Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams

Irina Paperno

Published by Cornell University Press 2010

Stories of the Soviet Experience

Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams

Irina Paperno

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801459115

Overview
Contents

About this book

Paperno 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.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California:

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.

Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University:

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?

Peter Kenez, University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz, author of Birth of the Propaganda State; Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929:

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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Part I. Memoirs and Diaries Published at The End of The Soviet Epoch: An Overview
Publishers, Authors, Texts, Reader, Corpus Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
The Background: Memoir Writing and Historical Consciousness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Connecting the “I” and History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
Revealing the Intimate Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
Building a Community Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	24
Writing at the End Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
Qualification: The “I” in Quotation Marks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
Excursus: Readers Respond in LiveJournal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
Concluding Remarks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
Part II. Two Texts: Close Readings
1. Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Diary of Anna Akhmatova’s Life: “Intimacy and Terror” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
2. The Notebooks of the Peasant Evgeniia Kiseleva: “The War Separated Us Forever” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	118
Part III. Dreams of Terror: Interpretations
Comments on Dreams as Stories and as Sources Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
Andrei Arzhilovsky: The Peasant Raped by Stalin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
Nikolai Bukharin Dreams of Stalin: Abraham and Isaac Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Writers’ Dreams: Mikhail Prishvin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
Writers’ Dreams: Veniamin Kaverin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
The Dreams of Anna Akhmatova Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
A Comment on Writers’ and Peasants’ Theories of Dreams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
A Philosopher’s Dreams: Yakov Druskin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Stalin’s Dream Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Concluding Remarks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Appendix: Russian Texts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 304
Keywords: Literary Studies; History; Soviet & East European History

eBook

Published: January 15, 2011
ISBN: 9780801459115