The Russian Memoir: History and Literature

The Tale of Bygone Years: Reconstructing the Past in the Contemporary Russian Memoir

Marina Balina The Tale of Bygone Years: Reconstructing the Past in the Contemporary Russian Memoir “IN THE LAST FEW YEARS memoir has become one of the most popular literary genres,” state the editors of the journal Voprosy Literatury (Literary Issues) in their January 1999 roundtable discussion titled Memoirs on the Cusp of the Epoch.1 Acknowledging the fact that more and more literary figures take the opportunity to “write directly of themselves and their times,” the editors posed the following question to contemporary memoirists: “Why did you decide to write memoirs?” The result of this survey of eighteen was quite unexpected: most of the writers do not consider themselves memoirists and vehemently resist classification of their work as such. This roundtable discussion temporarily united a very diverse group comprised by such well-known fiction writers as Grigorii Baklanov and Andrei Bitov; poets and prose writers Konstantin Vanshenkin, Anatolii Naiman, Semen Lipkin, Naum Korzhavin, Elena Rzhevskaia, and Sergei Gandlevskii; literary critics Pavel Basinskii, Leonid Zorin, and Emma Gershtein; publicist and well-known economist Nikolai Shmelev; poetry translator Andrei Sergeev; surgeon and documentary writer Iulii Krelin; Orthodox priest Mikhail Ardov; and actor and poet Vladimir Rezepter. In keeping with this trend of resisting the memoir classification of his writing, Anatolii Naiman states, “I have not yet written a memoir and don’t know if I ever will” (30). It seems that he leaves it to his reader to decide the genre of his work, The Honorable End of a Dishonorable Generation. Andrei Sergeev remarks, somewhat less negatively, that although he does not believe his Stamp Catalog “is a work of pure memoir genre,” he also realizes that discussion of such “purity” is extremely difficult and proposes to “abandon the division of prose into separate genres” (32). Genre division could be superseded, in his opinion, by a division into greater and lesser prose (bol’shaia i malaia proza) where the definition would simply be based on length rather than the features of a too loosely defined literary canon. Nikolai Shmelev maintains, “No, no, I don’t write memoirs,” instead characterizing his work as painting 186 “pictures,” which he believes demand “less responsibility than memoirs” (34). Vladimir Rezepter defines memoir not as a self-sufficient genre, but as “a search for a genre” (31). Iulii Krelin proposes a new genre, diarymemoir , which is most closely tailored to his goal: “to leave a noticeable presence of existence and, in some cases, of direct action” (24). Pavel Basinskii and Sergei Gandlevskii both reject outright the notion that they are writing memoirs. Basinskii protests that, “I am too young and not mature enough for that [memoir writing].” While Gandlevskii admits that his work, Trepanation of the Cranium, has “a memoir-like undercurrent,” for him it is not “a memoir in its pure form” (13). Memoirists of the older generation, such as Konstantin Vanshenkin, Emma Gershtein, and Daniil Danin, admit to the memoir status of their creations, but actively try to separate themselves , if not from the memoir genre, then from its past socialist realist tradition of subverting facts to ideological demands. “Faith in the credibility of literary recollections is indeed hard to maintain,” writes Danin (20). Borshagovskii states that the chief driving force behind contemporary memoir is Deception (“precisely Deception with a capital ‘D’” [11]). The desire to overturn this Deception “paradoxically supports the existence and relative increase in the production of memoir literature” (12). This unanimous reluctance to be considered a memoirist is in no way prompted by a lack of respect for the genre in general. Basinskii pronounces the genre high, complex, and noble, “where one cannot hide” (6). Gershtein also recognizes the high demands that the genre places upon the author. Many of the roundtable participants refer to Aleksandr Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts as a quintessential example of the memoir genre. Yet in all of the commentaries one feels that the authors are heeding an overwhelming urge to step over or reject the closest time stratum, that of the memoir of the Soviet period, in order to escape the implications and suspicions of contributing to a genre well known for its political compromise. Nevertheless, contemporary post-Soviet memoir is a Soviet phenomenon to a much greater degree than a continuation of the “interrupted” classical tradition (Tartakovskii, 40). Formalized under the aesthetic dominance of socialist realism, the Soviet memoir over the years developed a stern and all-controlling etiquette2 that has deeply entrenched itself in the genre memory,3 requiring current memoirists to...