Social Commentary as Biographical Work: Post-Communist Autobiographies in Latvia

Post-communist life writing is a rapidly growing field in Latvia. The number of published autobiographies that reflect upon Soviet-era experience has increased exponentially since 1991 when Latvia regained independence from the USSR. At first glance, it might seem as if these texts reflect a transitional society that bridges the gap between communist and post-communist realities and that is coming to terms with its past. Taking a closer look, we may, however, find that instead of healing and reconciliation, many Latvian autobiographers have dealt with the non-democratic past as a stimulus to criticism of the post-communist status quo. In other words, these autobiographies express work of social commentary towards the present-day social order.

The sociologist Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal has suggested that in times of rapid social change, individuals undertake biographical work: through the communication and shared interpretation of what has happened in one's life and what can be expected to happen in the future, individuals look for ways to reach "a flexible balance which both allows and reduces contingency, both creates and transcends consistency" (261). Biographical work may occur privately as well as publicly, and as Denzin outlines, different types of biographical forms presuppose different trajectories of biographical work (47-48). The present social order, nonetheless, is a common ground for any kind of biographical discourse: a dialogically-constructed definition of this order serves as a crow's-nest from which to observe past and future. Therefore, understanding shared definitions of a present social reality is as important as discovering how the past and future trajectories are created within life-writing's materials. For autobiographical texts, this means being attentive to how narrators undertake the work of social commentary or how they deal rhetorically with their present social order while explicating the retrospective and prospective dimensions of their lives.

Yet biographical studies of post-communist societies have mostly been concerned either with reconstruction of communist experience or adaptation to new conditions, thus leaving in the background representations of a post-communist social order per se (Bertaux, Thompson, and Rotkirch; Humphrey, Miller, and Zdravomyslova). They have relatively ignored the importance of comparative explorations of public biographical work that autobiographers advance. This has resulted in the situation that we more or less understand how people survived under Communist rule and how they coped with the changes after the collapse of the Berlin wall, but we have only a vague picture of how various types of autobiographical and biographical texts (films, memoirs, interviews, feature stories) reflect Soviet-era experiences and publicly define post-communist societies. Perhaps such a trend, especially with respect to the Baltic States, may be also explained by an official memory politics, which presumes that the benefits from the disintegration of the Soviet Union are self-evident and, that in terms of the Soviet period, the Baltic nations are only sufferers and/or heroes (Onken). Furthermore, in the 1990s a prevailing public discourse pressured autobiographers to take up a post-socialist history cleansed of communist garbage; that, as Koresaar insists, forced individuals "to avoid evaluation in their life stories" (131). However, one may also contend that the above-mentioned issue emanates from a much broader backdrop. As Hörschelmann has insisted, postmodernism as the dominant social and cultural order because of its hierarchical time/space constructions and universalizing tendencies has overlooked the persistence of different conceptions and practices that challenge the current status quo in post-communist societies as the subjects of post-communist transformation "retain a memory of the past which, in its inevitably incomplete and remoulded shape, continues to influence evaluations of the present" (63). The aim of this article, therefore, is to shed light on these challenging practices that are being highlighted by Latvian autobiographers who have commenced the work of social commentary within their memoirs.

Post-Communist Life Writing in Latvia: An Outline

The emergence of post-communist life writing in Latvia has been similar to that in other post-communist societies. That is to say, the most significant endeavors were devoted to oral history projects or to other types of biographical...