Avtobiografija

Authors

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Яновский, Андрей (под ред.). 2019. Городцов Василий Алексеевич. Дневники ученого. 1914–1918: Из собрания Государственного исторического музея. В 2 кн. (Москва: ГИМ). Кн. 1. 1914–1915. 544 с., ил.; Кн. 2. 1916–1918. 384 с., ил.

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Inber, Vera. 2022. Quasi tre anni. Leningrado. Cronaca di una città sotto assedio, traduzione e cura di Francesca Gori (Milano: Guerini e associati), 231 pp.

2024-08-13T15:13:48+02:00

Kuznecov, Eduard. 2023. Parole trafugate. Diari clandestini dalla Russia (1970-1971), traduzione di Maria Olsufieva e Oretta Michahelles (Milano: Guerini e associati), pp. 200.

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Kuzovkina, Tat’jana, Lotman, Michail, e Majja Chalturina (a cura di). 2023. Zara Grigor’evna Minc: Dokumenty, pis’ma, vospominanija (Tallinn: Izdatel’stvo Tallinskogo universiteta), pp. 656.

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To Be a Woman in Sovremennik: Poetry and Truth in Avdotia Panaeva’s Fiction

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The article focuses on Avdot'ia Panaeva’s fiction as a source for reconstructing the writer’s subjectivity. Examined from this point of view, her prose allows for an understanding of how Panaeva, the only female contributor to The Contemporary [Sovremennik], felt about the progressive declarations and daily practices of the male editorial staff of the periodical. The article also discusses in detail both the defining characteristics of Panaeva’s prose (such as prototypism, or the emancipation project outlined in her prose) and her literary reputation as a fiction writer, in particular examining her retirement from literature a few decades after the publication of the novel A Woman’s Lot [Zhenskaia dolia, 1862]. Although, due to historical circumstances, Panaeva’s progressive project turned out to be unpopular with her contemporaries, the legacy of her prose gives researchers an opportunity to view the editorial staff of The Contemporary through a woman’s eyes. This article is the updated version of a Russian language article published by the authors in the journal New Literary Observer [Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie] in 2023 (No. 3).

In the Fog of the Past: An Unpublished Autobiographical Fragment by Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko

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In 1909, the poet and translator Fedor Fidler (Friedrich Fiedler) curated a collection of short autobiographies from various contemporary Russian writers. However, not all of the autobiographies submitted to him were included in the final 1911 volume First Literary Steps. Notably absent from this publication is the contribution of the prose writer and journalist Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko (1845-1936). Recently unearthed, this previously unpublished text is presented and analyzed here for the first time.

The Contexts and American Epitext of Evgenii Evtushenko’s A Precocious Autobiography

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The Soviet Russian poet Evgenii Evtushenko, just thirty years of age, first published A Precocious Autobiography (1963) in translation in western European periodicals. This was his attempt to speak directly to international audiences, bolstering his global reputation while responding to critics. I offer new facts

about the circumstances of this autobiography’s publication and Evtushenko’s subsequent defence of his actions in the face of Soviet criticism. American appropriations of this autobiography are of special interest. The text, but especially the polemical back-and-forth between Evtushenko and his critics, which nourished the autobiography’s epitext, riveted American political elites (including Allen Dulles and Sargent Shriver) in the summer and autumn of 1963.

This narrative of literary reception refines our understanding of Soviet tamizdat and its early history; it also reveals Evtushenko’s prominence as a global literary figure in US public debates in the early 1960s.

The Aesopian Moment. M.L. Gasparov and the Cultural Biography of the Soviet Intelligentsia. A Philological Fable.

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In one of his letters, written in 1992, Mikhail Gasparov mentions an article about the pitiful state of the Russian intelligentsia that he received from an American scholar. To Gasparov’s (rather ironic) surprise, the author of this piece stated that the term ‘period of stagnation’ had been introduced by Gasparov himself in his essay on Horace, which allegorically portrayed the Roman Age of Augustus. In the present essay, I trace the origins of this intriguing legend (an essay and a sociological theory by the eminent Israeli-American Soviet-Jewish scholar of nationalism Liah Greenfeld) and expand on the role of Roman allusions in the political imagination of the Soviet ‘thinking class’ from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s.

Did Gasparov coin the term? Were his famous philological essays on Roman culture allegorical by design? How did they correlate with his views of Soviet society and its intellectual dissenters? I argue that in his series of articles and chapters about the age of Augustus, Gasparov considered historical ‘Aesopian language’ as a symptom of the deep moral and intellectual crisis of Roman intellectual society, which, like its Soviet counterpart in the twentieth century, ‘thought little about new needs and conditions’ and was used to promote political jokes, gossip, hints, and squabbles.

The Author is both a Cameraman, a Director and an Actor’. A Conversation with Slava Sergeev about his Autobiographical Prose, Historical Memory and Life-Affirming Laughter

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Everyone Was Thrown Out of the Water and Onto the Shore’. An Introduction to the Diary of Slava Sergeev (March-May 2022)

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Where Have You Been, Adam?’ In Emigration, O Lord, Not at the Front

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Introduction to the Special Issue Russian Autobiographical Writing in Twenty and Twenty-First Centuries – Part 1

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Winners of the Lottery: The Stalin Period in the Memoirs of Contemporaries

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The article deals with the ways in which the memoirs of Il'ia Ehrenburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Emma Gershtein, and Raisa Orlova testify to their authors’ life during the Stalinist terror and to the fates of their contemporaries who fell victim to persecutions. Ehrenburg compared his having avoided arrest during the years of terror to having drawn a lucky lottery ticket: indeed, though each of the four memoirists took various measures to escape repressions, a great deal depended on sheer luck.

The article focuses on the areas where the memoirists concurred with the ideology of the Soviet system. These are issues that Lidiia Ginzburg called ‘areas of identification’ or ‘points of compatibility’, that is, aspects of the Soviet reality with which even the critics of the regime consented, feeling a genuine inner need to cultivate such consent. Ehrenburg alternates his spare account of the Great Terror with that of his struggle against fascism and his participation in the Soviet promotion of the international peace movements: he had, as it were, to choose his fights (though he downplays the wisdom of his conduct during the antisemitic campaign of Stalin’s last years). The memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose canonical status has recently been undermined, and of her former friend Emma Gershtein, likewise not immune to criticism, take the position that is the duty of intellectuals to maintain cultural treasures through the worst of times. By contrast, the memoirs of Raisa Orlova are a puzzled soul-searching confession of a former committed Stalinist who eventually shed her dogmatic beliefs and became a dissident.

Konstantin Paustovskii’s Memoirs as an Intergenerational Landmark

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This article analyzes the reception of the six-part memoir cycle by Konstantin Paustovskii, published in 1946-63, and the discussions about it among professional critics, writers, and non-professionals. Using the concept of a memory episteme coined by Hans Brockmeier, I propose that Paustovskii positioned his autobiographical cycle between three memory epistemes. The first, which can be called the episteme of the lost world, originated towards the end of World War II. The second, which can be called the episteme of ideological purity, was characteristic of the years of the fight against cosmopolitanism (1948–53) and was, therefore, somewhat neglected in Paustovskii’s works. However, it remained relevant even after Stalin’s death, which forced Paustovskii to modify some of the episodes of his life or to silence them. The third episteme was launched by Novyi mir magazine not long before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. It was related to the idea of deep personal involvement in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, including the traumatic losses of the Great Terror. Paustovskii’s own memory episteme, which he started promoting after 1953, involved popularizing a revival of the life-creation and life-writing strategies of the modernist era, while also giving the Novyi mir episteme of personal involvement in Big History its due. Whereas older generations of readers saw this revival of modernist strategies culturally insignificant and derivative, younger readers perceived it as innovative and stimulating by the younger readers.

Woman and Time: Twentieth-Century Female Ego-Narratives.

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Introduction

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