The Russian Memoir: History and Literature

Introduction

A good question prompted this volume. As my graduate students were perusing a list of required primary texts for their comprehensive examinations in Russian literature, they asked, quite sensibly, about the inclusion of certain memoirs. At the time I mumbled something about the arbitrary nature of canonization and resorted to a vague justification I later found repeated in various literary histories: that some memoirs qualify as superb works of verbal art and reward the specialist’s close analysis and cultural contextualization.1 These works of verbal art, I continued more brightly, yield a factual bonus—the eyewitness encounters and “backstage” news of the worlds they purport to record. After all, one can’t know the engendering sociopolitical context of Russian realism without studying Aleksandr Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts. One can’t fathom the dread conditions of Stalinist culture without experiencing the memoirs of Evgeniia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam. While my students, at least to my face, appeared satisfied with my answer , I was not. Nor did I discover a more satisfactory justification among those other habitual assigners of memoirs—historians. Memoirs intermittently surface as documents rather than literary works in history course syllabi and reading lists. Historians recommend memoirs as primary sources which, despite their bias and stylization, proffer more compelling, coherent reading than other sorts of documents. In some cases, memoirs may be all that remain, the “unofficial” narratives that eluded political censure or academic regimentation. Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, dispatched from exile by an astute politician, at last made a full breast of the nineteenthcentury revolutionary’s history. The Stalinist camps were first and foremost exposed by their survivor-memoirists. It seems, therefore, that for all its indispensability to the making and understanding of Russian culture and history, the memoir, with its generic slippage between art and document, subjective expression and dedicated record , often falls through the cracks separating the relatively recently develIntroduction ix Beth Holmgren oped academic fields of literary studies and historiography. We assign memoirs in our courses haphazardly, enjoy them enormously, yet rarely bother with their structural and stylistic analysis. We’re intent either on general historical coverage or concentrating on a more traditional canon of fictional “greats.” Yet we are developing the tools to teach otherwise: recent scholarship has begun to explore Russian modes of self-representation and self-expression, to interrogate Russians’ specific, presumably non-Western conceptions and constructions of the self.2 This inquiry, belatedly echoing renewed interest in Western autobiography, is in good part fired by the quest to recover silenced or censored subjects. I would argue that feminist scholars catalyzed the new focus on various Russian forms of autobiographical writing, testing and extending Barbara Heldt’s hypothesis about Russian women’s signal achievements in autobiography and lyric poetry, and producing such fine anthologies of primary sources and critical writings as Russia Through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia and Models of Self: Russian Women’s Autobiographical Texts.3 This new scholarship naturally absorbs the memoir in its declared investigation of currently more fashionable concepts of autobiography and the self—in significant contrast, as one anthology notes, to “Russian and Soviet scholars’ preference for the terms memoir literature or documentary literature” (Russia Through Women’s Eyes, 6). Our volume specifically heeds this preference and proposes a “genre”specific focus—for it asserts that the memoir or vospominaniia (recollections , reminiscences), with their dual (if not always balanced) agendas of individualized expression and reliable reportage, has maintained an abiding national genre “contract” between Russian writers and readers. Promising to inscribe the memoirist’s self among (often famous) others, with reference to and commentary about the real world, the memoir has powerfully attracted and obligated Russians who were eager to articulate their engagement with their singular, developing society, yet also muted by political censorship in other forms of writing. For centuries Russians have embraced the memoir as a form of autobiography with (depending on one’s point of view) a conscience or an agenda, a legacy that encourages and troubles writers even in the post-Soviet present. The Russian Memoir proffers readers both closer and extensive looks at this durable and elastic narrative form. The introduction opens by exploring the thorny questions of the memoir’s definition and disciplinary appropriation . Its successive sections, titled “The Memoir and the World” and “The Memoir and the Word,” lay out the framework for the essays to follow, respectively accenting, on the one hand, the memoir’s various extraliterary functions (as interpretive history...