Женщина и время (женские эготексты XXвека)

Abstract

The article aims to give an overview of women’s ego–narratives from the twen-tieth century while demonstrating how the personal experience of living in dif-ferent periods of the last century was recorded (re-written) and reflected in women’s autobiographies,memoirs, and diaries. Twelve texts representing a diverse body of ego-narratives were chosen for the analysis, including well-known texts. These include the diaries of Elizaveta D'iakonova, a student of Bestuzhev courses and a law student at the Sorbonne;accounts from the life of writer and human rights activist Lidiia Chukovskaia; memoirs by the Soviet–era poet Olga Berggol'ts; recollections of Aleksandr Blok’s wife, Liubov' Blok; autobiographical texts by a famous Soviet writer, Marietta Shaginian, a Lenin Prize laureate; Elena Rzhevskaia’s World War II notes from the front; the au-tobiographies of Agrippina Korevanova, a peasant woman who became a member of the USSR Writers’ Union; and Mariia Arbatova, a 1990s feminist. Among the less–known, ‘marginal’ texts considered are the diaries of Zinaida Lykova, a Thaw-era schoolgirl, and of Maria Suslova, a collective farmer in the 1980s; the memoirs of the dissident Liudmila Alekseeva and of the wife of So-viet artist Avgust Lanin, Natalia Lanina, are also quotedin the article.The criteria for selecting narrative samples were the following: the texts should be representative of their time and, at the same time, their analysis should al-low the reader to visualize different variants and modes of women’s autobio-graphical writing.The main task of the scholarly investigation was to uncover the gender speci-ficity of these ego-narratives: to what extent and in what way does this speci-ficity influence the thematic repertoire, the author’s point of views, autobio-graphical discourse, various taboos, real and imaginary addressee, etc., in or-der to demonstrate the plurality of experiences and strategies of women’s writ-ing about themselves and about their time