Poetics of Traumatized Memory in Memoirs about the Soviet Past (Using the Example of Tamara Petkevich's Memoir Book "Life is an Unpaired Boot")

The project is devoted to the peculiarities of representation of the traumatized memory in the contemporary Russian writer Tamara Petkevich’s oeuvre. The object of the research is the first memoir book by Tamara Petkevich “Life is an Unpaired Boot” (1993) (Russian: “Жизнь – сапожок непарный” [Zhizn' – sapozhok neparnyj], English edition: “Memoir of a Gulag Actress”). The plot of the book is based on the personal fate of the writer, who spent several years in imprisonment in the Gulag and lost her family due to social disasters in the Soviet period. Thus, the purpose of the research is to identify the main elements of the poetics of memory of traumatic life experience in Petkevich’s book. The specificity of Petkevich’s creative manner lies in the fact that the author was not a professional writer. It is also important that these memoirs are at the intersection of documentary, fiction, and women's literature. It can be assumed that all these factors determined the uniqueness of the Petkevich’s narrative. It follows that the “Life is an Unpaired Boot” should be studied in the context of the trauma studies and in the framework of the biographical, historical, gender and literary approaches as well. The research draws upon theoretical works by Tartakovsky, Savkina, Kolyadich etc.