ABSTRACT
Participation in a culture includes participation in the narratives of that culture, a general understanding of the stock of meanings and their relationships to each other.
(Richardson, 1990: 24)
The following three chapters are devoted to an analysis of fifteen life story interviews with the representatives of the shestidesyatniki generation unit, which I conducted in Russia during the summers of 2002 and 2003 (see Appendix 1 for details about the participants). The choice of this data collection format was determined by my interest in how individuals construct and present themselves beyond the ideological context of thematic discussion or public gatherings, and which cultural story they would choose to participate in. I approached people of the 1930s birth cohort who had received higher education and who were pursuing intellectual professions or were in highly qualified professional jobs. The sample of interviewees included two schoolteachers, three academic philosophers, three sociologists, two biologists, an academic engineer, a literary critic, an architect, an artist and an actor/ professor in an acting school. Based on the details of each interviewee that I could obtain prior to the meeting (age, occupation, education and place of work), I could only hope that they would appear as participants in the shestidesyatniki generation unit, i.e. would share the mental data with other members of the group.
