Опыт детства как преодоление прошлого в современной автобиографической прозе

• Main Author: Marina Balina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari - Università di Padova 2014-12-01
• Series: Avtobiografija
• Subjects: autobiographic life-writing; childhood; sanaev; chudakov; private memory
• Online Access: https://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/41

In the 1990s and 2000s, autobiographic life-writing became the territory of intense negotiations between private and historical experiences. Debates about Soviet history supported by the opening of the State archives and resulting in the accessibility of public as well as personal documents, triggered a process of re-conceptualization of private experience into a historical event. Private memory became the territory for the creation of identity that was in close contact with the collective living experience of a generation but was never dominated by it. Two narrative planes, the private and the public that were previously separated, merged together in the unity of one’s life. In this new context, recollections of childhood became increasingly important by giving the reader an opportunity to experience various, often contradictory, dimensions of the author’s self. Two autobiographical recollections of childhood, Pavel Sanaev’s Bury Me Behind the Baseboard, 1996, and Alexander Chudakov’s A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps, 2000/2011 are analyzed in the article.