The framework of this paper is how to overcome, remember, and retell Soviet state-sponsored violence as the victim of these events.
Among the participants of a life stories` competition (1996) was Eric Talve, born in 1921. In 1940, the first year of the first Soviet occupation of Estonia, Eric ...
(Show more)The framework of this paper is how to overcome, remember, and retell Soviet state-sponsored violence as the victim of these events.
Among the participants of a life stories` competition (1996) was Eric Talve, born in 1921. In 1940, the first year of the first Soviet occupation of Estonia, Eric Talve was a high school student. The reason for his arrest was that a politically compromising anti-Soviet flyer was found in his school bag. His punishment was 5 years in a labour camp in the polar region, Vorkuta. Talve was released in 1946, but arrested a second time in 1949. There was no new accusation. The second five-year time he was „resettled“ beyond the Ural Mountains. He returned in 1953. As a youth Talve had been a Boy Scout and acquired basic first aid skills which came in handy the first time he was in the Gulag. When he returned to Estonia, he worked as a pharmacist`s assistant.
The case study of Eric Talve presented in this paper is based on his autobiographical accounts. Talve has written about his life story in more genres and versions than anyone I know: life narrative, diary notes, several plays, short stories. Talve declares that all of his works are autobiographical, explaining that he has shifted from the documentary narrative toward the fictional because he believes fiction is more valuable. Moving back and forth from oral to written form, it seemed that he had found an anchor for his written work in the Tartu Literary Museum`s Life Stories collection..
It often thought that when people narrate their lives, one version of the life story is selected out and „sticks,“ while the others recede or disappear. However, Talve`s writing strategy seems to prove the opposite. His desire to write was activated by finding a addressee—that is, the archive. On the other hand writing and reading his stories out loud helped him to define himself socially, specificallyt as a former political prisoner and survivor of the Soviet Gulag.
In his old age, Talve had an unlimited amount of time to occupy himself with his memoirs. Talve has a characteristic sense of humour; if his first version of an event or episode is in the tragic mode, subsequent rewritings shift into comedy, with more and more of the absurd. Talve`s favourite genre is the anecdote – originally an oral genre, which depends on the performance skill of the narrator. Working in a pharmacy after his return to Estonia provided Talve with enough strange experiences to feed his narrative imagination. His main narrative line, about his experiences in the Gulag is tragic—it could not be otherwise. However, by continuing to explore this narrative material, he surrounds it with small anecdotal stories.
Talve does not want to forget; he wants to keep telling stories. Remembering may reawaken trauma, but Talve neutralizes it with humour .Thus he positions himself at the border between oral and written history, presenting his tale with repetitions and variations.
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