Аннотация
Broken Vertebrae of the Century: Amateur Memoirs of the year 1970 about the Idyllic Childhood of the 1920s
This article serves as an analytic foreword to the publication of the memoirs of the author’s grandfather, Boris Vulfovitch Bronner (1916-1991), a telecommunications engineer, who after having suffered from a severe spinal injury, devoted several months of immobility to the creation of a series of sketches about his childhood. Although these memoirs belong to the field of amateur literature, they can throw some new light on the social and cultural processes typical of the USSR in the 1960s. The chronotope of the memoirs is definitely idyllic: there is no mention of the future repressions that affected some of the protagonists in the 1930s. This turn to the idyll of childhood can be regarded as the late echo of the same developments that took place in the Soviet literature of the late 1950s and 1960s and, widely speaking, in the deep concern in the autobiographical narrative of childhood which became a means of ‘treating’ the traumas of both the Great Terror and its denunciation in 1956.