Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the daily life personal micro-stories of residents living in Kaunas micro-districts that were built in the soviet period. The main issue of the article - to examine relation between visual and textual narratives, also to analyze the processes of storytelling and textualizating

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the daily life personal micro-stories of residents living in Kaunas micro-districts that were built in the soviet period. Kaunas is the second largest city in Lithuania located in the geographical center of the country, during the interwar period it had temporarily become the capital of the country. After the Second World War, the city suffered from demographic changes caused by internal migration and a rapid industrialization process.

The main issue of the article - to examine relation between visual and textual narratives in soviet and postsoviet period, also to analyze the processes of storytelling and textualizating the experience. In analyzing micro-districts residents narratives, classical and modern ethnographic research methods were used: comparative and retrospective methods, content analysis of textual and oral narratives. While analyzing oral and visual narratives, the aim was to identify and distinguish the dominant thematic areas, leitmotifs or "worlds" (Young 1987). This paper is based on a fieldwork research conducted by the author at Kaunas in 2018.

Memory is the ability that allows us to shape self perception (identity) both on a personal and collective level (Assmann 2008: 109). In this paper oral and visual naratives are used as an access to reveal the identities created by memories. Analyzing memory narratives from the Soviet era, both major macro-narratives and micro-stories prevail. Individual micro-stories always have a relationship with other narratives - narratives of other people, major narratives - meta-narratives (Šutinienė 2013), as well with narratives of the local places and the community history.