A Girl from the Sunny City: An Autobiography of 'Oriental' Soviet Childhood in Dina Rubina’s and Narine Abgaryan’s Fiction

• In Event: A Childhood in the "Orient": Autobiographical Reflections through the Lens of the Soviet Experience

Abstract

Paper Abstract
Provide a 1-3 sentence description of paper, in language that would be clear to someone who is not a specialist on the topic. My paper presents an analysis of how emotional memory transforms into an autobiography of girlhood in the Soviet “Orient”—Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and a provincial town in Armenia in Dina Rubina’s On the Sunny Side of the Street and Narine Abgaryan’s Maniunia respectively. I look at how memory passes through a filter of narrative priorities—a hierarchy of themes, motifs, and paradigms set by the author in her attempt to establish and define a unique, personal connection between her present and former states of consciousness and between ethnically tinged experiences and pervasive (or invasive) Soviet practices.

Author

• Anastasia G Kostetskaya, U of Hawai'i at Manoa