Karin Sarsenov

The Constitution of a Reliable Self : Word for Word by Oleg Dorman and Lilianna Lungina

In July 2009, Oleg Dorman’s eight-hour documentary Word for Word was roadcast in five episodes on prime-time Russian television. Lilianna ungina (1920–1998), a translator and a witness to the purges of the Stalin period, tells her life story in front of the camera. There is no dramatization, only Lungina talking and occasional pictorial illustrations accompanying the narrative. The screening was a most unexpected success, and a book containing Lungina’s narrative soon became a bestseller. This achievement is perplexing in several ways. What in this plain and unobtrusive film managed to spellbind the Russian television audience, sated as it is with glamour and sensation? How come a simple life story that contributes little new information on the period in question became a major media event? Moreover, Lungina’s narrative is permeated with episodes, referred to as truthful descriptions of actual events, but to which she obviously was not an eyewitness. How come that she willingly puts her own credibility at risk, seemingly without fear of being accused of false testimony? I will argue that the question of subjectivity is crucial to understanding the cultural signification of this autobiographical narrative, as instanced in the film and the book.1 I will show how the narrative constructs a reliable subject position, taking recourse in normative conceptions of gendered identity.

Mirrors in Russian Women’s Autobiographical Writing : The Self Reflected in Works by Alla Demidova and Vera Luknitskaia

In autobiographical writing, the mirror is not only a privileged metaphor for the genre as a whole; it also functions as a primary administrator of boundaries, demarcating the space of the self from the foreign, the chaotic, the unknown. The mirror metaphor is not a gender neutral one: in Western elite culture the mirror has served to reinforce the patriarchal dichotomy between man/mind and woman/body, prompting Luce Irigaray’s view of the mirror as “a male-directed instrument of literal objectification.” This article examines two women-authored texts in which the mirror motif is fundamental to the construction of the autobiographical self: the actress Alla Demidova’s The Flying Line of Memory (2000) and the literary scholar Vera Luknitskaia’s Ego – Echo (2003). A close reading of the texts maps out the operations performed by the mirror and locates the boundaries delineated. The reading shows that the two authors are united by the fervency with which they affirm their social identity as members of the intelligentsia. Their gendered identity is expressed in terms of vulnerability, implicitly in Demidova, by the omission of all intimate detail, and explicitly in Luknitskaia, in reports of sexual assault. However, both have omitted one of the most frequently encountered uses of the mirror motif in European culture – to connote female vanity. In their work, the mirror is a productive literary device, affirming the feminine self. (Less)