{"product_id":"stories-of-the-soviet-experience-9780801475900","title":"Stories of the Soviet Experience","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ePaperno argues that, diverse as they are, these narratives—memoirs, diaries, notes, blogs—assert the historical significance of intimate lives shaped by catastrophic political forces, especially the Terror under Stalin and World War II.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"With this, her third magisterial book, the eminent literary and cultural historian Irina Paperno moves from Russia's nineteenth into the twentieth century, of which she was a denizen and which is now history. As usual, Paperno works at the elusive borderline between 'raw life' and the 'meaning(s)' born from its foam. The riveting interest of the stories told by history's participants is matched by the sophistication of the analyst.\"—Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California\u003cbr\u003e\"The value and longevity of a book of personal 'stories' gathered from a traumatic era—and from a pool so vast—depends to a large extent on the scholarly wisdom, trustworthiness, and good taste of the gatherer. The stories must be singularly meaningful and at the same time representative; coherent for outsiders but not self-consciously crafted for them; and arranged under some unifying rubric that nevertheless does not depersonalize the subjects. Given the profusion of Soviet-era memoirs and diaries, such a book benefits from some new filter, information source, or angle of interpretation on the memory-material. Irina Paperno's Stories of the Soviet Experience satisfies all these criteria at the highest level. Who could have predicted that Russian e-journals would be inspired by great Stalin-era witnesses like Lydia Ginzburg, or that we could learn so much about the inner life of those times by tapping accounts of people's nightmares and dreams?\"—Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University\u003cbr\u003e\"Irina Paperno in her book deals with a form of art in which the Russians have always exhibited particular talent: the writing of autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries. With the help of her insightful analysis and long excerpts from the texts, we can, as we never could before, gain some knowledge and understanding of how the Soviet people, or at least intellectuals, perceived what was happening to their country. Through the description of the lives of concrete individuals, some famous, some not well known, she makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Soviet history.\"—Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Birth of the Propaganda State; Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49405152461143,"sku":"9780801475900","price":22.39,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780801475900.jpg?v=1730488896","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/stories-of-the-soviet-experience-9780801475900","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}