Leon Trotsky’s account of his birth and childhood in his autobiography reverses the pattern of Freud’s “family romance.” If, according to this pattern, when the child fantasizes that his parents are not his real parents, the fantasy entails the image of the “real parents” as being of higher social standing, the symbolic undercurrents of Trotsky’s autobiography, implicitly downgrade his Jewish wealthy-farmer father and replace his actual origins by a transnational proletarian affiliation, more exalted in terms of his ideology.
January 2006: Mikhail Weisskopf teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the editor of the journal Solnechnoe spletenie (Solar Plexus). He is the author of numerous essays on Russian literature, history, and culture, as well as of the following books: Sjuzhet Gogolia (Gogol’s Plot, 1993, reprinted in 2003), Vo ves’ logos. Religiia Maiakovskogo (Mayakovsky’s Religion, 1997); Pisatel’ Stalin (Stalin as a Writer, 2002) and a collection of articles on Russian Literature (2003).
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