The Refraction of the Self

The Project

The Refraction of the Self. Autobiographical Forms and Genres and Memoirs in Russian Culture of 19th and 20th C.

Numerous essays and monographs, both in Russia and in the West, have been devoted to the theme of writing the self (in different genres and forms, such as autobiography, biography, autobiographical fiction, diary, correspondence, memoirs) in Russian literature. These works, diverse in their value, theme and approach, give an idea of the interest shown by critics towards the literature of the self, but also outline how fragmentary they are under a methodological and epistemological point of view. Therefore, in order to highlight the typological and structural features of the many genres, the need for a monographic study on the topic seems more and more urgent.

The main target of the proposed research project can be considered as the more innovative aspect: the creation of a permanent observatory on the literary and artistic culture of self expression in all its various genres and forms. One of the instruments used by the observatory will be (containing bibliographical indexes, published and unpublished texts, critical materials and practical resources). The Web portal's open content feature will encourage the efficient cooperation between the members and the diffusion to the international scientific community of critical works produced by the research group. The other tool will be the online journal (that will also have a printed version): it will have monographic issues on the themes of autobiography and contiguous genres and will contain the proceedings of the two study days planned at the end of the first and second years.

In order to offer for the first time an articulate but compact monographic study on the theme of autobiographical and memoirs genres, the proposing research group intends to utilize different approaches (historical-literary and textual analysis, genetic criticism, cultural studies) that are typical of the various cultures of each member. This way, a typological and structural enquiry on autobiographical genres will be offered.

The methodology and the results sought have the objective of giving an important status in the international network to the studies on the representation of the self in Russian culture, restoring its prestige given by the high value of the literary works produced and by the importance that this genre has always had in Russian historical and cultural space.

The project, following the theoretical debate blossomed in the United States of America and in France, aims at reconstructing the genesis of the autobiographical and contiguous forms between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth centuries, paying attention to the artistic genres of portrait and self portrait. The group will try to define the still open issues on the terminology and genre definition. In particular, autochthonous (especially those of hagiography and of chronicles) and foreign (especially the confession) models that cross into modern Russian memoirs and autobiographies will be examined. Moreover, the corpus of English, French, German, Czech and Polish autobiographies, memoirs and diaries of different centuries will be compared, paying particular attention to women's literature.

Some less studied genres, such as the autobiographical prose in Russian press during the second half of the Nineteenth century, the “zhurnal-dnevnik”, developed around the Seventies of the Nineteenth century, and the autobiography on commission (already widespread in Russia in the Eighteenth century) will be analysed.

Some corpora that have never been studied, such as Gogol's and Tolstoy-Chertkov's correspondence (partly unpublished to date) will be taken into special consideration. Regarding memoirs, a textual and theoretical study of the “biography of trauma” in the Soviet context will be pursued through the analysis of gulag memoirs.

Through detailed textual analyses, the fictional procedures typical of modernist and postmodernist autobiography, biography and autofiction will be investigated.

Director: Claudia Criveller

Contact us: Andrea Gullotta