Life Writing of Dissenters in the Soviet Union (1960ies-1980ies)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Mirja Lecke
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263485568

The production of literary, documentary, and political texts and their circulation was one of the most important activities of dissenters in the Soviet Union. Many dissenters also kept diaries, wrote memoirs or engaged in other forms of life writing. While these texts more or less explicitly claim to authentically represent reality, they nonetheless arise as a construction based on literary strategies. The latter in turn are and influence the society's discoursive structure. In the framework of the research group's set of questions and assumptions we want to describe these texts as plural aesthetic as well as socio-cultural phenomena. For this, we will combine literary and rhetorical analysis with discourse analysis derived from cultural sociology. Thus we will be able to determine the literary features of the texts, but also to describe the dissenters' life writing in relation to notions and models of subjectivity: how do they represent everyday practices, where does life writing itself figure in the texts and what does this say about dissent as a way of life? Dissenters' life writing has not yet been studied systematically. Most texts so far served as mere source material for the historiography of Soviet dissent and received hardly any attention as literary works. Moreover, dissent has not yet been thoroughly studied as a subject culture. Out of the research topics that the research group proposes to investigate the following will be of particular importance for this subproject: 1. norms and deviation from norms: how are they modeled in the literary text, 2. concepts of the public sphere and privacy as well as their connection with certain topics and stylistic conventions, 3. literary constructions of histories of dissent in Russia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants