Autobiographical Context Research Articles

Retrieving autobiographical memories in autobiographical contexts: are age-related differences in narrated episodic specificity present outside of the laboratory?

The Autobiographical Interview, a method for evaluating detailed memory of real-world events, reliably detects differences in episodic specificity at retrieval between young and older adults in the laboratory. Whether this age-associated reduction in episodic specificity for autobiographical event retrieval is present outside of the laboratory remains poorly understood. We used a videoconference format to administer the Autobiographical Interview to cognitively unimpaired older adults (N = 49, M = 69.5, SD = 5.94) and young adults (N = 54, M = 22.5, SD = 4.19) who were in their homes at the time of retrieval. Relative to young adults, older adults showed reduced episodic specificity in their home environment, as reflected by fewer episodic or "internal" details (t (101) = 3.23, p = 0.009) and more "external" details (i.e., semantic, language-based details) (t (101) = 3.60, p = 0.003). These findings, along with detail subtype profiles in the narratives, bolster the ecological validity of the Autobiographical Interview and add promise to the use of virtual cognitive testing to improve the accessibility, participant diversity, scalability, and ecological validity of memory research.

BINARY OPPOSITIONS IN LEONID ANDREEV’S CHRISTMAS STORY “ANGELOCHEK”

The article analyzes the story “Angelochek” (“The Little Angel”), which has an important place in the creativе work of Leonid Andreev, and is included in the school curriculum, where its plot is considered within the framework of the established literary approach to the Christmas story. Most of the researchers note the changes that occurred to the boy after his meeting with the angel, and believe that the Christmas miracle did happen, positively affecting Sashka’s life. The authors of this work propose a different approach to the story: binary oppositions (living-inanimate, truth-lie, real-fake, friend-alien, man-beast, earth-sky, etc.) are revealed, reflecting the ambivalence of the writer’s view of the problem; onomastic units, which, being part of symbolic and autobiographical contexts, make it possible to clarify the intent of the work, are considered. The plot of the story is autobiographical (the angel, once removed by the future writer from the Christmas tree and placed on the stove, melts), but the main character is now a boy from a poor family who goes to celebrate the holiday to the rich patrons, the Svechnikovs. The space of the Svechnikov house is ambivalent: for the father it is a symbol of lost paradise, and for the son it is the habitat of devils, because the Christmas symbols filling the house are fake. Acquisition of humanity through the rebirth of the soul is the most significant theme of the story, realized through the “man-beast” opposition. Sashka’s family is inscribed in the zoomorphic code of the text of the story. Possessing the angel creates a feeling of “human happiness,” which results in the elimination of the animal element in the boy’s image. However, the memory of his father, who is part of the anti-house, brings Sashka’s animal appearance back. The “iving-inanimate” opposition sets the parameters of Sashka’s fate, for whom “non-life” is the only possible way out of the cycle of meaningless existence. The hope for the rebirth of the boy’s soul is illusory (the opposition is “real-fake”). By the end of the story, the motifs of gravity and immersion in the abyss are intensified: the personification of salvation — a melted angel with dragonfly wings — falls to the floor at the end of Christmas. A cockroach that is unable to fly now becomes the symbol of substitution. The illusory nature of hopes is confirmed by the chronotope of the story. Christmas breaks the cycle of existence and introduces the boy to the circle of eternity, but the striking of the clock brings the heroes back to earth and accelerates their biological time. The image of the “frozen water carrier” in the story’s finale is a symbol of the return of cyclicity to the child’s life and a sign that the revival did not take place.

The City as a Theme and Text in the Prose of Victoria Tokareva

The subject of the study is the image of the city in small and medium prose by V.S. Tokareva. The author reveals the uniqueness of the artistic concept of the city in the work of Victoria Tokareva, which consists in a combination of the image of a generalized conditional space and recognizable spatial images that can be considered in the context of the poetics of local texts. Clarification of the characteristics of a generalized conditional city occurs through the analysis of a system of characters whose moral and philosophical paradigm is correlated with urban loci. Recognizable spatial images are correlated with the autobiographical context of the author's work and considered from the point of view of the author's contribution to the "Moscow" and "Petersburg" text of Russian literature. The author's main contribution to the study of the poetics of V.S. Tokareva's prose is to clarify the typology of images of short stories and novels and to identify "episodic heroes" - characters with an unformed moral and philosophical paradigm and a life position of non-participation in the destinies of other characters and their own fate. The poetics of the episode determines both the key characteristics of such characters and the properties of the urban loci associated with them. The main artistic techniques contributing to the identification of the characteristics of the characters of urban prose are V.S. Tokareva's precedent comparisons and details revealing the author's position. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that reading Tokareva's small and medium prose through the prism of the poetics of local texts makes it possible to clarify the originality of the author's interpretation of the images of the two capitals. Shifting the research focus to the generalized image of the city is productive from the point of view of clarifying the typological features of the character sphere and identifying relevant moral and philosophical issues.

Captions as Suturing in Hybrid Memoirs

This essay studies the role that captions play in the interaction between photographs and text in hybrid memoirs. Rarely studied, captions can nevertheless be seen as fundamental transitory spaces where visual information and textual information are first confronted with each other before further connections can possibly be established by the main text. But even if captions can sometimes be seen as “secondary text,” offering basic and factual information about the photographs they are attached to, they can also have their own original narrative function. In what W. J. T. Mitchell calls the “suturing of discourse and representation,” captions may challenge readers’ or viewers’ expectations, especially in an autobiographical context where their main purpose is normally to confirm and enhance the referential content of the photograph.

Encoded Confessions: D. H. Lawrence’s Secretive Fruits

Critical readings of D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) have regarded this collection of poems as about, well, birds, beasts, and flowers, rather than about the poet himself. Whereas Lawrence’s 1917 collection, Look! We Have Come Through!, was explicitly and directly autobiographical, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers—as W. H. Auden put it in an influential essay—Lawrence does not write about “men and women with proper names” but “describes the anonymous life of stones, waters, forests, animals, flowers,” making him “the most enchanting companion imaginable, tender, intelligent, funny and, above all, happy.” This article argues, however, that the five opening poems of the collection, poems collectively entitled “Fruits,” are profoundly autobiographical poems in which Lawrence teasingly fails to reveal himself transparently, by transmuting the autobiographical material on which they are based into encoded, paradoxical, learned humor, and that the poems draw attention to this very process by lecturing the reader on the symbolical nature of the fruits described. This knowing symbolism, the article suggests, echoes the representation of fruits in Italian Renaissance poetry and painting; the autobiographical context of the poems is an adulterous affair that the poems could not represent directly. Rosalind Baynes, the woman who inspired the poems, does not appear in the poems as a woman with a proper name, but her name recurs throughout the sequence as a series of puns on Rosalind, figured as the rose and as Rosaceae.

Joachim Ringelnatz’s “Liner Roma” as a modernist recontextualization of Nikolai Gogol’s “Rome”

The article contributes to the scholarly discourse on “Liner Roma” (1924), the urban novella of a highly popular yet scholarly marginalized German poet and writer Joachim Ringelnatz (1883–1934). While its autobiographical contexts and its compositional inventiveness have already been a subject of inquiry, its intertextual relationship to the past remains unexplored. The article argues that Ringelnatz’s dialogic engagement with Nikolai Gogol’s “Rome” (1842) and its description of a modern Paris and traditional Rome is of a constitutive importance to the Ringelnatz’s own description of a metropolitan Berlin. Ringelnatz follows Gogol by accentuating analogic phenomena within the time-space of urban modernity. Like Gogol’s Paris, Ringelnatz’s Berlin is also a secular, temporarily fast-fleeting space of a fragmentary multiplicity which disintegrates the syncretic religious “wholeness”. Nonetheless, while Gogol describes the secular Paris through negative spatial two-dimensionality, and only the antithetical “eternal” and sacral Rome receives representation in a positive spatial three-dimensionality, Ringelnatz ascribes positive three-dimensionality to the secular Berlin and therewith, in accordance with the modernity-encouraging tendencies of his period, emancipates the space of urban progress.

Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastico-épileptique

There is ample evidence to indicate that Hector Berlioz suffered from a specific epilepsy syndrome that can be diagnosed as juvenile myoclonic epilepsy. This biographical background provides a foundation for reappraising many peculiarities of his oeuvre. The Symphonie fantastique in particular can be interpreted as a composition in which Berlioz deals explicitly with his illness, the idée fixe taking on the role of a seizure motif. Based on an interdisciplinary cooperation between a neurologist and a musicologist, we provide an indepth analysis of both the well-known “program” and the score of the Symphonie fantastique from an epileptological perspective. This innovative approach allows a plausible and coherent, medically corroborated and thus “natural” reinterpretation of Berlioz’s masterpiece within its autobiographical context.

Expressar a Interioridade: Os Diários Filmados de Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas develops the diary film practice as a way of celebrating and preserving his lived experiences through the act of representing them. In addition to making his life the subject matter of his diary films, Mekas wants his filmic recordings to be traces of his own gestures as he moves ahead in search of glimpses of beauty. Therefore, the diarist adopts a set of techniques, associated with avant-garde cinema, and inserts them in an autobiographical context, with the intention of creating a cinematic language capable of representing his interiority. This essay will analyze the techniques employed by Jonas Mekas and the way in which they attempt to represent the diarist’s self.

On the autobiography of M. Y. Lermontov's dramaturgy of the early period (plats “Menschen und Leidenschaften” and “A Strange Man”)

This article is dedicated to the analysis of the two plays written by M. Y. Lermontov in the the early period – “Menschen und Leidenschaften” and “A Strange Man” form the perspective of manifestation of autobiographical context therein. These works are based on the dramatic events in Lermontov's biography that took place in 1830–1831, such as conflict between the poet's grandmother and father, death of his father, as well as Lermontov's relationship with N. F. Ivanova. Analysis is conducted on the texts of these two dramas, as well as on the biographical situation that encouraged Lermontov to create these plays. Special attention is given to determination of specificity of interrelation between the biographical and fictional in Lermontov's dramaturgy of the early period. Lermontov’s appeal to the drama genre is associated directly with the need for artistic mastering of the biographical context. The article analyzes the process of instilling life facts in the dramaturgical text, as well as the specificity of manifestation of the autobiographical in the plotline, images of the heroes, as well as ideological-thematic aspect of the work. The result of the conducted research lies in tracing the evolution of the image of the protagonist based on self-projection of the author's personality, as well as the peculiarities building a romantic conflict that has autobiographical grounds. The two compositions represent a different perspective upon the personality and behavior of a “strange” man; autobiographical accuracy in depicting a romantic conflict is associated with the possibility of conveying the history of relationships in the play, due to the closeness of this literary genre to empirical reality. This allows viewing the two plays as a system of artistic development of biographical events in the dramatic discourse.

Особенности интерпретации библейских женских образов в лирике А. А. Ахматовой

The article deals with the analysis of biblical female characters in Anna Akhmatov’s works and examines the features of their artistic interpretation in the cycle of Biblical Poems. The focus of the study is the Old Testament images of Lot’s wife, Rachel, Michola, which are significant for Akhmatov’s creativity. Their special aspects are conditioned by historical and autobiographical context of the poetess’s work. Having got through the civil war and revolution like many poets of the Silver Age, she correlated them, firstly, with the events described in the human eternal book, secondly, she passed them through the prism of her own experiences, which allows us to talk about the gender dimension of her reception of biblical female characters. This is evidenced by the architectonics of the cycle and the author’s re-emphasis in the transmission of biblical plots and characters that essentially disputes the biblical interpretation.

A moufl on is waiting on the doorstep. Cosima by Grazia Deledda as a literary transformation of a biography

The article analyzes the methods of a literary transformation of the biography of Grazia Deledda in her unfi nished novel Cosima (editio posthuma 1937). This novel marks an important attempt to expand the autobiographical context of Grazia Deledda’s literary output insofar as, in generic terms, it represents „a novel of transformation” (analogous to Bildungsroman but presented from a woman’s perspective). Deledda’s method of rewriting a biographical narrative consists employing some elements of a fairy tale, with the moufl on as an allegory of the fate of a woman who tries to compromise her desire of artistic freedom and obligation to fulfi l gender roles. Thus literary biography of the novel’s protagonist (and also of Grazia Deledda herself) establishes a paradigm of fight as an expression artistic freedom in the face of various forms of cultural imposition.

“The Semantic Environment” of the Late Dramatic Works of A. Platonov

This review raises a set of important issues. The use of contextual, motif, and “evidence-based” methods make it possible to identify hidden semantic layers which are hard to discern in Platonov’s late plays at first. The authors manage to demonstrate both the peculiarities of the plot of Platonov’s late dramas and their connection with the writer’s creative work as a whole. Particularly important is the autobiographical context which significantly enriches the “semantic environment” of the works analysed. It is based on Platonov’s family drama related to the arrest and premature death of his son Platon. The study reveals various ways of inclusion of the “son motif ” in the plays Voice of the Father, A Magical Being, and A Student of the Lyceum. The analysis of the play Noah’s Ark turns out to be less interesting, which is largely due to the fact of its being unfinished and, thus, lacking artistic perfection. The stylistic originality of Platonov’s late creative work and its artistic distinction from the works of the 1920s – 1930s remain outside the authors’ framework of reflection. This range of issues may serve as a future focus of study.

РОМАН Ж. ПЕРЕКА «W, ИЛИ ВОСПОМИНАНИЕ ДЕТСТВА» КАК АВТОВЫМЫСЕЛ

This article attempts to define the complex relationship of truth and fiction in the autobiographical context of Georges Perec’s novel W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Georges Perec is a classic of French literature who immigrated as a Polish Jew, whose family suffered the horrors of the Second World War. In France, his literary heritage remains relevant to scholars, although many works are already devoted to him, but in Russia he is still little known and poorly understood. Within his most famous novel W, or the Memory of Childhood Perec presents two stories that are intertwined in a special way: autobiographical and fictional. The purpose of this article is to establish not just textual differences between two stories that have deceptive paratextual boundaries, but to establish how the factual and fictional mutation occurs in Perec’s autobiographical text, often referred to by researchers as autofiction. Autofiction is applied to almost all French literature of 60-70s as a certain literary tendency of comprehending and aesthetization of infraordinary life. Thus, the study of autofiction in Perec’s works allows us to better understand not only his poetics, but also the typical features of the literature of that time period. The author of the article considers the genre features of the work, its structure, the essence of various narrators. The article concludes that the writer has a complex perception of the relationship between truth or fact and fiction, expressed in the form of autofiction, not because of the desire to play with the reader, but because of the game with its own memory, which reveals the real indistinguishability of some memories as false or true.

Strategie autentyczności w prozie Ignacego Karpowicza (Sońka i Miłość)

Strategies of Authenticity in Ignacy Karpowicz’s Prose (Sońka and Miłość) The article concerns two books by Ignacy Karpowicz – Sońka from 2014 and Miłość from 2017, interpreted in an autobiographical context. This context serves not so much to highlight the links between these novels and the writer’s experiences, but to recreate the “strategy of authenticity” used by Karpowicz in Sońka and the “strategy of honesty” used in Miłość. Both constitute a kind of “pact” (similar to the “autobiographical pact”) concluded with the readers by the author. According to Olga Szmidt’s deliberations, one of the inalienable elements of the “discourse of authenticity” is the undisclosed secret, which in Sońka’s case turns out to be the protagonist’s (homo) sexuality. The “strategy of honesty” is based on the assumption that the author does not hide anything from his audience. Both the interpretation of the two books contained in the text and the author’s brief discussion of their reception show that the “strategy of authenticity” seems to be more artistically effective.

«Куманинское дело» и роман «Подросток»: рецептивный аспект

The article considers a little-known aspect of the autobiographical context of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent, which is related to the writer’s long-standing dispute with his relatives over A.F. Kumanina’s inheritance. Clear parallels between the vicissitudes of the case and Dostoevsky’s novel suggest that he consciously used this biographical material while working on The Adolescent. Unlike the Petrashevsky case, however, the Kumanin case did not become part of Dostoevsky’s biographical myth. Apparently, this explains both The Adolescent’s relatively poor reception compared to other novels of the great “Pentateuch” and its lesser appeal. In the historical “competition” of legends that distort the popular perception of Dostoevsky’s image, his personality, and life, the case of the Kumanin inheritance was less “successful”. As a result, it practically fell out of the context of The Adolescent’s perception and Dostoevsky’s legacy in general, although the novel begins with a direct mention of a disputed inheritance. Without taking into account its reverberations, the reception aspect of The Adolescent runs the risk of remaining significantly limited.

«Куманинское дело» и роман «Подросток»: рецептивный аспект

The article considers a little-known aspect of the autobiographical context of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent, which is related to the writer’s long-standing dispute with his relatives over A.F. Kumanina’s inheritance. Clear parallels between the vicissitudes of the case and Dostoevsky’s novel suggest that he consciously used this biographical material while working on The Adolescent. Unlike the Petrashevsky case, however, the Kumanin case did not become part of Dostoevsky’s biographical myth. Apparently, this explains both The Adolescent’s relatively poor reception compared to other novels of the great “Pentateuch” and its lesser appeal. In the historical “competition” of legends that distort the popular perception of Dostoevsky’s image, his personality, and life, the case of the Kumanin inheritance was less “successful”. As a result, it practically fell out of the context of The Adolescent’s perception and Dostoevsky’s legacy in general, although the novel begins with a direct mention of a disputed inheritance. Without taking into account its reverberations, the reception aspect of The Adolescent runs the risk of remaining significantly limited.

On the role of autobiographical knowledge in shaping belief in the future occurrence of imagined events.

Recent studies suggest that different forms of episodic simulation-mental representations of past, future, or atemporal events-recruit many of the same underlying cognitive and neural processes. This leads to the question whether there are distinctive hallmark characteristics of episodic future thinking: the subjective sense that imagined events belong to and will occur in the personal future. In this study, we aimed at shedding light on the cognitive ingredients that contribute to this sense of future occurrence by asking participants to imagine personal and experimenter-provided future events associated with high or low degrees of belief in future occurrence and then to reflect on the bases for their beliefs. Results showed that contextualising autobiographical knowledge (i.e., articulating links between items of information associated with imagined future events, goals, and personal characteristics) is a critical aspect of belief in future occurrence, and autobiographical knowledge can be flexibly used to either support or suppress belief in future occurrence. These findings indicate that episodic future thought not only depends on simulation processes (i.e., the construction of detailed mental representations for future events) but also requires that imagined events are meaningfully integrated within an autobiographical context.

Polish Women in Exile to Siberia in the 19th Century – Autobiographical Reflection in Women’s Narratives

[full article and abstract in English]
 The paper discusses the issues related to the biographical research perspective and the role of ego-documents in modern humanities. These considerations focus on autobiographical narratives of women exiled to Siberia in the 19th century, both those who were sentenced or went there voluntarily. Different forms of women’s narratives were analysed, namely a memoir of Helena Skirmuntowa (1827–1874), written in the years 1863–1867, and a diary of Maria Obuchowska-Morzycka (1841–1911?), who wrote it 40 years after her life in exile. The autobiographical research model adopted in the paper focuses not only on the questions regarding the autobiographical context of ego-documents but also on biographical and autobiographical identity of the authors, connected with the description of their life, experiences, emotions as well as their attitude to the outside world and relations with other people.

Love on the Final Slopes of Life: Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev and “The Denis’eva Cycle”

Old age represents a serious contemporary social issue. With the greater incidence of longevity also literary approaches to ageing have emerged, and “Ageing and literature” is now established among literary scholars as a critical perspective in its own right, with a perspective usually marked by an interdisciplinary stance.What insights can literature offer when it comes to old age that other kinds of knowledge cannot? As my article aims to show, literature is and remains (inter alia) highly relevant as a unique access to individual ageing, enabling us to grasp the ambivalences and intricacies connected to growing old more distinctly then quantitative, statistical sociological studies and medical reports can do. And most notably, literature can investigate the domain of ageing senses and sensations and widen our understanding of how elderly people experience sensual attractions, love and desire.To concretize these assumptions, I will focus on the so called “Denisieva cycle”, by Feodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, one of the greatest poets in the classical Russian tradition. The cycle has an autobiographical context: it retells in lyrical verse how the married Tyutchev, at 50, an advanced age at that time, fell in love with Elena Aleksandrovna Denisieva, a noblewoman of 22 and a school-friend of his daughters. While not divorcing, the poet kept up an illicit relationship with Denisieva for 15 years and she bore him three children. The affair ended in utmost tragedy, when Denisieva, ostracized by both family and former friends, died in 1865, followed closely by the death of two of their children. These events brought the elderly lover into a spiral of endless despair, but also resulted in a sublime body of poems which constitutes a remarkably testimony of the senescent subject in love, questioning, as I will demonstrate, a number of prevalent stereotypes about passions in the winter of a man’s life. Moreover, the manner in which Tyutchev in these poems builds his final love into an utterly moving narrative, making bearable through its sheer literary and poetical magnetism the real sufferings it is based on, reminds us in a meaningful way of the words once uttered by Karen Blixen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story”.

Honoré de Balzac, La Femme de trente ans. Édition de Jean-Yves Tadié.

La Femme de trente ans stands as one of Balzac’s most intriguing works. Consisting of six short fictions that were written and revised repeatedly between 1829 and 1842, the story famously heralded thirty as the age at which feminine beauty truly blossoms. In the early nineteenth century, when women who remained unmarried in their late twenties were commonly viewed as spinsters, this claim won Balzac the adoration of female readers across France and beyond. However, as Jean-Yves Tadié points out in his preface to this new edition of the text, the novel also appears as a nexus of many of the themes and narrative strategies that underpin Balzac’s wider œuvre. Tadié’s detailed and informative preface is divided into short sections, each of which deals with a key aspect of the text. The first of these sections explains how La Femme de trente ans represents a point of intersection between the Scènes de la vie privée, to which the novel belongs, and the Scènes de la vie militaire. In a manner typical of La Comédie humaine, history looms large in this text, which opens with the description of a military parade at the Tuileries in April 1813, prior to Napoleon’s departure on his ill-fated German campaign. Tadié proceeds to consider the autobiographical resonance of the story and the way in which Balzac can be seen to draw on his own experience of relationships with older women (most notably his cherished friend, lover, and confidante Mme de Berny, who was twenty-two years his senior). By establishing this autobiographical context, Tadié paves the way for a more sustained analysis of one of the central themes of the novel, namely that of marital unhappiness. As the editor explains, Balzac re-invigorated the well-worn literary stereotype of the unhappily married woman by representing her plight with acute psychological realism. In particular, La Femme de trente ans traces the disintegration of the marriage between Victor and Julie d’Aiglemont to its first, violent night, during which Victor proves incapable of satisfying his wife’s physical and emotional needs. As well as providing the standard critical apparatus that will be useful to students and readers approaching this text for the first time, Tadié reflects on previously under-discussed aspects of the novel. Of particular interest in this regard is his discussion of the theme of childhood and Balzac’s portrayal of the hatred that can develop between siblings when one is born of conjugal duty and the other of a love-affair — a situation that recalls the novelist’s own resentment towards his younger brother, Henry. In addition to this prefatory material, the volume contains a summary biography of Balzac, prepared by Samuel S. de Sacy for the 1972 Folio edition, an overview of the genesis and publication history of the text, and a short bibliography that complements the extensive notes. Collectively, these elements make for an accessible, well-finished edition of the novel, and a valuable reference for students and specialists alike.