This study explores the relationship between memory of individual, private lives and the re-construction and writing of history. Memoirs and autobiographies written in Armenian and by Armenian participants in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and others began to appear soon after the revolution in 1913 and continued until the 1960s. These narratives challenge the dichotomy between private and public spheres as anecdotal experiences of individuals translate into a public discourse on nationhood. Drawing on memoirs and autobiographies themselves as well as theoretical works on memoirs and autobiographies, the paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which authors in writing their memories were cognizant of their own role as historical actors and as presenters of their experiences.
Through the act of committing
their memories to paper for a public audience, they and their readers
perceived them to be worthy of recollection. They attempted to shape the
memory of others while at the same time receiving group confirmation.
Without that kind of reaffirmation from the larger group, individual
memoirs would have withered away and not necessarily contributed to
history, identity, or collective memory. In other words, here the self
did not exist without the public audience. Therefore, as a genre,
autobiographies and memoirs carry within them a claim to public space.
As a form of political discourse, these narratives challenge us to
interrogate the ways that these activists/authors created a public space
in which narratives of individual and national creation coincided and
overlapped, thus bringing into existence a new systematic form in which
two seemingly dissimilar elements, private and public, meld into a
powerful vehicle of political transformation.
