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Abstract:

In this paper, I consider the relationship between art, publication practices, memory, and the production of a public persona in and in relation to Soviet Uzbekistan. Specifically, I examine memoirs written by (mostly Russian) artists or prominent figures in artists’ circles in Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of their memoirs, however, were published from the late 1960s until the early 1990s, and recounted events that had happened decades earlier. In some ways, from the 1960s onward, there was more space within officially published Soviet texts to discuss art and artists who had been repressed in the 1930s. However, these memoirs still skewed or evaded critical narratives, and only some artists from the period were given such a platform. Looking at these sources, this paper asks: What does an analysis of the narratives of these memoirs reveal about autobiographical practices in and about Uzbekistan in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period? How do these narratives change over time? How does such a reading complicate existing histories of art in Uzbekistan the 1920s and 1930s? And what particularities are present in the case of Uzbekistan that push against scholarship on autobiographical writing in the Soviet Union? Through answering these questions, this paper contributes to studies on Soviet autobiographical practices, which have mainly looked at autobiographical works published in the interwar period and written within the Russian SFSR. Rather, this paper shifts the focus to autobiographical practices of the late Soviet period and within or about Uzbekistan. Similarly, while these memoirs have been used as sources in the works of historians writing on art in Uzbekistan in the interwar period, the focus has largely fallen on their presented timelines and events, rather than on narrative forms, publishing practices, or the production of subjectivities across a temporal divide.