writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

young adult memories. On the final page of The Family Chronicle, Rostopchina shared her regret that
her cousin Henrietta Freneau (1829‐1908), could not read this book. She ended her family history
with an ambiguous paragraph.
[Henrietta] was convinced that all the lovely qualities of her beloved mother, the
famous Countess Sophia [de Ségur, née Rostopchina], were a maternal legacy and that
[her mother and grandmother] were venerated in the image of one another. This is what
stopped me for a long time. Yet the great word ‘Truth’ eliminated all that; I kneeled before
it (284).
Freneau's positive view of their grandmother revealed Rostopchina's own bias; the author could
not see that the grandmother she disliked was a beloved relative to others. Yet the author also
needed to share a depiction that countered her cousin's ideas. Rostopchina could have omitted her
cousin's views, but the imperative to present the past in all its uncertainties and complexities
demanded that she include Freneau's perspective. Seeking the truth about her grandfather's role in
the Moscow Fires and striving to present the truth about her mother's misunderstood poem,
Rostopchina ultimately confronted a truth about her herself.
Keywords: Russia, Family history, Memory
Laura Schlosberg, PhD
Assistant Director, Transdisciplinary Studies Program, Claremont Graduate University,
California, United States
laura.e.schlosberg@gmail.com
Notes
1
Lidiia Rostopchina, Semeinaia Khronika [1812 g.] trans. A. F. Gretman. (Moskva; Sankt Peterburg:
[Zvezda], ca. 1910 or 1912), 13.
2
Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and the Historical Practice. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998,) 8, 9‐10.
3
Thomas Sanders, “The Third Opponent: Dissertation Defenses and the Public Profile of
Academic History in Late Imperial Russia” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Professional
and Writing of History in a Multinational State ed. Thomas Sanders (New York: M. E. Sharpe,
1999), 73‐76. Google eBook; Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers
Confront the Past (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994). Tolstoy’s War and Peace
is one well‐known example.
4
Beth Holmgren, introduction to The Russian Memoir: History and Literature ed. Beth Holmgren
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003), xii‐xxxix.
5
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
2 nd edition. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010): 270‐271. The article they cite is
David Parker, “Narratives of Autonomy and Narratives of Relationality in Auto/Biography.” a/b:
Auto/Biography Studies vol. 19.1‐2 (Summer‐Winter 2004): 137‐55.
6
Arja Rosenholm and Irina Savkina, “‘How Women Should Write’: Russian Women’s Writing in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Women in Nineteenth‐Century Russia: Lives and Culture eds. Wendy Rosslyn
and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 161‐207, quote 169.
7
An English translation by Sibelan Forrester is available in Russian Women, 1698‐1917: Experience
and Expression, an Anthology of Sources eds. Robin Bisha, et. al. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002): 97‐99.
8
V. S. Kiselev, “Poetessa i Tsar (Stranitsa istorii russkoi poezii 40‐kh godov)” Russkaia literatura 1
416