Abstract
The paper explores the representation of past events in autobiographies, i.e., narratives that on one hand document real events in the contemporary world and on the other examine the past through the subjective view of the writer who is reminiscing. Autobiographies represent a broad group of memoirs that play a role in the shaping of the collective memory of a given society.
At the same time, these literary works reflect period norms of perception of the past. How a person remembers their own past is influenced by the culture of which he is part.
Our Czech, respectively Central European, culture dictates a certain number of models that are mediated to a person in the course of their development. We do not always create anew the plots according to which we create our own life stories; instead we frequently draw on the plots of works produced in literature or orally from the repertoire of our own culture.
Autobiographies as broad, publicly received texts have a strong influence on the shape of collective sharing of ideas of the past, both in the case of texts that correspond to the dominant narrative and in storytelling that contradicts the prevailing view of the past. The paper aims to show how authors in writing about themselves grasp the past in the framework of the heterogeneous narratives of the Central European space in the 20th century, i.e., what story a given society tells about the past and what narrative and artistic means it employs to do so.