Language, Individual & Society, Volume 19, 2025

Rezumat: The article examines competing narratives about the Latvian War of Independence through the lens of memoirs by Andrievs Niedra and Pavel Bermondt-Avalov. The study aims to demonstrate how personal and collective memories are constructed within autobiographical texts and function as tools in the symbolic struggle for historical legitimacy. The methods of memoir and narratology are employed as the methodological foundation. The research materials - two sets of memoirs written by the authors in the 1920s and 1930s - enable us to trace how each narrator selects and organises facts, appealing to different cultural frameworks: Latvian national memory and Russian emigration discourse. Narratological analysis shows that the choice of emplotment influences the ideological tone: in one case, the events are depicted as a tragic struggle of a ‘traitor of the people,’ while in another, as a heroic tribute to anti-Bolshevism. The results of the study demonstrate that memoirs are not passive accounts but active shapers of historical reality, where personal memory is ‘stitched’ together using cultural codes and collective myths. The processes of self-representation and ideological selectivity, through which authors aim to justify their positions, are uncovered.