Stories of the Soviet Experience

Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams

Irina Paperno

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801457876
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART I

MEMOIRS AND DIARIES PUBLISHED
AT THE END OF THE SOVIET EPOCH
An Overview

If, as I argue, the massive appearance of personal documents at the end of the Soviet epoch is indeed a trend, what does it mean? Some answers are obvious. Imbued with the historicist sense of an end and by specific circumstances of violent Soviet history, Russian memoirists are driven by a need to claim their survival, commemorate the dead, provide historical data and ethnographic material, talk through their traumatic past, repent, accuse, and denounce. There are also the writer’s imperative to write about himself, the scholar’s urge to make his life into an object of investigation, the public demand (or publisher’s commission) to disclose the lives of celebrities—all encouraged by the new possibilities to speak, from the political ethos of openness during Gorbachev’s glasnost to the availability of unrestrained publishing opportunities in post-Soviet Russia. In looking at personal documents from Soviet Russia, I have chosen to suspend, as far as possible, certain widely available explanatory categories, such as “memory” and “collective memory,” inasmuch as they create an alternative to the traditional concepts of “history” and “historical consciousness” the twin notions “trauma” and “testimony,” insofar as they imply the therapeutic nature and value of recollection and revelation; and “mastering of the past,” for its moral pathos.¹ Instead, I ask: What are the motives, uses, and meanings of the explosion of publication of personal writings in Russia in the last two decades?

PUBLISHERS, AUTHORS, TEXTS, READER, CORPUS

The explosion began with the sensational publication of personal accounts of the Stalinist terror written during and after the “thaw” (mainly in the 1960s) and circulated underground, such as, in 1988, the memoirs of Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel′shtam and Evgeniia Semenovna Ginzburg. There was a strong reaction: what impressed the readers even more than the stories themselves was seeing them published. It became clear that, after all the years of strict control over what could be told, it was now possible, even desirable, to speak of the hardship and repression in Soviet times. Scores of personal accounts followed from a wide range of people. (Remarkably, many authors wrote multiple texts, and quite a few texts appeared in multiple editions.)

Such publications have been promptly institutionalized. In the late 1980s, most of the Soviet literary journals opened regular features: “Diaries, Reminiscences,” “Reminiscences, Documents,” “Memoirs, Archives, Testimonies,” “Memoirs of the Twentieth Century,” “Private Reminiscences of the Twentieth Century.” The new historical journal Odissei included a section of memoirs in which historians speak about themselves, “The Historian and Time.” In the 1990s, new post-Soviet book publishers, varied as they were, started special series with telling titles: My Twentieth Century, The Twentieth Century from the First Person, The Twentieth Century through the Eyes of Witnesses, The Family Archive of the Twentieth Century, From the Manuscript Collections, Diaries and Memoirs of St. Petersburg Scholars, Life Documents and Interpretations, the People’s Archive Series, the People’s Memoirs.² Some of these publishers clearly pursue commercial goals; others do not. And whether such series issued a steady stream of publications or a single book, the publishers claim to represent a trend.

For those without access to publishing, there was another option: they could deposit their life stories in an archive. For victims of government repression there were local chapters of the Memorial (a nongovernment society for the commemoration of political persecution in the Soviet Union, established in 1988). Another grassroots institution, the People’s Archive (Narodnyi arkhiv) in Moscow, also established in 1988, started to accept diaries, memoirs, and other personal records from “everybody.”³

Who is speaking? Purportedly, “everybody”: members of different generations, the living and the dead, professional writers and illiterate peasants, public figures (writers, actors, politicians) and “ordinary people,”⁴ dissidents and loyal citizens—all intent on making their intimate lives a matter of historical record. Of course, memoirs of celebrities appear in greater numbers than those of unknown people. There is a serious effort to publish memoirs and diaries of survivors and victims of the terror.⁵ Dissident political activists and hidden dissidents figure prominently. But people in power—including Stalin’s men—are also represented (mostly by their children).

Professional intellectuals, as can be expected, took charge of the project, and many write as members of “the Russian intelligentsia.” But there is also an effort to allow “the people,” even barely literate people, to speak—a paradoxical desire to create access to the “voices of the people on behalf of whom the intellectuals always spoke” (published under close editing). Special series are devoted to the publication of “people’s memoirs.”⁶ Such is the remarkable story of Evgeniia Grigor′evna Kiseleva (1916–1990). Wanting to see her life made into a film, she described it in hesitant writing and sent the notebook to a Moscow film studio. Her manuscripts passed through the hands of many an intellectual and was published more than once, in various forms. When, in 1996, Kiseleva’s life story was published by two scholars, who not only transcribed her idiosyncratic, quasi-oral narrative (from the notebooks deposited in the People’s Archive) but also provided an extensive interpretation, or “reading,” they put their own names in place of the author’s on the book’s cover.⁷

Professional writers are especially prominent. Of course, writers have always been prolific autobiographers. Still, since the late 1980s, the number and intensity of writers’ self-revelations have exceeded readers’ expectations—and most of them put on record their previously hidden distaste for Soviet power. The private life and secret thoughts of the prominent poet David Samoilovich Samoilov (born Kaufman, 1920–1990) was revealed through several sets of diaries and memoirs, issued and reissued in installments by the writer’s widow beginning in the year of his death. There are daily recordings of thoughts (Podennye zapisi), a general chronicle of daily events (Obshchii dnevnik), and memoir essays (Pamiatnye zapiski); jointly, they cover almost the whole span of his life (1934 to 1990).⁸

The writer Iurii Markovich Nagibin (1920–1994) submitted his extremely intimate diary for publication in person. But Nagibin died before the diary (1942–86)—which testifies to his distaste for Soviet power—was published. Standing by his body at the funeral, the publisher felt that, as the first reader of Nagibin’s diary, he alone knew the writer’s true self.⁹ Yet he commented in the book’s annotation that “during one’s lifetime, the diary should be kept in a desk drawer.”¹⁰ A year later (having sold 35,000 copies), the same publisher issued a second edition of Nagibin’s diary, complete with reference material (commentaries, photographs, and a name index), that is, as a historical document.

The popular playwright Leonid Genrikhovich Zorin (born in 1924) published a “memoir-novel,” entitled Proscenium, which takes him from 1934 to 1994. Claiming the stage for himself, he traces the “historical drama” of his confrontations with the “inhuman power system” (mostly, over the staging of his plays). He also published his scattered notes (Green Notebooks, held together, he tells us, by little more than the ready-made green binder); from the author’s introduction, we learn that for most of his life he has also kept a diary, still unpublished.¹¹

Lidiia Chukovskaia’s famous Notes about Anna Akhmatova is a diary written by one person (a professional editor) on behalf of another (a great poet). For years, Lidiia Korneevna Chukovskaia (1907–1996) recorded, with ethnographic precision, her intimate conversations with Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and details of her friend’s daily life, cruelly deformed—as they both thought—by state repression. This diary, too, appeared in at least three different editions that grew and grew with each publication. Later editions contain extensive explanatory footnotes, endnotes, and name indexes prepared by the author, her daughter (who figures in the text as a child), and their helpers.¹²

Prominent as they are, professional writers are not the only ones who have published voluminous records of daily life. There is the diary of Elvira Grigor′evna Filipovich (born in 1934), issued by an obscure publisher in five hundred copies in 2000.¹³ Suggestively entitled From the Soviet Pioneer to the Pensioner and Black Marketeer, it documents, step-by-step, the life of a Soviet teenager at the time of the war, a student at an agricultural academy in the 1950s, a livestock technician working difficult jobs in the 1960s, and, finally, a scientist with an advanced degree in animal husbandry. This is also the story of a daughter, wife, and mother, which carefully describes the minutiae of professional and family life in specific historical situations. In this case, we learn little about the author’s politics. In October 1961, we see her rejoice in Khrushchev’s announcement of the imminent coming of communism at the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “The party solemnly proclaims that the present generation of people will live under communism,” said Nikita Sergeevich. […] And in our country plans are being fulfilled, ahead of time even” (176). In August 1968, we see her in Czechoslovakia (the home of her husband) bewildered and embarrassed by the Soviet invasion. The title promises to show the diarist’s old age, when, as a pensioner, she becomes a small-scale black marketeer, post-Soviet style (chelnok), but the publication—financed by the author—ceased after volume one (which takes the reader from 1944 to 1972).

The time span covered in this corpus of documents extends for the whole period of Soviet history, from the early 1920s to this day. Still, there is a tendency to focus on Stalin’s time, presenting it as the defining Soviet experience, and on the years of the Second World War in the Soviet Union (1941–45). But there are also several memoirs about the recent past, “histories of yesterday.” One of them, The Seventies as an Object of Cultural History, features essays, mostly by scholars, who subject their own personal memories to historical and semiotic analysis.¹⁴ Another, Dmitrii Iakovlevich Severiukhin’s An Evening in the Summer Garden: Episodes from the History of a “Second Culture”, makes a claim to represent those born between 1954 and 1974. Written by an amateur historiographer and bibliographer, this publication is justified as a record of an unofficial “second” culture, hidden from the Soviet public. One reviewer has defined this generation as those “conceived after Stalin,” and its temporality as a “continuous yesterday.” (This memoir takes the reader from the early 1970s through 1999.)¹⁵ Finally, as reviewers have noted, there are “memoirs about today,” written by politicians who relate current events in the mode of a memoir.^*

There are ongoing diaries as well as memoirs that narrate the history of yesterday on a daily basis, striving to catch up with the moment of publication. Leonid Zorin’s Green Notebooks, published in 1999, extend to the year 1998. The personal notebooks of the literary historian Marietta Omarovna Chudakova (born in 1937), published in 2000 and entitled “At the End of the Soviet Period,” extend to 1996.¹⁶ Then, in 2006, Chudakova published the diary of her husband, the literary scholar Aleksandr Pavlovich Chudakov (1938–2005), which covers the last year of his life. In 1999 the post-Soviet (postmodernist) writer, journalist, and feminist Mariia Ivanovna Arbatova (born in 1957) published an “autobiographical novel” called I Am Forty, describing her life through the year 1997. In 2002 she published an autobiography in two volumes, Good-bye to the Twentieth Century, extending her life story for another five years and another marriage (and more than five hundred pages)—this time, to the very moment of publication.¹⁷ The scholarly notes to Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Notes about Anna Akhmatova, growing from one edition to another, link the records made in 1938–41 and 1952–66 to the evolving present (the last notes were made shortly before the 1996–97 publication).

A comment is due on the documents’ form. (A more thorough analysis of texts in this corpus for their literary form lies beyond the goals and possibilities of this book.) One is struck by how quite a few of these accounts are texts in flux—diverse fragments that can be, and have been, assembled and reassembled into different makeshift texts by either their authors or publishers. This is true of both self-conscious authors, who are aware of the implications of choosing a literary form (be it the finished or the unfinalized), and of amateur writers, who may feel a “naive” need to create a text that is true to their shifting lives, even in its form. At times, it is difficult to tell which is which. Take the case of the poet David Samoilov: there are several different posthumous arrangements of the vast records of events, thoughts, memories, and “things to be remembered” (pamiatnye zapiski) that he made on a daily basis throughout his life, as if striving to catch it in its entirety and variety. The literary translator and poet Andrei Iakovlevich Sergeev (1933–1998) deliberately defined his unusual 1995 autobiography, Stamp Album, as “a collection of people, things, words, and relationships” (he threw in his birth certificate).¹⁸ The journalist and filmmaker Aleksei Kirillovich Simonov (born in 1939) used the phrase “private collection” to define the genre of his 1999 book, consisting of short essays (“stories” and “portraits”) and documents (photographs, letters, photographically reproduced certificates). He remarked on the seeming adequacy of this structure to that of “life itself”: “life—it is but a collection of future reminiscences.”¹⁹

Throughout her long writing life, the literary scholar Lidiia Iakovlevna Ginzburg (1902–1990)—one of the cultural heroes of late-Soviet and early post-Soviet times—deliberately cultivated an indeterminate genre called “notes” (zapisi, zapiski), comprising carefully shaped snapshots of everyday situations, recorded conversations (including overheard conversations), aphorisms, and occasional thematic “essays.” She did this in full consciousness of the difficult predicament of a sophisticated twentieth-century autobiographical writer, esp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I - Memoirs and Diaries Published: At the End of the Soviet Epoch: An Overview
• Part II - Two Texts: Close Readings
• Part III - Dreams of Terror: Interpretations
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Russian Texts
• Notes