An Autobiography, is an Autobiography, is an Autobiography

Abstract

In volume 34, nos. 1-2 (1992) of Canadian Slavonic Papers, Donna Orwin published a comprehensive review of A.B. Wachtel' s The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (1990), asserting that style and structure of the book are clear. The author moves skillfully from close textual analysis to textual history, literary biography and on to social history and politics. He has a broad knowledge of European and Russian literary history. He knows the criticism and builds upon it without unnecessary repetitions (p. 175). In the Slavic and East European Journal (vol. 35, no. 3 [1991]) an equally positive appraisal appeared, the critic (M. Ehre) again expressing an appreciation for the book's solid structure and the refreshing approach to an old subject. Wachtel should indeed be lauded for the courage he displays in tackling material which has been masticated over many times. His main thesis is that the concept of a happy childhood found in Tolstoy's Childhood (1852) inspired a variety of writers among them Aksakov, Belyi, and Bunin to write their own happy accounts about this period of life. In contrast Gorky, who belonged to a different stratum of Russian society, attacked the Tolstoyan view and responded by creating in his Childhood a type of anti-childhood. Wachtel sets himself two goals: to reformulate the formal concept of autobiography and, in the process, to provide fresh insights into the socioeconomic myth of a happy childhood as it was manifested in Russian society proper until 1917, and in Russian emigre literature up to 1930. Wachtel' s proposals are doubtless worthy of scrutiny. My own feeling is that a closer examination of his study must lead to the conclusion that the formal aspect of the works he investigates is misrepresented. For that reason the alleged impact of the famous first lines of the fifteenth chapter of Tolstoy's Childhood on subsequent Childhoods is not convincing. In stressing the division between autobiography proper (where author and narrator are one and the same person) and the autobiography (where the two are not identical), Wachtel takes his cue from Philippe Lejeune's definition of the geme: A retrospective narration in prose by a real person about his or her own life. It emphasizes the individual life and, in particular, the development of one's