Paperno argues that, diverse as they are, these narratives—memoirs, diaries, notes, blogs—assert the historical significance of intimate lives shaped by catastrophic political forces, especially the Terror under Stalin and World War II.
A deeply-informed account of Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience.
Analyzing a variety of sources—medical reports, social treatises, legal codes, newspaper articles, fiction, private documents left by suicides—Irina Paperno describes the search for the meaning of suicide. Paperno focuses on Russia of the 1860s–1880s.
Paperno argues that, diverse as they are, these narratives—memoirs, diaries, notes, blogs—assert the historical significance of intimate lives shaped by catastrophic political forces, especially the Terror under Stalin and World War II.