The son’s marginalia in the father’s manuscript as an identity marker

Abstract

The research question relates to the peculiarities of the implementation of the intergenerational dialogue about the family history: the author analyzes the marginalia of the late migrant V.K. Vins (b. 1942) as a response to the manuscript of his father, repressed Soviet German Labor Army soldier K.A. Vins (1905–1988). The manuscript is a summary of the history of a Soviet German family through the life of its breadwinner. The author of the memoirs presents himself as a German, a teacher of the German language, a father of a family and a Soviet citizen; and our research task is to identify the reaction of his son to this text through his marginals. It is revealed that there is a continuous dialogue between father and son, marks in the text perform different functions – from drawing the reader’s attention to lapidary fragments to enhancing the rhetoric of the father’s statements. Marginalia become a marker of V.K. Vince’s identity – in some episodes this identity corresponds to the author’s, in others it contradicts it. To expand the context of the study, the work draws on the son’s ego-documents, in which he sets out his own vision of the family history.