Abstract
The genre of autobiography is often situated on border-line between fiction and non-fiction; autobiography refers to real characters and events, but at the same time it is a literary work of art, a verbal construct in which the representation of reality is subject to the intentions of the author. Autobiographies frequently use the same narrative schemes as the fictional texts, such as novels or poems.
For the adequate interpretation of the text of autobiography is therefore necessary to ask why the author uses this schemes and what effect these strategies have. This issue will be demonstrated primarily in the autobiography of the Czech authoress Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) Under a Cruel Star (1973).
Her life was dramatic and in many ways tragic, but at the same time it included paradoxical and ambivalent situations. On the one hand, Heda Margolius Kovály was wife of one of the prominent Communist officers - Rudolf Margolius; on the other hand, her husband was found guilty of conspiracy during the show trial in 1952, sentenced to death and executed, her property was confiscated, she and her young son Ivan were persecuted...
The central question of our paper is this: What kind of narrative schemes does Heda Margolius Kovály use? Was she victim, or culprit? Is she apologizing and defending herself or is she accusing society of letting this happen? The authoress displays herself in the text in accordance with a specific pattern and plot and her positioning in the story is therefore a matter of a selected and combined narrative - thematic and compositional - technique. We have to analyse this narrative technique to make out what kind of story Heda Margolius Kovály tells us.