| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1104368 | Russian Literature | 2007 | 36 Pages |
This essay explores the specific strategies Alexander and Natalie Herzen use to weave the personal stories of their family drama into the grand narrative of history. Ilya Kliger traces the “emplotment”, or narrative organization of events, shaped by plots and tropes borrowed from literature. He deals with Natalie's letters and journal entries from 1848–1852 and with Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, paying special attention to Section Two of Book Five of the memoirs. Kliger's close reading of the two sets of texts reveals that both Natalie and Alexander Herzen, in trying to situate, by narrative means, their personal experiences in the wider social context, are guided primarily by the master trope of synecdoche. Their conception of history is essentially organicist, leading them to perceive their lives as microcosmic figurations of the historical totality of which they are parts. The essay also suggests a way of reading Herzen's account of the drama as a polemic with Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit and with the pattern of the Bildungsroman.
