrote in The New Yorker Rave review About her autobiographical essay, Rachel Cusk equated her prose with “The New Female Voice Standard”. Ginzburg was also admired by other authors – we mention only the most famous of them.
Today, Ginsburg is republished, read, researched, and performed on stage around the world. It all started in the mid-2000s, when Elena Ferrante became a world cultural event and Italian literature came back into fashion: reprints of “forgotten” Italians of the 20th century were released, including Ginzburg.
Ginzburg was born in 1916 in Palermo, and her youth fell on the years of fascism in Italy. The father of the future writer, the famous biologist Giuseppe Levi, was an Italian Jew and anti-fascist who ended up in prison on political charges (along with his sons). Natalia’s first husband, the publisher and anti-fascist Leon Ginzburg, was also persecuted by the authorities: from 1940 to 1943, he lived in political exile in Abruzzo with his wife and children. Afterwards, Leon was arrested by the Wehrmacht – and quickly executed in a Romanian prison. Natalia was left a widow with children in her arms; One of them, Carlo Ginzburg, would become a star in academic historiography three decades later.
After the war, Ginzburg moved to Turin, where she worked at the publishing house Einaudi, one of whose founders was Leone. She befriended and worked with the great Italian writers: Cesare Pavese, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino. In the same period, she published her own translation of Marcel Proust, wrote the introduction to the first Italian edition of Anne Frank’s diaries, and published several of her own books that brought her fame in her homeland, most notably The Family Dictionary (1963).
In 1950, Natalia married for the second time – to Shakespeare scholar Gabriele Baldini – and moved with him to Rome. They even starred in cameo roles in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel of Matthew (There Photographswhere the couple was photographed with a new reality director). In 1969, Baldini was involved in a serious car accident in Rome and required a blood transfusion; She became infected, died at the age of 49, and Ginsburg became a widow for the second time. The couple had two children, both of whom were born with disabilities, and the boy did not live to see a year.
In 1983, Ginsburg focused on politics: she was elected to the Italian Parliament as an independent left-wing candidate, called for peace and fought to legalize abortion. Natalia died in 1991 in Rome. Until her last days, she worked at the publishing house Einaudi, where she edited the Italian translation of the novel “Life” by Guy de Maupassant.
Ginzburg’s “fashion” came to Russia after it began to be published in English, but was implemented at a high level: the Subscription Editions publishing house had already published two novels. A year ago, the famous “Family Dictionary” was released, and now “All Our Past Days”.
These novels are similar in plot and theme, so you can start learning about Ginzburg’s works from anyone. But we must keep in mind the difference in temperament. “The Family Dictionary” is two-thirds very funny, one-third very sad, and “All Our Past Days” is just the opposite: you are more often sad than happy, but if you are happy, what’s more, you laugh out loud.
The novel “All Our Past Days” revolves around two families: they live in neighboring houses in northern Italy during the years of Mussolini’s dictatorship. The first family is poor bourgeois, the second is the owners of a soap factory. In the first family there are orphaned boys and girls, and in the second there are spoiled brothers, their sister, and their mother. They also have friends, lovers, and servants. There are many characters in the novel, especially in the beginning, when “peaceful” life under Mussolini was still going on. But then, when the conspiracy gains momentum – or rather, the war comes to Italy – arrests, political exile, disappearances, suicides and executions immediately begin. The novel ends with the war and the execution of Mussolini. A country covered in rubble does not know what awaits next, and the surviving members of two families are reunited in their hometown.
Among the heroines stands Anna, the youngest sister in a poor bourgeois family. Before our eyes, she grows into a teenager, falls in love, experiences her first tragedy—a pregnancy she didn’t plan for—then leaves for a village in southern Italy and, at the end of the war, faces a second tragedy. By the end of the novel, she transforms from a confused teenager into a woman, mother, and widow—to someone who has learned the grief of war, miraculously survived and wants only one thing: to return to her remaining relatives. Her photo reveals the autobiographical features of Natalia Ginzburg.
Family is the main theme in the writer’s work. It doesn’t idealize her, but it doesn’t project childish anger onto her. Instead, you carefully study how this circle of people works. Particular attention is paid to language: what words relatives use when they joke or curse, how often they deliver bad or good news, and which family words stay with us even decades later, when our parents are no longer alive. Of course, the influence of Proust, whom the writer translated during the years of war and political exile, was felt here: the French modernist was one of the first to explore the links between the language of the family and our deepest memories.
Home drawings require brevity. “All Our Past Days” is written exactly that way – in the simple language we use every day, talking and gossiping and having sad thoughts. Ginzburg essentially avoids the pathos of speech, thus contrasting his style with the rhetoric of fascism, the language of totalitarian pathos. Here it is worth noting once again the first-class work of translators and editors of Russian-language publications: they managed to convey the entire emotional palette of the characters’ speech – jokes, insults, declarations of love or hatred.
In the Russian-speaking environment and abroad, Ginzburg’s texts are perceived differently. In the West, her books returned to readers about ten years ago – in peacetime, in the wake of the global renaissance of women’s literature. For this reason, the leading women writers of our time saw Ginzburg’s prose as primarily “the standard of the new female voice.” In Russia, her books began to be reprinted in 2025, when peacetime turned into “Our Yesterday.”
Ginsburg avoids comforting illusions – she describes with honesty and bitterness survival in a fascist and militaristic state. But her books are by no means hopeless. On the contrary, the writer’s story helps us look at our lives in a tragic time differently, to look at them more maturely. This alone is a compelling reason to read it.
Alex Mesrobov