“Nostalgia not for the Past”. Content analysis of the memories of Soviet women academics (1950–1990s)

Abstract

The poetic line of Andrey Voznesensky “not nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for the present” is interpreted as the content of the collective female memory of the life of scientific institutions that were part of the USSR Academy of Sciences. And as the memory of details in everyday life lost during the years of perestroika – it is precisely that everyday life of the academic community that is as a manifestation of the “present” – real satisfaction with their work, real involvement in their professional work, as the absence of doubt in the correctness of the choice of life path. An analysis of the Russian experience of the academic life anthropology, which emerged in the 2010s as an independent direction in the anthropology of everyday life, shows the heuristic possibilities of applying content analysis approaches to such sequences of biographical stories. The gender aspect of such memories (“autogynographs”) as an independent approach to obtaining special aspects of the everyday history of the Soviet past that has not been studied before. How did the collectivity of the life in the former research institutes remain in the memory of women scientists of the older generation? Why does the older generation of female researchers have a desire to share the details of their former lifestyle, nostalgically reporting small details? What engraved in the memory of that older generation of women scientists, whose talents were realized during the Khrushchev thaw and the Brezhnev stagnation, and what is the relationship between the official discourse of collective memory and the individual image of the institute past, which is remembered and heard in oral biographies?