Strategies of Remembering: Fact and Fiction in Childhood Recollections of Post–Catastrophic Times

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Today, debates arise over how childhood memories serve as historical evidence, particularly regarding including invented, fantastic elements in these narratives. This aligns with Maurice Halbwachs' assertion that a person writing about such experience simultaneously relives and recreates their childhood, noting that "...it is an adult who recreates within and around themselves an entire vanished world, and this picture contains more fiction than truth" (The Social Frameworks of Memory, 1925). The roundtable participants will examine the relationship between fact and fiction in childhood memories, discussing how these texts testify to collective memory about historical cataclysms in the 20th and 21st centuries. This format will allow the exploration of genre characteristics and the relationship between rapidly changing public history and personal family narratives. The discussion will analyze diverse childhood memories through several lenses: documentary texts of individuals whose childhood coincided with collectivization (Maria Mayofis); memory and distortions in Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory (Sara Pankenier Weld); reexamination of Narine Abgaryan's Soviet Armenian childhood through the author's narrative priorities (Anastasia Kostetskaya); and the intersection of factual and fictional elements in Alexander Chudakov's A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps (Marina Balina.)

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Liliya Dashevski, Yale U

Roundtable Speakers

• Marina Balina, Illinois Wesleyan U

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

• Maria Mayofis, Amherst College

• Sara Pankenier Weld, UC Santa Barbara