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Soviet memoir literature : personal narratives of a historical epoch
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Shaw, Claire (2020) Soviet memoir literature : personal narratives of a historical epoch. In: Gilbert, George, (ed.) Reading Russian Sources : A Student’s Guide to Text and Visual Sources from Russian History. London: Routledge, pp. 212-227. ISBN 9781351184175
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781351184175-15
Abstract
This chapter examines memoir literature as a source of Soviet history that is as productive as it is problematic. As many historians – not just of Russia – have argued, memoirs are an unreliable source, in which the instability of memory forestalls any search for objective truth about the past. For historians of the USSR, memoirs – like autobiographies and diaries – raise important questions about whether subjective narratives can ever be trusted in a ‘totalitarian’ regime. At the same time, however, the Soviet Union’s shaping of collective memory, and its insistence that personal narratives had political importance, mean that memoirs represent a particularly rich source of information about how the past was understood, and how personal preoccupations and memories intersected with broader narratives of socialism and historical progress. In addition, the possibility of memoir to unlock individual experiences of past events, experiences which often foreground the emotional and the sensory, make memoirs a particularly productive source for the historian.
Item Type: | Book Item | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||
Publisher: | Routledge | ||||
Place of Publication: | London | ||||
ISBN: | 9781351184175 | ||||
Book Title: | Reading Russian Sources : A Student’s Guide to Text and Visual Sources from Russian History | ||||
Editor: | Gilbert, George | ||||
Official Date: | 20 January 2020 | ||||
Dates: |
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Page Range: | pp. 212-227 | ||||
DOI: | 10.4324/9781351184175-15 | ||||
Status: | Not Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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