Avtobiografija

Introduction: Socialist Trauma and the Self

2026-09-13T18:34:34+02:00

Introduction to the second part of the special issue on the autobiography of Socialist Trauma.

Dying by Instalments, the Cannibalism of a Regime

2026-09-13T18:42:09+02:00

The paper analyses certain aspects of the narration of trauma in one of the best-known Slovenian novels thematising the violence of the Yugoslav regime in the 1940s and 1950s, Umiranje na obroke [Dying by Instalments, 1984], by the playwright and prose writer Igor Torkar (1913-2004). The paper contextualises the novel in the historical situation in Slovenia during the Second World War and in the period immediately after it, and relates it to other earlier and later representations of these themes in Slovenian literature.

A ‘Microhistory’ of Trauma and Collective Memory: Aleksandar Aleksiev and the Goli Otok Experience

2026-09-13T18:47:24+02:00

This paper analyses the written testimony of the Macedonian writer Aleksandar Aleksiev, which recounts his internment on Goli Otok, the Yugoslav political labour camp established in the aftermath of the Tito-Stalin split. It focuses on Aleksiev’s subjective experience of the mechanisms of political repression, and ideological re-education.
The conceptual framework is grounded in Theodor Adorno’s notion of working through trauma and its subsequent elaboration by Dominick LaCapra, who distinguishes between acting out and working through trauma in both individual and collective contexts. Within this theoretical paradigm, Aleksiev’s testimony is understood not merely as a personal reckoning with past violence, but as a site of collective working through of trauma in post-Yugoslav societies. His account represents the experiences of Goli Otok inmates and could thus become part of a more inclusive and critical public memory.
By bringing Aleksiev’s narrative into a dialogue with trauma theory and historiography, this paper argues that literary and testimonial texts are crucial to the process of collectively working through trauma. They enable the articulation of suppressed experiences, foster empathetic identification, and open a discursive space for re-evaluating the legacy of state violence. Aleksiev’s testimony, in this sense, becomes not only a record of individual suffering but also a medium through which society might begin to confront and integrate traumatic pasts into a shared historical consciousness.

The Remains of the Self: Trauma, Gender, and the Residue of Soviet State Violence in Nina Bardina’s My Life

2026-09-13T18:53:44+02:00

This paper examines the representation and interconnection of trauma and identity in the memoir My Life [Moia zhizn'] by Nina Bardina. It focuses primarily on sexual violence as an essential aspect of women’s gendered experience in the Gulag. The article demonstrates how Bardina’s narrative overcomes the taboos that surround the issue of violence as well as the silence and inability to speak linked with trauma. Using the approaches of trauma studies, it aims to trace the textual presence of trauma and to examine how the process of writing might become a means of coping with it. It shows how, on the one hand, the narrator’s identity is destroyed by the impact of state violence and, on the other hand, is reasserted through the very act of writing and recording her own experiences and the crimes of the Soviet state.

The Gulag of Polish Poets. Shame and Guilt in Poetry Born from Traumatic Experiences

2026-09-13T18:57:33+02:00

Drawing on several poetic texts written in Soviet labour camps, this paper aims to identify and investigate the functions and determinants of moral emotions, with reference to the so-called evaluative self-conscious emotions (shame and guilt) and to the differences between them in terms of cognitive evaluation and regulation strategies. More specifically, the article deals with the role of these emotions on the cognitive processing of the traumatic event in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Blood, Stigmata and The Prison Cell: Trauma and Redemption in Radu Gyr’s Detention Poetry

2026-09-13T19:00:48+02:00

Poetry produced in the prisons of communist Romania still represents a lost page in the history of European literature, as it has so far received less attention from critics than prose and memoirs. In this contribution, after some preliminary reflections on Romanian Gulag poetry, I will propose a close reading of Radu Gyr’s poetry, focusing in particular on the two posthumous cycles The Blood of the Prison [Sângele temniței] and Stigmata [Stigmate] and on some recurring themes and motifs in his prison poetry: the infernal space of the prison and the cell, blood and wounds, which converge in the shocking image of the stigmata. By analysing how these themes evolve and change in the author’s poetic universe, I will demonstrate that Radu Gyr, through his search for a sacred, ritual, and cathartic language, transformed the brutality of imprisonment into poetry, making his poetic art not only a testimony to trauma, but also an act of inner healing.

The Biography and Poetry of the Udmurt Poet Kuzebai Gerd as an Example of Repression of Ethnic Writers in Soviet Russia

2026-09-13T19:03:35+02:00

This article focuses on one less known episode in the history of repression in the Soviet Union. The Stalinist terror has been widely investigated. Still, it has been examined most from the point of view of the centre, from the capital cities, and less from the provinces. Moreover, a topic to which not enough attention has been devoted is the systematic attack on Russia’s nationalities, which had so much benefitted from the early Soviet system. At some time, they had become a threat, emphasising their differences from the dominant ethnic group, as they had been formerly encouraged to do. Among the first nationalities to suffer were the Udmurts. The present article concentrates on a representative case study, that of the Udmurt poet Kuzebai Gerd, who had acquired the status of a rising star for the newly promoted Udmurtness before being repressed.

Authors

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Scherbakova, Irina. 2024. Le mani di mio padre. Una storia di famiglia russa (Milano: Mimesis), pp. 477.

2026-09-13T19:30:41+02:00

Szyszko-Grzywacz, Anna. 2024. La mia vita nel gulag. Memorie da Vorkuta 1945-1956 (Milano: Guerini e associati), pp. 191

2026-09-13T19:32:44+02:00

Ветлугина, Анна; Максименко, Дмитрий. Таривердиев. Москва: Молодая Гвардия, 2025. 239 с.

2026-09-13T19:35:58+02:00

Interview with Egana Dzhabbarova

2026-09-13T19:26:55+02:00

Egana Dzhabbarova is a poetess, a novelist, and PhD. She was born and raised in Ekaterinburg by Azerbaijani parents. Her life has been characterized by continuous moves from Russia to Istanbul, Baku and then Germany (with a year-long stay in Taiwan in 2022).
She is the author of the novels Руки женщин моей семьи были не для письма (The Hands of My Family’s Women Were Not for Writing, No Kidding Press, Dzhabbarova 2023), Дуа за неверного (Dua for the Infidel, NLO, Dzhabbarova 2024), Terra Nullius (NLO, Dzhabbarova 2025) and of the poetry collections Босфор (Bosphorus, Dzhabbarova 2015), Поза Ромберга (Romberg’s Pose, Dzhabbarova 2017), Красная кнопка тревоги (Red Alert Button, Dzhabbarova 2020) and the collection Деколониальность: настоящее и будущее. Сборник статей (Decoloniality: Present and Future, Gorizontal’, Dzhabbarova 2022). Her poems have been shortlisted for the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize (2019) and published in international anthologies, such as F-Letter (Britain), DEARS (Switzerland), and PENopp (Sweden).
In this interview, Dzhabbarova reflects on autofiction as a form of resistance, on Russophone literature beyond the imperial canon, and on writing in Russian in the context of war, exile, and dissent. The interview was conducted by Michela Romano in May 2025.

Ricordi sul caso Vera Zasulič di A. F. Koni. Autoritratto di un giudice

2026-09-13T19:07:13+02:00

A. F. Koni’s Recollections of the Vera Zasulich Case offers a cross-section of social history useful for reconstructing the macrohistory of the Russian judicial Counter-Reformation together with the microhistory of the many characters who crowded Russia’s dungeons and courtrooms in the 1870s. In these pages, Judge Koni retraces the milestones of the procedural history of revolutionary Vera Zasulich and writes about himself as a judge, his own idea of justice, and the factors that led him away from criminal law. Koni is self-deprecating throughout this account of those days of great upheaval, above all in his dialogues with Minister of Justice K. I. Palen. Koni, blamed for neither convicting Zasulich nor resigning, defends his actions and the institution of the popular jury. This article reevaluates Koni’s self-portrait on the basis of his dialogues with Palen and his chosen evaluative lexicon.

Representations of Growing up in Wartime In the Contemporary Croatian Novel

2026-09-13T19:10:35+02:00

The paper explores the issues of growing up in specific circumstances in Croa-
tia in the first half of the 1990s − significantly those determined by the collapse
of Yugoslavia, the war in newly formed Croatia and the neighbouring state of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the large number of refugees and exiles
from war-torn areas − as the thematic axis of a relevant number of contempo-
rary Croatian novels. The study focuses on five novels: Underground Barbie [Sloboština Barbie, 2008] by Maša Kolanović; The Hotel Tito [Hotel Zagorje, 2010] by Ivana Simić Bodrožić; In Late Summer [U kasno ljeto, 2022] by Magdalena Blažević, Cabbage Leafing [Listanje kupusa, 2023] by Igor Beleš; and The Croat Factory [Tvornica Hrvata, 2023] by Nebojša Lujanović. These novels were not initially conceived as childrenʼs or young adult novels but function as a kind of mediation space between childrenʼs literature and adult literature (so-called crossover literature) due to certain characteristics – child protagonists, issues related to growing up, the context of the peer group, the relation between the world of youth and the world of adults, the questioning of associated socio-psychological phenomena (wartime trauma, hatred, violence, exclusion, political and economic transition, gender and class deprivation, etc.). The latter is confirmed by the inclusion of some of them in primary or secondary school lists of required reading (The Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić). Through analytical examination of the motifs, themates, and concepts, and worldviews present in the selected novels, we observe the representation of growing up in a collision with the semantic, narrative, linguistic and stylistic aspects of their structure and establish the typology of several different models of growing up in the modern Croatian novel. Special attention is paid to the dimension of autobiographism generated through the relationship of instances of author, narrator, and character, whereby the autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical nature of all novels is observed as their common structural feature. Also, in all the novels analysed here, war becomes a kind of platform for accelerated maturation and, at the same time, a site of implicit social criticism.

Remembering the (Post)War in Svetlana Alexievich and Ludmila Ulitskaya

2026-09-13T19:14:35+02:00

This article examines two non-fictional texts composed from the privately communicated memories of historical witnesses to present an ethnography of Soviet childhood during the Second World War and the early post-war year: Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses. An Oral History of Children in World War (1985) and Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Childhood 45–53. And Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness (2013). How do these texts ‘stage’ post-war memories, given that they both draw on the sensation of dislocation generated by temporal chasms in the process of recreating the childhood memories of now-adult survivors? How do these texts establish a connection between the remembered experience and the process of remembering, particularly considering the epistemic split that arises not only between a child and an adult witness, but also between a child and his or her family members as they mediate the traumatic war experience? Finally, how do narrated memories forge a link between the remembered child and the remembering adult?

Biographical Canon in the Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1930s: On the History of Formation

2026-09-13T19:18:42+02:00

The article analyzes the history of the formation and development of the Soviet children’s literature’s biographical canon. This study traces the roots of Soviet biographical tradition to its origins in revolutionary eulogies, which were respectively rooted in the ancient traditions of life writing and Christian hagiographies of the saints. Many Bolshevik Party Leaders, like Vladimir Lenin and Sergei Kirov, had multiple books written about their childhood times; Stalin, however, stood as a unique exception: despite the flourishing of political biographies for children in the 1930s, Stalin’s early life was kept out of public cultural discourse. This paper investigates the reasons for creating a biographical canon within children’s literature, arguing that Stalin was the only exception to the rule. The article addresses the pedagogical approach that dominated these life-writing narratives, discusses the style of political biographies written for children, and analyses the creation of a new heroic pantheon for the upcoming Soviet generation.

Nastas'ja Kairova: dal processo giudiziario al giornalismo di guerra

2026-09-13T19:23:44+02:00

Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Kairova (1844–1888) was a trailblazing figure in late 19th-century Russia, notable for her groundbreaking autobiographical writings and role as a war correspondent. Accused of a crime of passion in 1876, Kairova became the centre of public debate, attracting attention from figures such as Fedor Dostoevsky. Despite her acquittal, she emerged as a writer unafraid to confront taboo subjects like mental illness, maternal ambivalence, and female sexuality. Her autobiographical works blend confessional literature with diagnostic narratives, offering rare insight into the fragmented self of a “new woman” navigating societal change during the Great Reforms. Kairova’s career as a war correspondent during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) broke gender barriers in journalism, showcasing a commitment to truth and innovation in reporting. This study examines Kairova’s multifaceted legacy, highlighting her contributions to Russian autobiographical literature, gender studies, and journalism.

Introduction to the fourteenth issue of AvtobiografiЯ

2026-09-13T11:39:21+02:00