On reading soviet memoirs: A history of the "contemporaries" genre as an institution of Russian intelligentsia culture from the 1790s to the 1970s

Russian Review

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 327-352

  Walker, Barbara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0039458540     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.00126     Document Type: Article

References (126)

1. Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life, 1891-1921, trans. Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp (New York, 1962);
2. idem, Memoirs, 1921-1941, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (Cleveland, 1963);
3. idem, The War, 1941-1945, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (Cleveland, 1965);
4. idem, Post-War Years, 1945-1954, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (Cleveland, 1965);
5. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York, 1970);
6. idem, Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York, 1974);
7. Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York, 1967);
8. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla Johnson MacMillan (New York, 1967);
9. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, trans. Harry Willetts (New York, 1975);
10. Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, tans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York, 1979). This article will touch on the debate over the veracity of the Shostakovich memoir in its final section.
11. See, for example, David Magarshack, Dostoyevsky (New York, 1961), 80;
12. Avril Pyman, The Life of Alexander Blok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder, 1880-11908 (Oxford, 1979), 17;
13. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 1, The Strengths of Contradiction (London, 1985), 47, 205n.102;
14. and John Malmstad and Vladimir Markov, M. A. Kuzmin, Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Munich, 1977), 9.
15. For the impact of the revisionists on Soviet historiography see Jane Burbank, "Controversies over Stalinism: Searching for a Soviet Society," Politics and Society 19, no. 3 (1991): 325-40.
16. See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Oxford, 1985), 4-5, 211-20.
17. Getty is particularly concerned about the reliance on gossip by many memoirists of the Soviet era. To support his argument for rejecting the memoir as a historical source he cites Louis Gottschalk, Clyde Kluckholn, and Robert Angell, The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology, and Sociology (New York, 1945), 20-21;
18. and Paul Fussel, The Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), 310; actually, Gottschalk argues that falsehoods and inaccuracies may themselves be significant historical phenomena.
19. Some memoirs rely more on gossip than others; authors sometimes cite specific oral sources, at other times referring to a nebulous "they" or merging gossip seamlessly with the eyewitness narrative. See, for example, Alliluyeva's description of the "family legend" that Stalin saved her mother's life when she was two years old (Twenty Letters to a Friend, 47).
20. Solzhenitsyn's memoir is laced with descriptions of political maneuvering in the literary community which he did not personally witness, sometimes attributing the information to specific sources but more often not (for example, The Oak and the Calf, 19-23).
21. Mandelshtam relies often on gossip. For example, she passes on several undocumented tales of how justice, injustice, and trousers were meted out to individual writers by Bryusov and Gorky in the early days of Soviet power (Hope Abandoned, 95).
22. Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York, 1976);
23. David Remnik, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (London, 1993);
24. Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York, 1994). The movie Stalin, with a screenplay written by Paul Monash, appears to draw heavily on the memoirs of Svetlana Alliluyeva, as well as on those of other members of the Alliluyev family.
25. See Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, ed. and trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton, 1991), 107-217, for a pertinent typology of memoirs and/or autobiographies.
26. Marc Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, 1994), 42-64;
27. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York, 1965);
28. Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews Rusiecka (Oxford, 1975);
29. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, 1978);
30. Edward Brown, Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830-1840 (Stanford, 1966);
31. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York, 1960);
32. Kendall Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and his Scientific School, 1863-1945 (Bloomington, 1990);
33. Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, 1999);
34. and Barbara Walker, "Maximilian Voloshin's 'House of the Poet': Intelligentsia Social Organization and Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Russia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 1-22.
35. On upward mobility and the "outsider" in Imperial Russian intelligentsia history see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia's "People of Various Ranks" (DeKalb, 1994), esp. chaps. 5-6.
36. Daniel Brower questions the value of the concept in "The Problem of the Russian Intelligentsia," Slavic Review 26 (Winter 1967): 638-39.
37. I agree, however, with Wirtschafter's argument that although "it is difficult to formulate scientifically neutral terms of analysis that adequately describe the group's historical existence," there really was a "self-conscious intelligentsia" which may be recognized through its attempt to "secure its identity through staged and ritualized displays of cultural values" (Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia [DeKalb, 1997], 90-91).
38. The "contemporaries" genre might be seen as one such "ritualized display" by which this complex social group attempted to "secure its identity." Other discussions of the concept of the intelligentsia include Martin Malia, "What is the Intelligentsia," in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. Richard Pipes (New York, 1961), 118;
39. Otto Mueller, Intelligencija: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes (Frankfurt, 1971);
40. Michael Confino, "On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia," Daedalus 101 (1972);
41. and Jane Burbank, "Were the Russian Intelligenty Organic Intellectuals?" in Intellectuals and Political Life, ed. Judith Farquhar et al. (Ithaca, 1994), chap. 6.
42. A. G. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow, 1991), 38.
43. Brenda Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New Brunswick, 1982);
44. David Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, 1975);
45. John Alexander, "Favorites, Favoritism and Female Rule in Russia, 1725-1796," in Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga, ed. Roger Bartlett and Janet Hartley (New York, 1990), 106-24.
46. Igor Fedorovich Von Bradke, "Avtobiograficheskie zapiski," in Russkie memuary: Izbrannye stranitsy, 1800-1825 gg., comp. I. I. Podol'skaia (Moscow, 1989), 192.
47. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Dmitriev, "Melochi iz zapasa moei pamiati," in Russkie memuary: Izbrannye stranitsy, XVIII vek, comp. I. I. Podol'skaia (Moscow, 1988), 438.
48. Lev Nikolaevich Engel'gardt, "Vremia do pribytiia moego na sluzhbu v Preobrazhenskii polk i nekotorye anekdoty," in Russkie memuary XVIII vek, 221.
49. Von Bradke, "Avtobiograficheskie zapiski," in Russkie memuary 1800-1825, 202-3.
50. Whether or not the emergence of character description in Russian memoirs is due to the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other Romantics is a matter for debate. The problem of the character of political leaders goes back as far as the medieval period in Russian history to such tales of personality as Sviatopolk. See, for example, Samuel H. Cross, "The Russian Primary Chronicle," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 12 (1930): 212-32.
51. Even so, it can certainly be argued that there is a more modern Romantic concept of character and of the individual emerging here which will have its impact on the development of Russian self-narratives in general, as well as on the Russian conception of the individual and of human character. Scholars who have explored such a tendency in depth include Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia, 42-64;
52. and Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, 27-106.
53. A. N. Radishchev, "Zhitie Fedora Vasil'evicha Ushakova s priobshcheniem nekotorykh ego sochinenii," in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS) (Moscow, 1938), 1:155-212.
54. For a discussion of the Russian concept of the individual as it is encapsulated in the word "dusha" (which Radishchev used repeatedly) see Anna Wierzbicka, "Soul and Mind: Linguistic Evidence for Ethnopsychology and Cultural History," American Anthropologist 91, no. 1 (1989): 41-58. Wierzbicka argues that the Russian concept of "dusha" embodies a far more socially determined understanding of the individual than does the English concept of the "soul."
55. A theme of obvious relevance, which due to lack of space is not pursued here, is that of traditional Russian hagiography as a model for Radishchev's Life of Ushakov and for the "contemporaries" genre. On the role of hagiography in modern Russian letters in general see Margaret Ziolkowski, Hagiography and Modern Russian Literature (Princeton, 1988).
56. See also Evgeny Dobrenko, "(Auto/Bio/Hagio)graphy: Or, Life as Genre: Alesha Peshkov - Maksim Gor'kii - Mark Donskoi," a/b Auto/Biography Studies 11 (Fall 1996): 43-67.
57. Aleksandr Radishchev, Sochineniia, ed. V. V. Kallash (Moscow, 1907), 180-81.
58. The quote is from David Marshall Lang, The First Russian Radical. Alexander Radishchev, 1749-1802 (London, 1959), 125.
59. Radishchev, Sochineniia, 174, 186.
60. See, for example, "Rasskazy, zametki, i anekdoty iz zapisok Elizavety Nikolaevny L'vovoi," in Russkie memuary XVIII vek, 403-13.
61. See also Memoirs of Catherine II and the Historic Court of St. Petersburg, by one of her courtiers (Boston, 1900);
62. M. G. Krivoshlyk, Istoricheskie anekdoty iz zhizni russkikh zamechatel'nykh liudei: S portretami i kratkimi biografiami (1897; reprint ed. Moscow, 1991)
63. and Sally Kux, "On the Boundary of Life and Literature: The Anecdote in Early 19th-century Russia" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994).
64. P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, Literary Memoirs, ed. Arthur Mendel, trans. Irwin Titunik (Ann Arbor, 1968), 137.
65. For an anthropological discussion of the important role of gossip in network and small group social organization see Max Gluckman, "Gossip and Scandal," Current Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1963): 307-15.
66. Radishchev, PSS 1:159-60.
67. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika, 160-61.
68. V. E. Vatsuro, ed., A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1985), 1:25.
69. Anthropological studies of the interface between the written and the oral generally focus on what distinguishes the two types of communication from one another. One rare study of the integration of an oral tradition into a written one is Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley, 1997).
70. For example, memoirs by and about members of the Friendly Literary Society after its demise in 1801 almost all took the form of letters to be circulated among themselves (Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia, 57 64 [notes]).
71. Ginzburg describes this as taking place at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s especially (On Psychological Prose, 197).
72. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. ed. Humphrey Higgins (Berkeley, 1982);
73. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade;
74. See, for example, Turgenev's advocacy of the values of his own generation in I. S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1962), 10:67.
75. Memoirs about the Decembrists, who, though not generally described as intelligentsia, were vital intelligentsia role models, and about Pushkin, whose circle offered a standard of gracious gentry intellectual life and culture, are prominent among such narratives. See V. A. Fedorov, ed., Dekabristi v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1988);
76. and V. V. Grigorenko, ed., A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1974).
77. For a description of the poverty of some of the upwardly mobile see Rose Glickman, "An Alternative View of the Peasantry: The Raznochintsy Writers of the 1860's," Slavic Review 32 (Winter 1973): 693-707.
78. E. R. Dashkova, The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova (Durham, 1995);
79. Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars (Bloomington, 1988);
80. Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (DeKalb, 1995);
81. Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford Rosenthal, eds. and trans., Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar (New York, 1975).
82. See Kern's "Vospominaniia o Pushkine," "Vospominaniia o Pushkine, Del'vige i Glinke," and "Del'vig i Pushkin," in A. P. Kern, Vospominaniia, Dnevniki, Perepiska (Moscow, 1989).
83. A. G. Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1925);
84. M. A. Beketova, Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke (Moscow, 1990);
85. Aleksandra Tolstaia, Otets: Zhizn' L'va Tolstogo v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1989).
86. For a discussion of Belinsky's commitment to his ideals at the expense of his friendships see Isaiah Berlin, "Vissarion Belinsky," in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, 1948), 166-69.
87. "Iz vospominanii Professora A. V. Nikitenko o K. F. Ryleeve," in Dekabristy v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 87.
88. "Iz vospominanii S. V. Kapnist-Skalon o Dekabristakh," in ibid., 115.
89. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 230.
90. Marcus Levitt sees even the Pushkin cult in terms of the creation of a "cultural neutral zone" as an "alternative model of Russian society to those extremely polarized schemes that the zealots of autocracy and of revolution had advanced." See his Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989), 8-9.
91. There is evidence that the centrality of such figures was often in fact the creation of a nostalgic memory. See, for example, Brown, Stankevich and his Moscow Circle.
92. Kern, Vospominaniia, Dnevniki, Perepiska, 47-49.
93. Maksim Gor'kii, "Lev Tolstoi," in O literature: Literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i (Moscow, 1955) 175-215;
94. Ivan Bunin, "Chekhov," in Memories and Portraits (New York, 1968), 31-58.
95. Marina Tsvetaeva, "Zhivoe o zhivom," translation in Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose of Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, 1994), 42, 48, 64..
96. For extensive discussion of the Lenin cult see Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
97. Bunin, Vospominaniia;
98. Tsvetaeva, "Zhivoe o zhivom"; Georgii Ivanov, Peterburgskie zimy (Paris, 1928);
99. Il'ia Erenburg, Portrety russkikh poetov (Berlin, 1922);
100. A. V. Lunacharskii, Revoliutsionnye siluetty (Moscow, 1923);
101. Lev Trotskii, O Lenine: Materialy dlia biografii (Moscow, 1924).
102. Walter Comins-Richmond, "The Polemics of Recollection: Three Russian Futurists Struggle over the Past," a/ b: Auto/Biography Studies 12, no. 1 (1997): 22-36.
103. Vladimir Khodasevich, "Nekropol'" i drugie vospominaniia (Moscow, 1992), 121-22.
104. On this topic see my "Maximilian Voloshin's 'House of the Poet,'" 228-59.
105. Two such memoirs appeared in Gor'kii: Sbornik statei i vospominanii o M. Gor'kom, ed. I. Gruzdeva (a Serapion Brother) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928).
106. Also, two Serapion Brothers contributed to "Pisateli o Gor'kom," Uchitel'skaia gazeta, 30 March 1928.
107. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge, England, 1970), 19.
108. Tsvetaeva, "Geroi truda (zapisi o Valerii Briusove)," translation in Joan Delaney Grossman, The Diary of Valery Bryusov (1893-1905) (Berkeley, 1980), 173.
109. Zinaida Gippius, Zhivye litsa (Tbilisi, 1991), 1:181.
110. Walker, "Maximilian Voloshin's 'House of the Poet,'" 183-259, 291-95.
111. "O perestroike literaturno-khudozhesvennykh organizatsii," party resolution of 23 April 1932, in Osnovnye direktivy i zakonodatel'stvo o pechati: Sistematicheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1936), 50.
112. Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh, 1993), 97.
113. Ehrenburg, People and Life, 46, 251, 130, 142.
114. Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 302.
115. Beth Holmgren, Women's Work in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelshtam (Bloomington, 1993).
116. See also Sarah Pratt, "Angels in the House: Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Lidiia Ginzburg, and Russian Women's Autobiography," a/b Auto/Biography Studies 11 (Fall 1996): 68-86.
117. Mandel'shtam, Hope Against Hope, 11.
118. Mandel'shtam, Hope Abandoned, 84-87.
119. Smith, The Russians, 540.
120. Alliluyeva also is drawing on another very important Russian memoir genre: the family memoir, which seems to gain influence in the intelligentsia "contemporaries" tradition during this period. For a discussion of this genre see Andrew Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990).
121. Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, 26 (note again the contiguity of family and state).
122. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 78.
123. Vladimir Lakshin, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and Novy Mir, trans. Michael Glenny (Cambridge, MA, 1980).
124. Fundamental to the attack on the authenticity of Testimony is the argument of Laurel E. Fay, "Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?" Russian Review 39 (October 1980): 484-93.
125. A recent defense of its authenticity comes from Allen B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, authors and editors of Shostakovich Reconsidered (London, 1998).
126. Shostakovich, Testimony, 36, 172, xvi, xvi.