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3.10 - Self-Writing

from History 3 - Forms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Emily Van Buskirk
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter examines forms of self-writing (memoir, autobiography, diaries, documentary prose, and other in-between genres) that demonstrate an ‘orientation toward authenticity’, to borrow the phrase of the writer-scholar Lidiia Ginzburg. The arc spans the late seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the period from the end of World War II to the late Soviet era, which witnessed an explosion of non-fictional narratives to document the war, camps, and Stalinist terror. The chapter takes its cues from Ginzburg’s theory that in-between prose is uniquely innovative when it fixes its attention on concepts of the self and literary forms, and that it flourishes most when canonical genres are in flux. In addition to the topic of childhood and, more centrally, personal encounters with history, the chapter discusses the role of women writers, and the sub-genre of the memoirs of contemporaries written by members of the intelligentsia.

Keywords

documentarymemoirdiariesautobiographynon-fictionexperienceautofiction
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 624 - 642
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Engelstein, Laura, and Sandler, Stephanie (eds.), Self and Story in Russian History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginzburg, Lydia, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Jane Gary, Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heldt, Barbara, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Holmgren, Beth, The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Paperno, Irina, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia (eds.), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Toker, Leona, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Wachtel, Andrew, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Walker, Barbara, ‘On reading Soviet memoirs: A history of the “contemporaries” genre as an institution of Russian intelligentsia culture from the 1790s to the 1970s’, Russian Review 59.3 (2000), 327–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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