Articles de revues sur le sujet « Autobiography – Russian authors »

A leading position in the 17th century Belarusian literature is occupied by Afanasij Filipovich, a writer and publicist, a political and Orthodox Church activist. His “Diariuš”, an autobiographical work is one of the most distinctive examples of polemic publicity devoted to the fight against the Brest Union in 1596 and its tragic consequences. Meanwhile, a special place in the 17th century Russian literature is occupied by protopop Avvakum’s “Žitie” – a remarkable first apostle and a symbol of the Old Believers movement whose life experience served as the first autobiography in Russian literature. Afanasij Filipovich’s “Diariuš” and protopop Avvakum’s “Žitie” present sufficient grounds for considering various typological similarities and parallels in authors’ fate and the pathos of their works. New principles of the selfawareness of an individual and the ways of expressing them are present in the works of Belarusian and Russian writers.

The article sheds light on the experience of being an inorodets (a non-Russian, non-Christian subjects of the Russian Empire) in the imperial penitentiary system. The Tatar intellectual elite of the early 20th century pondered over the “prison experience” of this period in a number of texts, and the most significant of them are ego-documents written by a new generation of the Tatar elite that reflect new trends in the public discourse of the Muslim community of late imperial Russia. The present publication is based on the texts of private origin (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries) of a number of Muslim prisoners who had a difficult relationship with the authorities as well as with the officially recognized Muslim clergy. The article analyzes three works representing different views of Muslim authors on their prison experience. The prison reality at the turn of the 1870-1880s is depicted in the autobiography of Gabdrashid Ibragimov, who described it from the position of a young Muslim believer. He experienced feelings of shame during in time imprisoned; and at the same he realized that the prison had become for him a “school of life.” The other two writings are the famous work “Prison [Tiur’ma]” by Gaiaz Iskhaqyi and “Prison Reminiscences [Tiuremnye vospominaniia]” by Iusuf Akchura. They were published in 1907 and describe the prison experience of a Muslim in a Tsarist prison from an alternative perspective. We see that the emerging Tatar intellectual circle was quite seriously incorporated into the political context of the late Russian Empire. Therefore, religious aspects of prison reality occupy a rather modest place in the works of the Tatar political activists, and the personal experience of religious feelings is marginal. This corresponds to the circumstance that personal religious experience did not dominate the general worldview of the authors. At the same time the description of prison experience in the form of a more or less developed literary work reflected the level of the various authors’ “personality as well as cognitive and human maturity.”

The article is a detailed commentary to a page from Ivan Bunin’s unpublished notebook (1944). The page lists the names of writers, poets, critics and publishers from the time of Bunin’s youth. According to the author of the article, this listing gives much more objective information about the influences on Bunin’s own early work recognized by himself than all autobiographical notes and memoirs published by the writer. The list of prose writers is dominated by Narodnik authors (he met many of them thanks to his brother, Yuly Bunin) and the writers close to them, who were considered “progressive”. In the list of poets, the authors of “pure art” are connected with the poets of “civil sorrow”, members of the Surikov circle and some senior Symbolists. The list of critics and publishers brings us back to populism. The article concludes that the list presents an attempt of an objective literary autobiography, in contrast to such official autobiographical texts as “Memoirs”.

This paper considers the texts of natural written speech as a source of describing the author’s personality axiological dominants determined by the social norms and reflecting them. The authors substantiate the statement about the significant manifestation of the personal principle in certain genres of natural written speech, with texts not subjected to editing and censorship, which is one of the most specific features of this type of speech activity. The research materials are the draft versions of autobiographical texts that embody the personal element quite explicitly despite the cliché nature of the speech genre of autobiography due to its institutional nature. The axiological analysis of autobiographies is based on the concept of “autographeme,” considered as a life event transformed by a person into a text event. The axiological study of autographemes has revealed through the method of keywords the author’s axiological orientations, reflecting, ultimately, the value dominants of the Soviet mentality: “the Soviet person is a screw, a part of the socialist system,” “work as a socially useful creative activity,” “accessibility of education,” “social elevators,” etc. The dominants mentioned are centered by the superdominant “social justice of socialism,” integrating all the axiological meanings of the autobiographical text. In some autographemes (“parents and their social status”, “work path”), the transformation of the author’s social orientations (and to a certain extent the society) can be traced through the correlation of what was written with the sociocultural stage of Russian society when the autobiography was written.

The activities of the prominent Russian organizer of science, scientist, and teacher of higher education, Lyudmila Alekseevna Verbitskaya (Bubnova), are extremely relevant. Studying of her experience allows us to form an effective work algorithm for our contemporary seeking to make a personal contribution to the development of national science and education. To conduct the study, the authors have used such methods as analysis, synthesis, generalization, comparison, as well as a number of purely historical methods: historical-systemic, comparative, retrospective. The publication is to analyze the previously unpublished documents from the archive of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University on Lyudmila Bubnova’s stay in the Lviv Children’s Labour Colony, where criminals and children of repressed Soviet citizens were kept together. Lyudmila Alekseevna Verbitskaya is a famous Russian philologist and organizer of science, the only female rector in the history of the St. Petersburg State University. Lyudmila Alekseevna began her career in Ukraine, being admitted to the Ivan Franko Lviv State University from the Lviv Children's Labor Colony, where she was kept as the daughter of an “enemy of the people.” The article is based on unique archival documents that permit to analyze the initial formation of the future philologist; among them L. A. Bubnova’s handwritten autobiography (1953), petition of the head of the department of children's colonies of the Lviv region, Major Chumakov, to the rector of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University for her admission to the faculty of philology (department of Russian philology), L. Bubnova's texts in Russian and Ukrainian written for entrance examination in the university, documentary data on her grades at entrance examination in Russian language and literature, Ukrainian language, history of the USSR, geography, and foreign language. Of interest is her personal data sheet, her academic certificate for the first year at the university with results of 8 exams and tests in the first semester and 12 tests and exams in the second semester, as well as her coursework. The authors conclude that the “Lviv period” in her life and education gave L. A. Verbitskaya (Bubnova) a launching pad for her future scientific and administrative career.

The early Soviet period in the life of Grigory Kondratievich Ozhigov (Ozhegov) (1878-1935) is reconstructed within the author’s paper. A native of a Vyatka peasant family, a worker at the Izhevsk defense factories, a Socialist-Revolutionary militant, as well as a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the first convocation, who was at party work in the Baltic States and Finland, Orzhigov had a varied career The authors through their work have introduced into scientific use new sources analyzed in the context of the theory of social adaptation, through anthropological approach as well as historical-biographical methodology. Of greatest interest are the materials of the: Revolutionary Civil Council of Izhevsk (1918), Soviet commissions on the affairs of former Red Guards and Red partisans (the 1930s), and the autobiography and memoirs of G.K. Ozhigov himself . The documents of the private origin fund of the Ozhigov family are stored in the Central State Archive of the Udmurt Republic, and are of a complex nature. The study of the biography of Ozhigov, who had turned out to be among the most revolutionary-minded citizens, as shown in other empirical material, does explain why he supported the left-wing radical societal project in Udmurtia. A region by the beginning of modern times which has been the largest agrarian and industrial region of Russia, while largely preserving its traditional way of life.

The article presents a review of a three-day conference session “French lectures: teachers and students” (“Lectures françaises: maîtres et disciples”) as part of the 50th International scientific philological anniversary conference named after L. A. Verbitskaya, which took place on March 15–23, 2022, at St. Petersburg State University. The work of this session was dedicated to the memory of its founder, Tatyana Solomonovna Taymanova (1954–2020), who made a significant contribution to the development of the Russian and French literary and intellectual ties. This year the format of the “French lectures” has been transformed in order to expand the chronological framework and specify the theme range, which will be annually updated, according to the organizers’ design. The topic of the past breakout session – “Teachers and students” – focused the scientific discussion on the issue of the continuity of the ideas of writers, philosophers, literary scholars, on the impact of the poetics of one author on the oeuvre of others, on the reception of works in different types of art and national cultures. The presentations of the Russian and foreign participants addressed a wide range of works from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, various genres (fairy-tale, essay, novel, epistolary, autobiography, travelogue, comics), classical and modern French authors (J.-B. Moliere, Ch. Montesquieu, G. Sand, M. Proust, P. Claudel, Ch. Peguy, G. Perec, C. Laurens, Shan Sa, etc.), the reception and influence of the Russian writers and thinkers in France (F. M. Dostoyevsky, N. A. Berdyaev, A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky, M. I. Tsvetaeva), traditional and new approaches to the analysis of a literary text. “French lectures – 2022” have confirmed their status of an outstanding platform which promotes strengthening the scientific relationships and Russian and French interaction.

The article presents an analysis of Ahatanhel Krymskyi’s novel “Andrew Lagovskyi” in terms of reflecting the “spirit of the times” (decadence, hysteria, plebeianism), the actualization of the philosophy of nihilism, imperial colonialism. Such a critical perspective determined the structure of the article. The focus is on the psychotype of a new character in the literature of the modern era – “hysterical man”. It is noted that the two defining features of modernism – intellectualism and neuroticism – link Krymskyi with modernism. The comparison of this feature of Krymskyi’s work with the works of art of Ivan Franko (collection “Withered Leaves”) and Lesia Ukrainka (“Blue Rose”) was made. It is emphasized that at the end of the XIX century. the notion of a biographical “human document” is transformed into a subjective “psychological document”, and the artistic image into a “vivisection” and introspection – a self-analysis of one’s own soul. It is concluded that the new literature and, in particular, the emerging modern subject clearly tended to decadence, and the new authors unequivocally associated themselves with the decadents, even though they denied it. All this undermined the foundations of populist consciousness, that is, the worship of the “people” that dominated Ukrainian literature in the Shevchenko era. The linguistic diversity of the Krymskyi’s narrative is noted, in particular, the saturation of the text of the novel with quotations, translations, scientific commentaries, transitions to Greek, Turkish, German, French, Latin, and Russian. Socio-cultural value is noted in relation to fragments of vernacular language practice of the mother of the main character. Textual phenomena such as insinuation and orientalism have been noted. Ahatanhel Krymskyi’s unfinished novel is considered as a model of a modernist novel with its intellectual hero, polymorphic structure, philosophical and moral themes, psychological analysis and autobiography.

The article identifies thе alternative changes to the traditional plot pattern for autobiographical narration. Memoirs of the 18th century are based on the cumulative principle presuming that heterogeneous events (both nation-wide and those of public and private life of the memoirist himself) are described in parallel and in a strict chronological sequence. In contrast to the previous tradition of memoir-making, Shakhovskoy conceptualizes his life as moving from happiness to unhappiness and focuses on the cumulative plot of an adventure novel. He describes only official activity and builds up the plot of the autobiography as a number of series, consisting of structurally homogeneous microplots or plot situations. Happiness alternates with unhappiness both within the series of microplots and in the very sequence of the series (loss of patrons — victories over opponents — victories of opponents — success in the service of Her Majesty). Unlike other autobiographies, The Adventures of Ensign Klimov is based not on the cumulative but on the cyclic pattern of the plot (forced abandonment of the Fatherland and the family — suffering calamities in exile — return). The plot of Klimov’s memoirs is semantically based on the story of cruel fate and God’s will. The memoirs of Shakhovsky and Klimov actually represent two possible options for transferring the plot structure of epic genres into memoir narration: specifically, the cumulative plot of an adventure novel in one case, and the cyclic one of the parable of the prodigal son and ancient Russian stories dating back to it in the other. The use of models of fiction literature plots is predetermined by the authors’ conceptual understanding of their own life history, in contrast to most memoirs of the 18th century, where events are simply recorded as a chronicle and do not line up in a semantically determined plot series.

This article analyses the ego-documentary narratives authored by writers of the younger generation of the literature of the first wave of the Russian emigration. Writers like I. Odoevtseva (On the Banks of the Neva and On the Banks of the Seine), G. Kuznetsova (Grasse Diary), and N. Berberova (Italics Are Mine: Autobiography) turned out to be united by a common personal and literary fate. They established dialogue with literary predecessors, which largely determines the aesthetic position of the authors and their place in the literature of abroad. The memoirs of I. V. Odoevtseva, as memoirs of a participant in the literary life of the Silver Age and the first wave of emigration, make it possible to recreate and preserve the era in the faces of its most prominent representatives, not so much as poets but as unique people. The organisation of the narrative in the form of dialogues meets the task of directly “resurrecting” its characters in the mind of the future reader. G. N. Kuznetsova’s diary/memoir has a two-pronged task: firstly, it helps form an aesthetic idea of émigré life and the circle close to Bunin. Also, in the memory of the descendants, it not only preserves a man but also a unique artist, who was ahead of his time and felt dramatically at odds with his literary era. Finally, it depicts the complex process of formation and self-identification of a creative personality in their dialogue with the literary “forefathers”. N. N. Berberova, who creates a myth about herself and her contemporaries according to the laws of pan-aesthetic art, includes herself in the йmigrй literary canon with a “pantheon” of literary “ancestors” (with Khodasevich and Bunin at the centre): if not a writer of the first row, then an outstanding one, a talented creative personality keeping up with the times.

The anthology “State of War” is a fiction and documentary prose about the bloody war unleashed by Russia on Ukrainian lands, a prose in which the authors, through the prism of their own worldview, experience and emotions, offer the general readership the recorded tragedies of “timeless truth”, the facts of grave illegal crimes committed by the Russian occupiers. The article aims to examine the reception of martial law events in the anthology as non-fiction literature in contemporary Ukrainian prose. The object of the study is the texts of the anthology “State of War”, united by the subject of depicting military events in Ukraine in order to document the war in its various manifestations and tell the world about it in the “Ukrainian voice”. The study was conducted using elements of descriptive, structural and semantic, receptive and interpretive, and contextual methods of analysis. The anthology “State of War” is a genre transformation that combines “sophisticated fiction and the accuracy of documentary” (V. Sayenko), and is dominated by essays, narratives, and memoirs that have only recently been classified as fiction and documentary literature. The textual and social conclusions of “State of War” with an appeal to autobiographical memory made it possible to consider texts in the genre of “non-fictional prose” (T. Bovsunivska): they contain autobiography, the authors appeal to personal experience, indicate involvement in the events described, the narrative is in the first person and is based on a reliable fact, as in memoir genres. The core format of the anthology’s textual content is determined by the history of everyday life. The authors of the book (fifty of them), like the characters in the stories, are writers and public figures, journalists and scholars, volunteers and soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Combatant writers, i.e., active military personnel – Oleksandr Mykhed, Artem Chapai, Artem Chekh – create stories not based on other people’s impressions but on what they have seen and experienced, proving that the problems of a soldier are not only related to fighting and defending positions, but also to the aesthetics of survival, to the belief in victory over the aggressor for the further development of society. The texts of the anthology “State of War” contain genre “inclusions” (“Siren-Hyena” by L. Taran, “Under the Bridge” by S. Povaliaiev, “After the Occupation” by V. Puzik) that organically fit into the author’s narrative, confirm significant events, and increase the recipient’s responsibility in the reading process. The semantic core of the narrative of “State of War” is determined by the titles: they influence architectonic expressiveness, inform the reader about the objective reflection of events, facts and phenomena, transform into message titles, decode the content (“Being a Teacher Under Occupation” by L. Denysenko, “My First Bomb Shelter” by I. Pomerantsev, “After the Occupation” by V. Puzik, “Roots Up, or Fear of Migration” by T. Gundorova, “Presentation with Stress” by Y. Vynnychuk).

The publication characterizes autobiographies of the historian, ethnographer, linguist, “father” of the Russian school of Mayanism Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (1922–99), that have been identified in the fonds of various institutions and departments: (State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Scientific Archive of the Russian Ethnographic Museum (REM), Scientific Archive of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (MAE RAN). Autobiography is a “free” author's presentation (with fixed semantic accents, sometimes duplicating the data of personnel sheet) and a mandatory formal element of Soviet personnel management. The text of the autobiography was influenced by the document’s purpose: individual facts unfit for socially and ideologically correct biography were “hushed up” or otherwise carefully explained by the author. Drawing on Yu. V. Knorozov’s autobiographies written in different years and for different reasons (admission to graduate school, employment, dissertation defense, promotion to honorary titles), the article assesses how explanatory statements were changing textually. “Corrections” are considered using the example of specific facts: during the Great Patriotic War (from 1941 to February 1943), Yuri Knorozov, a student of the Kharkiv Pedagogical University, unfit for military service for health reasons, was in the territory occupied by the enemy. The article is accompanied by the publication of a detailed autobiography of Yuri Knorozov (1981) compiled on the occasion of his nomination as corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in “General history” (ethnography). The autobiography text contains information on most important facts of Yuri Knorozov’s scientific biography, including his expeditions (field research), reports at foreign scientific events and participation in international scientific associations. The author concludes that it is more important to analyze not the content of the autobiography, but the socio-political circumstances and practices that determined its semantic framework.

In the personal fund R-2808 "Boris Sergeevich Abalikhin - Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor" of the State Archive of the Volgograd Region (SAVR) the authors identified a personal letter from the academic secretary of the regional center of the Saratov State Pedagogical Institute, Associate Professor Pyotr Vasilievich Tkachenko to the rector of the Volgograd State Pedagogical University V. I. Danilchuk and Academician B. S. Abalikhin. S. Abalikhin, dated by postmark November 18, 1993. On the envelope on the diagonal large "V. I. personally” was diagonally written. It was received in Volgograd on November 21, 1993. The letter bears the rector's visa - "to Vice-Rector N. K. Sergeev, to Academician B. S. Abalikhin.” Most likely, the letter was written after the regional meeting on vocational guidance work, at which V. I. Danilchuk spoke. The meeting with his colleague from Volgograd revitalized P. V. Tkachenko's Stalingrad memories associated with the Great Patriotic War. In his letter, the events of the Battle of Stalingrad and the battles for Orlovka come to life in his memory. Biographical information is drawn from the personal file of Associate Professor P. V. Tkachenko, kept in the archive of the N. G. Chernyshevsky Saratov National Research State University. It contains an autobiography, personal record sheet, certificate of school department of Krasnokutsk Pedagogical College, diploma of Saratov State Pedagogical Institute, diploma of candidate of sciences and certificate of associate professor, characteristics, list of scientific works, award list, certificates, statements, decision of the Ministry of Education of the RSFSR on awarding, excerpt from the order on declaring gratitude to the participants of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Book of Memory of the Saratov region contains information about the military service of P. V. Tkachenko. In 2023 Volgograd and the whole country celebrated a significant event, a landmark for the historic victory in the Great Patriotic War - the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi troops by Soviet troops in the Battle of Stalingrad. In the state plan of celebration, approved by the President of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin, special attention was paid to the activities associated with the personification of the great feats of the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad. It seems that the introduction of this letter into scientific circulation will complete the picture of the Battle of Stalingrad through the prism of the memories of 79-year-old political officer of the 7th company of the 724th rifle regiment of the 315th Siberian rifle division Pyotr Vasilievich Tkachenko. The letter is autograph, has a handwritten form and is written on yellowed paper. The date of writing is missing.

The article analyses the approaches of outstanding Russian philosophers — V.A. Podoroga and S.A. Smirnov — to the philosophical works of Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili. Their two monographic studies, published in 2020, offer a perfectly unique view through the original authorial lenses of the philosophical ideas of M.K. Mamardashvili. Making special mention of the topological configuration of Mamardashvili’s thinking, his specific metaphoricalness, these authors, each in his own way, immerse the readers into the semantic space of his philosophy. V.A. Podoroga reveals the unique philosophical style of Mamardashvili built on free speech-thought in contrast to a written text, with its permanent desire to repeat what was said in order to receive a new impetus for the motion of thought, and with its invariable return to the starting point. S.A. Smirnov retraces Mamardashvili’s authorial act of utterance as an autobiographic one, restoring the navigation of the philosopher’s personality through his creation that appears as an organ-tool of understanding. The monographs are a significant contribution to comprehension of the Russian philosophical tradition of the 20th century.

The article is both scientific autobiography of a professional historian of physics who has worked at the S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the RAS (IHST RAS) for more than half a century, and a reflection of the history of research in the field of the history of physics at the IHST RAS during this time. The author identifies a sequence of turning points associated with his most important works and changes in research topics. His research on the history of the principles of symmetry, the theory of relativity, unified field theories, the social history of Russian physics, and also on the history of the Soviet atomic project are considered. The connection between the history of science and the philosophy of science, which the author taught postgraduate students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, is also discussed. Particular attention is paid to the author's teachers and his meetings with prominent scientists (science historians, physicists, philosophers), including foreign ones. The article also tells about the scientific and organizational work of the author (leading the sector of physics and mechanics history, related Moscow-wide seminars and seminars on history of the Soviet atomic project), in particular, and about mistakes and missed opportunities in this area. In conclusion, some features and problems of the development of the history of physics and historical and scientific research in general are formulated in the form of “history lessons”.

This paper looks at the collection of articles entitled Voices of Russian Philology from Budapest, published in 2018 under the editorship of Prof. Katalin Kroу. The collection gives a recapitulation of several generations of Russian studies produced by scholars affiliated with Eцtvцs Loránd University. The book contains works on both Russian literature and language; however, the review focuses solely on the papers dealing with various aspects of the history of Russian literature covering a large period from Pushkin to Ulitskaya. The reviewer points out a significant thematic diversity of the reviewed papers: some authors elaborate on rather conventional topics (such as Vladimir Solovyov’s historical philosophy, autobiographic elements in Herzen’s prose, poetics of detail in Chekhov’s works, etc.), while others develop relatively new issues. Some articles are of interest from the methodological point of view. The quality of articles collected in this volume proves that despite the fact that the Russian language no longer retains its status in contemporary Hungary, Russian studies still keep a high profile.

В статье рассматривается феномен усадебного пространства и реалий, его отражающих. Материалом для исследования послужили автобиографические тексты В. Набокова «Другие берега» и “Speak, Memory”, первый из которых рассматривается нами в оригинале, а второй – в авторском переводе. Такой подход позволяет сравнить описания усадебного пространства на русском и английском языках, выявить и проанализировать переводческие решения автора при межъязыковой передаче российских усадебных реалий в англоязычной версии автобиографии. The article examines the phenomenon of the Russian estate space and the realia that represent it. The research is based on Vladimir Nabokov's autobiographical texts "Other Shores" and "Speak, Memory", the first of which can be considered as the original, and the second one as an author's translation. This material allows us to compare the description variants of the estate space in Russian and English, to identify and analyze the translation solutions of the author-translator in the interlanguage transfer of Russian estate realia in the English version of the autobiography.

The article discusses the content of the first Russian manual on pediatric traumatology and the key points of the biography and work of its author, Nikolai G. Dame. The article introduction briefly outlines the creation history of the first Russian manual on traumatology for adult patients, which noted that pediatric traumatology developed within the framework of pediatric surgery. The first part of the work focused on its greatest interest to readers. It presents previously unpublished reviews of famous orthopedic traumatologists for the first (1950) and second (1960) editions, which perfectly reveal the books content. The second part of the article included the published autobiography written by N.G. Dame. Additionally, the work of N.G. Dame based on archival documents as a military field surgeon during the Great Patriotic War was presented in the same section. The final part included the role of N.G. Dame in creating an original school of pediatric trauma surgeons. The merit of N. G. Dame is the creation of a manual that outlines the basics of diagnosing and treating injuries in children of all types and localizations. He believed that a traumatologist should have the necessary knowledge and skills in emergency general surgery, neurotraumatology, and other surgical specialties. Thus, he anticipated the creation of injury surgery, of which the basic provisions were transferred from the practice of military field surgery.

In the modern Russian writer Yuri Buida’s novel "Thief, Spy and Murderer" (2014), Christian discourse reveals itself at different levels of the text’s organization: genre (autobiography / confession), imaginative (marginal, mad / poor in spirit), motivic (imperfection of human nature / sin), plot (the hard way the son to the father / parable of the prodigal son) and others. On the one hand, Christian allusions in the novel are a manifestation of intertextual poetics, creating a cultural context for the perception of the postmodern text. On the other hand, the Christian "code" is the most relevant for the disclosure of the philosophical and psychological content of the novel, as in Christian categories expressed by the author's attitude to the leading cultural meanings of the era, to modern man, and to himself.

Prosaic notes by Mandelstam and Kаrabtchiyevski selected for critical reading contribute to the Armenian text in the Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin, Valery Bryusov, Sergey Gorodetsky, Andrei Bely, Anna Akhmatova, Vasily Grossman, Andrei Bitov). A methodology adopted in the article enables analyzing the postcolonial awareness of travelling authors expressed in the two works, and its origin one should look for in the position of an outsiders in the Soviet culture. The autobiographic narrators — Mandelstam and Karabtchiyevsky — seem to be fully associated with a frequently tragic experience of a centuries long colonial domination suffered by Armenians. While the attitude of the author of the Journey to Armenia is supported by exceptionally broad knowledge about history and culture of the country, the main role in Longing for Armenia is played by well-motivated ethical emotions of the traveler.

The purpose of the article is to determine the value of works like the book Pomni korni svoi (“Remember your roots”) by the Karelian folklorist A.S. Stepanova about the history of her native village for humanitarian research and for the dissemination of historical and ethnographic knowledge. Stepanova’s book is examined in the context of problems concerning the possibilities and ways of reconciling academic and personal everyday knowledge in the situation when a humanities scholar is acting as a first-hand historian or as an ordinary life writer. While Stepanova’s scholarly works on Karelian lamentations are internationally known, the book in question was published both in Russian and Karelian and is addressed to her direct descendants. It is about the North Karelian village of Shombozero, which no longer exists. Most of its inhabitants were related by kinship. The narrative is based on the author's memoirs and autobiography. The book includes the results of genealogical reconstruction, documentary information about the history of the settlement, oral history materials, and the demographic history of households in the late 19th — first half of the 20th centuries. It describes the topography of the area, ways of communication and means of transportation, the traditional household, and economic and everyday life of the Karelians in the 1930s–1950s. The history of the place and the everyday life of its inhabitants are presented in the projection of the formation and life path of a professional philologist and teacher. The author of the book describes and reflects on the activities of rural “national” boarding schools in the 1930s–1940s, teachers and students, life stories of various immigrants from local peasant families, the daily life of university students in the 1950s, twists and turns in the life of her family, the process of becoming a scholar, and episodes from the history of the study of Karelian folklore. As a result, the book notably exceeds its objective to preserve family memory. It is a valuable source for the study of ethnography, ethno-social and ethno-linguistic processes, the circulation of folklore, social history of families and other areas of humanitarian and social studies. It conveys both local and general historical knowledge and can be used by specialists as a professional description of the life of the settler and family-related communities during changes due to chrisis.

The author of the essay, a linguist, argues that a certain part of the so-called wise sayings and quotes are mere platitudes. Some of them are believed to be indisputable truths but they make no sense; among false assertions are the well-known statements “There is no rule without exceptions” and “The exception proves/confirms the rule”. One of the famous quotations, namely Gandhi’s statement that “Bad handwriting is a sign of an imperfect education” is dealt with separately and extensively. The author thinks that schoolteachers’ efforts are to little avail if the student has no talent for calligraphy and spelling (as well as for other subjects). The priority of sense is contended with regard to all statements including philosophical ones. The authors draws on Gandhi’s “Autobiography” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” and their Russian translations to show that foreign texts reach the Russian reader with the meaning/message of the original more or less distorted. The Russian translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s exposition of Spinoza’s philosophical views is subjected to criticism.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. 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The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg's poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII "Beat Generation" writers. "Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature," laments Nancy M. Grace, "doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project" (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—"Ginsberg's most highly praised and his least typical poem" (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theories of interpretation—or "hermeneutics"—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or "restorative" mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a "suspicious" approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski's pioneering work in relating Ricoeur's concept of "suspicious reading" to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing? In "Kaddish," Ginsberg tells the story of his mother Naomi Ginsberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who died in a mental hospital in 1956. It is a lengthy prose poem and spans a remarkable 19 pages in Ginsberg's Collected Poems (1984). In the words of Maeera Y. Shreiber, "Kaddish" "is a massive achievement, comprised of five numbered parts, and an interpellated 'Hymmnn' between parts two and three" (84). I focus on the second narrative part, which forms the bulk of the poem, where the speaker—I shall refer to him henceforth as "Allen" in order to differentiate between Ginsberg's poetic self-representation and Ginsberg-the-author—recounts the nervous breakdowns and hospital movements of his mother, whom he calls by her first name, Naomi. I begin by illustrating the ways in which Allen focalises Naomi in the text, and suggest that his attempts to "read" her suspicious mind alternate between restorative and suspicious impulses. I then take up the issue of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. Acknowledging Ricoeur's assertion that psychoanalysis is an unequivocal "school of suspicion" (32), I consider James Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish," in particular, his reading of what is easily the most contentious passage in the poem: the scene where Naomi solicits Allen for sex. I regard this passage as a microcosm of the issues that beset a suspicious reading of "Kaddish"—such as the problem posed by the self-exposing poem and poet—and I find that Breslin's response to it raises interesting questions on the politics of psychoanalysis and the nature of suspicious interpretation. Finally, I identify an unpublished thesis on Ginsberg's poetry by Sarah Macfarlane and classify her interpretation of "Kaddish" as unambiguously suspicious. My purpose is not to advance my own suspicious reading of "Kaddish" but to highlight the difficulties of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. I argue that while it is difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously, to do so offers a fruitful counterbalance to the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. There are as yet unexplored hermeneutical territories in and around this poem, indeed in and around Ginsberg's work in general, which have radical implications for the future direction of Beat studies. Picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an O, suspicion—thought's old worn vagina— (Ginsberg, "Kaddish" 218)Ginsberg constructs Naomi's suspicion in "Kaddish" via Allen's communication of her visions and descriptions of her behaviour. Allen relates, for example, that Naomi once suspected that Hitler was "in her room" and that "she saw his mustache in the sink" ("Kaddish" 220). Subsequently, Allen depicts Naomi "listening to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill," and, in an attempt to "read" her suspicious mind, suggests that she envisages "an old man creep[ing] with his bag stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat" ("Kaddish" 220). Allen's gaze thus filters Naomi's; he watches her as she watches for spies, and he animates her visions. He recalls as a child "watching over" Naomi in order to anticipate her "next move" ("Kaddish" 212). On one fateful day, Naomi "stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner"; Allen interprets that she "spied a mystical assassin from Newark" ("Kaddish" 212). He likewise observes and interprets Naomi's body language and facial expressions. When she "covered [her] nose with [a] motheaten fur collar" and "shuddered at [the] face" of a bus driver, he deduces that, for Naomi, the collar must have been a "gas mask against poison" and the driver "a member of the gang" ("Kaddish" 212). On the one hand, Allen's impetus to recover "the lost Naomi" ("Kaddish" 216)—first lost to mental illness and then to death—may be likened to Ricoeur's concept of a restorative hermeneutic, "which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation" (Felski 216). As if Naomi's mind constitutes a text, Allen strives to reveal it in order to make it intelligible. What drives him is the cathartic impulse to revivify his mother's memory, to rebuild her story, and to exalt her as "magnificent" and "mourned no more" ("Kaddish" 212), so that he may mourn no more. Like a restorative reader "driven by a sense of reverence" (Felski 216), he lauds Naomi as the "glorious muse that bore [him] from the womb [...] from whose pained head [he] first took Vision" ("Kaddish" 223). Critics of "Kaddish" also observe the poem's restorative impulse. In "Strange Prophecies Anew," Tony Trigilio reads the recovery of Naomi as "the recovery of a female principle of divinity" (773). Diverging from Ginsberg's earlier poem "Howl" (1956), which "represses signs of women in order to forge male prophetic comradeship," "Kaddish" "constructs maternity as a source of vision, an influence that precedes and sustains prophetic language. In 'Kaddish', Ginsberg attempts to recover the voice of his mother Naomi, which is muted in 'Howl'" (776). Shreiber also acknowledges Ginsberg's redemption of "the feminine, figured specifically as the lost mother," but for her it "is central to both of the long poems that make his reputation," namely "Kaddish" and "Howl" (81). She cites Ginsberg's retrospective confession that "Howl" was actually about Naomi to argue that, "it is in the course of writing 'Howl' that Ginsberg discovers his obligation to the elided (Jewish) mother—whose restoration is the central project of 'Kaddish'" (81). On the other hand, Allen's compulsion to "cut through" to Naomi, to talk to her as he "didn't when [she] had a mouth" ("Kaddish" 211), suggests the brutality of a suspicious hermeneutic where meanings "must be wrestled rather than gleaned from the page, derived not from what the text says, but in spite of what it says" (Felski 223). When Naomi was alive and "had a mouth," Allen aggressively "pushed her against the door and shouted 'DON'T KICK ELANOR!'" in spite of her message: "Elanor is the worst spy! She's taking orders!" ("Kaddish" 221). As a suspicious reader wrestles with a resistant text, Allen wrestles with Naomi, "yelling at her" in exasperation, and even "banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the whole gamut of Hallucinations—for real—her own universe" ("Kaddish" 221).Allen may be also seen as approaching Naomi with a suspicious reader's "adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings" (Felski 216). This is most visible in his facetiously professed "good idea to try [to] know the Monster of the Beginning Womb"—to penetrate Naomi's body in order to access her mind "that way" ("Kaddish" 219). Accordingly, in his psychoanalytic reading of "Kaddish," James Breslin understands Allen's "incestuous desires as expressing [his] wish to get inside his mother and see things as she does" (424). Breslin's interpretation invokes the Freudian concept of "epistemophilia," which Bran Nicol defines as the "desire to know" (48).Freud is one of "three masters" of suspicion according to Ricoeur (32). Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx "present the most radically contrary stance to the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as the recollection of meaning" (Ricoeur 35). They "begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering" (Ricoeur 34). Freud deciphers the language of the conscious mind in order to access the "unconscious"—that "part of the mind beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence upon our actions" (Barry 96). Like their therapeutic counterparts, psychoanalytic critics distinguish "between the conscious and the unconscious mind," associating a text's "'overt' content with the former" and "'covert' content with the latter, privileging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about" (Barry 105). In seeking to expose a text's unconscious, they subscribe to a hermeneutic of suspicion's "conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings" (Felski 216). To force texts to relinquish their meanings suspicious readers bear "distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact" (Felski 222).For the most part, these qualities fail to characterise Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" and "Howl." Far from aggressive or superior, Breslin is a highly sympathetic reader of Ginsberg. "Many readers," he complains, are "still not sympathetic to the kind [sic] of form found in these poems" (403). His words echo Trigilio's endorsement of Marjorie Perloff's opinion that critics are too often "unwilling to engage the experimental scope of Ginsberg's poems" (Trigilio 774). Sympathetic reading, however, clashes with suspicious reading, which "involves a sense of vigilant preparedness for attack" (Shand in Felski 220). Breslin is sympathetic not only to the experimental forms of "Kaddish" and "Howl," but also to their attestation to "deep, long-standing private conflicts in Ginsberg—conflicts that ultimately stem from his ambivalent attachment to his mother" (403). In "Kaddish," Allen's ambivalent feelings toward his mother are conspicuous in his revolted and revolting reaction to her exposed body, combined with his blasé deliberation on whether to respond to her apparent sexual provocation: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. ("Kaddish" 219)In "Confessing the Body," Elizabeth Gregory observes that "Naomi's ordinary body becomes monstrous in this description—not only in its details but in the undiscriminating desire her son attributes to it ('Would she care?')" (47). In exposing Naomi thus, Allen also exposes himself and his own indiscriminate sexual responsiveness. Such textual exposés pose challenges for those who would practice a hermeneutic of suspicion by "reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings" (Felski 215). It appears that there is little that is hidden or repressed in "Kaddish" for a suspicious reader to expose. As Perloff notes, "the Ginsberg of 'Kaddish' is writing somewhat against the grain" (213). In writing against the grain, Ginsberg inhibits reading against the grain. A hermeneutic of suspicion holds "that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths" (Felski 216). "Kaddish," however, parades its unpalatable truths. Although Ginsberg as a Beat poet is not technically included among the group of poets known as the "confessionals," "Kaddish" is typical of a "confessional poem" in that it "dwells on experiences generally prohibited expression by social convention: mental illness, intra-familial conflicts and resentments, childhood traumas, sexual transgressions and intimate feelings about one's body" (Gregory 34). There is a sense in which "we do not need to be suspicious" of such subversive texts because they are "already doing the work of suspicion for us" (Felski 217). It is also difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously because it presents itself as an autobiographical history of Ginsberg's relationship with his mother. "Kaddish" once again accords with Gregory's definition of "confessional poetry" as that which "draws on the poet's autobiography and is usually set in the first person. It makes a claim to forego personae and to represent an account of the poet's own feelings and circumstances" (34). These defining features of "Kaddish" make it not particularly conducive to a "suspicious hermeneutic [that] often professes a lack of interest in the category of authorship as a means of explaining the ideological workings of texts" (Felski 222). It requires considerable effort to distinguish Allen, speaker and character in "Kaddish," from Ginsberg, celebrity Beat poet and author of "Kaddish," and to suspend knowledge of Ginsberg's public-private life in order to pry ideologies from the text. This difficulty of resisting biographical interpretation of "Kaddish" translates to a difficulty of reading the poem suspiciously. In his psychoanalytic reading, Breslin's lack of suspicion for the poem's confession of autobiography dilutes his practice of an inherently suspicious mode of interpretation—that of psychoanalysis. His psychoanalysis of Ginsberg shows that he trusts "Kaddish" to confess its author's intimate feelings—"'It's my fault,' he must have felt, 'if I had loved my mother more, this wouldn't have happened to her—and to me'" (Breslin 422)—whereas a hermeneutic of suspicion "adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts" (Felski 216). That said, Breslin's differentiation between the conscious and unconscious, or surface and underlying levels of meaning in "Kaddish" is more clearly characteristic of a hermeneutic of suspicion's theory that texts withhold "meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers" (Felski 216). Hence, Breslin speculates that, "on an unconscious level the writing of the poem may have been an act of private communication between the poet" and his mother (430). His response to the previously quoted passage of the poem suggests that while a cursory glance will restore its conscious meaning, a more attentive or suspicious gaze will uncover its unconscious: At first glance this passage seems a daring revelation of an incest wish and a shockingly realistic description of the mother's body. But what we really see here is how one post-Freudian writer, pretending to be open and at ease about incestuous desire, affects sophisticated awareness as a defense [sic] against intense longings and anxieties. The lines are charged with feelings that the poet, far from "confessing out," appears eager to deny. (Breslin 422; my emphasis)Breslin's temporary suspicious gaze in an otherwise trusting and sympathetic reading accuses the poet of revealing incestuous desire paradoxically in order to conceal incestuous desire. It exposes the exposé as an ironic guise, an attempt at subterfuge that the poet fails to conceal from the suspicious reader, evoking a hermeneutic of suspicion's conviction that in spite of itself "the text is not fully in control of its own discourse" (Felski 223). Breslin's view of Ginsberg's denial through the veil of his confession illuminates two possible ways of sustaining a suspicious reading of "Kaddish." One is to distrust its claim to confess Ginsberg, to recognise that "confession's reality claim is an extremely artful manipulation of the materials of poetry, not a departure from them" (Gregory 34). It is worth mentioning that in response to his interviewer's perception of the "absolute honesty" in his poem "Ego Confession," Ginsberg commented: "they're all poems, ultimately" (Spontaneous 404–05). Another way is to resist the double seduction operative in the text: Naomi's attempted seduction of Allen, and, in narrating it, Allen's attempted seduction of the psychoanalytic critic.Sarah Macfarlane's effort to unmask the gender politics that psychoanalytic critics arguably protect characterises her "socio-cultural analysis" (5) of "Kaddish" as unmistakably suspicious. While psychoanalytic critics "identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical context" (Barry 105), Macfarlane in her thesis "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg" locates Allen's "perception of Naomi as the 'Monster of the Beginning Womb'" in the social and historical context of the 1950s "concept of the overbearing, dominating wife and mother who, although confined to the domestic space, looms large and threatening within that space" (48). In so doing, she draws attention to the Cold War discourse of "momism," which "envisioned American society as a matriarchy in which dominant mothers disrupted the Oedipal structure of the middle-class nuclear family" (Macfarlane 33). In other words, momism engaged Freudian explanations of male homosexuality as arising from a son's failure to resolve unconscious sexual desire for his mother, and blamed mothers for this failure and its socio-political ramifications, which, via the Cold War cultural association of homosexuality with communism, included "the weakening of masculine resolve against Communism" (Edelman 567). Since psychoanalysis effectively colludes with momism, psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" is unable to expose its perpetuation in the poem. Macfarlane's suspicious reading of "Kaddish" as perpetuating momism radically departs from the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. Trigilio, for example, argues that "Kaddish" revises the Cold War "discourse of containment—'momism'—in which the exposure of communists was equated to the exposure of homosexuals" (781). "Kaddish," he claims, (which exposes both Allen's homosexuality and Naomi's communism), "does not portray internal collapse—as nationalist equations of homosexual and communist 'threats' would predict—but instead produces […] a 'Blessed' poet who 'builds Heaven in Darkness'" (782). Nonetheless, this blessed poet wails, "I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless" ("Kaddish" 212), and confesses his homosexuality as an overwhelming burden: "a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head"("Kaddish" 214). In "Confessing the Body," Gregory asks whether confessional poetry "disclose[s] secrets in order to repent of them, thus reinforcing the initial negative judgement that kept them secret," or "to decathect that judgement" (35). While Allen's confession of homosexuality exudes exhilaration and depression, not guilt—Ginsberg critic Anne Hartman is surely right that "in the context of [the 1950s] public rituals of confession and repentance engendered by McCarthyism, […] poetic confession would carry a very different set of implications for a gay poet" (47)—it is pertinent to question his confession of Naomi. Does he expose Naomi in order to applaud or condemn her maternal transgressions? According to the logic of the Cold War "urge to unveil, [which] produces greater containment" (Trigilio 794), Allen's unveiling of Naomi veils his desire to contain her, unable as she is "to be contained within the 1950's [sic] domestic ideal of womanhood" (Macfarlane 44). "Ginsberg has become such a public issue that it's difficult now to read him naturally; you ask yourself after every line, am I for him or against him. And by and large that's the criticism he has gotten—votes on a public issue. (I see this has been one of those reviews.)" (Shapiro 90). Harvey Shapiro's review of Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) in which "Kaddish" first appeared illuminates the polarising effect of Ginsberg's celebrity on interpretations of his poetry. While sympathetic readings and romantic portrayals are themselves reactions to the "hostility to Ginsberg" that prevails (Perloff 223), often they do not sprout the intellectual vigour and fresh perspectives that a hermeneutic of suspicion has the capacity to sow. Yet it is difficult to read confessional texts such as "Kaddish" suspiciously; they appear to expose themselves without need of a suspicious reader. Readers of "Kaddish" such as Breslin are seduced into sympathetic biographical-psychoanalytical interpretations due to the poem's purported confession of Ginsberg's autobiography. As John Osborne argues, "the canon of Beat literature has been falsely founded on biographical rather than literary criteria" (4). The result is that "we are for the immediate future obliged to adopt adversarial reading strategies if we are to avoid entrenching an already stale orthodoxy" (Osborne 4). Macfarlane obliges in her thesis; she succeeds in reading "Kaddish" suspiciously by resisting its self-inscribed psychoanalysis to expose the gender politics of Allen's exposés. While Allen's confession of his homosexuality suggests that "Kaddish" subverts a heterosexist model of masculinity, a suspicious reading of his exposure of Naomi's maternal transgressions suggests that the poem contributes to momism and perpetuates a sexist model of femininity. Even so, a suspicious reading of a text such as "Kaddish" "contains a tacit tribute to its object, an admission that it contains more than meets the eye" (Felski 230). Ginsberg's own prophetic words bespeak as much:The worst I fear, considering the shallowness of opinion, is that some of the poetry and prose may be taken too familiarly, […] and be given the same shallow treatment, this time sympathetic, as, until recently, they were given shallow unsympathy. That would be the very we of fame. (Ginsberg, Deliberate 252)ReferencesBarry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Breslin, James. "The Origins of 'Howl' and 'Kaddish.'" On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 401–33.Edelman, Lee. "Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 553–74.Felski, Rita. "Suspicious Minds." Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34. Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. London: Penguin, 2000.---. "Kaddish." Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 209–27. ---. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958–1996. Ed. David Carter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Grace, Nancy M. "Seeking the Spirit of Beat: The Call for Interdisciplinary Scholarship." Rev. of Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester, by Ben Giamo, and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, by John Lardas. Contemporary Literature 43.4 (2002): 811–21.Gregory, Elizabeth. "Confessing the Body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the 'Real.'" Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 22–49. Hartman, Anne. "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg." Journal of Modern Literature 28.4 (2005): 40–56. Howl. Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Perf. James Franco. Oscilloscope Pictures, 2010.Macfarlane, Sarah. "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg." MA thesis. Brown U, 1999.Nicol, Bran. "Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation." Literature and Psychology 45.1/2 (1999): 44–62.Osborne, John. "The Beats." A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. Blackwell Reference Online. Ed. Neil Roberts. 2003. 16 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=1205/tocnode?id=g9781405113618_chunk_g978140511361815&authstatuscode=202›.Perloff, Marjorie. "A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties." Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990. 199–230.Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Shapiro, Harvey. "Exalted Lament." Rev. of Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960, by Allen Ginsberg. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 86–91. Shreiber, Maeera Y. "'You Still Haven't Finished with Your Mother': The Gendered Poetics of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg." Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 46–97.Trigilio, Tony. "'Strange Prophecies Anew': Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's Kaddish." American Literature 71.4 (1999): 773–95.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. 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