Стари и нови „жизнени светове“: биографични реконструкции и социално инженерство в личния архивен фонд на Ана Хранова
Old and New “Lifeworlds”: Biographical Reconstruction and Social Engineering in the Personal Papers of Anna Chranova

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyzes the structure and content of the personal papers of Prof. Ana Chranowa (1889-1981), a distinguished Bulgarian woman zoologist, which is stored in the Scientific Archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (SA-BAS) and is primary invento-ried. Prepared for transmission in the SA-BAS by the holder during her lifetime, the struc-ture and content of the personal papers reflect her strategy to reconstruct her own ‘life-worlds’ before and after 1944 and to harmonize it with the requirements of the ‘new’ total-itarian society. For these reasons, the archive presents primarily clichéd image of the so-cialist "exemplary scholar", which belongs to the class of ‘popular intelligentsia’, i.e. a thorough professional, speaking postulates of the Marxism-Leninism and the theories of the Soviet biological pseudoscience; an active public figure; a humble worker, completely devoid of private life, female identity and political affiliation. ‘Presences’ and ‘absences’ of the personal papers, i.e. types of available and missing documents, are analyzed as a manifestation of ‘public’ and ‘intimate’ lifeworlds, as a marker of self-censorship in terms of totalitarian society, as a sign of self-construction of desired image, and as a means of acquiring ‘symbolic capital’ of a woman scientist. The paper also comments the motivation of Ana Chranowa to complete such a personal archive – her possible strategies to preserve her documentary heritage and her scientific results about cancer; or the desire to build on her own image after her death; or the temptation to show the public her importance as a scientist biologist.

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