Abstract
This article examines the life story of a woman born in a village in southern Estonia in 1918. It is based on two life stories told in Estonian and one told in Russian, as well as a story about her home. The stories were written at the initiative of the researcher between 1996 and 2004 and are stored in public archives. These texts have been chosen in that they are characteristic of the multifaceted phenomenon of inter-cultural contact: the narrator is of Estonian de- scent; she was imprisoned during the German occupation and taken to Germany, where she lived among local Germans and Red Army soldiers after the war; she married a man of Russian descent who served in the Red Army; from 1948, she and her family lived in a culturally diverse environment in Kohtla-Jarve. The focus of this research is on the manifestation of cultural borders at the levels of life history, self-description and cultural context. The narrator presents herself as a person who is not constrained by cultural borders. The relative importance of various cultures in her life and her self-perception is dependent on the general historical and political context and the context of everyday life at the stage of her life that is being described. This aspect emphasises the flexible and volatile nature of cultural borders; however, the analysis of the text reveals the permanence of cultural borders - the narrator cannot step out of her cultural background when describing a culture that she sees as 'other'.
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