What is it about?
The article explores the narrative strategies the interviewees adopted to let them present their lives as in a coherent way, despite the change in frame of reference. Four such strategies are discussed: sameness (unbroken loyalty to the former regime); biographical revisionism (distancing the self from the regime but retaining loyalty to the ideology); reversed temporality (privileging the past); and steering away (focusing on private life while ignoring its context).
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Why is it important?
The article offers personal perspectives on the communist past by contemporaries, and how they situate their biographies in the larger historical and social context. Certain characteristics of the biographical narratives can be linked to the lack of public and political consensus about what communism was and how this past should be dealt with.
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This page is a summary of: Negotiating Socialist Lives after the Fall. Narrative Resources and Strategies of the First Socialist Generation in Bulgaria, Südosteuropa, January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/soeu-2016-0029.
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