Narrating Resistance: Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg’s „The Thaw Generation” 1990

Abstrakt

The production and circulation of literary, documentary, and political texts were among the main activities of dissenters in the Soviet Union. Many of them also kept diaries or notebooks, wrote memoirs or engaged in other forms of life writing. While these texts more or less explicitly claim to authentically represent reality, they nonetheless arise as a construction based on literary strategies. The analysis of the latter in Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg’s The Thaw Generation is the subject of this article. We discuss the rhetoric of these memoirs focusing particularly on stylistic features and argumentative structures that are meant to grant the text credibility among American and Russian readers.