Autobiographical Genre Research Articles

THE STORY “ZINDAN” BY GAYAZ ISKHAKI IN THE LITERARY CONTEXT OF THE EPOCH

The classic of Tatar literature Gayaz Iskhaki was born in Kutlushkino (Yaushirma) village of Chistopolsky district in the family of a famous mullah who engaged in education and charity. First, he received knowledge, love for books and reading from parents and maternal grandmother and later in the day school of the village. He continued his studies in a famous in the Muslim world of Russia and the countries of the East madrasah of Zakir Kamalov, which not only produced future imams, hazrats, but also teachers for other madrasahs. This period of his life spent in Chistopolsky district laid the foundation for the worldview of the future writer and thinker and played an important role in shaping the personality of G. Ishaki. It was there, in the Chistopolsky prison, that the autobiographical novel "Zindan" was written, which testifies to his passion for revolutionary ideas and reflects the real facts from the life of the Chistopolsky prison. The autobiographical work "Zindan" is based on real events and provided with various historical and cultural facts and details from the literary life of the epoch. The text reflects the perception of current events by the writer who was the witness and an active participant in them. The novel "Zindan" was published in a separate edition in Kazan in 1907. Due to the humanity of the censor N.F. Katanov, the book was not confiscated and criminal prosecution against the author was not initiated. The interest of the Central Committee of Foreign Censorship of St. Petersburg manifested in 1908 in relation to the work of G. Iskhaki led to a thorough examination of the content of "Zindan" by another member of the Kazan Provisional Committee for Press Affairs N.I. Ashmarin in order to search for places with signs of "crimes". His review led to the decision of the Committee to seize Iskhaki's pamphlet "Zindan" because of the illegal content, bringing the author to criminal responsibility under the article 129 of the Criminal Code. The author of the article summarized the material on the period from the biography of G. Iskhaki spent in Chistopolsky district and revealed the great work of the scientific community of Tatarstan to return its literary heritage to the history of Tatar literature of the twentieth century. The interpretation of the story "Zindan" by various literary critics in the historical, cultural and literary context of the epoch showed that the story "Zindan" in the form of a prison chronicle introduced new ideological and thematic tones into Tatar literature and gave impetus to the rapid development of the autobiographical genre in Tatar literature being of high value as a historical source.

After the Words Are Done: Publishing, Paratext and the Ethics of Reading Recent Australian Trauma Memoir

ABSTRACT This article discusses two recent essays published by the memoirists Amani Haydar (The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (I Choose Elena; My Body Keeps Your Secrets) during 2020–2022. By conceptualising these essays as paratext, drawing on Gillian Whitlock’s consideration of the paratext as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir, this article argues that Haydar and Crowley-Osborne are amplifying a broader call for care from Australian authors who write about trauma, illness and disability in autobiographical genres. Negotiating with some of the formal, cultural and generic limits for memoir as social justice, these essays emphasise the cultural value of narrating life stories as well as potential personal and community benefits. In their essays, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne offer exegetical insights on process and craft, but they also draw attention to trauma memoirs’ afterlives: to the evolving impact of circulation, reception and promotion on autobiographical life writing and in the context of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson name the unstable “futurity” of this genre. In doing so, these writers make visible ongoing wellbeing and other challenges for the author of trauma memoir after the work is published.

Following Laura Marcus: from autobiography to testimony

ABSTRACT The publication of Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called ‘Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”’ (1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an ‘age of testimony’ which is addressed in Auto/biographical Discourses and subsequent essays by Laura. The essay will then compare the playfulness of the autobiographical genre with the ethical seriousness of Holocaust testimonies and slave narratives. At the heart of the essay is Laura’s conceptualisation of autobiography and its connections with those who write testimonial memoirs in extremis.

Macro- and microstructure of an autobiographic genre: linguistic and cognitive aspects

The article is devoted to the study of sports autobiography specifics as an institutional discourse genre. The relevance of the study is determined not only by the need for a systematic linguistic study of literary texts in new conditions dictated by the lingua-cognitive research paradigm, but also by the fact that in modern linguistic researches sports autobiography is not sufficiently represented as a discursive genre. The study purpose is to identify structural regularities of an autobiography used to create the image of the main character and to represent professionally and personally oriented relationships in sport. Achieving this goal involves solving the following tasks: 1) developing an algorithm for lingua-cognitive analysis of a sports autobiography text, 2) determining the macro- and microstructural units of the discursive genre under consideration. The research material is based on the autobiographies of boxer M. Tyson «Undisputed Truth» and chess player A. Karpov «Life and Chess. My autobiography». Due to objective and subjective factors, the autobiographies differ significantly in lexical, stylistic, and thematic aspects. However, both autobiographies have several common features and characteristics that have been established during the study. In particular, the use of content analysis contributed to the identification of six macrostructural components of sports autobiographies and the results of the directed associative experiment made it possible to identify frames that act as sports autobiography microstructural components. The results of the study develop and complement the theoretical principles of discourse science and expand the understanding of the modern professional linguistic personality of a sportsman.

Portrait Gallery of an Era: on the Pages of Bibliotekovedenie Journal (1952—2021)

The article is devoted to the study of the publications of biographical direction of the “Bibliotekovedenie” — Russian Journal of Library Science in 1952—2021. The most attention is paid to the analysis of the materials published in the 20th century. It reconstructs the history of the development of biographical materials on the pages of the periodical edition, defines the stages and characteristic features of each of them, presents the forms of biographical publications, reveals the circle of persons engaged in studying biographies of outstanding librarians, as well as the persons who became the objects of the authors’ and editors’ attention. The scientific discipline of humanitarian cycle, biography, is discussed. The authors cite the opinions of scholars (Yu.N. Stolyarov, V.S. Kreydenko, A.N. Vaneev, I.L. Belenkiy, G.G. Silnitskii, etc.) which emphasizes the necessity and significance of studying history through biographical studies. In the 21st century the library and book community has entered with a very developed direction of historical research on biography. While before 1970 there were sporadic publications on people of the library profession, by the end of the 20th century the number of biographical materials had increased significantly. Books and monographs dedicated to librarians appeared, name conferences began to be organized, autobiographical genre began to form, memoirs “in the first person” were published. Various factual and biographical materials have been collected in the journal.During the 15-year period of publication of the collection (bulletin) “Libraries of the USSR. Work Experience” (1952—1966) it published four articles of biographical genre: on the bibliographer A.P. Sokolov; on V.I. Lenin’s elder brother A.I. Ulyanov; the writer V.G. Korolenko and his library; the librarian A.A. Pokrovsky. During the six years (1967—1972), when the collection was published under the title “Libraries of the USSR”, nine articles dedicated to individual outstanding people were published in it. In 1973 the collection was transformed into the scientific and practical journal “Soviet Bibliotekovedenie” (Soviet Library Science). During the twenty years between 1973 and 1992, 128 biographical materials were published, and 96 persons were the subject of attention. Since 1993 the journal has been published under the title “Bibliotekovedenie” (Russian Journal of Library Science). From 1993 to 2000, 59 biographical materials were published in it. Articles of autobiographical genre appeared. For the first time, the interview genre was used. Between 2001 and 2021, 298 biographical materials were published in the journal, and more than 200 persons received attention. Of these, material on 165 persons appeared for the first time.Between 1952 and 2021, a total of over 280 authors published articles of biographical genre. The librarians about whom the greatest number of materials has been published: O.S. Chubarian, N.I. Tyulina, Yu.V. Grigoriev, N.S. Kartashov, K.I. Abramov, A.A. Pokrovsky, M.Ya. Dvorkina, N.A. Rubakin, Yu.N. Stolyarov, L.B. Khavkina, etc.The materials presented in the journal may serve as a basis for further research. The article may be useful for library professionals to intensify research activities in the field of library history through the study of biographies of prominent people.

Le Jeune Homme by Annie Ernaux

Reviewed by: Le Jeune Homme by Annie Ernaux Edward Ousselin ANNIE ERNAUX Le Jeune Homme Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 48 pages. ANNIE ERNAUX'S latest book was published a few months before she was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. At roughly forty pages, it is closer in length to a short story than to a novel. While Ernaux has regularly distanced herself from the still-fashionable genre of autofiction (and from just about any literary movement), almost all her fictional works have been autobiographical in nature and characterized by the frequent use of first-person narration. "The Young Man" is no exception. In fact, this short book seems to encapsulate many of the events and themes found in her previous novels. In Passion simple (1992), and again in more detail in Se perdre (2001), she recounted her affair with a married man. This time, her love affair is with a much younger man, a student who wanted to meet the already famous author. As the narrator points out: "He was almost thirty years younger than me." She also remarks that the young man's small apartment was across the street from the hospital where—many years earlier, when she was nearly his age—she had been taken after a painful and dangerous backstreet abortion (in France, abortions were illegal until 1975). This traumatic episode of Ernaux's life is the topic of L'Événement (2000). The narrator often compares the young student's impecunious lifestyle to her own small-town, working-class origins, a long-running thematic thread in many of Ernaux's books and interviews. She notices that while she had long felt relegated to a lower social status, including during most of her seventeen-year marriage, with the student she suddenly seemed to be a part of the upper class. As the older, richer partner in this unlikely couple, she could, for instance, go off with him on vacations he would not have been able to afford. The sort of power imbalance that is more common between an older man and a younger woman was now inverted: "I was in a dominant position." Perhaps fittingly, this relationship lasted approximately as long as Ernaux was working on another book. The conclusion of Le Jeune Homme is a moment for Ernaux to relect on a turning point in her life, when she realized that she was happy to be independent at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ernaux is now eighty-two years old. Whether or not she publishes anything else, her place in French literary history is secure. While she has often been criticized for her choice of an unadorned écriture plate (flat writing style), she has renewed the autobiographical genre by turning much of her life story into an extensive and fascinating fictional domain. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Et opgør med Författaren


 
 
 
 At the end of the sixth volume of My Struggle, Knausgård writes that he now wants to enjoy, “really enjoy the thought that I am no longer a writer.” These famous words have been read as the author’s farewell to his authorship, which was not, however, confirmed by the author’s further writings. In this article, I show that the closing words can be understood with reference to August Strindberg’s Forfättaren (1877- 1887) as a break with a particular image of the author to which My Struggle relates. This interpretation of the closing words also gives a completely new understanding of how My Struggle is doubleexposed with Strindberg’s autobiographical project, and thus far more constructed than has hitherto been recognized. This also sheds a different light on the work’s relationship to the autobiographical genre, its authenticity and character assassination.
 
 
 

Wole Soyinka’s Ori Olokun Emprise and Autobiography

In Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies, I suggest that the overwhelming presence of the community is one of the major continuities in Black autobiographies of Africa, the Unites States, and the Caribbean. This focus on community manifests itself in terms of resistance, solidarity, and inclusiveness in the autobiographies of slaves, creative writers, and political activists. A new dimension to the superordinate presence of the community in Black autobiography is in terms of diaspora sensibility. This diaspora consciousness is symbolized in the Orí Olókun treasure that Wole Soyinka foregrounds in You Must Set Forth at Dawn. This paper focuses on the development of Soyinka’s diaspora consciousness in relation to the perceived presence of Orí Olókun in Bahia and his attempt with his colleagues to forcefully repatriate the treasure back to the public domain from where it was removed. The paper argues that what operates at the background of Soyinka’s group’s project of repatriating Orí Olókun from Brazil to Nigeria is the communal spirit of Yoruba and African nationalism that cuts across colonial geographical boundaries. The paper considers the role of Soyinka, Yai, Isola, and Abimbola in the attempt to repatriate Orí Olókun back to Nigeria. Emphasis is also on Soyinka’s narrative strategies and specifically the implications of his autobiographical medium to represent his and his community’s struggle to return what rightly belongs to them back to Nigeria. How the autobiographical genre develops that umbilical cord that links the Yorubas in Africa and the diaspora through the Ori Olokun episode is also considered.

Говард Фаст и советские писатели. Статья 2. «Жертва самого невероятного мошенничества": 1955-1959

The article reconstructs Howard Fast’s literary contacts with Soviet writers during the Khrushchev Thaw and traces the history of his painful break with the Communist movement. Based on Fast’s autobiographical books, personal correspondence, as well as articles in the Party press (Masses and Mainstream, Daily Worker), the paper demonstrates that at the beginning of 1956 the writer condemned the Stalinist regime as “bloody” and “criminal”. However, in his correspondence with the Soviet friends (Boris Izakov and Boris Polevoy) Fast tried not to enter into direct confrontation and only lamented the plight of the leftist movement in America. His Soviet friends learned about the writer’s departure from the US Communist Party from the press only in February 1957. Having every reason to believe that Fast would have informed them about such a serious step personally in a confidential manner, prominent functionaries of the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union became upset and furious having read Fast’s exclusive interview to Harry Schwartz, a newsman working for the New York Times. At this point Fast declared a fullfledged information war on the USSR: he accused the Soviet government of being anti- Semitic, antidemocratic and terroristic. In turn, Moscow launched a campaign to discredit Fast. After 1958, the writer was no longer mentioned in Soviet reviews, correspondence with him ceased, and all working contacts were broken off. In his post-communist period, Fast turned to the autobiographical genre, writing two books: The Naked God and Being Red, where, among other things, he provided insights into his difficult relationships with the representatives of the Soviet literary establishment. Fast’s correspondence with Boris Izakov and Boris Polevoy from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art is published in the addendum.

The Holocaust Trauma and Autobiographism in Ida Fink’s and Charlotte Delbo’s Stories

The research is based on a study of short story collections by Israeli writer Ida Fink’s, All the Stories, and French writer Charlotte Delbo’s, Auschwitz and After, to reflect the impact of the Holocaust on autobiographical elements in their work. The authors are representatives of the first generation of Holocaust survivors, which means that the mass systematic genocide during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. The works of female writers are studied using the theory of trauma at the genre level. Since autobiography has been considered a documentary genre with its own peculiarities, works about the Holocaust were seen as historical evidence of this event. However, based on the works of Juri Lotman and some principles of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”, we can conclude that autobiography is similar to fiction if it can meet certain aesthetic functions. Under the influence of trauma, the genre of autobiography can be modified in the literary text in such a way that the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred. Ida Fink and Charlotte Delbo write short stories with fictional narrators, but all the situations are certainly the experiences of the writers themselves, who turn to the autofiction and conventions of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” to transfer their memories to literary heroes. The aim of the study is to define the peculiarities of the autobiographical genre, analyze its functions in Holocaust literature, identify poetic elements of autobiography, and prove that there is no canonical form of narration about the Holocaust-Era, as the writers were searching for how to articulate their traumatic experience in experimental forms.

Creating relational ripples in therapy

Exegesis In my doctoral inquiry, I focused on the relational space in the therapy room. The relational space is a concept that may appear in different forms and include words, emotions, non-verbal communication, objects within the context of space and time (Gergen, 2015). As a systemic practitioner and practitioner researcher, I find the process, and, potentially, the outcome of therapy to be largely defined by: the relational space between myself and my client; the relational space within my different selves; and the interconnectedness of these relational spaces. By being both self-reflexive and relationally reflexive, my research addresses the question of how the relational space between client and therapist interconnects with the relational space within the therapist, thus creating “relational ripples” in the therapy room (Karamatsouki, 2020). My interest in the area emerged as in my practice I observed that when I bring more of myself in the therapy room, more of the client is in there, too. In order to study the complex encounter in the therapy room I used autoethnography through storywriting. Autoethnography, “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness” (Ellis, 2004, p. 37), gives access to research material from an insider’s perspective. I use stories from practice in a literary style and in an ethical manner, where the focus is neither on the therapy techniques nor on the client’s difficulties. Instead, the focus is on the relational conversation between my client and me, as well as my inner dialogue and thoughts and feelings. What follows in a story from within practice which appears in my doctoral thesis and shows the relational flow of the therapeutic process and the creation of relational ripples. In a way, what I am trying to do is expand systemic thinking by bringing to the fore the relational space within myself as a therapist and create a professionally employable space for the personal.

G.D. Grebenstchikoff's Late Autofiction: Narrative Strategies in the Story "Egorkina zhizn"

As far as the genre of the last major work of G.D. Grebenstchikoff "Egorkina zhizn" is concerned, being an autobiographical material, it is a compromise of different trends – the aspiration to capture the world of the past as tangibly as possible, in all its details, and the need to establish literary communication with the reader. This challenged the author to use a number of narrative strategies – establishing an epic distance between the time and place of the events in the story, recurrent addressing the reader, and above all – various forms of socialization (generalization) of the personal, which is presented as an element of the self-contained and beautiful (seen from apart) harsh world of Siberian village, and – at the same time – as a way to shape a creative individual (the idea of vocation). The latter is manifested, in particular, in the abundance of literary parallels and comparisons, which form a conceptually significant overlap between literature and personal experience. On the one hand, Grebenstchikoff's experience in autobiographical genre contributes to the wealth of autobiographical prose of the XIX century, on the other hand, it is natural for such genre of modern literature as autofiction, the extreme popularity of which is associated both with the desire to abandon dated narrative strategies, and the ambition to re-examine the category of fiction.

Crossing the Boundary: An Investigation of Transnationalism, Transculturalism and Transracial Marriages in Jane Katjavivi’s Undisciplined Heart and Trudie Amulungu’s Taming My Elephant

ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is to explore the literary portrayal of transnational identities, transculturalism and transracial marriages as presented by two expatriate female writers who have made their niche in the postcolonial Namibian autobiographical (sub) genre, namely, Taming My Elephant by Amulungu (2016) and Undisciplined Heart by Katjavivi (2010). The paper explores the different challenges faced by two migrant and transracial couples from different backgrounds which include issues of communication breakdown, a lack of understanding of the partner’s background, racial differences and indifference in the communities. The couples’ families hesitated to welcome the spouses into their families, whereas the couples’ relationships and motivations varied and are couched in shifting arenas, yet their interactions created opportunities for the circulation, promotion, and adaptation of a wide range of cultural, political, and social influences. Amulungu and Katjavivi are tracing their interactions within and among liberation movements, being hosted as a transmigrants, whilst facing a wider set of external actors, revealing the lasting legacies that have too often been eclipsed by dominant national histories. The paper postulates that the selected autobiographers allied with more than a single culture, and are pioneers as transracial couples in a newly independent Namibia as well as persistent beings who are portrayed as compassionate, assertive, and enduring people.

Autobiography and the Autobiographical Mode as Narrative Resistances. An Interdisciplinary Perspective

If every human gesture is autobiographical, then autobiographical genres and modes are being enriched day by day by contemporary and emerging disciplines and fields which do not necessarily belong to life writing. When it comes to trauma and war studies, the autobiographical imposes itself in a variety of thematic and structural ways in order to express the subjectivity of the oppressed, not without difficulties. This international and inter-disciplinary cluster of articles proposes to explore autobiography through the filiation narrative, autofiction, the anecdote, the body, the rewriting of the Grand Historical narratives, namely World War Two and the Franco-Algerian conflict, and the deconstruction of such binary oppositions as War Vs Peace and Lived Trauma Vs Narrated Trauma. The present introduction to the cluster will first introduce the genre of life writing in general, and autobiography in particular, by tracing its evolution towards a postmodern, more metabiographical stance. It will then summarize and comment on each article in the cluster so as to highlight their shared thematic patterns and the various findings which are pertinent to the fields of autobiography, trauma and war studies. The final section of the introduction will provide a new perspective on Freudian studies through the lens of auto/biography and metabiography.

The Genesis and Evolution of the Autobiographical Genre in Russian Early Modern Manuscript Culture

The Genesis and Evolution of the Autobiographical Genre in Russian Early Modern Manuscript Culture

Movies about the First World War: Shaping the collective memory. Cases of Serbian/Yugoslav and Greek cinematography

The First World War brought radical changes to the political map of Europe and took more than 15 million lives on both warring sides. This conflict of unprecedented proportions has left deep traces on the lives of people who found themselves in a whirlwind of war. Therefore, it is no wonder that the theme of war was present in various types of human creativity - through literature (especially autobiographical genres), art, but also popular culture, where movies rightly took centre stage. Even during the period 1914-1918, the film became the main weapon of propaganda. Through this instrument, the message was able to reach quickly a large number of people, regardless of their social status and level of education. After 1918, the film served as a popular medium through which the memory of war events was preserved. The first movies exuded the anti-war spirit at the moment when post-war Europe was facing long-term economic consequences that had surfaced. Pacifist messages could be seen in different film productions, which to a large extent looked up to Hollywood, the most significant film industry in the world. The same was in the case of smaller allied countries such as Greece and Serbia, which both paved a different path of development due to the complexity of historical processes conducted in these Balkan countries. This paper aims to point out these different developments and shed light on lesser-known facts about Yugoslav and Greek WWI cinematography.

‘Maasainess’ and Whiteness: The Ruins of Colonial ‘Penetration’ in Hoffman’s The White Maasai and Budgor’s the Warrior Princess

This paper looks at ‘Maasainess’ and Whiteness as binaries in constant engagement aimed to question how Whiteness is re-inscribed in Maasainess in the autobiographical genre. It explores the image of the Maasai often figured as a male warrior, a residue from the colonial intrusion into the East African region during the nineteenth century. To trace the various embodiments of this male figure and how it enhances the intersections between Maasainess and Whiteness, I focus on two autobiographies by Euro-American women: Corine Hoffman’s The White Maasai and Budgor’s The Warrior Princess: Becoming the First Female Maasai Warrior. Drawing from Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the contact zones and Renato Rosaldo’s imperial nostalgia, the paper reads Maasainess and Whiteness as sites of cultural encounters, even contested encounters. Both Hofmann and Budgor appropriate the Maasai male warrior by way of nostalgia as a trope and double cultural signifier to embody and reflect white privilege as well as freeze the image of Africa to its colonial past. It argues that the autobiography as a tool for self-expression is employed to extend the colonial agenda to appropriate cultural spaces and entities to further perpetuate the differences between Maasainess and Whiteness as cultural markers. However, the two autobiographies read here as medium of self-expression defy such cultural appropriations through their constant engagement with Whiteness and Maasainess as categories of difference, highlighting the fault lines in the cultural appropriation of Maasainess by Whiteness.

La révolution espagnole… de Clara Campoamor: presencia y alcance en el campo cultural y literario francés

"Our paper analyzes the reception in the French press of La révolution espagnole vue par une républicaine (1937) by Clara Campoamor. Already written in exile by one of the first practicing women attorneys in Spain, one of the first elected women parliamentarians that the country had had, the craftswoman of obtaining the female vote and many other social advances, one of the few writings in the early months on the Spanish civil war, the first by a woman, this autobiography in the style of a political essay had not gone unnoticed in the French press. In our paper we approach the interest that work awoke as far as concerns its thematic and by its contribution to the women autobiographic genre."

Sheila Heti, Melanie Klein and Motherhood

ABSTRACT Sheila Heti, in her approach to motherhood, as orientated around inter-generational matrilineal relationships, models many of Melanie Klein’s ideas about the mother being at the heart of an individual’s identity. I read Motherhood as both autofiction and a testimony of Heti’s experience of being mothered, which was shaped by her own mother’s inherited trauma. I argue Heti’s deep ambivalence toward motherhood and her uncertainty about her desire to be a mother, is a projection of the problematic bond with her own mother. Motherhood makes an important contribution to the genre of autofiction in linking the significance of the symbolic mother to making claims on one’s own identity, and to the autobiographical genre more broadly by suggesting claims to identity are intimately linked to the mother. In returning to the bond with her mother and enacting this reparation through writing Motherhood, Heti demonstrates the centrality of the maternal bond to the individual’s sense of self, also demonstrating Klein’s idea that the subject must separate from the mother and achieve a separate identity. As Heti demonstrates, the writing of autofiction can be a means through which this separateness is attained.

Memory and History: A Comparison of the Past in Slovak Prose of the Post-2000 Period

This study focuses on how two kinds of memory: historical and personal are reflected in a section of Slovak literature of the past two decades. A variety of autobiographical genres and biographically-stylised fictional prose draw on personal memory, and history, is the domain of historical genres, particularly the novel. After the 1990s, the present was deemed important and historical presentations of the past were parodiedin the prose of Peter Pišťanek and Igor Otčenáš. At the beginning of the new millennium, however, prose portraying and reflecting on the past reappeared. Memory- based writing which is concerned with an individual situated within history, or outside of it, is more persuasive. Memory-based writing is used in different forms of autobiographical writing: within fiction it takes a form of biographical stylisation (e. g. Vilikovský, Kopcsay and Rozner). In the past ten to fifteen years, there has been a renewed interest in history in Slovak literature, mainly in pre-1989 history (e. g. Rankov, Krištúfek and Lavrík), which had been mistreated in pre-1989 Slovak literature, and later there was no interest in it or it was even rejected in the 1990s.During that time, historical memory was exploited to meet societal requirement. Silvester Lavrík was an exception—he was able to marry the two basic approaches to the past (personal history and historical) in a form of a dispute between them.