This letter collection is a story about a woman called Mařenka. She has not written any of these letters herself but she and her family have been their recipients. Johanna Kulmala has studied how the classic narrative model, created by Labov and Waletzky as early as in the 1960s, functions when searching for narrations and parts of narration in this correspondence.
The correspondence which Kulmana has studied for her dissertation begins from the late years of Austro-Hungarian double monarch, it leads its readers through the First and the Second World War and the inter-war years, the First Czechoslovakian Republic. It ends to the Cold War.
Scriptum 2/2020 has published the lectio praecursoria of Johanna Kulmala’s dissertation, when she presents how the famous Labov’s model functions in these letters.
Johanna Kulmala: A Narrative model of Family Letters from the 20th-century Czechoslovakia
Johanna Kulmala: “The letter is only a poor expression of what the heart over-flows: Family Letters from the 20th-century Czechoslovakia” , dissertation in University of Jyväskylä, 2020.