A book of love and devotion: a communist father’s image reconstruction in the daughter’s memoirs

Abstract

Problema voluminis 110 The author analyzes the combination of the writer's father's words about himself and people like him and the peculiarities of his transformation in the biographic narrative authored by his daughter. For Navarskaya the text about her father becomes one about herself too, and may be regarded as the work of an autobiographic memory that lasts as long as its owner's life. The contrast of two types of narrative-that of a father about himself and that of his daughter about him-turn out to be a powerful deconstructing mechanism of the text that tells more than the author initially meant. The text is complete compositionally, as it opens with a pathetic overture for a grave mourning where the possibility of a catharsis is inherently opposed to loyalty and is thus rejected for the sake of the father's memory as understood by the author of the genealogy .