Four strangers, life on the margins

n the history of Russian literature, The Life of Archipriest Avvakum, The Memoir of the Princess Natal'ia Borisovna Dolgorukaia, and Notes and Quotes by Mikhail Gasparov are among the most familiar autobiographies. In this dissertation, I argue that these texts are actually strange autobiographies, but strange in ways that invite their comparison. The inclusion of an even more ancient text in this grouping, Afanasii Nikitin's Voyage beyond Three Seas, provides unexpected benefits for a clearer understanding of the autobiographical impulse. My analysis operates on two levels. First, I give a new interpretation of each text on its own terms. Second, I juxtapose them to reveal intimate meanings that otherwise would stay hidden behind the veil of their fame. The texts I chose share a particular quality of self-knowledge, namely, the effort to overcome an acute sense of self-estrangement through writing. Their prominence in literary history has obscured their failure in this effort. Although these texts vary dramatically in subject and style, time and space, self-estrangement is their common subject, and writing, as a modern method of realizing the ancient injunction, "know thyself," is their failed promise. Rather than constructing a tradition of autobiography based on direct influences, I want to illuminate family resemblances among them. All four of the authors were sensitive to the symbolic aspect of space, each, in their own way, made a distinctive contribution to the collective transformation of medieval spaces into modern distances. My readings bring forth the undiscovered eloquence of their marginality and sublimity of their revelations.