"Wounded Narratives: Jewish Childhood Recollections in Post-Soviet Autobiogra

"Wounded Narratives: Jewish Childhood Recollections in Post-Soviet Autobiographical Discourse."

Questions frequently asked by Slavic scholars interested in modern culture and literature revolve around the issue of identity in the post-Soviet era. At the center of my inquiry is the intricate nature of childhood recollections of Jewish writers in post-Soviet Russia for whom the hybrid nature of life writing, with its blurred boundaries between its different forms, provided new opportunities for the reconstruction of their suppressed Jewish identity. I will be analyzing two Russian-Jewish childhood recollections published after the fall of the Soviet Union, namely Yuri Karabchievsky's The Life of Alexander Silber (1991) and Dina Rubina's Apples from Shlizbutter's Garden (1992).

Marina Balina is Isaac Funk Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University, USA. She is the author, editor and co-editor of 11 volumes, including Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (with Larissa Rudova, 2008), Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (with Evgeny Dobrenko, 2009,) The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Russian Literature (with Evgeny Dobrenko, 2011,) Constructing Childhood: Literature, History, Anthropology (2011), To Kill Charskaia: Politics and Aesthetics in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920s and 1930s (2014), and Hans Christian Andersen in Russia (forthcoming November 2018, University of Southern Denmark Press). The focus of her scholarship is on historical and theoretical aspects of twentieth-century Russian children’s literature, specifically the Soviet period. Her scholarly interests include the hybrid nature of life writing in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (autobiography, memoir, diary, and travelogue,) and she has published widely on this subject.

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Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

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(808) 956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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