Stories of the Soviet Experience - by Irina Paperno (Paperback)

About the 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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."--Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Birth of the Propaganda State; Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929

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

"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."--Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California

About the Author

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.