Reading my personal “biography” in the secret-police speak of the files sends me back to a self I both recognize and don’t, creating another place of writing, which I could not have imagined before. I am caught in the conflict between the free, fluid language of memory and the shackled, impersonal language of surveillance reports.
Back in the USSR
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I’ve just finished reading two books on Russia, well, actually the old
USSR, set 30 years apart — one in the 1960s, and the other in the 1990s
when the USS...
4 years ago