S pozitsii svidetelia RU

It is well established in theory that trauma resists attempts to speak about it directly. At the same time, traumatic experience insistently demands to be told and shared. This collection brings together autofictional texts in which personal experience becomes a form of testimony. The representation of war, emigration and loss in these texts avoids closed narrative structures. On the contrary, the authors reject classical genre and narrative forms in favor of a search for a language capable of holding and making sense of transformative experience.

The autofictional stories, essays, long poems and plays written by students of the Smolny Beyond Borders project do not always strive for aesthetic wholeness. Their task is to preserve a trace of what was lived through and to share it with the reader. This collection is a document of its time, recording an attentiveness to the vulnerable experience of others.

Larisa Muravieva, lecturer and researcher of contemporary literature