Memoir literature as a historical source. The concept of women's literature Recommended list of dissertations
literature in the genre of memoirs (French mémoires, from Latin memoria memory), a type of documentary literature and at the same time one of the types of “confessional prose”. It implies notes-memoirs of a historical person about real events of the past, which he happened to be an eyewitness. The main prerequisites for the work of a memoirist are strict compliance with historical truth, factuality, chronicity of the narrative (leading the story along the milestones of the real past), refusal to “play” with the plot, conscious anachronisms, and deliberate artistic techniques. These formal features bring memoirs closer to the diary genre, with the significant difference that, unlike a diary, memoirs imply retrospection, an appeal to a fairly distant past, and an inevitable mechanism for re-evaluating events from the height of the experience accumulated by the memoirist. V.G. Korolenko in memoirs The story of my contemporary(1954) expressed the ideal aspirations of a memoirist in this way: “In my work, I strived for the most complete historical truth possible, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or striking features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I haven’t encountered in reality, that I haven’t experienced, felt, or seen.”
In terms of their material, reliability and lack of fiction, the memoirs are close to historical prose, scientific-biographical, autobiographical and documentary-historical essays. However, memoirs are distinguished from autobiography by their focus on displaying not only and not so much the personality of the author, but the historical reality surrounding him, external events - socio-political, cultural, etc., in which he was involved to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, unlike strictly scientific genres, memoirs imply the active presence of the author’s voice, his individual assessments and inevitable bias. Those. one of the constructive factors of memoir literature is the author's subjectivity.
Memoir literature is an important source of historiography, material of historical source study. At the same time, in terms of the actual accuracy of the reproduced material, memoirs are almost always inferior to documents. Therefore, historians are forced to subject event facts from the memoirs of public and cultural figures to critical verification with available objective information. In the case when a certain memoir fact finds neither confirmation nor refutation in available documents, the evidence about it is considered by historiography as scientifically valid only hypothetically.
The persistent features of memoirs as a form of literature are factuality, the predominance of events, retrospectiveness, immediacy of evidence, which in no way ensure the “purity of the genre.” Memoirs remain one of the most fluid genres with extremely fuzzy boundaries. Memoir signs do not always indicate that the reader is dealing with memoirs. So, on the first page of S. Maugham’s book, endowed with all the above-mentioned features Summing up(1957), the author warns that this work is not a biography or memoir. Although his gaze invariably goes back to the past, the main goal here is not to recreate the past, but to confess artistic faith, summing up the results of half a century of literary development. The genre of Maugham's book is not a memoir, but an extended essay.
In the 19th century, as the principle of historicism developed, memoir prose, which had already reached maturity, was conceptualized as an important source of scientific and historical reconstructions. Attempts to abuse this reputation of the genre immediately make themselves felt. Pseudo-memoirs and various memoir hoaxes arise. These tendencies are especially clearly noticeable in works devoted to purely mythologized figures of history and already completed cycles of the past. As a result, annoying historical misconceptions are possible in works based on unsubstantiated memoir sources. Thus, D.S. Merezhkovsky in his sketch about A.S. Pushkin from the cycle Eternal companions(1897) built the entire concept of the poet’s work on the notes of Pushkin’s friend A.O. Smirnova. However, after several years it became clear that these memories were entirely falsified by her daughter, O.N. Smirnova. Another example memoirs St. Petersburg winters G. Ivanov, dedicated to recreating the atmosphere of the pre-revolutionary years of the “Silver Age”. There are reasons to consider it a literary text based on a conventional literary technique. The literature of the Russian post-revolutionary emigration, in which memoirs generally played a particularly significant role, provided, along with masterpieces of prose in the genre of memoirs, many examples of mystified and falsified memoirs (the fake “diary” of the maid of honor of the Empress Alexandra, the patroness of G. Rasputin A.A. Vyrubova, etc. ).
In the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Purely works of fiction with a fictitious plot are often styled as memoirs. The purpose of such a technique can be different: from recreating the atmosphere of time through the genre ( Captain's daughter (1836) by Pushkin, where the use of the memoir genre in Pyotr Grinev’s “Notes” is one of the main forms of literature of the 18th century. acts as a stylization technique “for the Catherine era”) to give the text special sincerity, authenticity, compositional freedom and the illusion of independence from the “will of the author” ( Netochka Nezvanova(1849) and Little Hero (from unknown memoirs)(1857) by F.M. Dostoevsky).
Often, autobiographical works are indistinguishable from memoirs in their literary qualities. But these genres can also pursue different goals. Autobiography is more easily subject to fictionalization and transition to literary fiction. Thus, in the autobiographical trilogy of L.N. Tolstoy Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), Youth(1857) memories are subordinated not to the actual memoir, but to the artistic task to the psychological study of character and creative comprehension of philosophical categories that are important for the author (consciousness, reason, understanding, etc.). For this reason, in terms of genre, Tolstoy's trilogy is closer to a novel than to memoirs.
Directly opposite cases are also possible. So, in Family chronicle(1856) and The childhood years of Bagrov the grandson(1858) by S.T. Aksakova, the main character appears under a fictitious name, which is natural for fiction. However, the author’s task here is purely memoiristic: the resurrection of the past and its “atmosphere”, a true memory of the past. In terms of genre, both books belong specifically to memoir literature. It is no coincidence that openly memoir-documentary Memories(1856) by Aksakov are perceived as a direct continuation of the dilogy about Bagrov.
The mobility of the memoir genre is also facilitated by its stylistic variability. The narration here can also be noted for the colorfulness of artistic prose ( Childhood(1914) and In people(1916) M. Gorky), and journalistic bias ( People, years, life(19601965) by I. Ehrenburg), and a strictly scientific justification of what is happening (57 parts Of the past and thoughts(18521867) A.I. Herzen). The precariousness of the border between memoirs and artistic, journalistic, scientific genres was determined in Russian and Western European literature by the mid-19th century. This was greatly facilitated by the crisis of romanticism and the strengthening of a new aesthetics aimed at imitation of reality in its social concreteness, the aesthetics of realism. V.G. Belinsky in the article A look at Russian literature of 1847(1848) already records this genre amorphousness of memoir prose: “Finally, memoirs themselves, completely alien to any fiction, valuable only to the extent that they faithfully and accurately convey actual events, memoirs themselves, if they are masterfully written, constitute, as it were, the last facet in the field of the novel, closing it with himself.”
An unsurpassed example of mature and at the same time extremely complex in terms of genre, multi-component memoir prose Past and thoughts Herzen. As the author's plan was realized, this work turned from notes about a purely personal, family past into something like a “biography of humanity.” This is where intentional merging is achieved. genre characteristics memoirs and journalism, “biography and speculation,” diary and literary portraits, fictional short stories, scientific factography, confession, essay and pamphlet. The result is a literary form that, in the author’s words, “doesn’t lace up anywhere and doesn’t pinch anywhere.” The hero of the book is not the author himself (as in ordinary, one-dimensional memoirs from the point of view of the genre) and not contemporary history (as in historical chronicles), but the most complex process of eventful and spiritual interaction between the individual and society in a certain era. Herzen's book went beyond the natural boundaries of memoir prose itself and became the most important programmatic text of the era of “critical realism” in European literature. It is characteristic that Western criticism could discern an even broader historical and literary significance behind this text. So, a review about the author White and doom in one of the issues of the London newspaper “The Leader” for 1862 concluded with the conclusion: “Goethe could see in it a clear confirmation of the theory of a future universal literature.”
In the first half. 20th century in the era of the so-called “the end of the novel,” when literature experienced a crisis of traditional conventional forms and switched to the border between fiction and document, a series of synthetic texts appeared ( No change on the Western Front(1929) E.M. Remarque, Life in Bloom(1912) A. France, The noise of time(1925) by O. Mandelstam, later in line with the same tradition My diamond crown(1978) V. Kataeva et al.). In them, the memoir principle is included in the organic nature of fiction. Historical material, the real life of the author, is transformed into a fact of art, and stylistics is subordinated to the task of producing an aesthetic impact on the reader. On the maturity and completeness of the process of “adoption” of memoir prose by fiction of the 20th century. evidence of the parodic use of its laws in the genre of the novel ( Confessions of adventurer Felix Krul(1954) T. Mann).
The measure of historical content of memoirs and the very type of their practical use by various humanities disciplines as sources largely depend on the personality of the author. If a memoirist is a bright and extremely significant person for history and culture, then the focus of interest in the reader’s and research’s perception of his text is inevitably focused on the author himself. In this case, historical material fades into the background. A striking example of an essay of this kind Ten years in exile(1821) Madame de Stael, an outstanding woman of the era, one of the brilliant writers and cultural figures of romanticism. A sample of memories of a different type was left by the Duke of Saint-Simon. His Memoirs(published in 1829-1830) are valuable primarily for small facts, details that meticulously convey the atmosphere of court life in Paris during the last twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of Louis XIV and the regency period. As a result, the memoirs of Madame de Stael are the object of attention primarily of literary scholars, the memoirs of Saint-Simon are the object of attention of historians. Since the 1940s, thanks to the researchers of the “Annals School” (L. Febvre, F. Braudel, J. Le Goff, etc.), historical science has experienced a surge of interest in the memoirs of unremarkable and non-public people. Their writings (of the type: “notes of a German miller of the mid-17th century,” “notes of a middle-class London merchant of the early 18th century,” etc.) help restore the objective history of everyday life, identify certain social stereotypes that fix the characteristic, standard, and not exceptional. Memoirs of this kind are an important source of the history of civilization and historical sociology.
Memoir literature traces its origins to Xenophon’s memories of Socrates (4th century BC) and his Anabasis(401 BC) notes on the military campaign of the Greeks. Antique examples of the genre, which also include Notes on the Gallic War Julius Caesar (1st century BC), are impersonal and gravitate toward historical chronicles. Christian Middle Ages (Confession(approx. 400) Bl. Augustine, The story of my disasters(1132 1136) P. Abelard, partly New life(1292) Dante and other monuments) brings to the genre a developed sense of the narrator’s inner self, moral introspection and a repentant tone. The emancipation of personality and the development of individualistic consciousness during the Renaissance, clearly reflected in The Life of Benvenuto Cellini(1558-1565), prepared the flowering of memoirs in the 17th-18th centuries. (Saint-Simon, Cardinal G. Mazarin, J.-J. Rousseau, etc.)
In the 19th-20th centuries. Memoirs of writers and about writers are becoming one of the leading genres of literature. Thus, literary memoirs proper are formed; J.-W. Goethe, Stendhal, G. Heine, G.-H. left their memories. Andersen, A. France, R. Tagore, G. Mann, R. Rolland, J.-P. Sartre, F. Mauriac and others.
In Russia, memoir literature dates back to Stories about the Grand Duke of Moscow(mid 16th century) Andrei Kurbsky. An important milestone in the formation of personal identity in Russian literature autobiographical Life(16721675) Archpriest Avvakum. Vivid monuments of Russian memoirs of the 18th century. ¶ The life and adventures of Andrei Bolotov(c. 1780), Handwritten notes of Empress Catherine II(published in 1907), Notes(published in 18041806) E.R. Dashkova, Sincere confession of my deeds and thoughts(1789) D.I. Fonvizina. The rapid development of memoir literature in Russia in the 19th century. associated with the memories of N.I. Turgenev, Decembrists I. Pushchin, I. Yakushkin, M. Bestuzhev, writer N. Grech, censors A. Nikitenko, E. Feoktistov, writers I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov and others Factual details in descriptions of literary life of the 2nd half. 19th century The memoirs of A.Ya. Panaeva, N.A. Ogareva-Tuchkova, T.A. Kuzminskaya are valuable. The social situation of these years is reflected in Notes of a revolutionary(1899) P.A. Kropotkina, On the path of life(published in 1912) A.F. Koni.
The revival of memoir literature, associated with a series of memoirs about the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era published in the USSR and in emigration, occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. (memoirs of K. Stanislavsky, V. Veresaev, A. Bely, G. Chulkov and others).
A new surge in memoir literature in the USSR, caused by the “Khrushchev Thaw,” began in the mid-1950s. Numerous memoirs are published about writers who did not quite fit into the structure of Soviet ideology: V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin, Yu. Tynyanov, etc. Numerous memoir essays by K. Chukovsky are published, Tale of life(1955) by K. Paustovsky, collections of memoirs about E. Schwartz, I. Ilf and E. Petrov. The “Literary Memoirs” series, founded by the publishing house “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” in the 1960s, publishes the memoirs of A. and P. Panayev, P. Annenkov, T.P. Passek, collections of memoirs about N.V. Gogol, M.Yu. Lermontov, V.G. Belinsky, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky.
Since the late 1980s, materials have been published about the artistic life of the “Silver Age” and the memories of representatives of the Russian emigration ( On Parnassus Silver Age (1962) K. Makovsky, On the banks of the Neva(1967) and On the banks of the Seine(1983) I. Odoevtseva, A calf butted heads with an oak tree(1990) A. Solzhenitsyn, Italics are mine N. Berberova and others), previously unpublished.
Since the early 1990s in Russia, an avalanche of memoirs has been published from the pens of contemporary political and cultural figures, many of which are more a fact of social life than literature itself.
Gennadi G. Notes (memoirs) of Russian people. Bibliographical instructions // Readings at the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University. 1861, book. 4
Pylyaev M.I. Notes of Russian people// Historical Bulletin, 1890. T. 39
Index of memoirs, diaries and travel notes of the 18th-19th centuries. M., 1951
Annotated index of memoir literature. Part 1, M., 1985. Part 2, 1961
Cardin V .
Today is about yesterday. Memoirs and modernity. M., 1961
Katanyan V. O writing memoirs // New world, 1964, № 5
Elizavetina G. The formation of the genres of autobiography and memoirs // Russian and Western European classicism. Prose. M., 1982
Literary Memoirs of the 20th Century: An Annotated Index. 19851989. M., 1995. Part 12
Find " MEMOIR LITERATURE" on
Autobiographies and memoirs are often separate, full-fledged literary works, so they constitute a special genre. Autobiographical literature is based on the personality of its author, who tries to portray his life and his thoughts through the use of an artistic form.
Memoir literature is memories of the past that are created on the basis life experience author. In this case, the author talks about his life and what he managed to survive due to certain political and historical changes, and for this he uses letters, diaries and various documentation.
The personality of the author and its disclosure in literature
Main difference between autobiography and memoirs is that autobiographical literature is devoted exclusively to the personality of the author and what is connected with it, and memoir literature can tell about important historical eras and events and show them through the eyes of one or more people.
Therefore, it can include the memories of many people. There are outstanding literary works of this genre - these are “Confession” by J. Rousseau and “Past and Thoughts” by A. Herzen. These memoirs fully reveal the author's personality, showing what he had to endure in different, difficult circumstances.
Herzen's memoirs had a great influence on the development of Russian literature as a whole, as they delighted the reader not only with the author's interesting thoughts about life and historical events, but also with high verbal skill and artistic expressiveness.
Memoirs are also used for ideological and political struggle; examples of such works are “Thoughts and Memoirs” by O. Bismarck and “Memoirs” by S. Witte. And despite the fact that memoirs often become historical sources, many authors resort to distortion of the truth due to their personal ideological views.
The historical significance of the memoirs lies in the fact that the author, revealing his life, also reveals a picture of life of that period, political events, its cultural component, the life and customs of people of different classes.
Traditions of autobiographical literature
The emergence of autobiographical and memoir literature dates back to the Renaissance, when awareness of the historical value of the human personality and unique individual experience came.
And by the 18th century, literature of various forms had developed, both autobiographies and memoirs. It was during this period that the main traditions of autobiographical literature were formed, since the most important historical events pushed people to write literary works in this genre.
The main traditions of this genre are truthfulness from the author, accuracy and exceptional clarity of class assessments. A car should justify and explain its personal view, but not present it for granted.
A large number of autobiographies and memoirs are devoted to the Great October Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. A series of memoirs were published in the USSR - these are “About Life and About Myself”, “War Memoirs” and “Literary Memoirs”.
MEMOIR LITERATURE- literature in the genre of memoirs (French mémoires, from Latin memoria memory), a type of documentary literature and at the same time one of the types of “confessional prose.” It implies notes-memoirs of a historical person about real events of the past, which he happened to be an eyewitness. The main prerequisites for the work of a memoirist are strict compliance with historical truth, factuality, chronicity of the narrative (leading the story along the milestones of the real past), refusal to “play” with the plot, conscious anachronisms, and deliberately artistic techniques. These formal features bring memoirs closer to the diary genre, with the significant difference that, unlike a diary, memoirs imply retrospection, an appeal to a fairly distant past, and an inevitable mechanism for re-evaluating events from the height of the experience accumulated by the memoirist. V.G. Korolenko in memoirs The story of my contemporary(1954) expressed the ideal aspirations of a memoirist in this way: “In my work, I strived for the most complete historical truth possible, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or striking features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I haven’t encountered in reality, that I haven’t experienced, felt, or seen.”
In terms of their material, reliability and lack of fiction, the memoirs are close to historical prose, scientific-biographical, autobiographical and documentary-historical essays. However, what distinguishes memoirs from autobiography is their focus on displaying not only and not so much the personality of the author, but the historical reality surrounding him, external events - socio-political, cultural, etc., in which he was involved to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, unlike strictly scientific genres, memoirs imply the active presence of the author’s voice, his individual assessments and inevitable bias. Those. One of the constructive factors of memoir literature is the author’s subjectivity.
Memoir literature is an important source of historiography, material for historical source studies. At the same time, in terms of the actual accuracy of the reproduced material, memoirs are almost always inferior to documents. Therefore, historians are forced to subject event facts from the memoirs of public and cultural figures to critical verification with available objective information. In the case when a certain memoir fact finds neither confirmation nor refutation in available documents, the evidence about it is considered by historiography as scientifically valid only hypothetically.
The persistent features of memoirs as a form of literature are factuality, the predominance of events, retrospectiveness, immediacy of evidence, which in no way ensure the “purity of the genre.” Memoirs remain one of the most fluid genres with extremely fuzzy boundaries. Memoir signs do not always indicate that the reader is dealing with memoirs. So, on the first page of S. Maugham’s book, endowed with all the above-mentioned features Summing up(1957), the author warns that this work is not a biography or memoir. Although his gaze invariably goes back to the past, the main goal here is not to recreate the past, but to confess artistic faith, summing up the results of half a century of literary development. The genre of Maugham's book is not a memoir, but an extended essay.
In the 19th century, as the principle of historicism developed, memoir prose, which had already reached maturity, was conceptualized as an important source of scientific and historical reconstructions. Attempts to abuse this reputation of the genre immediately make themselves felt. Pseudo-memoirs and various memoir hoaxes arise. These tendencies are especially clearly noticeable in works devoted to purely mythologized figures of history and already completed cycles of the past. As a result, annoying historical misconceptions are possible in works based on unsubstantiated memoir sources. Thus, D.S. Merezhkovsky in his sketch about A.S. Pushkin from the cycle Eternal companions(1897) built the entire concept of the poet’s work on the notes of Pushkin’s friend A.O. Smirnova. However, after several years it became clear that these memories were entirely falsified by her daughter, O.N. Smirnova. Another example is memoirs. St. Petersburg winters G. Ivanov, dedicated to recreating the atmosphere of the pre-revolutionary years of the “Silver Age”. There is reason to consider it a literary text based on conventional literary techniques. The literature of the Russian post-revolutionary emigration, in which memoirs generally played a particularly significant role, provided, along with masterpieces of prose in the genre of memoirs, many examples of mystified and falsified memoirs (the fake “diary” of the maid of honor of the Empress Alexandra, the patroness of G. Rasputin A.A. Vyrubova, etc. ).
In the literature of the 19th–20th centuries. Purely works of fiction with a fictitious plot are often styled as memoirs. The purpose of such a technique can be different: from recreating the atmosphere of time through the genre ( Captain's daughter(1836) by Pushkin, where the use of the memoir genre in Pyotr Grinev’s “Notes” - one of the main forms of literature of the 18th century. - acts as a stylization technique “for the Catherine era”) to give the text special sincerity, authenticity, compositional freedom and the illusion of independence from the “will of the author” ( Netochka Nezvanova(1849) and Little hero(from unknown memoirs) (1857) by F.M. Dostoevsky).
Often, autobiographical works are indistinguishable from memoirs in their literary qualities. But these genres can also pursue different goals. Autobiography is more easily subject to fictionalization and transition to literary fiction. Thus, in the autobiographical trilogy of L.N. Tolstoy Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), Youth(1857) memories are subordinated not to the actual memoir, but to the artistic task - psychological research of character and creative understanding of philosophical categories important for the author (consciousness, reason, understanding, etc.). For this reason, in terms of genre, Tolstoy's trilogy is closer to a novel than to memoirs.
Directly opposite cases are also possible. So, in Family chronicle(1856) and The childhood years of Bagrov the grandson(1858) by S.T. Aksakova, the main character appears under a fictitious name, which is natural for fiction. However, the author’s task here is purely memoiristic: the resurrection of the past and its “atmosphere”, a true memory of the past. In terms of genre, both books belong specifically to memoir literature. It is no coincidence that openly memoir-documentary Memories(1856) by Aksakov are perceived as a direct continuation of the dilogy about Bagrov.
The mobility of the memoir genre is also facilitated by its stylistic variability. The narration here can also be noted for the colorfulness of artistic prose ( Childhood(1914) and In people(1916) M. Gorky), and journalistic bias ( People, years, life(1960–1965) by I. Ehrenburg), and a strictly scientific justification of what is happening (parts 5–7 Of the past and thoughts(1852–1867) A.I. Herzen). The precariousness of the border between memoirs and artistic, journalistic, scientific genres was determined in Russian and Western European literature by the mid-19th century. This was greatly facilitated by the crisis of romanticism and the strengthening of a new aesthetics aimed at imitation of reality in its social concreteness - the aesthetics of realism. V.G. Belinsky in the article A look at Russian literature of 1847(1848) already records this genre amorphousness of memoir prose: “Finally, memoirs themselves, completely alien to any fiction, valuable only to the extent that they faithfully and accurately convey actual events, memoirs themselves, if they are masterfully written, constitute, as it were, the last facet in the field of the novel, closing it with himself.”
An unsurpassed example of mature and at the same time extremely complex in terms of genre, multi-component memoir prose - Past and thoughts Herzen. As the author's plan was realized, this work turned from notes about a purely personal, family past into something like a “biography of humanity.” Here, a deliberate fusion of genre features of memoirs and journalism, “biography and speculation,” diary and literary portraits, fictional short stories, scientific factography, confession, essay and pamphlet is achieved. The result is a literary form that, in the author’s words, “doesn’t lace up anywhere and doesn’t pinch anywhere.” The hero of the book is not the author himself (as in ordinary, one-dimensional memoirs from the point of view of the genre) and not contemporary history (as in historical chronicles), but the most complex process of eventful and spiritual interaction between the individual and society in a certain era. Herzen's book went beyond the natural boundaries of memoir prose itself and became the most important programmatic text of the era of “critical realism” in European literature. It is characteristic that Western criticism could discern an even broader historical and literary significance behind this text. So, a review about the author White and doom in one of the issues of the London newspaper “The Leader” for 1862 concluded with the conclusion: “Goethe could see in it a clear confirmation of the theory of a future universal literature.”
In the first half. 20th century in the era of the so-called “the end of the novel,” when literature experienced a crisis of traditional conventional forms and switched to the border between fiction and document, a series of synthetic texts appeared ( No change on the Western Front(1929) E.M. Remarque, Life in Bloom(1912) A. France, The noise of time(1925) by O. Mandelstam, later in line with the same tradition - My diamond crown(1978) V. Kataeva et al.). In them, the memoir principle is included in the organic nature of fiction. Historical material, the real life of the author, is transformed into a fact of art, and stylistics is subordinated to the task of producing an aesthetic impact on the reader. On the maturity and completeness of the process of “adoption” of memoir prose by fiction of the 20th century. evidence of the parodic use of its laws in the genre of the novel ( Confessions of adventurer Felix Krul(1954) T. Mann).
The measure of historical content of memoirs and the very type of their practical use by various humanities disciplines as sources largely depend on the personality of the author. If a memoirist is a bright and extremely significant person for history and culture, then the focus of interest in the reader’s and research’s perception of his text is inevitably focused on the author himself. In this case, historical material fades into the background. A striking example of an essay of this kind is Ten years in exile(1821) Madame de Stael, an outstanding woman of the era, one of the brilliant writers and cultural figures of romanticism. A sample of memories of a different type was left by the Duke of Saint-Simon. His Memoirs(published in 1829–1830) are valuable primarily for small facts, details that meticulously convey the atmosphere of court life in Paris during the last twenty-five years of the reign of Louis XIV and the regency period. As a result, the memoirs of Madame de Staël are the object of attention primarily of literary scholars, while the memoirs of Saint-Simon are the object of attention of historians. Since the 1940s, thanks to the researchers of the “Annals School” (L. Febvre, F. Braudel, J. Le Goff, etc.), historical science has experienced a surge of interest in the memoirs of unremarkable and non-public people. Their writings (of the type: “notes of a German miller of the mid-17th century,” “notes of a middle-class London merchant of the early 18th century,” etc.) help restore the objective history of everyday life, identify certain social stereotypes that fix the characteristic, standard, and not exceptional. Memoirs of this kind are an important source of the history of civilization and historical sociology.
Memoir literature traces its origins to Xenophon’s memories of Socrates (4th century BC) and his Anabasis(401 BC) - notes on the military campaign of the Greeks. Ancient examples of the genre, which also include Notes on the Gallic War of Julius Caesar (1st century BC), are impersonal and tend to be historical chronicles. Christian Middle Ages ( Confession(approx. 400) Bl. Augustine, The story of my disasters(1132–1136) P. Abelard, partly New life(1292) Dante and other monuments) brings to the genre a developed sense of the narrator’s inner self, moral introspection and a repentant tone. The emancipation of personality and the development of individualistic consciousness during the Renaissance, clearly reflected in Life Benvenuto Cellini (1558–1565), prepared the flowering of memoirs in the 17th–18th centuries. (Saint-Simon, Cardinal G. Mazarin, J.-J. Rousseau, etc.)
In the 19th–20th centuries. Memoirs of writers and about writers are becoming one of the leading genres of literature. Thus, literary memoirs proper are formed; J.-W. Goethe, Stendhal, G. Heine, G.-H. left their memories. Andersen, A. France, R. Tagore, G. Mann, R. Rolland, J.-P. Sartre, F. Mauriac and others.
In Russia, memoir literature dates back to Stories about the Grand Duke of Moscow(mid 16th century) Andrei Kurbsky. An important milestone in the formation of personal self-awareness in Russian literature is autobiographical Life(1672–1675) archpriest Avvakum. Vivid monuments of Russian memoirs of the 18th century. – The life and adventures of Andrei Bolotov(c. 1780), Handwritten notes of Empress Catherine II(published in 1907), Notes(published in 1804–1806) E.R. Dashkova, Sincere confession of my deeds and thoughts(1789) D.I. Fonvizina. The rapid development of memoir literature in Russia in the 19th century. associated with the memories of N.I. Turgenev, Decembrists I. Pushchin, I. Yakushkin, M. Bestuzhev, writer N. Grech, censors A. Nikitenko, E. Feoktistov, writers I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov and others Factual details in descriptions of literary life of the 2nd half. 19th century The memoirs of A.Ya. Panaeva, N.A. Ogareva-Tuchkova, T.A. Kuzminskaya are valuable. The social situation of these years is reflected in Notes of a revolutionary(1899) P.A. Kropotkina, On the path of life(published in 1912) A.F. Koni.
The revival of memoir literature, associated with a series of memoirs about the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era published in the USSR and in emigration, occurred in the 1920s–1930s. (memoirs of K. Stanislavsky, V. Veresaev, A. Bely, G. Chulkov and others).
A new surge in memoir literature in the USSR, caused by the “Khrushchev Thaw,” began in the mid-1950s. Numerous memoirs are published about writers who did not quite fit into the structure of Soviet ideology: V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin, Yu. Tynyanov, etc. Numerous memoir essays by K. Chukovsky, A Tale of Life (1955) by K. Paustovsky, collections of memoirs about E. .Shvartse, I.Ilf and E.Petrov. The “Literary Memoirs” series, founded by the publishing house “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” in the 1960s, publishes the memoirs of A. and P. Panayev, P. Annenkov, T.P. Passek, collections of memoirs about N.V. Gogol, M.Yu. Lermontov, V.G. Belinsky, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky.
Since the late 1980s, materials have been published about the artistic life of the “Silver Age” and the memories of representatives of the Russian emigration ( On Parnassus of the Silver Age(1962) K. Makovsky, On the banks of the Neva(1967) and On the Banks of the Seine (1983) by I. Odoevtseva, A calf butted heads with an oak tree(1990) A. Solzhenitsyn, Italics are mine N. Berberova and others), previously unpublished.
Since the early 1990s in Russia, an avalanche of memoirs has been published from the pens of contemporary political and cultural figures, many of which are more a fact of social life than literature itself.
Vadim Polonsky
Literature:
Gennadi G. Notes (memoirs) of Russian people. Bibliographical instructions // Readings at the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University. 1861, book. 4
Pylyaev M.I. Notes of Russian people// Historical Bulletin, 1890. T. 39
Index of memoirs, diaries and travel notes of the 18th–19th centuries. M., 1951
Annotated index of memoir literature. Part 1, M., 1985. Part 2, 1961
Cardin V .
Today is about yesterday. Memoirs and modernity. M., 1961
Katanyan V. O writing memoirs// New World, 1964, No. 5
Elizavetina G. The formation of the genres of autobiography and memoirs // Russian and Western European classicism. Prose. M., 1982
Literary Memoirs of the 20th Century: An Annotated Index. 1985–1989. M., 1995. Parts 1–2
1) Theoretical approaches: the concept of “gynocriticism” In 1985, a book was published in the United States, edited by Elaine Showalter. New feminist criticism which collected classic works on the poetics of feminism by such authors as Annette Kolodny, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Bonnie Zimmerman, Rachel DuPlessis, Alicia Ostriker, Nancy Miller, Rosalind Coward and others. The main task of “women’s literature” is the study of themes and genres of literature created by women; the study of new subjects - such as the psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics and the problem of female language, trajectories of individual or collective female authorship, the history of women's literature and the study of individual writers and their works.
In her famous article “On the Question of Feminist Poetics,” 2 Elaine Showalter argues for two main methods of analyzing “women’s literature”:
1) “feminine criticism” - the feminine is reduced to patriarchal sexual codes and gender stereotypes of a masculine-constructed literary history, which is based on the exploitation and manipulation of traditional feminine stereotypes;
2) “gynocriticism” - builds new types of female discourse independently of male discourse and refuses the simple adaptation of male/patriarchal literary theories and models. The woman in this type of discourse is the author of the text and the producer of textual meanings, expressing new models of literary discourse that are based on women's own experience and experience. “Gynocriticism,” Showalter says, begins when we free ourselves from the linear and absolute male literary history, stop fitting women into the gaps between the lines of male literature, and focus instead on the new visible world of women’s culture itself.
2 Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature and Theory(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 125-143.
Based on the methodology of “gynocriticism,” Elaine Showalter identifies three main methods of writing in the development of women’s literature: 1) representation of the “feminine” - imitation of the canons of the dominant/patriarchal literary tradition and the internalization of traditional gender standards of art and social roles; 2) representation of the “feminist” - protest against dominant/patriarchal standards and values of culture and language, defense of minority rights and values, including the demand for women's autonomy; 3) representation of the “feminine” - as a specific female identity that differs from the male canon of representation And letters. 3
2) Women-centered literature: “the time of innocence”
The female-centered tradition in literature is the tradition of studying female authors, female heroines And“female” genres of writing (poetry, short story, autobiography, memoirs, diaries); the main concept is the concept of female authorship, determined by the principle of gender, and the basic theoretical construct is the idea of female emancipation in literature.
Ellen Moers Literary woman(1978) 4 - a pioneering attempt to describe the history of women's literature separately from men's: the literary tradition is considered here from the point of view of the continuity of female authorship and the mutual influence of women writers on each other, as well as women's literary-emotional textual communication and interaction. Moers insists on the different conditions for the formation of gender authorship in classical Anglo-American literature: if male authorship was formed in the public space of the university, male friendship and public literary discussions (Moers gives the example of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who graduated from Cambridge), then women, deprived of “the opportunity education and participation in public life, isolated in the space of the home, limited in travel, painfully limited in friendship,” is formed as an author in
3 Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” pp. 137-139.
4 Ellen Moers, Literary Women(London: The Women's Press, 1978).
the private, intimate space of family and intimate reading (Moers refers in this case to the contemporary of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Jane Austen). In this situation of female socialization in a private space, the greatest influence on female authors, according to Moers, is exerted by other female authors who preceded them, and not by male authors, because only through female authorship can they draw analogies with their own feelings and experiences, usually not fixed -ed by men. It can be argued, Moers believes, that as a result, the female literary tradition seems to “replace” the male one for female authors - regardless of the historical period, national context or social conditions of the women writing. Overall, the book serves as an excellent initial introduction to the topic of women's literature and feminist literary criticism.
3) “Women's experience”And “women’s literature”: extraliterary criteria in literature
The main goal of this theoretical direction is the search for specific “female” means of literary expression to reflect specific female subjectivity in literature. One of the main theses of this approach is the thesis about the importance of empiricism and extra-literary parameters of the study of women's literature - in other words, a thesis about "women's experience" that differs from men's. One of the constructs of “female experience” in literary theory is the construct of “secondary authorship,” since it is implicitly assumed that famous (that is, women writers included in the literary canon) share gender and linguistic norms and stereotypes that are dominant for a given stage of culture, interpreting and internalizing patriarchal aesthetic and social values (otherwise they would not have entered the canon). This approach is most fully implemented in the books of Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from the Brontës to Lessing(1977), Women's madness. Women, madness and English culture, 1830-1980(1985), Sexual anarchy. Gender and culture at the turn of the century(1990) and others.
Elaine Showalter A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from the Brontës to Lessing(1977) 5 -
examines the work of women writers who are considered secondary from the point of view of the “big” literary discourse, representing marginal subjectivity and marginal practices of linguistic expressiveness, which correspond to a certain (affective) topology of female subjectivity.
Showalter argues that the peculiarity of the marginal/minor topology of the feminine in 19th-century literature was determined by the fact that women writers were primarily interpreted by culture according to biological criteria - as women (with their affects, sensibility and emotions), and only secondarily according to professional - as a writer. As a result, women's creativity was interpreted not as a technological result of writing, but as a result of the natural creativity and psychological characteristics of a woman, her special intense (bodily, affective) unique states, that is, as the result of a “demonic female genius” (by analogy with the male bodily “romantic genius "in the philosophy of the romantics). In other words, the construction of female subjectivity was defined through the construction of deviation and the corresponding feeling of guilt in relation to “normative”/male subjectivity. Hence the corresponding female affective expressiveness (“the language of madness”) in women’s literature of the 19th century as the main form of manifestation of female subjectivity. And only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the work of women writers, according to Showalter, there was a refusal to label their own subjectivity as deviant, marginal and affected.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th Century Literary Imaginary(1979) 6 is a classic study of women's literature in feminist literary criticism. Unlike Showalter, the authors explore the work of not minor but famous women writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley,
5 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own. The British Women Novelists
from Bronte to Lessing(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
6 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1979).
George Eliot and Emily Dickinson, although in their work they also reveal a patriarchal interpretation of women's literature as pathology and madness, as well as a stable binarism of the feminine in traditional culture: a woman is either a monster and a witch, or an angelic saint. The authors prove that women writers in a patriarchal culture inevitably fall into its discursive traps, since in any case they are forced to dramatize the ambivalent division between two possible images of the feminine: the traditional patriarchal image and the simultaneous resistance to it. This “gap,” according to the authors, forms the ambivalent structure of female authorship as a structure of “madness.” Another symbol of the “crazy” identity of women writers, which Gilbert and Gubar also use in their study, is the symbol of the mirror, which expresses women's dramatic state of rupture: the desire to conform to male normative ideas about women and the simultaneous desire to reject these norms and ideas.
Thus, Gilbert and Gubar not only consistently explore the tradition of women's literature, but also problematize it, while avoiding the labels of “innocent historicism.”
4) Problemsand the search for new theoretical foundations: criticism of the concepts of “female authorship” and “female experience” in literature
Already in the late 80s, such a productive V In the 70s, the construction of “a woman as the author of a text” causes several philosophical problematizations. According to Toril Moy, the main methodological problem of “women's literature” is the goal of creating a special, female literary canon in its difference from the male one. But new canon may be no less repressive than the old one, following Foucault, Moy warns, recalling that in Foucault’s theory of marginal practices, the goal was to avoid any powerful dominant canon, and not to build a new one. 7 Moreover, after Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” in 1977 (the text is not an expression of individual subjectivity or a simple representation of external
7 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory(London and New York: Routledge, 1985), p. 78.
sociality, but is an act of writing, a material manipulation of signs, discursive structure, textual elements) it is impossible to talk about authorial authenticity in general, which means it is impossible to establish the coding of authorship as female authorship. Women authors can produce masculine texts, and antifeminist women can produce feminist texts. Therefore, the concepts of “women’s literature” in feminist literary criticism are being replaced by the concepts of “women’s reading” and “women’s writing,” which use the concept of “female” not on the basis of biological gender authorship, but on the basis of different sexual styles of textual practices.
3. The concept of “women’s reading”
1) Basic provisions of the theory of “women’s reading”
Barthes's thesis about the change in the politics of literature from the production of texts to their perception (the death of the author meant the birth of the reader) turned out to be very fruitful for feminist literary criticism: since the procedure of perception allows us to detect the multiplicity and ambivalence of textual structures, it means that it allows us to identify specifically gender/female textual reception , which was considered “minor” in the history of “great”/male literature and criticism. Thus, it was discovered that from now on any text can be analyzed from a female/feminist point of view and that a special topology of female subjectivity in its difference from male subjectivity is associated with the structure of perception.
One of the leading characteristics in the structure of female perception are the characteristics of sexuality and desire, understood very broadly - as the dominant of sensuality in the structure of traditional subjectivity: if traditional cultural stereotypes of male perception are built on the model of a rigid and rational “I” identity, then the “female reading” of texts is based on plural and multiple psychological and social female bodily experience. Concept of reading like female desire in feminist criticism is expressed in various literary concepts of “women’s reading”
nia”, such as “the ethics of reading” by Alice Jardin; “free reading” by Elizabeth Berg; reading as a “trans position” by Katherine Steampson; reading as “gender marking” by Monique Wittig; “overreading” by Nancy Miller (as “reading between the lines”, “deciphering silence”, “filling the gaps of repressed expression”); “restorative reading” by Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert (that is, discovering minor female authors, representing anonymous women's experiences and experiences); "ecstatic reading" by Judith Fetterley ("a woman's reading of women's tests can and is eroticized reading").
From here the task of female criticism becomes clear - it is to teach a woman to “read like a woman.” What does it mean?
1. This is a reading outside the traditional theoretical discursive schemes of classical literary theory of author-reader-genre-historical era, resisting conventional literary codification, the scientism of literary theory and the pre-given parameters of the androcentric critical tradition. 8
2. This is the connection between textuality and sexuality, genre and gender, psychosexual identity and cultural authority. 9
3. The process of sexual differentiation in the reading procedure must be considered primarily as a textual one - that is, as a process of producing meanings. By constituting a woman as an object at the moment of our reading, we not only “gender” read the text, but also produce ourselves as women - through the affectivity of the identification process.
4. This is reading as “female desire,” 10 that is, reading that is private, detailed, sensual, built on the principle of “part instead of the whole,” which becomes a type of autobiography and is ultimately indistinguishable from the act of writing.
8 Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to America
Fiction(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. viii.
9 Sandra M. Gilbert, “What Do Feminist Critics Want? A Postcard from the
Volcano", in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on
Women, Literature and Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 29-45.
10 Mary Jacobus Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986).
At the same time, feminist criticism postulates the need for the concept of “women's reading” not only as a stylistic, but as an ideological and political argument: “reading like a woman,” according to Judith Fetterley, means liberating new meanings of the text a) from the point of view of women’s experience, and also b) the right to choose what in the text is most significant for women. This thesis is complemented by Nancy Miller's famous thesis that feminist reading should not be a “poetics of impartiality”, but rather a constant reminder that nothing in culture at all is impartial and that feminist criticism is simply not afraid to represent bias in relation to women's values being.
The most systematic principles for understanding “women's reading” in feminist literary criticism were expressed by Annette Kolodny in the article “Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts” in the book New Feminist Criticism (1985). The article was written with the aim of polemically using the theses of the famous work of Harold Bloom "Misreading Card"(1975), which, according to Annette Kolodny, in its thesis "we are what we read" comes from the position of a gender-neutral reader, while a female reader reads differently from a male reader. eleven
First, women's reading is less abstract than men's: a woman always reads her own real life experiment into the text. Women's reading is the decoding and discovery of symbolization of the usually suppressed and inaccessible female reality and then “fitting” it into one’s daily life.
Secondly, in the reading procedure, a woman usually feels a situation of suppression of her feelings and resists this suppression with the strength of her own affect.
Thirdly, in women's reading special attention is paid female images and women's situations, which are deciphered by men as secondary and insignificant.
11 Annette Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature and Theory(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 46-62.
Annette Kolodny compares how the concept is used differently "reading as revision" Harold Bloom and feminist theorist Adrienne Rich: if for Bloom “revision” is a textual experiment with the goal of constructing another possible generally valid literary history, then for Rich the main goal of women’s reading as a “revision” is not a generally significant, but a personal unique history, the main thing in which - the ability to transform not the text, but own life as stories of oppression. 12
2) Criticism of the theories of “women’s reading”
At the end of the 1980s, the concept of “female reading” was also subject to philosophical problematization: writing, according to Derrida, functions in a situation of radical absence of any empirically determined recipient of the text, the text never reaches its destination, and the reader is as dead as the author . Therefore, in modern feminist literary criticism, not only the concept of “female authorship” is problematized, but also the concept of “female reader”, as well as specific “female reading”.
4. The concept of “women’s writing”
1) Basic provisions of the theory of “women's writing”
The concept of “women's writing” arises under the influence of the Der-Ridaist concept letters(which he contrasted with the concept of speech) - as a search for new forms of discursive/philosophical expressiveness. According to Derrida, speech embodies phallic truth, while for the actual practice of writing the concept of truth is always something insignificant and secondary, since the main thing in writing is the experience of writing itself, the production of graphic compositions, and not how graphic the experience of writing corresponds to mental truth. As a result, “writing”, as well as literature, is declared
12 Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision in: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978(New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1979), p. 24.
a phenomenon that has a feminine nature, that is, the ability to avoid the male dominants of logocentrism.
In progress Jellyfish laugh(1972) 13 French philosopher and feminist theorist Hélène Cixous first introduces the concept of “women's writing,” which later became famous. (“ecriture feminine”), which is designed to free a woman from the masculinist type of language, striving for a single truth, as well as from the restraining shackles of logic and the pressure of self-consciousness, the burden of which is inevitably present in any current moment speech situation. The purpose of women's language or women's writing is decentration systems of traditional textual meanings. In this context, another famous French philosopher and feminist theorist, Lucie Irigaray, instead of traditional “phallic symbolism” in writing practices, suggests using technologies that oppose it "vaginal symbolism". The so-called phallic language, according to Irigaray, is based on the semantic effect of the verbal opposition to have/not to have and its endless repetition, while the “vaginal symbolism” opposed to the phallic is capable of producing not repetitions, but differences in both the structure of meaning and syntactic structure. Against the symbolic structure of the phallus as the structure of “one”, the symbolic structure of the vagina puts forward neither “one” or “two”, but “two in one” - that is, multiplicity, decentralization, diffuseness, instead of relations of identity embodying relations of duration, the mechanism of action of which is not subject to the logical law of consistency (in particular, a woman can never give an unambiguous and consistent answer to a question, preferring to endlessly supplement it, endlessly move in clarifications, returning again and again to the beginning of her thought, etc.).
At the same time, feminist concepts of “women's writing” differ from the Derridian concept of writing. The main difference is that feminist theories of writing are not limited to theoretical interest or the textual level of working with language, as is the case in feminist theory.
13 Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa", Signs 1 (summer, 1976), pp. 875-899.
go Derrida, but express in language the painful experience of female suppression in culture. Hence, feminist deconstruction of traditional types of discourse (and text) has not so much a theoretical as a practical goal: not just the liberation of new textual/symbolic values, but the desire to express the forbidden - repressed - female / asymbolic experience carried out outside the discourse of meaning in traditional culture.
Feminist authors, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prefer to distinguish between two main types of linguistic use: language rational and language expressive. Feminine types of language and writing refer to strategies of expressive language - one that escapes the boundaries of linguistic matrices of established meanings. Feminist authors strive to restore this expressive femininity. In the interview "Language, Persephone and Sacrifice" (1985), Irigaray uses mythological image Persephone, whom mother Demeter seeks and cannot find: only the echo of the disappeared feminine responds to her. Irigaray calls the search for femininity the search for a language that “speaks before speech” - a kind of utopian language that speaks “outside and beyond words,” the meaning of which is not fixed in articulated speech.
Where to look for femininity? And how can femininity express itself?...
1) Cixous gives the following answer to these questions: femininity is the female body and bodily relations with other bodies. But what, according to Cixous, is hidden under the concept of “body”? And under the concept of “female body”? And what does a feminist slogan mean? "write the body"? Answering this question, Cixous again refers us to the Rousseauian concept of two types of language (rational and expressive). Only by using the second type of language - expressive, sensual language - can one discover the existence of a “body”: a sensory formation that cannot be rationally comprehended. A man always controls his impulses, a woman does not. Writing a text for a man means using complete formulations and concepts; writing a text for a woman means prolonging the situation of incompleteness and infinity in the text. IN female text there is and cannot be either a beginning or an end; such text cannot be assigned. According to Cixous, categories
traditional language prevents one from directly perceiving the world, imposing on it a grid of a priori concepts or definitions. Such a perception of the world, Cixous believes, can only be countered by a naive perception, not burdened by reflection, which exists before any linguistic categories - the perception of a child or a woman. In the female perception of the world, as well as in the perception of a child, Cixous believes, it is not the categories of male rational thinking that predominate, but ecstatic (“bodily”) communication with the world, which consists primarily of sensations of color, smell, taste. In other words, female communication with the world is communication of the physical body with physical world of things.
2) In establishing female language strategies, Cixous and Iri-gare do not stop at the level of word use, but descend to a deeper level of grammar. Women's language tends to violate conventional syntax. Irigaray substantiates the idea of “double syntax”: the first expresses the logic of rational thinking, the second - the female repressed unconscious. In the second case, linguistic figures or images do not correlate with traditional logic.
2) Criticism of the concepts of “women’s writing”
Modern criticism of the concepts of “women's writing” is associated with a general criticism of essentialism in the interpretation of female subjectivity - the reduction of the structure of female subjectivity to an a priori and unchangeable “female essence”. Therefore, in modern feminist literary criticism, the analysis of “women’s writing” occurs through the use of the conceptual apparatus and methodology of gender theory, capable of discursively reflecting all the diversity and complexity of performative gender identifications not related to the unique female “essence” in modern literature.
5. Women's autobiography as a special type of “female experience”
The genre of autobiography, along with the genres of diaries and memoirs, traditionally belongs to the “female” genres of writing in the literary canon of “great literature”. The main task of autobiographical women's writing, as defined in feminist literary criticism, is the task of self-representation of the female “I”. In this sense, the traditional concept autobiography in feminist literary criticism changes to the concept auto-gyno-graphy- with an emphasis on women's specific subjectivity in autobiographical writing. 14
What are the main parameters of women's autobiography as a genre identified in feminist literary criticism?
1. In women's autobiographical writing, the entire woman's life is worthy of description, and not just the defining stages of that life. In terms of content, one of the main themes of a woman’s autobiography is the theme of home and family (it is the family that is recognized as the main model for the formation of gender identification). The difference from classic women’s autobiographies is that the decisive content parameter today is “fearlessness to talk about your body and sexuality” not as something secondary and additional to the main autobiographical plot, but as the main thing in it.
2. The formal sign of an autobiographical letter remains the sign of writing in the first person, while a feature of a woman’s autobiography is an appeal to personal experience not as an individual, but as a group's gendered experience.
3. There is a conscious or unconscious meaningful opposition of one’s inner private world to the world official history: in a woman’s autobiographical text it is often impossible to determine in principle which historical era it belongs to. This refusal or challenge to official history - through the representation of the themes of home, kitchen,
14 Elizabeth Wilson Mirror Writing: An Autobiography(London: Virago, 1982), p. 53.
family life, women's and children's experiences and illnesses, etc. - is recognized as one of the conscious feminist gestures of women's autobiographical writing.
4. In the formal structure of the text, instead of a temporal narrative sequence of events, an emotional sequence is realized; the eventfulness of the “big story” is replaced by a woman’s internal “affected story.” The main type of narrative linking becomes the “and...and...and...” type, in the terminology of Rosi Braidotti.
Foucault's concept of marginal practices had a huge influence on the concept of women's autobiography. Foucault draws an analogy between the traditional carriers of the discourse of recognition in culture - criminals who produce numerous literature of confessions (the so-called literature of “gallows speeches”), patients - and the female subject, represented in culture exclusively through the discourse of guilt. According to feminist researchers, a woman as a socially marginal object in culture is left with one “privileged” place - the place confessing subjectivity: as the woman who confesses says, and as she is censored and forbidden to say, a whole range of women's social identifications are formed. Foucault pays special attention to the fact that the discourse of recognition in culture is always a discourse of guilt and that the “ideal” figure of the embodiment of guilt in history is a woman. 15 Indeed, classic studies of women's literature by Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that its main form has traditionally been autobiographical writing as a letter of confession, on the basis of which the distinction of genres is built: short story, tale, diary, memoir, poetry.
Elaine Showalter applies Foucault's methodology for analyzing marginal practices to the analysis of the phenomenon of the feminine in culture as a “subjectivity of recognition” that is formed in various spheres of reality based on the analysis of the practices of female sexuality (Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Turn of the Century, 1991), female madness (Women's madness. Women,
15 Foucault Michel. A history of madness in the classical era. St. Petersburg: University Book, 1997. P. 491.
madness and English culture, 1830-1980, 1985) and women's literature, including autobiographical (Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from the Brontës to Lessing, 1977). Its main conclusion is the conclusion about the inevitable gender asymmetry in culture: if the concept of the feminine in it is always labeled as a symbol of the irrational and guilty, the ultimate expression of which is the label “madness,” then the concept of the masculine inevitably correlates with the concepts of reason and rationality. And although the concepts of female and male subjectivity may change in different historical eras, the gender asymmetry of the representative policies of female and male in culture, according to Showalter, remains unchanged: even when the phenomenon of the irrational is represented by a man (confession of sins, pathology or sexual perversions in the discourse of men prose of recognition at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries), at the symbolic level it receives the inevitable labeling of the feminine: “female madness” or “female sensuality” within the male subject. 16
The methodological problem of analyzing women's subjectivity as a discourse of recognition posed by Foucault is a form of conceptual tension in modern feminist theory, in which today there are two main approaches to assessing women's discourse as a discourse of recognition. Theorists of “equality feminism” call for resistance to patriarchal mechanisms for the production of female subjectivization in culture and equal adoption of male discursive values and norms (in particular, in assessing the female discourse of recognition, it is emphasized that a woman does not implement a discourse of guilt, but a discourse of independence, self-affirmation and self-sufficiency). Theorists of “difference feminism” insist that women's specific discourse (including autobiographical discourse as a discourse of recognition) is an alternative form of knowledge and an alternative form of subjectivity. A confessing woman, in their opinion, is not only an object of power, but also a subject of language, and the female body
16 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 18301980(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 4.
spoken language as a language of recognition turns out to be that field of suggestive signs - will, desire and independent pleasure - that undermines the norms of patriarchal culture. Therefore, women's autobiographical discourse, in their opinion, cannot be measured within the framework of traditional men's discourse, in which it inevitably acquires secondary markings, and it is necessary to develop our own standards for analyzing women's autobiographical writing.
Conclusion: The Implications of Feminist Literary Criticism for Literary Theory
The effect of feminist literary criticism on literary theory and culture at the end of the 20th century is truly stunning: many texts by women authors (including minor and forgotten ones) have been discovered and studied not only in the traditions of the leading literatures of the world, but also in the literary traditions of various countries; A significant number of male and female authors of classical literature have been subjected to feminist analysis, from ancient times to the present day; many new interpretations of the classical literary tradition have been proposed; a new apparatus of literary theory has been created, enriched with the apparatus of feminist literary criticism, new strategies for analyzing literary texts have been introduced and are being used. It can be said that today there is no practice of reading a literary or philosophical text that would not take into account its possible gender or feminist interpretation. And most importantly, a new broad academic discipline has been created - feminist literary criticism, within which texts related to women's writing, women's style or women's way of being are produced.
As already noted, in contrast to the logic of essentialism (essentialist concepts of “women’s literature”, “women’s reading” and “women’s writing”), feminist theory of the late 20th century puts forward non-essentialist projects of female subjectification in culture based on postmodern concepts of a decentered subject (in particular , performative
gender identification in literature). One could say that feminist literary criticism today stands at the intersection of these two methodological approaches, theorizing female authorship and female literary creativity in the context of this methodological problematization. And it is precisely in its vein in modern gender discourse that there is a conceptual meeting of two main strategies for interpreting female subjectivity in the culture of the late 20th century - feminism and postfeminism, and further retheorization of the problem of female subjectivity in literary theory depends on their possible interaction and mutual influence on each other .
Memoirs are testimonies of participants or eyewitnesses to any historical events, compiled on the basis of personal impressions. By reproducing the most important aspects of reality, the memoirist seeks to determine his place in what happened and evaluate historical events. This makes memoirs a valuable source for studying the psychological aspects of the development of society, determining the connection between events occurring in the past, and deciphering incomplete, inaccurate or deliberately distorted information from other historical sources. Memoirs serve as an additional source of factual material on topics. They are usually created after a long period of time and contain a retrospective, biased view of the events described. Depending on the object of the memory, they represent a biography of the author, a memory of a separate event, a historical figure, etc.
A feature of memoir literature is its documentation, which is based on the testimony of memoirists, eyewitnesses of the events described. Memoirs are not only a recording of past events, they are also confession, justification, accusation, and personal reflections. Of course, memoirs are subjective in nature, since they bear the imprint of the author’s personality. Memoirs are not alien to colorful prose, biased journalism, and validity. Therefore, the lines separating memoir literature from fiction, journalism, and even scientific research are not always distinguishable.
The nature of the content of the memoir heritage is associated with the personality of the author, the depth of his plan and also depends on the significance of the events described. If the author is a historically significant person, he himself, his views and ideas, his attitude to the events of which he was an eyewitness are especially interesting. At the same time, memoirs cannot be considered a product of exclusively personal origin. They inevitably bear the mark of their time. The sincerity of the memoirist, the completeness and reliability of his impressions depend on the era in which the memoirs were written and published. The object of memories is also of no small importance: the event or person about which the memoirist writes. A memoirist often first of all wants to show his role in this event, to emphasize his significance in the events described, of which he was a contemporary.
The sources of memoir literature itself can be written and oral. Written documents are a wide variety of documents: operational documents of military headquarters, excerpts from letters and diaries, newspaper reports, fragments of departmental documentation, etc. Oral sources are also involved in writing memoirs. It happens that the stories of other people are the only channels of knowledge about a particular fact. In this regard, the most important source of memoirs remains memory. Here, much depends on the reliability of the memoirist’s memory and on his ability to accurately convey information about events to the reader. At the same time, time distance makes it possible to more calmly evaluate the past, take an objective look at one’s own person, place emphasis more carefully, highlight the most important from the particular, etc. One of effective methods verification of the completeness and reliability of the memoirs is their comparison with other sources Chernomorsky M.N. Memoirs as a historical source. - M., 1959. - P. 395..
The peculiarity of memoir literature is its correspondence to historical events, the chronological sequence of the narrative, and the use of artistic techniques. They involve turning to the distant past, re-evaluating current events from the height of the memoirist’s accumulated experience. In terms of relative authenticity and lack of fiction, memoirs are close to historical prose, scientific-biographical, autobiographical and documentary-historical essays. At the same time, memoirs are distinguished from autobiography by their focus on displaying not only the author’s personality, but also the historical reality to which he was involved. Elizavetina G. Formation of the genres of autobiography and memoirs // Russian and Western European classicism. - M., 1982. - P. 65.. In contrast to the scientific genre, memoir literature presupposes a personal assessment of events. In this regard, in terms of actual accuracy, the reproduction of the material is often inferior to the document. Researchers are forced to subject event facts from the memoirs of socio-political and cultural figures to critical analysis with available information in other documentary sources V. Cardin. Today about yesterday. Memoirs and modernity. - M., 1961. - P.45.. Memoir literature reflects not only social events, the lives of individual people, but also the motives, goals of their activities, personal experiences. Due to this feature, historians classify memoir literature as one of the most complex, multifaceted sources that cannot be replaced by either documentary sources or historical and literary works Pavlovskaya S.V. Memoirs and diaries of domestic historians as a historical source for studying the socio-political and scientific-pedagogical life of Russia late XIX- beginning of the 20th century. // Abstract of dissertation. Ph.D. ist. Sci. - Nizhny Novgorod, 2006. .
The problem of classifying memoir heritage in historical literature is debatable. Researcher S. Gelis suggests dividing memoirs into categories depending on the role, place and share of the author of the memoirs in the events described. According to this principle, the researcher divides memoirs into memoirs of an organizer, memoirs of a participant, memoirs of a witness, memoirs of an eyewitness, memoirs of a contemporary Gelis S. How to write memoirs (Methodological essay) // Proletarskaya revolution.- 1925.- No. 7.- pp. 203-206. .
Scientist M.N. Chernomorsky identifies four types of memoir sources: complete biographies - memories covering a long period of time; memories covering a certain period of time; memories of specific events; diaries; literary notesChernomorsky M.N. Memoirs as a historical source. Textbook on source studies of the history of the USSR. - M., 1959 - P. 74..
Researcher L.G. Zakharova proposed as a basis the division of memoirs by type of activity: memoirs and diaries statesmen, memoirs of public figures, memoirs of landowners and commercial and industrial figures, memoirs of scientists and cultural figures, memoirs of clergy, memoirs of military figures Zakharov L.G. Memoirs, diaries, private correspondence of the second half of the 19th century century // Source study of the history of the USSR. / ed. I.A. Fedosova.- M., 1970.- P. 369-370..
L.I. Derevnina proposes to base the classification on the principle of differences in the author's individuality and position. From this point of view, the researcher considers memories as the author's consideration of the past from the perspective of the present; diaries - the author's consideration of the past from the positions characteristic of the author in this very past. For this reason, L.I. Derevnina identifies the following groups of memoirs: memoirs, diaries, transcripts and literary recording of Derevnina L.I. On the term “memoirs” and the classification of memoir sources (historiography of the issue) // Questions of archival science. - 1963. - No. 4. - P.45..
S.S. Mintz suggests unconventional way groupings of memoir sources. As a basis for grouping sources of this type, she proposes to accept the subjective nature of memoirs, reflecting the objectively existing different levels of an individual’s awareness of interpersonal and social relations Mints S.S. On the peculiarities of the evolution of sources of a memoir nature (towards the formulation of the problem // History of the USSR. - 1979. - No. 2. - P. 69-70.. Such a grouping, from its point of view, looks like this:
Sources reflecting the initial stage of the objective process of awareness of the social significance of the individual: separation of the individual from the social environment surrounding him (self-centered sources, often contrasting the individual with the society being described);
Sources reflecting the individual’s weak awareness of the mechanism of social relations: the degree of awareness of the participation of the authors of memoirs in interpersonal relationships does not rise above the defense, sometimes unconscious, of the interests of a small corporate closed group to which the memoirist belongs;
Sources reflecting the degree of awareness by their authors of interpersonal relationships: the self-awareness of an individual rises to the level of conscious acceptance of the interests of a certain class;
Sources reflecting the highest degree of an individual’s mastery of the mechanisms of social relations: the individual’s self-awareness is inseparable from the awareness of the national interests and needs of society as a whole. Ibid..
The author stipulates that when using such a grouping when conducting a specific historical study, it is impossible to do without observing the principle of historicism, since the role of an individual link is manifested in its entirety only taking into account the characteristics of the historical era. The difference and advantages of his classification S.S. Mintz sees that it is based not on a formal, but on a qualitative feature that characterizes the internal essence of sources of a memoir nature. Sheretov S.G. Problems of classification of memoir sources in Soviet historiography of source studies. // Bulletin of Kainar University, 2002. - No. 2. - P.54. .
In addition, the following classifications of memoir literature are common among researchers: about events described in memoirs on a thematic and chronological basis (for example, about the October Revolution and the Civil War, about the Great Patriotic War etc.); by personalities (for example, memories of V.I. Lenin, etc.); classify by origin (i.e. who wrote the memoirs) (for example, memoirs of statesmen, memoirs of literary and artistic figures, military memoirs, etc.); memoirs by method and form of reproduction (for example, memories themselves, literary recordings, interviews, diaries). The nature of the memoirs, the degree of their reliability, completeness, concealment of information, and understatement are greatly influenced by the era in which the memoirs were created. Therefore, it is legitimate to classify memoir literature on a chronological basis: memoirs written in the 20s; memoirs of the 30s - early 50s; memoirs of the “thaw” period of the 60s; memoirs of the 60-80s, etc. Derevnina P.I. On the term “memoirs” and the classification of memoir sources // Questions of archival science. - 1963. - No. 4. - P. 125.
It should be noted that diaries are closely related to memoirs - a set of daily or periodic fragmentary records of the author, outlining the events of his personal life against the backdrop of events of contemporary historical reality. A diary is the primary form of memoir literature, which is devoid of eventful narration. Diaries differ from memoirs in that entries in them are recorded immediately after an event.
Diaries can be divided into two categories: diary entries that simply state the sequence of events and the author’s attitude towards them. Such notes can sometimes be hasty; the author does not care about the form of presentation. The second category of records is a kind of form artistic creativity. Such recordings are characterized by careful elaboration of the text. We are not talking about artistic delights, but about a particularly high form of poetic understanding of reality by a creative person and a truthful, accurate, expressive reproduction of his perception of the world.
Memories and notes are special, while more complex shape memoir literature. Memories are not only a dispassionate recording of past events, they are also confession, justification, accusation, and reflections of the individual. Therefore memories are subjective. In his memoirs, the author describes a large period of time and analyzes events from the angle of a certain concept. Memories are devoid of randomly described events.
A special form of memoir is autobiography. This is a form of biography where the main character is the author. The autobiography is written in the first person and covers most of his life. Autobiography is not just self-reflection, it requires a certain narrative form. This short description important turning points in personal history. When assessing autobiographical entries, it should be borne in mind that these entries are often compiled with the explicit purpose of self-justification and self-defense of their author. It should be noted that memoirs are not the same as autobiography. The memoirist tries to comprehend historical events through the prism of his own consciousness, to describe his actions as part of a general process, and in an autobiography the emphasis is on inner life person. When using memoirs as historical sources, the question is always how much you can trust what is written in them. The comparison method allows us to identify some inaccuracies. An important role in confirming or refuting the facts stated in the memoirs belongs to reference literature relating to the time reproduced on the pages of the memoirs.
Researcher Grebenyuk O.S. notes that the autobiography genre is widely used when writing scientific research. He distinguishes two types of autobiographies: the first is a short and formal official autobiography, dryly listing the facts of life, and the second is an autobiography as an individual’s desire to comprehend his life path and your mental and spiritual self-development. These are detailed artistic and philosophical-reflective texts. This kind of biographies reveals not only the process of self-conversion, but also the very process of its constitution as a holistic experience. Although autobiography aims to create an image of oneself as a result of reflective experience, this image is always created taking into account who will read the text of the autobiography. In autobiographies, literary form can come into conflict with content: self-condemnation can turn into narcissism. This is not surprising, since the author of his own biography is almost always “ positive hero", he is biased about his own life, and it is difficult for him to maintain objectivity. An extensive autobiographical text does not simply list the events of the author’s life, but contains a number of assessments that replace each other. On the one hand, the author wants to see the integrity of himself, to understand himself in the context of self-realization, on the other hand, he changes assessments of himself, moving from describing one stage of life to to another. This creates tension and openness in the autobiography. The author of an autobiography appears simultaneously in two persons: on the one hand, he is an actively acting, thinking, remembering, text-creating subject; on the other hand, he is the object of description, therefore, in memories, a transition from the first to the third person is possible, when a person calls himself by name and gives himself detached characteristics Grebenyuk O.S. Autobiography: philosophical and cultural analysis. / Author's abstract. diss. Ph.D. Philosopher Sci. - Rostov-on-Don, 2005..
Letters are a unique, unlike anything else type of historical source. They are of great value for historical research. In source studies they can be considered in several capacities: as a newspaper genre; as a type of office documents; letters to famous people have independent significance politicians, writers, artists, etc.; as a type of epistolary genre.
For the convenience of characterizing letters, we will carry out a small classification of them: permanent mail to newspapers, including letters published and stored in the newspaper archive. We can especially highlight a subgroup of letters received in connection with some anniversary or significant event, discussion of some important document, etc.: permanent mail to state and public institutions (complaints, claims, proposals, denunciations, etc.); letters to politicians, public figures, scientists, representatives of the arts; private correspondence is a residual phenomenon of the once very widespread epistolary genre of V.V. Kabanov. Source study of the history of Soviet society/ http://www.opentextnn.ru/history/istochnik/kabanov/?id=1376.
Diaries, memoirs, autobiographical works, letters, like any other historical source, can play both the main and minor role for the historian. This is largely determined by the choice of topic and aspect of the study. So, for working on the biographies of historical personalities, for recreating political history, for studying the level of development of science, culture, and art, diaries and memoirs can be considered as the main source. If we're talking about about the study of topics of specific historical events, processes or phenomena, then memoirs, as a rule, are used as an additional source of information Pavlovskaya S.V. Memoirs and diaries of domestic historians as a historical source for studying the socio-political and scientific-pedagogical life of Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. // Abstract of dissertation. Ph.D. ist. Sci. - Nizhny Novgorod, 2006. .
Memoir literature can serve as historical material, documentary evidence, but of course only under the condition of critical verification and revision, which are usual for every historical source. The authenticity of the memoir monument, i.e., its actual belonging to the author to whom it is attributed, must be subjected to examination; its reliability. When deciding on the reliability of memoirs, one should take into account such characteristics of the author of memoirs as memory, attention, type of perception, nature and working conditions, then the use of sources in the work, etc. Of course, errors in the memoirist’s memory, its persistence depend on from the duration of the period of time separating the moment of commission or observation of an event from its recording, etc., are easily corrected and supplemented by other sources and do not represent a decisive “factor” in the question of the reliability of memoirs.
Thus, memoirs represent the most important historical source, containing information not only about specific events, but also reflecting the trends of social thought of a particular era. At the same time, memoir literature is subjective in nature, the main source of which is the author’s memory.