Auto/biographics

Please reference as:  Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. "Auto/biographics", https://sites.google.com/view/soundscapesandechoes/home/kassia/autobiographics

Autobiographics in Fragments: Kasia and the Scarcity of the Self

Leigh Gilmore’s concept of autobiographics (1994) is crucial for thinking about Kasia because it relocates autobiography away from the expectation of self-authored, linear life narration and toward the dispersed, contingent forms through which a subject may be made legible. Gilmore shows that autobiography is not simply a genre but a site of authorization: a space where access to self-representation is negotiated through social, institutional, and literary constraints. (1994, 42) This emphasis on constraint is what renders Kasia’s archive interpretable. Her traces do not provide an autobiography, yet they reveal the conditions that determine whether she could ever have produced one. To read Kasia autobiographically is therefore not to search for a missing manuscript, but to examine the terms by which self-representation is permitted, silenced, or displaced onto other voices.

In this framework, the three surviving letters from St Theodore the Studite to Kasia are significant not for what they tell us about her expressive agency, but for how they map the boundaries of the autobiographical field around her. These are documents that stage her from the outside: they imagine her, address her, and in doing so circumscribe the position from which she might speak. Within an epistolary logic, the self is configured relationally—correspondence produces a provisional “I” through address, expectation, and reply, even when the reply is absent. [2] Moreover, Gilmore’s insistence that the autobiographical subject is a discursive construction rather than a preexisting essence (1994, 25) means that these letters matter not as her speech, but as the architecture within which speech by her would have had to occur. They are not autobiographical documents in their own right; they are documents that reveal what autobiography was not allowed to be.

Kasia’s writings on the monks, although brief, demonstrate the inverse dynamic: here she can speak, but only obliquely. These texts do not present the self directly; they present her from a position. The autobiographical appears not in confession but in point of view — in the ethical and perceptual stance that seeps through description. In Gilmore’s terms, this is a form of life-writing that proceeds by indirection: the self emerges not as theme but as consequence. (1994, 25)

Taken together, these materials do not accumulate into a life-story. Instead, they exemplify what autobiographics (Gillmore 1994) makes visible: a subject whose autobiographical possibility is produced at the edges of other people’s writing, in the constraints of institutional narration, and in the narrow apertures through which first-person perspective can be intimated but not claimed. Kasia’s archive is not the absence of autobiography; it is the record of a life lived at the threshold of the auto/biographical. Gilmore enables us to see that threshold not as failure, but as evidence — evidence of what forms of self-articulation were structurally unavailable, and of how a self might still press against those forms from within.

Notes

[1] See Silva 2006, 32-37 for a translation of these letters and Zugravu 2013, 206-208 for additional transcription in Greek.

[2] See Tamboukou 2020, for an elaboration of epistolary lives and the epistolary self.

[3] By the tenth century, Symeon the Logothete records the story of Kassia as the learned hymnographer who nearly became empress—a narrative that later passed into Byzantine tradition and, through manuscript and oral transmission, into Balkan and Modern Greek folklore. The chronicle is found in Patrologia Graeca 109, 685  and was first translated in English by Eva Catafygiotu-Topping (1981, 204)

References

Catafygiotu-Topping Eva (1981) “Kassiane the Nun and the Sinful Woman”, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 26, 201–209.

Migne, Jacques-Paul, ed. Patrologia Graeca: Cursus Completus, Series Graeca. 161 vols. Paris: Migne, 1857–1866.

Stanley, Liz. (1992.) The Auto/biographical I, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

 Tamboukou, Maria. (2020). “Epistolary Lives: fragments, sensibility, assemblages in auto/biographical research”,, in The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography, edited by Anne Chapell and Julie M. Parsons, 157-164. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Zugravu, Gheorghita (2013) Kassia the Melodist. And the Making of a Byzantine Hymnographer, PhD thesis, Columbia University.