![]() I have chosen the most widely elucidated and studied case of Binjamin Wilkomirski – a self-proclaimed Holocaust child survivor, who, according to Binjamin’s own words, was born somewhere in the Baltics, survived Majdanek and Auschwitz Birkenau and got swapped with a Swiss boy Bruno Grosjean, whose name he eventually acquired. There are numerous examples in history of fabricated memoirs such as Misha Defonseca, Herman Rosenblat, Martin Grey and etc. What is the reason for such a desperate and conscious desire to apply an identity which is actually not yours and live a life of not your own? Are fake memoirists people who write their story because they have none? I believe that fake memoir writing is a far more complicated process than one may think at first glance, influenced by social, historical, cultural and personal factors. By carrying out my research, I would like to question and criticize this neglecting position concerning fake memoirs and show how fake memoirs can challenge such fields as historical methodology, literary studies and psychoanalysis.įirst of all, I am going to look at the motives that guide fake memoirists in starting their fiction plot. Since they are denounced and proved fabricated, fake memoirs are considered blanks for both historical and literary purposes. ![]() I have felt an urge for studying this topic because it seems to me that there are still not enough studies conducted on the topic of fake memoirs because theorists underestimate the role of fake memoirs. The idea for writing such a paper struck me after getting to know about the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, who also became the main subject of my essay. But what if a memoir is a fake one and the described events have actually never taken place in real life? To make the matters worse – how should one evaluate a piece of writing claimed to be a memoir which received appreciation, various prizes and rewards, and then was declared a fake bringing fame and shame to its author? The central question of this work becomes the role of memoirs announced and proved fabricated, both in the historical methodology and literature. In this essay, I am going to talk about memoirs. The condition of remembering and non-forgetting is of importance here the word in itself suggests that if an event should be not only written down but also remembered, it might play a role for future generations, whether in broad or narrow sense. The lingual semantic difference between these two words suggests even a further divergence: an autobiography implies a mere description a memoir is not only about describing, but about writing something down and making it kept in mind. When it comes to memoirs, the word memoir is derived from Anglo-French memorie ‘note, memorandum, something written to be kept in mind’, which is special in itself – writers of memoirs are usually those persons who either have played roles in, or have been close observers of, particular historical events and whose main purpose is to describe or interpret the events, not their personas from the inside. There is an eventual establishment of a blind relationship between the author and the reader. Readers, in return, are invited as psychoanalysts to discover, analyse and interpret the inner world of ideas and multiple personalities of the author. Writers of autobiographies are concerned primarily with themselves as subject matter – autobiography, thus, requires from the reader to accept that the text describes aspects of the author’s life. The word autobiography consists of two parts: auto-, meaning ‘self, one’s own’ and biography-, coming from Late Greek ‘biographia’ and meaning ‘the description of life’. They are very often confused with each other, while each term has a very specific and noticeable difference. Part III The role of fake memoirs: negative or positive?īefore getting deeply engaged with the topic, it is important to distinguish between two notions, one of which will play a decisive role in this work. Similarities between “true” and fake memoirs Invented memories: the most important source of imaginary/embellished memoirs The graph of any quadratic function has the same general shape, which is called a parabola.Motives for writing imaginary/embellished memoirs illustrated by the example of Binjamin WilkomirskiĬonsidering the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski The function f( x) = ax 2 + bx + c is a quadratic function. Its x-intercepts are rotated 90° around their mid-point, and the Cartesian plane is interpreted as the complex plane ( green). Visualisation of the complex roots of y = ax 2 + bx + c: the parabola is rotated 180° about its vertex ( orange). Thus the roots are distinct if and only if the discriminant is non-zero, and the roots are real if and only if the discriminant is non-negative. In these expressions i is the imaginary unit. Which are complex conjugates of each other.
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