ABSTRACT
The Soviet era’s balancing act between history and story rendered personal reminiscences a genre most susceptible to political vicissitudes. 1 Not that the period that followed brought any sort of equilibrium; to the contrary, the end of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first were marked by constant reconsiderations and reevaluations of history. Often mutually contradictory, these new interpretations have led to a state of confusion as to just what constitutes a historical document, in particular, supplementing this category with personal recollections and reminiscences. To the lack of faith in tomorrow-understandable, given the dramatic upheavals experienced by contemporary Russia-has been added a loss of confidence in what happened yesterday, an undermining of the past, an un-writing of history textbooks hitherto thought immutable. Rattled by this instability, human interest naturally turns away from the sociopolitical “big picture” and toward far more embraceable phenomena: the private experience, especially of a single individual. Under these circumstances of uncertainty, greater value is assigned to the everyday and mundane, to such pedestrian responsibilities as working and raising a family, that is, to surviving-a category particularly applicable to those who have been “thrown out of their own biographies” (to use Mandel’shtam’s phrase [1987, 72] for life-trajectories derailed by historical upheaval). The most immediate advantage of post-Soviet memoir writing, in fact, has been its ability to offer the tangible reality of a personal story instead of the nebulous “truth” of a conventionally “historical” document. Amid the post-Soviet rubble, it is those who have lived through the cataclysms of History, with a capital ‘H’, whose stories have gained readerly trust. The true hero of the new epoch has been the survivor , of whatever temporal remove from the reader, and of whatever historical significance as traditionally understood. The latter point is in fact crucial: in the contemporary Russian cultural context, personal experience is no longer called upon to fulfill the now-discredited practice of modeling a broader social category; history has been replaced, in other words, by the individual story . The privatization of history that began in the glasnost’ period goes on, with readers continuing to trust that memoirs, diaries, and (auto)biographies offer a more faithful past than so-called historical documents.
