Autobiographies and Soviet Trauma: Ol’ga Adamova- Sliozberg's Case. Preliminary Remarks

The present article proposes a first reconstruction of the complex editorial path of Ol’ga Adamova-Sliozberg’s memoirs Put’ [Path]. The ultimate goal of the research is to provide a coherent analytical rendering of the genesis and textual dynamics of the work and to understand whether some authorial and editorial choices may be seen as traces of trauma. Bearing in mind the perspective of trauma – considered here as a potentially useful interpretative key in cases where textual or structural clues can be detected – it is possible to read the cultural documents linked to the memory of Soviet repression also in terms of their linguistic and compositional signals. Thus, the philological work on the texts by authors who underwent repression may help to get a clearer understanding of the relation between trauma and representation in autobiographical works.