Stories of the Soviet Experience

Irina Paperno

Description

Beginning with glasnost in the late 1980s and continuing into the present, scores of personal accounts of life under Soviet rule, written throughout its history, have been published in Russia, marking the end of an epoch. In a major new work on private life and personal writings, Irina Paperno explores this massive outpouring of human documents to uncover common themes, cultural trends, and literary forms. The book 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. Moreover, these published personal documents create a community where those who lived through the Soviet era can gain access to the inner recesses of one another's lives.This community strives to forge a link to the tradition of Russia's nineteenth-century intelligentsia; thus the Russian "intelligentsia" emerges as an additional implicit subject of this book. The book surveys hundreds of personal accounts and focuses on two in particular, chosen for their exceptional quality, scope, and emotional power. Notes about Anna Akhmatova is the diary Lidiia Chukovskaia, a professional editor, kept to document the day-to-day life of her friend, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Evgeniia Kiseleva, a barely literate former peasant, kept records in notebooks with the thought of crafting a movie script from the story of her life. The striking parallels and contrasts between these two documents demonstrate how the Soviet state and the idea of history shaped very different lives and very different life stories.The book also analyzes dreams (most of them terror dreams) recounted in the diaries and memoirs of authors ranging from a peasant to well-known writers, a Party leader, and Stalin himself. History, Paperno shows, invaded their dreams, too. With a sure grasp of Russian cultural history, great sensitivity to the men and women who wrote, and a command of European and American scholarship on life writing, Paperno places diaries and memoirs of the Soviet experience in a rich historical and conceptual frame. An important and lasting contribution to the history of Russian culture at the end of an epoch, Stories of the Soviet Experience also illuminates the general logic and specific uses of personal narratives.

Sujets

• Russie
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques
• History of Europe
• Russia
• Soviet Union
• Memoir
• USSR
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801459115
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

S T O R I E S O F T H E S O V I E T E X P E R I E N C E

S T O R I E S O F T H E S O V I E T E X P E R I E N C E

M E M O I R S , D I A R I E S , D R E A M S

I R I N A P A P E R N O

C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S | I T H A C A A N D L O N D O N

Copyright ©2009by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,512East State Street, Ithaca, New York14850.

First published2009by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks,2009

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Paperno, Irina.  Stories of the Soviet experience : memoirs, diaries, dreams / Irina Paperno.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN9780801448393(cloth : alk. paper) —  ISBN9780801475900(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Russian prose literature—20th century—History and criticism.2. Autobiography.3. Autobiographical memory— Soviet Union.4. Soviet Union—History.5. Soviet Union— Intellectual life. I. Title.

PG3091.9.A93P37 891.7'0935—dc22

2009

2009016842

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, lowVOC inks and acidfree papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing10987654321 Paperback printing10987654321

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi

P A R T I M E M O I R S A N D D I A R I E S P U B L I S H E D A T T H E E N D O F T H E S O V I E T E P O C H : A N O V E R V I E W Publishers, Authors, Texts, Reader, Corpus The Background: Memoir Writing and Historical Consciousness Connecting the “I” and History Revealing the Intimate Building a Community Moving in with a New Text | Joining the Ranks of Victims | Remembering Stalin: Tears | Disagreeing | Family Memoirs | Two Memoirs and a Novel Tell the Same Story | Generalizations: Soviet Memoirs as a Communal Apartment Writing at the End The Archive and the Apocalypse | The End of the Intelligentsia Qualification: The “I” in Quotation Marks Excursus: Readers Respond in LiveJournal Concluding Remarks

P A R T I I T W O T E X T S : C L O S E R E A D I N G S 1. Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Diary of Anna Akhmatova’s Life: “Intimacy and Terror”

The Years of Terror: In “the Torture Chamber”

1 1

9 15 17 24

41

49 51 55

57

59 62

vi contents |

Family and Home: “The Cesspit of a Communal Apartment” Overview of Circumstances | The Apartment in Poems and Dreams | “To Have Dinner at the Same Table as Her Husband’s Wife” | How Akhmatova Left Punin | Generalizations: The Soviet State, Domestic Space, and Intimacy During the War Poverty and Squalor: New Living Forms and New Insight | The Helplessness and the Power | Gossip | Hardships and Privileges “A New Epoch Began”: After1953 Did They Understand What Was Going On? | Akhmatova’s Things and Manuscripts | An Aside: Memoirs as Historical Evidence | Historical Continuity: The1930s and the1960s | “Same Time, Same Facts, Different Memories” Concluding Vignette: “She’ll Tell You What1937Was Like” 2. The Notebooks of the Peasant Evgeniia Kiseleva: “The War Separated Us Forever” Notebook1: “The Story of My Life” The Separation and the War | The Second Marriage | After the Second Marriage | Here and Now Notebooks2and3 Memory and Narrative | Television and Emotion | Television and Apocalypsis | A Comment on Historical Continuity: The Past War and the Future War | Generalizations: The Soviet State in the Domestic Space | Citizens and Power | The End: “We Live Like Strangers” How These Notebooks Reached the Reader: The Interpreters

Defining the Status of the Text: “Naive Writing” | The Competition between Publishers: “Legislators and Interpreters” | The Disappearance of the Author | “Person without Subjecthood”

Concluding Remarks

P A R T I I I D R E A M S O F T E R R O R : I N T E R P R E T A T I O N S Comments on Dreams as Stories and as Sources Andrei Arzhilovsky: The Peasant Raped by Stalin Nikolai Bukharin Dreams of Stalin: Abraham and Isaac Writers’ Dreams: Mikhail Prishvin Writers’ Dreams: Veniamin Kaverin The Dreams of Anna Akhmatova A Comment on Writers’ and Peasants’ Theories of Dreams

66

77

95

115

118 120

134

150

159

161 161 166 171 172 182 187 194

contents | vii

A Philosopher’s Dreams: Yakov Druskin Stalin’s Dream Concluding Remarks

C O N C L U S I O N E P I L O G U E

Appendix: Russian Texts 213 Notes 259 Index 279

197 203 205

209 211

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book began during my residency at the Netherlands Institute for Ad vanced Studies (1999). Major funding was provided by the National Endow ment for the Humanities (2003–4). Financial support was also provided by the University of California, Berkeley, through a Humanities Research Fellow ship (2007) and a Research Assistantship in the Humanities Grant (2007–8). Parts of this book have appeared as articles: “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,”Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History3, no.4 (Fall2002):1–35; “Dreams of Terror: Dreams from Stalinist Russia as a His torical Source,”Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History7, no.4 (Fall2006):793–824. This material has since been revised and amended. I would like to express my profound gratitude to colleagues and friends who read and criticized these essays and the book manuscript, which led to many revisions. Caryl Emerson, Laura Engelstein, Jochen Hellbeck, Hugh McLean, Anna Muza, Eric Naiman, Slava Paperno, Alexei Yurchak, and Al exander Zholkovsky are among them. I owe a special debt to Laura Engelstein for many stimulating conversations. The book has profited from my participa tion in the seminar “Dream Life: Conversations with Our Waking and Sleep ing Dreams” at the Extension Division of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute,2006–7. I am grateful to Cornell University Press director John Ack erman for his support and critical judgment. Over the years, research assistance was provided by Patrick Henry, Jane Shamaeva, Alyson Tapp, and Boris Wolfson. Jane Shamaeva translated the Russian texts in parts1and3, and Alyson Tapp in part2. To Alyson Tapp, I owe a large debt for innumerable editorial revisions of the whole manuscript. A note on language: throughout the main text of the book, the Russian text and Russian proper names are given in the Library of Congress transliteration