A talk entitled 'Autobiography in recent Russia Literature' will be given by
Subhi Sherwell at the Pushkin Club, at 72 Queensborough Terrace, near
Queensway Tube on March 15 at 7.15.
Subhi Sherwell will cover such works as Andrei Sergeev's "Stamp Album", Nina
Lugovskaya's "Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl", Larisa Miller's "Dim and
Distant Days" and Mikhail Gasparov's "Records and Excerpts", while also
examining their relationships with pre-Revolutionary and Soviet
autobiographic traditions.
In particular the talk will focus on the strain of falsification
in pre-Soviet autobiographies - most famously Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood,
Youth and how this mutates into the standard Soviet autobiography, where
events that would not fit into the Soviet ideal or tenets of Socialist
Realism were omitted.
Three of the above autobiographies are memoirs of childhood from
marginalised children, Miller a Jewess, Lugovskaya a dissident's daughter
and Sergeev a non-conformist - the talk will compare and contrast their
styles and how they treat the difficulty of re-entering their childhood
mindset and conveying this with varying degrees of success in adult prose.
Best Wishes,
Robert Chandler
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