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Overview
Beginning with glasnost in the late 1980s and continuing into the present, scores of personal accounts of life under Soviet rule, written throughout its history, have been published in Russia, marking the end of an epoch. In a major new work on private life and personal writings, Irina Paperno explores this massive outpouring of human documents to uncover common themes, cultural trends, and literary forms. The book argues that, diverse as they are, these narratives—memoirs, diaries, notes, blogs—assert the historical significance of intimate lives shaped by catastrophic political forces, especially the Terror under Stalin and World War II. Moreover, these published personal documents create a community where those who lived through the Soviet era can gain access to the inner recesses of one another's lives.
This community strives to forge a link to the tradition of Russia's nineteenth-century intelligentsia; thus the Russian "intelligentsia" emerges as an additional implicit subject of this book. The book surveys hundreds of personal accounts and focuses on two in particular, chosen for their exceptional quality, scope, and emotional power. Notes about Anna Akhmatova is the diary Lidiia Chukovskaia, a professional editor, kept to document the day-to-day life of her friend, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Evgeniia Kiseleva, a barely literate former peasant, kept records in notebooks with the thought of crafting a movie script from the story of her life. The striking parallels and contrasts between these two documents demonstrate how the Soviet state and the idea of history shaped very different lives and very different life stories.
The book also analyzes dreams (most of them terror dreams) recounted in the diaries and memoirs of authors ranging from a peasant to well-known writers, a Party leader, and Stalin himself. History, Paperno shows, invaded their dreams, too. With a sure grasp of Russian cultural history, great sensitivity to the men and women who wrote, and a command of European and American scholarship on life writing, Paperno places diaries and memoirs of the Soviet experience in a rich historical and conceptual frame. An important and lasting contribution to the history of Russian culture at the end of an epoch, Stories of the Soviet Experience also illuminates the general logic and specific uses of personal narratives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780801457876 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia, also from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. She is coeditor of several books, including Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Part I Memoirs and Diaries Published at the End of the Soviet Epoch: An Overview 1
Publishers, Authors, Texts, Reader, Corpus 1
The Background: Memoir Writing and Historical Consciousness 9
Connecting the "I" and History 15
Revealing the Intimate 17
Building a Community 24
Moving in with a New Text
Joining the Ranks of Victims
Remembering Stalin: Tears
Disagreeing
Family Memoirs
Two Memoirs and a Novel Tell the Same Story
Generalizations: Soviet Memoirs as a Communal Apartment
Writing at the End 41
The Archive and the Apocalypse
The End of the Intelligentsia
Qualification: The "I" in Quotation Marks
Excursus: Readers Respond in LiveJournal 51
Concluding Remarks 55
Part II Two Texts: Close Readings 57
1 Lidiia Chukovskaia's Diary of Anna Akhmatova's Life: "Intimacy and Terror" 59
The Years of Terror: In "the Torture Chamber" 62
Family and Home: "The Cesspit of a Communal Apartment" 66
Overview of Circumstances
The Apartment in Poems and Dreams
"To Have Dinner at the Same Table as Her Husband's Wife"
How Akhmatova Left Punin
Generalizations: The Soviet State, Domestic Space, and Intimacy
During the War 77
Poverty and Squalor: New Living Forms and New Insight
The Helplessness and the Power
Gossip
Hardships and Privileges
"A New Epoch Began": After 1953
Did They Understand What Was Going On?
Akhmatova's Things and Manuscripts
An Aside: Memoirs as Historical Evidence
Historical Continuity: The 1930s and the 1960s
"Same Time, Same Faces, Different Memories"
Concluding Vignette: "She'll Tell You What 1937 Was Like" 115
2 The Notebooks of the Peasant Evgeniia Kiseleva: "The War Separated Us Forever" 118
Notebook 1: "The Story of My Life" 120
The Separation and the War
The Second Marriage
After the Second Marriage
Here and Now
Notebooks 2 and 3 134
Memory and Narrative
Television and Emotion
Television and Apocalypsis
A Comment on Historical Continuity: The Past War and the FutureWar
Generalizations: The Soviet State in the Domestic Space
Citizens and Power
The End: "We Live Like Strangers"
How These Notebooks Reached the Reader: The Interpreters 150
Defining the Status of the Text: "Naive Writing"
The Competition between Publishers: "Legislators and Interpreters"
The Disappearance of the Author
"Person without Subjecthood"
Concluding Remarks 159
Part III Dreams of Terror: Interpretations 161
Comments on Dreams as Stories and as Sources 161
Andrei Arzhilovsky: The Peasant Raped by Stalin 166
Nikolai Bukharin Dreams of Stalin: Abraham and Isaac 171
Writers' Dreams: Mikhail Prishvin 172
Writers' Dreams: Veniamin Kaverin 182
The Dreams of Anna Akhmatova
A Comment on Writers' and Peasants' Theories of Dreams 194
A Philosopher's Dreams: Yakov Druskin 197
Stalin's Dream 203
Concluding Remarks 205
Conclusion 209
Epilogue 211
Appendix: Russian Texts 213
Notes 259
Index 279
What People are Saying About This
With this, her third magisterial book, the eminent literary and cultural historian Irina Paperno moves from Russia's nineteenth into the twentieth century, of which she was a denizen and which is now history. As usual, Paperno works at the elusive borderline between 'raw life' and the 'meaning(s)' born from its foam. The riveting interest of the stories told by history's participants is matched by the sophistication of the analyst.
Irina Paperno in her book deals with a form of art in which the Russians have always exhibited particular talent: the writing of autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries. With the help of her insightful analysis and long excerpts from the texts, we can, as we never could before, gain some knowledge and understanding of how the Soviet people, or at least intellectuals, perceived what was happening to their country. Through the description of the lives of concrete individuals, some famous, some not well known, she makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Soviet history.
The value and longevity of a book of personal 'stories' gathered from a traumatic era—and from a pool so vast—depends to a large extent on the scholarly wisdom, trustworthiness, and good taste of the gatherer. The stories must be singularly meaningful and at the same time representative; coherent for outsiders but not self-consciously crafted for them; and arranged under some unifying rubric that nevertheless does not depersonalize the subjects. Given the profusion of Soviet-era memoirs and diaries, such a book benefits from some new filter, information source, or angle of interpretation on the memory-material. Irina Paperno's Stories of the Soviet Experience satisfies all these criteria at the highest level. Who could have predicted that Russian e-journals would be inspired by great Stalin-era witnesses like Lydia Ginzburg, or that we could learn so much about the inner life of those times by tapping accounts of people's nightmares and dreams?
The value and longevity of a book of personal 'stories' gathered from a traumatic era—and from a pool so vast—depends to a large extent on the scholarly wisdom, trustworthiness, and good taste of the gatherer. The stories must be singularly meaningful and at the same time representative; coherent for outsiders but not self-consciously crafted for them; and arranged under some unifying rubric that nevertheless does not depersonalize the subjects. Given the profusion of Soviet-era memoirs and diaries, such a book benefits from some new filter, information source, or angle of interpretation on the memory-material. Irina Paperno's Stories of the Soviet Experience satisfies all these criteria at the highest level. Who could have predicted that Russian e-journals would be inspired by great Stalin-era witnesses like Lydia Ginzburg, or that we could learn so much about the inner life of those times by tapping accounts of people's nightmares and dreams?