Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams by Irina Paperno (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 742 did not merely use the novel as the site for the illustration of a philosophical doctrine on time but for the very experimentation of the doctrine. ‘Ada is not a late modernist monument at all but a novel about modernism, underscoring thereby the distance between its author and literary precursors’ (p. 158). The conclusion goes beyond Ada, extending to our contemporary literary landscape, for in the conclusion of her study, ‘World Literature and the Butterfly Man’ (pp. 159–69), Bozovic focuses on those she calls ‘the children of Nabokov’, that is a new generation of writers, such as Azar Nafisi, Orhan Pamuk and W. G. Sebald, to emphasize the long-lasting success of Nabokov’s enterprise in reshaping the literary landscape. Nabokov, she writes, ‘managed not only to escape marginalization himself, but through his literary output and lifelong aesthetic propaganda campaign, to reconfigure the international cultural playing field’ (p. 165). Bozovic’s study is remarkable in many ways, because it sets out to theorize with utmost clarity the unique place of Nabokov in worldwide literature, a place that he consciously forged himself, while accounting at the same time for the diversity of his literary descendants. Although Bozovic never loses track of her forceful idea, always pulling back to her main issues, she nourishes her notional points with precise and nuanced microanalyses of Nabokov’s texts. In the sea of intertextual speculations that Nabokov’s entire work calls forth, Bozovic helps us recontextualize the work of Nabokov and make sense of the nature of his bibliophilic experiments. Université de Cergy-Pontoise Y. Chupin Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2009. xv + 285 pp. Notes. Appendices. Index. $25.50: £21.95 (paperback). This excellent study makes for accessible reading without sacrificing intellectual sophistication. Irina Paperno’s focus is the published personal accounts of life in the Soviet Union which proliferated in the late 1980s to early 2000s, and her overarching theme is the disjunctive experience of the Soviet intelligentsia. Part One provides an interpretive overview of the substantial corpus, which comprises over 200 memoirs and diaries. For Paperno, the trend uniting these diverse texts (which are often overlapping, mutually reinforcing, or contradictory) is the way in which they articulate the ‘catastrophic quality of personal experience’, making ‘individual lives part of the history that has come to a close’ (p. xi). This is not merely about understanding the past: Paperno argues that these accounts all manifest the same aspiration to ‘turn intimate REVIEWS 743 life under Soviet conditions into a shared open space’ (p. 8), making the private public, and thereby ‘realigning selves and communities’ (p. 56). Part Two provides close readings of Lidiia Chukovskaia’s diaries about Anna Akhmatova and the autobiographical notebooks of an uneducated pensioner from Ukraine, Evgeniia Kiseleva. Chukovskaia’s journals initially seem too obvious a choice — they have received extensive treatment from scholars, including Beth Holmgren in Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1996). Some of Paperno’s insights could productively have been developed through more explicit dialogue with these existing sources. For instance, she remarks that Akhmatova’s rejections of official offers of improvements to her living situation were consistent with the intelligentsia’s moral valorization of poverty, so that her ‘carefully cultivated posture involved principled rejection of domesticity and comfort’ (p. 84), an observation which could have been nuanced through reference to Galina Rylkova’s discussion of the effects of Akhmatova’s immediate surroundings on her creativity in The Archaeology of Anxiety (Pittsburgh, PA, 2007). Nonetheless, what distinguishes Paperno’s analysis is her original approach to a well-known text. While acknowledging the mythopoetic and biographical significance of Chukovskaia’s diaries for Akhmatova, Paperno emphasizes their broader ‘ethnographic value’ (p. 60), examining them for what they reveal about the rituals, customs and behaviour of the literary intelligentsia in the Soviet era. Her discussion is detailed, perceptive and engaging, and her ‘ethnographic’ approach proves a fruitful reading methodology. The inclusion of the memoir by Kiseleva, conversely, appears somewhat counter-intuitive. The text — which describes its author’s experiences of war, marriage,infidelity,domestic abuse,complex...