Abstract:
A human is a narrator by nature. Narration implies not only
description, but also interpretation. Deliberately or accidentally,
meanings are attached to things, facts, and events that took
place in the past. According to Robert Neimeyer, both narrators
and audiences do so. The objective of this Article is to clarify
how 9 April 1989 and 1991, the war and civil confrontation in Tbilisi,
and a stressful series of sudden and intensive changes are
analyzed, conceptualized, and interpreted in the memoirs created
after Georgia became independent. The 1990s give an impetus
to the revival of the past also in texts on life. Lana Gogoberidze's
memoirs "What I remember and how I remember" are noteworthy
in this regard. The final version of the book was published
in 2019. As regards the texts of memoirs, this genre is called
lifewriting in scientific literature and this notion is wider than
just an (auto) biography. A lifewriting text is supposed to not
only tell a story, but also analyze the process(es), which determined
the concrete shape of the identity of a person. It analyzes
not only how the paradigm or platform, on which the author is
based on when writing a text, was created, but also why. "Life is
not what you have lived, but what you remember and how you
remember". These words by Lana Gogoberidze can be appropriate
to be used as a definition of the genre.
