ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine two descriptions of poor and socially marginal milieux written by two men from different Soviet Russian generations.1 ‘Mikhail Ivanov’ (bom 1935) talks about incest and about promiscuous milieux of the 1950s, and ‘Aleksei Lukashin’ (bom c. 1960) about Leningrad suburban gang and rock subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s. I am interested in the links between private and public selves, and in the conflicting ideals o f masculinity exhibited in these autobiographies. The first autobiography, also, created doubts as to its authenticity. I conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to extrapolate a certain way of life from only a couple of autobiographies, and propose a conceptual distinction between milieux and subcultures.
