Galaxy of Black Stars: The Power of Soviet Biography

Abstract

BIOGRAPHIES FASCINATE, AND BIOGRAPHIES-critical accounts of people's lives-are what historians should write insofar as they believe that it is their vocation to understand the human condition in its historically variable forms. And yet, many published biographies seem to limit, rather than enrich, historical understanding. Their focus on a single thinking and acting personality easily breeds self-absorption, at the expense of larger transpersonal dimensions. Add to that questions of relevance, representativeness, and ethics. Why this biographical subject and not someone else? In what ways does writing about X entail a silencing of Y and Z? And doesn't the pursuit of biography inherently breed hagiographical impulses, or the opposite desire to debunk a famous historical or literary actor? Yet I believe there are ways of writing biography that retain the inherent interest and excitement of exploring how it felt for historical subjects to live their lives, while also maintaining a critical distance and observing the shaping influences of context and structure. To write a biography in this manner is to start at a point that prefigures the biographical subject and investigates the historically specific norms and practices that condition the production of biographically relevant material. Too often, it seems, biographers just grab their sources and run; they accept as a given the existence of troves of letters, volumes of diaries and memoirs that allow them to peer into the inner life of their chosen biographical subject. Other historians complain about the lack of such sources in their area of expertise; if it weren't for that gap in the record, they, too, could produce better and richer biographical accounts. What I believe is often missing is a consideration of how and why the sources that we treat as biographical raw material were produced in the first place. To make that consideration is to shift the perspective from a thinking and speaking biographical subject to the making of subjects of biographical experience.1 In some areas and time periods, sets of institutions, social practices, and selfpractices coalesced to form veritable force fields in which a heightened biographical consciousness took shape. One can think of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, where a wealth of surviving diaries and other conversion narratives point to the investment of the Puritan faithful in the work of salvation, an investment that was sustained by ministers' exhortations to keep personal diaries as much as by indi-