Borderland lives: historical reflections in Eastern Lithuanian life stories

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Pasakojimas; Prisiminimai; Karo atminimas; Pokaris; Autobiografiniai pasakojimai; Gyvenimo istorijos; Storytelling; Memoirs; War memory; Post-war; Autobiographical narratives; Life stories.

ENWhile conducting fieldwork in Eastern Lithuania in 2010-2012, a group of researchers focused their attention on collecting a series of autobiographical narratives (life stories) by the local people, which inevitably reflected painful moments in the people's historical experience. This experience-or, rather, its subjective interpretation-constitutes the object of this study. During recent decades, folklore research in Lithuania became increasingly entangled with history and sociology, since representatives of these branches of scholarship actively employ the method of oral history—namely, interviewing informants regarding their experiences and recollections of the past, and subsequently turning these interviews into historical sources available for research purposes. Generally, oral history researchers tend to focus on the "little people": not exceptional historical figures but the average village or city residents whose voices are still not sufficiently heard in the great global and national narratives. However, the original proponents of oral history are particularly concerned with problems of sufficient representation and reliability of their sources, since they are mostly interested in the factual side of the narratives. Folklorists, on the other hand, proceed from a different angle: they are mainly interested in whose viewpoint the story represents, and how this is revealed in the narration. "Thus, while historians focus on the event, folklorists concentrate on the reciprocal connections between the event and the narrator." In analyzing the narratives collected during our fieldwork, we were most concerned with what, in the course of each narrative, was remembered and what was suppressed; who the narrator identified with (whose side they took in the case of a conflict); which details the narrator considered important; which means of expression they used; and what all of this said about her or him.We analyzed not only what the person remembered, but also how they reflected upon it: why the things being told seem significant to the speaker, how they give meaning to their accumulated experience, etc. Material collected in oral interviews is also interesting and valuable because, in contrast to written autobiographies, it is "unpolished" and therefore offers the possibility of observing examples of authentic verbal and paraverbal expression: vivid expressions, repetitions, pauses, awkward moments, laughter, tears, silence, and the like. The form of the narration sometimes reveals its content from a completely unexpected angle, thus adding considerably to the possible interpretations of the narrative. Folklorists worldwide have already accumulated considerable experience in this kind of narrative analysis. When assessing autobiographical narratives from a folklorists, rather than a historians point of view, one is concerned not so much with revealing objective truths or with some kind of verification of accumulated memories, but rather with the subjective interpretation of these memories and with locating meaning within the narratives about them. It is interesting to observe how individual stories are capable of powerfully reflecting the great historical narratives and enriching them in various ways, thus revealing such narratives' fundamental multiplicity and the questionable foundations of their origins. [Extract, p. 88-90]