Issue 4 (69)
| AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING OF L. D. TROTSKY DURING THE CIVIL WAR: POLITICS AND STYLISTICS | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 2020 | Number | 4(69) |
| Pages | 93-100 | Type | scientific article |
| UDC | 94(470):82-94 | BBK | 63.2(2)+63.3(2)612 |
| Authors | Reznik Aleksandr V. |
Topic | THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL IN EGO-DOCUMENTS |
| Summary | Leon Trotsky was not only an outstanding writer and speaker amongst Marxist politicians of his time, but he also could be named as one of the most well-known (auto)biographer. It was not only politics, that differed him from other high-ranking Bolsheviks, but it was a culture as well. Many of Trotsky’s rivals accused Trotsky of being extreme individualistic, alien to collectivist ideology. However, if to consider Trotsky’s biographical narratives in complex, the individualism was somewhat correct characteristic, as Trotsky indeed pointed the role of real persons, including of his own, in the history. Until recently, scholarly treatments of this issue have largely taken on Trotsky’s autobiography titled “My life: An Attempt at an Autobiography” (1929), yet this celebrated book had a certain background. The aim of article is to re-examine Trotsky’s literary and political activity in the context of his (auto)biographical texts, taking the period of the Russian Civil War as a case-study. The balance of pragmatics and poetics in his texts was reflected by Trotsky himself during the early period of the Civil War, when he publicly emphasized that he did not like the “military style”, but “got used to using the style of a publicist in life and literature”. Trotsky’s subsequent activities demonstrated that the balance between the dynamics of these two styles was determined not only by politics, but also by the author’s deeply rooted ideas about the place of his own “self” in writing. | ||
| Keywords | Trotsky L. D., autobiography, Revolution of 1917, Russian Civil War | ||
| References |
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