| This dissertation concerns the interpretation of the pseudo-autobiographical writings of Osip Mandelstam, Chingiz Aitmatov, Yuri Trifonov, and Andrei Makine.; The first chapter contains a brief overview of literary theory relevant to my thesis, including theory about genre study and about autobiographical genres. Since Andrew Baruch Wachtel was the first to formulate a definition of the pseudo-autobiography, in The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), a summary of his main points is provided.; In subsequent chapters, I analyze the following works from the point of view of pseudo-autobiography: Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp and The Noise of Time, Aitmatov's Jamila, Trifonov's The House on the Embankment and Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers. I discuss the form, content, and voice structure of each work; Besides arguing that these works can be read as pseudo-autobiographies, I show that the genre has undergone formal, structural, and thematic changes since the October Revolution. The final chapter is a comparative one, in which I discuss how these new pseudo-autobiographies compare to their predecessors and to each other. For example, innovations in narrative structure have taken place, as illustrated in Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp and Trifonov's The House on the Embankment, which feature shifts between first and third person narration. Writers of more recent pseudo-autobiographies have also experimented with the amount of autobiographical material used. As a result, Wachtel's definition requires some revision in order to reflect these modifications.; Furthermore, the works studied by Wachtel have certain themes in common. Not all of the traditional themes occur in the texts I analyze, while new ones reflecting the Soviet period appear, such as collectivization, Stalin's purges and World War II. Another theme that is prevalent among my chosen texts is the creation of a work of literature or art. |
