Beginning with Glasnost in the Late 1980s Continuing into the Present, scores of personal accounts of life under Soviet rule, written throughout its history, have been published in Russia, In this book, Irina Paperno explores these memoirs, diaries, notes, and blogs to uncover common themes, cultural trends, and literary forms. The book argues that, diverse as they are, these narratives assert the historical significance of intimate lives shaped by catastrophic political forces, the terror under Stalin and World War II. When they appear in the public arena, such personal documents create a community where those who lived through the Soviet era gain access to one another's intimate lives. This community strives to forge a link to Russia's nineteenth-century intelligentsia: the Russian "intelligentsia" is an implicit subject lar, Notes about Anna Akhmatova by Lidiia Chukovskaia and a life story of Evgeniia Kiseleva, a barely literate former peasant. The book also analyzes dreams (most of them terror dreams) recounted in the diaries and memoirs of many authors, from peasants to writers to party leaders. History, Paperno shows, invade their dreams, too. Book jacket.

Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia, also from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. She is coeditor of several books, including Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism.