1. MEMOIRS & AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
HI175: The Historian’s Toolkit
Dr Claire Shaw

2. Defining Memoirs and Autobiographies
A retrospective, personal narrative of a particular moment in history
Slippery distinction between memoir and autobiography:
Autobiography: focus on ‘the individual life, story of personality’ (Philippe Lejeune)
Memoir: focus on the historical moment, as inhabited by its author
Central question: how should we deal with sources that are partial, fragmentary, and deeply personal, even as they purport to reveal to their readers the ‘truth’ about a moment in history?

3. The Contested Role of the Author
Author as both subject and object of enquiry
Motivations: to sell, to ‘spin’, to testify
‘People produce accounts of their own lives for very different reasons: to update significant others; to think through, preserve, or pour out experiences; to explain past actions and attitudes, or defend themselves against accusations; to transmit what they think is important across generations; to bear witness to appalling times; to make money, or seek posthumous fame; to ventilate frustrations, explore dilemmas, and shape self-representations; and for countless other purposes.’
Mary Fulbrook, ‘Life Writing and Writing Lives’, p. 26.

4. The Problem of Memory Memory as a construction:
‘We do not have memory as much as remembrances, or even performances of remembering, where what is remembered is shaped fundamentally both by the meaning of the initial experience to the individual in question, and by the psychological – and inextricably social – circumstances of recall’.
Joan Tumblety, ‘Working with Memory as Source and Subject’, p. 1.
Violence and trauma leading to fragmented memories
Role of collective memory ‘scripts’ in shaping memory
The impact of lies and inadvertent falsifications

5. Personal Writing under ‘Totalitarianism’
‘Freedom’ to recount the past:
How do we recover the thoughts and values, hopes and beliefs of ‘ordinary people’? So often their voices have been silenced by the rich and powerful. In Stalin’s Russia, this silencing was particularly insidious. Not only were people literally silenced – shot, or incarcerated in concentration camps for expressing unorthodox views – but also the entire Soviet media eliminated virtually all reference to heretical opinion.
Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, p. 1.
‘Official’ vs ‘unofficial’ memory

6. Above: Tamizdat: A tiny copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris for distribution in the USSR, 1973
Right: Samizdat: A copy of the “MetrOpol” Almanac, Moscow 1979

7. The Value of Memoir Literature
Viewing these works as narratives in their own right –paying attention to the role of the author’s conception of their own agency, their faulty and selective memory, their motivations and imagined audience – unlocks important information about understandings of the ‘self’ in a particular historical context.
Accessing history ‘from below’: everyday, lived experiences
Appreciating how these experiences were interpreted: emotions, sensibilities, sensory perceptions
Uncovering marginal and minority historical experiences: gender, disability, ethnicity

8. Writing ‘I’ in an age of ‘We’
The autobiographical ‘I’ as a ‘relational identity’ (Paul John Eakin)
Soviet autobiographies as a tool of revolution-building
Understanding the self as belonging to multiple/alternative communities

9. Ways to Read a Memoir/Autobiography
Who wrote this memoir, and when? What was the historical context, both of the events depicted, and the time in which the memoir was written?
What was the intended audience of the memoir when it was written? In what ways does the author address the audience, and how does this shape the narrative?
Do the events depicted in the narrative accord with our wider understanding of the historical record? Are there gaps, repetitions, or distortions? How might we understand them?
Does the author rely on particular narrative tropes, such as the Soviet transformation narrative?

10. Ways to Read a Memoir/Autobiography
How are the events of the memoir experienced? Do we see any privileging of emotional, sensory, or gendered understandings?
How does the author understand her own identity, her relationship to certain individuals and communities, and to history?
Can we see this account as representative, either of a particular community, or of the wider Russian/Soviet experience?