Issue 4 (69)
| “AT HOME AMONG STRANGERS, A STRANGER AMONG HIS OWN”: IDENTIFICATION CODES IN THE MEMOIRS OF AINO KUUSINEN | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 2020 | Number | 4(69) |
| Pages | 136-144 | Type | scientific article |
| UDC | 82-94 | BBK | 84(4Ôèí) |
| Authors | Savkina Irina L. |
Topic | THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL IN EGO-DOCUMENTS |
| Summary | The article discusses the memoirs “The Lord Deposes his Angels” by Aino Kuusinen in the context of the study of genealogy and morphology of Soviet subjectivity. In the Soviet historiography Aino Kuusinen (1886–1970) is known as the wife of the prominent Finnish communist and Soviet politician Otto Ville Kuusinen and as the Comintern staff member. In the middle of 1930s she moved to Japan, where she was supposedly involved in espionage activities for the Soviet Union. From Japan, Kuusinen was summoned to Moscow where she was arrested in 1938 and was in prison until 1955. In 1965, Aino Kuusinen emigrated from the Soviet Union, and wrote her memoirs in German. The first Russian translation was published in 1989. The main addressee of Kuusinen’s memoirs was a Western, primarily Finnish, reader, and in that sense, both a Russian reader and a researcher act as an “unforeseen addressee”, what creates new opportunities for reading and interpretation. The article analyses the main principles of the construction of the author’s “I”, of her identity in ideological, ethnical and gender aspects; how the personal and the socially determined are combined in the identification codes, approved by the author, and in the models of self, constructed in the text as the most notable for the author. The main distinctive feature of Kuusinen’s memoirs as the egodocument is as follows: the narrative of the events of the Soviet epoch (1920–1950s) is presented by “a moral witness (A. Assman), who was inside the Soviet space, but at the same time was in the position of an other; who was in a situation of intercultural transformation or cultural hybridity. This position creates the optics of detachment in describing Soviet life, which is important for understanding the Soviet subject and the time when this subject was formed. | ||
| Keywords | Ego texts, memoirs, addressee of memoirs, Aino Kuusinen, identity, Soviet subjectivity | ||
| References |
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