The Remains of the Self: Trauma, Gender, and the Residue of Soviet State Violence in Nina Bardina’s My Life

Abstract

This paper examines the representation and interconnection of trauma and identity in the memoir My Life [Moia zhizn'] by Nina Bardina. It focuses primarily on sexual violence as an essential aspect of women’s gendered experience in the Gulag. The article demonstrates how Bardina’s narrative overcomes the taboos that surround the issue of violence as well as the silence and inability to speak linked with trauma. Using the approaches of trauma studies, it aims to trace the textual presence of trauma and to examine how the process of writing might become a means of coping with it. It shows how, on the one hand, the narrator’s identity is destroyed by the impact of state violence and, on the other hand, is reasserted through the very act of writing and recording her own experiences and the crimes of the Soviet state.