RETICENCE AS A STRATEGY OF THE WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXT OF SOVIET TIMES

The subject of the study is the system of reticence techniques in the women’s autobiography of O.Ivanenko, the Ukrainian writer of the 20th century. Western theorists of women’s autobiography (M.Mason, E.Jelinek) considered relativity, fragmentation, nonlinearity as qualities that define it. However, the concept of L. Gilmore, who considers autobiography as a writing strategy that constructs its object, allows us to raise the question of the potential functions of constructive techniques in this text. These and many other studies analyze the autobiographies of women in the Western world, leaving aside the writings of Eastern Europeans, however, the works of those who had to live in Soviet conditions are of particular interest for various reasons. The aim of the proposed study is to show the peculiarities of the creation and functioning of the women’s autobiographics in ideological societies on the example of Oksana Ivanenko’s memoirs Always in Life. The research methodology is based on women’s studies and discursive analysis. As a result of the study, it was found that in Ivanenko’s memoirs the theme of creative self-realization and literature as a whole pushes aside the narrative that Western theorists consider to be the main one for women's biography: comprehending their own female experience (first of all, love, marriage, motherhood). The relativity, embodied in the genre of the essay, allowed the author to talk about oneself, when she wanted it, and at the right moment to return to the pseudo-object. The non-linearity of the narrative helps to emphasize advantageous moments and to avoid forced chronology. But fragmentation and heterogeneity allow the woman writer not to build a holistic narrative about oneself, but to offer «flickering» content to readers. Thus, feeling ideological pressure, the author escaped memories not only of the difficult period in Ukrainian history, but also of important events in her life, ignoring her true experience. This means that an autobiographical work may be called upon not to record a true experience but to create a socially acceptable version of the writer.

“Distinguished Ladies” and the Doctrine of Womanhood: Auto-surveillance and Auto-performance in Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata

This essay reads Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata as form of auto-performative ‘anti-manual’ which employs a range of autobiographical forms and functions in protest of codes of womanhood published in an actual manual of women’s con-duct authored by Augusto Pinochet’s First Lady and enforced by his regime’s National Secretariat of Women which organized forms of auto-surveillance by which women policed themselves and one another. It argues that if the NSW functioned as a mechanism for the surveillance and discipline of women in Pi-nochet’s police state, Eltit’s text functions as a subversive auto-performance of Chilean womanhood offered in protest against the state censorship of women’s autobiography. The reading demonstrates the ways in which E. Luminata stra-tegically performs Eltit’s own public self-representation of womanhood which, although meant to be impossible, is not unattainable in the regime. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on October 19th 2015 and published on October 17th 2017.