Description:
Paperno 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.
Brief description: Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of "Who, What Am I?": Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams, and Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia, all from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior.
Review Quotes:
"Irina Paperno in her book deals with a form of art in which the Russians have always exhibited particular talent: the writing of autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries. With the help of her insightful analysis and long excerpts from the texts, we can, as we never could before, gain some knowledge and understanding of how the Soviet people, or at least intellectuals, perceived what was happening to their country. Through the description of the lives of concrete individuals, some famous, some not well known, she makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Soviet history."--Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Birth of the Propaganda State; Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929