Everyday epiphanies: Power, language, and stories in Czech and Russian autobiography of the 1970s

This dissertation examines conceptions of everyday life in first-person narratives by Czech and Russian authors from the 1970s. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 marked the end of the public project of reforming socialism "from above," through government initiative. Many writers responded by trying to re-invent themselves in everyday life, which potentially offered a more "authentic" alternative to the bankrupt ideology of the public sphere. Ultimately, my chosen authors were skeptical about this authenticity, but they likewise remained alive to its promise, intrigued by the oppositional charge that everyday life seemed to store.; In part one, "Power," I look at Vaclav Havel's vision, in The Power of the Powerless, of everyday life as a place where we can rediscover our authenticity and wield a newfound power. Ludvik Vaculik's diary, The Czech Dream Book, is more skeptical: Everyday life is contaminated by state power, but nevertheless we can find limited freedom through our self-description in the everyday. Part two, "Language," looks at the diaries of Jiri Kolar and Jan Zabrana, showing how the random surprises of "everyday speech" can counteract the ossified public discourse of Communism, but also lead to demoralizing self-fragmentation. Part three, "Stories," considers how Russian writers used everyday life to undermine the grand Soviet narrative of a revolutionary reconstruction of society. If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam still explore the struggle between revolution and everyday life, other writers---Natal'ia Baranskaia, Vladimir Voinovich, Iurii Trifonov, and Sergei Dovlatov---construct stories around trivial "non-events," bypassing the high drama of the regime's grand narratives or exposing them as irrelevant. {09}; I illuminate my chosen texts with a range of theorists: in part one, Foucault on power; in part two, Bakhtin and Lotman on the relation of the self to language; in part three, Morson, Bernstein, and de Certeau on the narrative structure of the everyday.; In the conclusion, I draw on Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self to sketch out a version of selfhood based on "everyday epiphanies"---epiphanies that, over time, illustrate our inability to construct inalienable selves, but also offer consolation in the sense of freedom (albeit ambiguous and temporary) that arises thereby.