Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams

304 Pages·2009·1.558 MB·English

by  Irina Paperno

STORIES OF THE
SOVIET EXPERIENCE

S T O R I E S
OF THE
S O V I E T
E X P E R I E N C E
M E M O I R S ,
D I A R I E S , D R E A M S
I R I N A P A P E R N O
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS | ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press,
Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2009 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2009
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paperno, Irina.
Stories of the Soviet experience : memoirs, diaries, dreams /
Irina Paperno.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4839-3 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8014-7590-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Russian prose literature—20th century—History and
criticism. 2. Autobiography. 3. Autobiographical memory—
Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—History. 5. Soviet Union—
Intellectual life. I. Title.
PG3091.9.A93P37 2009
891.7'0935—dc22
2009016842
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers
and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books.
Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers
that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers.
For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
PART I
MEMOIRS AND DIARIES PUBLISHED AT THE END OF
THE SOVIET EPOCH: AN OVERVIEW 1
Publishers, Authors, Texts, Reader, Corpus 1
The Background: Memoir Writing and Historical
Consciousness 9
Connecting the “I” and History 15
Revealing the Intimate 17
Building a Community 24
Moving in with a New Text | Joining the Ranks of Victims | Remembering
Stalin: Tears | Disagreeing | Family Memoirs | Two Memoirs and a Novel Tell
the Same Story | Generalizations: Soviet Memoirs as a Communal Apartment
Writing at the End 41
The Archive and the Apocalypse | The End of the Intelligentsia
Qualifi cation: The “I” in Quotation Marks 49
Excursus: Readers Respond in LiveJournal 51
Concluding Remarks 55
PART II
TWO TEXTS: CLOSE READINGS 57
1. Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Diary of Anna Akhmatova’s Life:
“Intimacy and Terror” 59
The Years of Terror: In “the Torture Chamber” 62
vi | contents
Family and Home: “The Cesspit of a Communal Apartment” 66
Overview of Circumstances | The Apartment in Poems and Dreams | “To Have
Dinner at the Same Table as Her Husband’s Wife” | How Akhmatova Left
Punin | Generalizations: The Soviet State, Domestic Space, and Intimacy
During the War 77
Poverty and Squalor: New Living Forms and New Insight | The Helplessness
and the Power | Gossip | Hardships and Privileges
“A New Epoch Began”: After 1953 95
Did They Understand What Was Going On? | Akhmatova’s Things and
Manuscripts | An Aside: Memoirs as Historical Evidence | Historical Continuity:
The 1930s and the 1960s | “Same Time, Same Facts, Different Memories”
Concluding Vignette: “She’ll Tell You What 1937 Was Like” 115
2. The Notebooks of the Peasant Evgeniia Kiseleva: “The War Separated
Us Forever” 118
Notebook 1: “The Story of My Life” 120
The Separation and the War | The Second Marriage | After the Second
Marriage | Here and Now
Notebooks 2 and 3 134
Memory and Narrative | Television and Emotion | Television and
Apocalypsis | A Comment on Historical Continuity: The Past War and the Future
War | Generalizations: The Soviet State in the Domestic Space | Citizens and
Power | The End: “We Live Like Strangers”
How These Notebooks Reached the Reader: The Interpreters 150
Defi ning the Status of the Text: “Naive Writing” | The Competition between Publishers:
“Legislators and Interpreters” | The Disappearance of the Author | “Person without
Subjecthood”
Concluding Remarks 159
PART III
DREAMS OF TERROR: INTERPRETATIONS 161
Comments on Dreams as Stories and as Sources 161
Andrei Arzhilovsky: The Peasant Raped by Stalin 166
Nikolai Bukharin Dreams of Stalin: Abraham and Isaac 171
Writers’ Dreams: Mikhail Prishvin 172
Writers’ Dreams: Veniamin Kaverin 182
The Dreams of Anna Akhmatova 187
A Comment on Writers’ and Peasants’ Theories of Dreams 194
contents | vii
A Philosopher’s Dreams: Yakov Druskin 197
Stalin’s Dream 203
Concluding Remarks 205
CONCLUSION 209
EPILOGUE 211
Appendix: Russian Texts 213
Notes 259
Index 279

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began during my residency at the Netherlands Institute for Ad-
vanced Studies (1999). Major funding was provided by the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities (2003–4). Financial support was also provided by the
University of California, Berkeley, through a Humanities Research Fellow-
ship (2007) and a Research Assistantship in the Humanities Grant (2007–8).
Parts of this book have appeared as articles: “Personal Accounts of the Soviet
Experience,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4
(Fall 2002): 1–35; “Dreams of Terror: Dreams from Stalinist Russia as a His-
torical Source,” Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 4
(Fall 2006): 793–824. This material has since been revised and amended.
I would like to express my profound gratitude to colleagues and friends
who read and criticized these essays and the book manuscript, which led to
many revisions. Caryl Emerson, Laura Engelstein, Jochen Hellbeck, Hugh
McLean, Anna Muza, Eric Naiman, Slava Paperno, Alexei Yurchak, and Al-
exander Zholkovsky are among them. I owe a special debt to Laura Engelstein
for many stimulating conversations. The book has profi ted from my participa-
tion in the seminar “Dream Life: Conversations with Our Waking and Sleep-
ing Dreams” at the Extension Division of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic
Institute, 2006–7. I am grateful to Cornell University Press director John Ack-
erman for his support and critical judgment.
Over the years, research assistance was provided by Patrick Henry, Jane
Shamaeva, Alyson Tapp, and Boris Wolfson. Jane Shamaeva translated the
Russian texts in parts 1 and 3, and Alyson Tapp in part 2. To Alyson Tapp, I
owe a large debt for innumerable editorial revisions of the whole manuscript.
A note on language: throughout the main text of the book, the Russian text
and Russian proper names are given in the Library of Congress transliteration