2025 Theses Doctoral

Autobiography and the Mirror of Archive: Iraïda Barry, Mirror Shards and the I.V. Barry Papers

Davis, Thomas M.

This dissertation provides the first study of Mirror Shards, an unpublished trilingual autobiography of significance to scholarship on Russian Literature at the juncture of migration and gender. The typescript was located in an unprocessed collection at the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture at Columbia University. The Iraïda Barry Papers Collection was processed using standard archival methods and was made publicly available for study in 2017.

This dissertation examines Mirror Shards as an innovative work of life writing characterized by its fragmentary, disjunctive composition and its indirect, oblique narrative manner, which foregrounds the life stories of the author’s close friends and relations. Considering the generic instability (Smith) or inherent open-endedness (Zwerdling) of autobiographical writing, I analyze the narrative strategies Barry employs in her heterogeneous, multi-voiced text. The manuscript’s original archival context crucially informs Barry’s radical centering of fragmentation to autobiographical production and extensive utilization of the writings of others.