Ausgabe: 59 H. Irina Paperno: Stories of the Soviet Experience. Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. XV, S. ISBN: Glasnost and the breakdown of the Soviet Union released a flood of personal writings about the Soviet past — memoirs, diaries, letters, notebooks, and auto-biographical novels. Many of them were pre-occupied with the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century, in particular the Terror and the War. Some of these texts had collected dust in desk drawers or police files; others were constructed after the end of the Soviet experience, with the benefit of hindsight.
With one exception, the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, the book is based entirely on published sources, illustrating what rich material is now in the public domain large sections of this diary have, of course, been published, but the excerpt Paperno quotes on p. The book is organized into three unequal parts. First comes a quick overview over some diaries and memoirs, which make up the corpus on which the study is based p. The third part focuses on the interpretation of one motif contained in many texts: dreams.
A literary scholar and intellectual historian, Paperno is not a methodological purist. She is impatient with too clear and, as she sees it, artificial genre boundaries between memoirs and diaries, which suggest that the one usually the latter is a more pure source for the past than the other, which is constructed post factum. Such pragmatism permeates much of the book.
Parts one and two are virtually jargon free and the introduction serves as one long counter footnote indicating that, yes, she knows the technical literature, but, no, she does not find it terribly convincing or helpful. It is only in part three, devoted to dreams, when secret language sneaks back in. It is in this chapter, too, when the allure of originality was not resisted. Readers struggling to understand the second sentence will get further confused as they read on. Paperno seems compelled to indicate that she understands that dreams cannot be accessed directly, but come to the analyst only when recounted by the dreaming subject.
At its core, this is a book about the Russian-cum-Soviet intelligentsia. The Stalins come and go, it seems, but the intelligentsia remains. A life story at the same time ungrammatical and epic, powerful and depressing, it sits a bit oddly in what until that point is a study of the intelligentsia. It is a historiographical and historical gem nevertheless. The fine tools of the literary scholar allow a subtle decoding, making intelligible what first just appears as simple illiteracy. The analysis unveils the extent to which her story telling is beholden to two sources — oral culture and film.
