ABSTRACT

In this paper, I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure who has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography of her early years in Russia her personal writings have never been translated in their entirety and remain inaccessible to non-Russian speaking scholars. What has emerged instead from the significant body of secondary literature that has evolved around her life and work is a meta-archive of scattered auto/biographical documents with different and often competing translations, extracts from her letters, diary entries, as well as novels and plays that create palimpsests of traces of the self. In addressing questions arising from working with fragments and traces of the self, I consider the importance of creative imagination in forming entanglements between the researcher and her archival figures. In this light archival research is configured as a process, emerging after layers of documents have been assembled, reordered, transcribed, translated and effectively rewritten.

摘要

在本文中，我通过挖掘索菲亚·科瓦列夫斯卡娅的自传/传记文件，借鉴了我​​的研究项目，即撰写女权主义自传谱系。作为现代欧洲第一位担任数学教席的女性，同时也是一位小说家和剧作家，科瓦列斯卡娅是一位激励了几代女数学家以及世界各地女权主义和文学学者的人物。然而，除了她早年在俄罗斯的自传外，她的个人著作从未被完整翻译过，非俄语学者也无法阅读。相反，从围绕她的生活和工作演变而来的大量二手文学作品中出现的是一个包含分散的自传/传记文件的元档案，这些文件具有不同且经常相互竞争的翻译、她的信件摘录、日记条目，以及创造自我痕迹的小说和戏剧。在处理因处理自我的碎片和痕迹而产生的问题时，我考虑了创造性想象力在研究人员和她的档案人物之间形成纠葛中的重要性。在这种情况下，档案研究被配置为一个过程，在文件层被组装、重新排序、转录、翻译和有效重写之后出现。