Abstract
“Undeveloped negatives”: Sophia Ostrovskaya’s Diary
The present article reviews Sophia Ostrovskaya’s (1902-1983) Diary as a compositional unity of separate ‘diaries’ written with different purposes using different strategies of diary writing. The article is focused mainly on diaries written in the period 1933-1947. I analyse the techniques of creating a ‘cryptogrammic diary’ in order to overcome the taboos and the ways of constructing a
social and gender identity through the writing process. The article also discusses the complex interaction between the ‘modernist’ and the ‘Soviet’ types
of subjectivity within the frame of the description of the ‘self’ operated through
the diary.
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