AHR roundtable galaxy of black stars: The power of soviet biography

American Historical Review

Volumn 114, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 615-624

  Hellbeck, Jochen ^a  

^a Rutgers University   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70249136924     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.3.615     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773-797.
2. Kathleen M. Swaim, Pilgrim's Progress, Puritan Progress: Discourses and Contexts (Urbana, Ill., 1993), 132-147;
3. Georges Gusdorf, Auto-Bio-Graphie: Lignes de vie 2 (Paris, 1991), 407.
4. Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 2. Biography continues to exert cultural power in the United States to this day; witness the ability of some nonfiction writers to command six-figure publishers' advances for their 800-page biographies.
5. See especially the "History of the Factories" project discussed below. See also Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981); and for the 1960s, the efforts by Soviet journalists to inculcate in their readers ideal notions of the Soviet person.
6. Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 2005).
7. This argument, most recently reaffirmed by Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007)
8. goes back to René Fülöp-Miller's influential The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York, 1965), originally published in 1927.
9. Fülöp-Miller was an eyewitness to the Proletkult-inspired collectivist experiments of the Soviet 1920s, many of which were discarded in the early 1930s, as Soviet culture shifted from a de-individualized proletarian man of metal toward exemplary, psychologically defined socialist men and women. On the latter, see Clark, The Soviet Novel.
10. "In the history of mankind there has never been a generation like ours. To take an example from astronomy, it is like those 'black stars.' They measure only a few cubic inches and weigh several tons. One such 'black hole' could represent my life." Alexander Medvedkin in a 1984 interview with Chris Marker; Marker, The Last Bolshevik (New York: First Run/Icarus Films, 1993).
11. See also Emma Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (London, 2005).
12. Stepan Podlubnyi, Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1939, trans. and ed. Jochen Hellbeck (Munich, 1996). English and Russian editions of Stepan Podlubny's diaries are in preparation.
13. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
14. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
15. Katerina Clark, "'The History of the Factories' as a Factory of History: A Case Study on the Role of Soviet Literature in Subject Formation," in Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller, eds., Autobiographical Practices in Russia (Göttingen, 2004), 251-277;
16. Sergei Vladimirovich Zhuravlev, Fenomen "Istorii fabrik i zavodov": Gor'kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov (Moscow, 1997);
17. Omri Ronen, "'Inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush': K istorii izrecheniia," Lotmanovskii sbomik 2 (1997): 393-400.
18. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), 549.
19. Pasha Angelina, "The Most Important Thing," in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 305-307, emphasis in original.
20. Mark lunge and Rol'f Binner, Kak terror stal "bol'shim": Sekretnyi prikaz no. 00447 i tekhnologiia ego ispolneniia (Moscow, 2003).
21. Halfin, Terror in My Soul;
22. Igal Halfln, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918-1928 (Pittsburgh, 2007).
23. See in particular the diary of Olga Bergholz, discussed in Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 105-106;
24. see also Stanislav Konstantinovich Bernev and Sergei Vladimirovich Chernov, comps., Blokadnye dnevniki i dokumenty (St. Petersburg, 2007).
25. On the biographical "discovery matrix" of the Soviet state and its productive as well as destructive workings, see Peter Holquist, "State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism," in Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, Calif., 2003), 43.
26. With their self-consciously heroic orientation, these Soviet notions of self resembled norms of behavior that circulated throughout interwar Europe. They consisted of a twofold obligation, for a personal worldview and for the individual's integration into a community. The result was, in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, an "aligned life" - a form of existence that promised authenticity and intense meaning, to be realized in collective acts of fulfilling the laws of history or nature. Kracauer, Schriften, I: Der Detektiv-Roman. Ein philosophischer Traktat (1922-25) (Frankfurt a.M, 1971), 109, 111, 118, 129.
27. Hamilton, Biography, 187, emphasis in original.
28. These censoring activities are well-documented in a recently published collection of previously classified military intelligence materials: Stalingradskaia epopeia: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB RF: Vospominaniia fel'dmarshala Pauliusa; Dnevniki i pis'ma soldat RKKA i vermakhta: Agentumye doneseniia; Protokoly doprosov; Dokladnye zapiski osobykh otdelov frontov i armii (Moscow, 2000).
29. Ilya Ehrenburg, Russia at War (London, 1943), 221.
30. See also Jochen Hellbeck, "'The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens': Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers," forthcoming in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.
31. Ulrike Bartels, Die Wochenschau im Dritten Reich: Entwicklung und Funktion eines Massenmediums unter besonderer Berücksichtigung völkisch-nationaler Inhalte (Frankfurt, 2004).
32. See, for instance, Egbert von Frankenberg, Meine Entscheidung (Berlin, 1963);
33. Otto Rühle, Genesung in Jelabuga: Autobiographischer Bericht (Berlin, 1968);
34. Ursula Heukenkamp, ed., Schuld und Sühne? Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutungin deutschen Medien derNachkriegszeit (1945-1961) (Amsterdam, 2001).
35. Facsimiles of (auto)biographically conceived essays, poems, plays, and novels on the meaning of the war, written by German POWs in Soviet captivity, are presented in M. M. Zagorul'ko, ed., Tvorchestvo nemetskikh voennoplennykh o Stalingrade i o sebe (1946-1949): Dokumenty i materialy (Volgograd, 2006).
36. On Soviet reeducational designs and their impact on returnees to East Germany, see Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, N.J., 2006).
37. http://webarchiv.bundestag.de/archive/2005/0825/parlament/praesidium/ reden/2002/008.htm; on the politics of biography in East Germany
38. see Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 130-157;
39. see also Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung: Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR. 30 biografische Eröffnungen (Berlin, 1991);
40. Thomas Lindenberger, "Kultur, Biographie und die Erflndung des Ostdeutschen: Einwände aus sozialhistorischer Sicht," Potsdamer Bulletin für zeithistorische Studien 18-19 (2000): 22-32.
41. Hamilton, Biography, 2.