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86 LITERATÛRZINÂTNE, FOLKLORISTIKA, MÂKSLA
any literary, artistic description. That is not possible for me and it’s not my task”. 16
Sometimes the insistence on actuality, however, is overcome by the insistance of telling
the truth: “If you ask me: Did this happen? I will reply: No. If you ask me: Is this
true? I will say: Of course.” 17 This points to the discursive work of representation and
signification the subject is going through in the process of writing. The documentary
phraseology can be interpreted as a sign of refusing to forget the past events and
experiences. 18
The difference in relation to previous times is that there is no one cause or ideology
which empowers them to write. There is a situation of identity crisis and confusion
about what to remember and what not. 19 It has brought up the question of differences
in postsocialist societies. During the Soviet era, “We” had repressed these differences.
The situation during and after perestroika has opened up new possibilities
also for women to represent their experiences.
One of the important common features of the women’s life stories is their focus on
everyday experiences: they either reveal the truth behind the myth of a strong Soviet
woman20 ; or represent the past relying on memories of past feelings, sounds, smells; or
the authors contrast their public image with their hideous everyday life. These details are
not only meant to authenticate the narrative, but to reproduce the past in the way the
writing subjects have experienced it. They search for a unity between their past and
present by restoring the everyday experiences in their life stories. 21
To find out whether this is a gender–specific feature of women’s texts, or a more
general trend in autobiographical writing in today’s Russia, I have also explored autobiographies
by men.
Autobiographical writings by Russian men
Grounding the focus on a selective group of men’s autobiographies, it can be
noticed that they also are re–interpreting the Soviet past. The means of representation,
however, are different from women’s: for instance, one author writes in his
memoirs mostly about his literary career and the political developments affecting it
during the Soviet era, saying little about his family life. His text does not give many
descriptions of everyday life. More importantly, the author declares at the beginning
of the text, that while writing it was hard for him to distinguish between fact and fiction,
since he had written many fictive stories based on his life. 22 By contrast, another
author lists failures in his professional career, and informs the reader why he could
not become successful in any particular profession. He also supposedly undermines
the meaning of his writing by stating near the end of his autobiography: “I don’t know
why this book has been written, whether it has been written, and whether it is a book,
– honestly, I don’t know.” 23 This differs from the position of the women writers quoted
earlier, who distinctly wished to tell the truth about their lives.
My aim is not simply to compare women’s and men’s texts as such. The reason
for referring to men’s texts is that a certain problem in exclusively researching
women’s literature is that it remains a separate area with consequently little influence
on the already existing literary canon. As a possible way of avoiding this, Miller sug-