Barbara Ronchetti is an Italian scholar of Russian Literature. She wrote the first Italian monograph on the “Znanie” group’s editorial activity (Roma 1996), and published around a hundred articles on 19th and 21st Century Russian poetry and prose. Among her major interests are the intercultural perspective in the study of literary topoi, intertextual and translational aspects of European culture. In more recent years, her research has brought to the fore texts and interpretative problems related to the field of memory studies (Post-Soviet Memory and Oblivion, Autobiography, Family Memory). Since 2011, she has been the editor of the Sapienza University Press “Intercultural Series”. Her latest books are: Caleidoscopio russo. Studi di letteratura contemporanea (Macerata 2014); Dalla steppa al cosmo e ritorno. Letteratura e spazio nel Novecento russo (Roma 2016; Russian translation: Iz stepi v kosmos i obratno. Literatura i prostranstvo v Rossii XX veka, Moskva 2021).
The essay is aimed at offering a reflection on family stories reconstructed along the female line of the family memory. Intertwining the reading of memories with the contemporary debate around the mother-daughter relationship, this essay analyses the memories left by two ‘daughters’ of the Russian 20th century: Elena Bonner and Vera Politkovskaia. These extraordinary witnesses of Russian history decided to collect their memories to react to a painful distance: Bonner, at a mature age, seeks a suspended and lost dialogue with her mother, after she passed away in 1987; Politkovskaia, a woman in exile after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that disrupted her family, remembers her mother (murdered in 2006).
Through the investigation of the female line of family memory, the relationship between mother and daughter – a crux of women’s biography and a leading theme of women’s literature – may become a utopian model of a story that involves such persons. By refusing emotional distance in writing, the memories of Bonner and Politkovskaia can suggest a horizon within which to build a cultural and literary history of Russia. This, in turn, should be capable of welcoming the questions that female voices have raised about that same history.