Abstrakt
Autobiographies as broad, publicly received texts have a strong influence on the shape of collective sharing of ideas of the past. 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/she is part. Autobiographies refer to real characters and events, but at the same time they are subjective literary works of art.
Autobiographical texts frequently use the same narrative schemes as the fictional texts, such as novels or poems. For the adequate interpretation of the text of autobiography is therefore necessary to ask why the author uses this schemes and what effect these strategies have.
This issue will be demonstrated primarily in the autobiography of the Czech authoress Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) Under a Cruel Star (1973). Her life was dramatic, and in many ways tragic, but at the same time it included paradoxical and ambivalent situations.
On the one hand, Heda Margolius Kovály was wife of one of the prominent Communist officers - Rudolf Margolius; on the other hand, her husband was found guilty of conspiracy during the show trial in 1952, sentenced to death and executed, her property was confiscated, she and her young son Ivan were persecuted... Was she victim, or culprit? How does she talk about the politics and the Communist government? The authoress displays herself in the text in accordance with a specific pattern and plot; her positioning in the story is therefore a matter of a selected and combined narrative - thematic and compositional - technique.
We have to analyse this narrative technique to make out what kind of story Heda Margolius Kovály tells us.