{"id":1082,"date":"2020-04-24T14:30:38","date_gmt":"2020-04-24T18:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/?p=1082"},"modified":"2020-04-24T14:30:38","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T18:30:38","slug":"another-life-of-soviet-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/2020\/04\/24\/another-life-of-soviet-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Life of Soviet History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Nancy Pellegrino<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yuri\nTrifonov, one of the most important Soviet writers of the 1960s and 1970s,\nfrequently turned to the everyday life of urban residents in his prose.  Trifonov explored topics such as how the past\ninformed the present, how to live an authentic life, and the moral compromises\nfrequently required by Soviet citizens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 1976 novella, Another Life,<\/em> Sergei Afanasievich\nserves as the key focal point for understanding Soviet society, as it closely\nfollows the thoughts of his wife, Olga Vasilievna, throughout\nevents from their early relationship and marriage to the months after he\nwidows her. Despite Olga and her mother-in-law\u2019s competition to be closer with\nSergei and their drastic personality\ndifferences, they both share a lack of capability to understand him and possess\ncontending beliefs about history and society compared to his views. This\ndifference separates him from his domestic life and contributes\nto Sergei being more absorbed and weakened by his work, though he has no raise\nin position or pay to show for it. In some regards, readers may pity Sergei; he\nfiercely resents submission and compliance, securing his position at the bottom\nof the ladder in the Soviet workplace. His insatiable\ndesire to understand history and how it connects everyone and everything to the\npast and even to the future creates conflict in\nseveral relationships throughout the plot. Because the narration closely\nreflects the thought process of the depressive\nand jealous Olga and her imperfect recollection of the past, the view the\nreader has of Sergei is often unreliable and incomplete. Therefore, the\nmajority of Sergei\u2019s thoughts and development are revealed through dialogue. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The narrator introduces the reader\nto Sergei first as a young and passionate historian. However, the passage of\ntime and support from his family did not lead Sergei to success at work or in\nfinishing his dissertation about the tsarist\nsecret police. Even after Sergei\u2019s death, Olga struggles\nto make meaning of his work, \u201cto her they were just series of names,\ndates, villages, counties, towns, code names, occupations, addresses. What\ncould anyone do with it all? She did not understand,\u201d\nand could not grasp the significance of history or appreciate the work it\nproduced (Trifonov 129). Olga is a biologist and regards history as the\nlinear process of reading and writing about events that will end up in the\narchives. This is a fundamentally different view of history compared to that of\nher husband. They occasionally discussed, to her astonishment, that Sergei\nperceives history as intertwined threads able to transcend death and time and\nconnect everyone to everything. He describes the, \u201cthread of human continuity\nfunction as a channel through which certain indestructible elements were\ntransmitted between the generations,\u201d and sees history as the work of following\nthese threads in order to make sense of everything and potentially predict\nwhere the threads of the future will go (114). Similar to Olga, Alexandra\nProkofievna, a long-time supporter of the\nCommunist Party and Soviet ideology, calls her\nson\u2019s lifetime of unconventional ideas delusional. Sergei\ntries to criticize his mother\u2019s obedient and uninspired ways of thinking by his response, \u201cwhereas over the same\nperiod you, Mother dear, have remained totally undisturbed by a single new\nidea,\u201d (178). Sergei reveals his distaste for the stagnation in the Soviet\nUnion and begins to argue with his mother about the possibility of anything\nafter death, an idea adamantly struck down by the\nstaunch atheism that was prominent in the Soviet Union. Sergei begins to\nconfide less and less in his wife and mother\nabout his work and whereabouts as he transitions from researching the February\nRevolution to the uncertainty of parapsychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to those closest to him not being able to understand him, Sergei runs into similar situations at the institute and in daily conversation. When interviewing an old informer, his drunken and uneducated grandson interrupts Sergei, \u201cWe learned all about history in school\u2026 there\u2019s only one history, and we don\u2019t need it anymore,\u201d and to which he replies, \u201chistory isn\u2019t mine it belongs to you, too, and to your grandfather. It belongs to everybody,\u201d (142-143). This emphasizes Sergei\u2019s idea of history as the entirety of truths that is accessible to everyone, contradicting the Soviet government\u2019s view of a future based strictly on their selective propaganda rather than on evidence from the past. Sergei goes even further to challenge the selectiveness of Soviet history when remarking, \u201cI wonder who decides what\u2019s expedient and what isn\u2019t? The academic council-by a majority vote?\u201d (95) during a debate about historical expediency with a colleague. He is also unable to abandon his truths of history and is unwilling to do special favors to boost his position, which were common at the time. Sergei\u2019s suborn adherence to his understanding of history results in the permanent delay of his dissertation and eventually, the reason for his resignation at the institute. He only wants to pursue the \u201ctruths\u201d and the future of contradictory sciences, which were viewed very negatively by many in the Soviet Union. With his death being accompanied by his unfinished dissertation and lack of progress in parapsychology, Trifonov\u2019s novella Another Life<\/em> ultimately deems Sergei Afanasievich as a character unfit for success in Soviet life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nancy Pellegrino is a second year student majoring in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Diplomacy and Global Politics<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By Nancy Pellegrino Yuri Trifonov, one of the most important Soviet writers of the 1960s and 1970s, frequently turned to the everyday life of urban residents in his prose.  Trifonov explored topics such as how the past informed the present, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":1083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}