The role of fiction as a historical source in research on new cultural history. Literary works as historical sources

KAZAN STATE UNIVERSITY

As a manuscript

1 V DVG 1998

Marina Borisovna Mogilner

FICTION AS A SOURCE ON THE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN RADICAL INTELLIGENCE OF THE BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURY

07.00.09 - Historiography, source studies and methods of historical research

Kazan - 1998

The work was carried out at the Department of Historiography, Source Studies and Methods of Historical Research at Kazan State University.

Scientific supervisor - Doctor of Historical Sciences,

Professor A.L. Litvin.

Official opponents - Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor

Historical Sciences, Professor S. M. Kashtanov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor I. A. Gilyazov.

Leading organization - Samara State

university.

The defense will take place on June 11, 1998 at 10 o’clock at a meeting of the dissertation Council D.053.29.06. by award scientific degree candidate of historical sciences at Kazan State University at the address: 420008, Kazan, st. Kremlevskaya, 18, second building, room. 1112.

The dissertation can be found at scientific library them. N.I. Lobachevsky Kazan State University. Abstract sent out "_[_" May 1998

Scientific Secretary of the Dissertation Council, Candidate of Historical Sciences,

Associate Professor L9 "--" R.G. Kashafutdinov

1. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORK

Relevance and rationale for choosing the topic. Among the many sources on the history of the Russian intelligentsia, fiction ranks special place. Due to certain historical and political circumstances, literature assumed very special functions: while fulfilling a religious and ethical mission, it also spread into the sphere of philosophy, journalism, and politics, taking on the “universal function of the universal language of culture.”1 This role of literature was especially clearly manifested h historical fate left-radical wing of the Russian intelligentsia. Through literary activity, they compensated for natural political and social frustration, turning literature not only into a means of self-identification as a distinct socio-cultural community, but also into a weapon in the struggle against the existing order.

Chronologically, the study is limited to two incomplete decades - 1900 - 1914. This short time period turned out to be extremely rich in both cultural and political events in which the radical intelligentsia took an active part, and which were uniquely reflected in the creation of literary texts written by her. According to V.V. Shelokhaev, at the beginning of the 20th century, the radical intelligentsia reached the peak of its |organizational maturity and ideological standardization.2 Despite party and program divisions, opposition parties, together with periodicals and literature close to them in spirit -

oh, and their wide audience, they spoke the same

om language - the language of a certain unity that opposed itself to re-sim. At the same time, this unity received the name “Underground Russia”

1 Lotman Yu. M. On the dynamics of culture // Semiotics and history. Works on sign systems XXV. - Vol. 936 - Tartu, 1992. - P. 21.

2 Shelokhaev V.V. The phenomenon of a multi-party system in Russia // Extreme history and extremes of historians. Sat. articles. - M., 1997. - P. 11.

this" (borrowed from the fictional essays of the same name by the terrorist and writer S. M. Stepyak-Kravchinsky, 1882): a capacious characteristic, often found in the press of those years, describing the world of professional revolutionaries, members of left-wing political parties and the socio-cultural environment that nurtured radicalism. The policy of the period of “Underground Russia” was finally realized as a systematic forceful influence on the state. The intelligentsia, whose humanistic values, in principle, contradicted violence, and even systemic one, was forced to work on self-justification, and that is why the concept of “Underground Russia” should not be included. only professional revolutionary groups and parties, but always texts that described these organizations and their members, imposing their image on both the radicals themselves and legal Russia.

An additional factor that determined chronological framework research, the state of historiography on the chosen topic was revealed. Unlike the radical intelligentsia of the 20th century, their predecessors - commoners and populists - are represented in historiography by more in-depth and large-scale studies. The importance of the cultural-psychological context, and therefore literary sources, for understanding the essence of these stages in the history of the intelligentsia, was widely recognized by historians.3 Moreover, in relation to the intelligentsia of the second half of the 19th century, a direction developed in domestic historiography related to

3 See: Russian literature and populism. Collection of articles / Rep. Ed. I. G. Yampolsky. - JI., 1971. - 191 e.; Sokolov N.I. Russian literature and populism. Literary movement of the 70s XIX century. -L., 1968. - 254 euros; The revolutionary situation in Russia in 1859 - 1861 / Ed. M. V. Nechkina. - M., 1970. - 375 euros; Essays on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia in the 60-80s of the 19th century. - Kirov, 1979. -102 e.; The development of revolutionary morality from noble revolutionaries to proletarian ones // Political exile and revolutionary movement in Russia. The end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century. Sat. Scientific works. - Novosibirsk, 1988. - P. 152 - 164; Alekseeva G. D. Populism in Russia in the 20th century. Ideological evolution. - M., 1990. - 246 p. ; Wortman R. The Crisis of Russian Populism. -Cambridge, 1967; Ventury F. Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. -New York, 1960, etc.

oe with historical development fiction. Along with the literary polemics of those years and the activities of various literary circles and student libraries, where “the political education of commoner students took place”4, researchers studied the history of the creation and social existence of individual revolutionary works literary creativity.5 We are trying to apply and develop the accumulated efforts of our predecessors in socially oriented analysis of artistic technologies to study the next generation of radicals.

Wulfson G. N. Raznochinno-democratic movement in the Volga region and the Urals during the years of the first revolutionary situation.

Kazan, 197 4. - 352 p. See also: Litvina F. Legal propaganda of raznochintsy-democrats of the 60-70s. XIX. - Kazan, 1986. - 133 e.; Hers: Literary evenings"The ruins of the fall of serfdom (From the history of social movement and cultural life in Russia / Dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences. - Kazan, 1970. - 260 p.

The historical and literary study of the anti-nihilistic Human has emerged as a special interdisciplinary direction. See: Belyaeva L. A. “Iskra” and “Anti-nihilistic humane // Russian literature and the liberation movement. IV

Vol. 129. - Kazan, 1974.-S. 17 - 35; Sorokin Yu. S. Dtinigilistic novel // History of the Russian novel. - T. .1. - M.-L., 1964. The social functions of illegal poetry: the end of the 19th century were comprehensively studied in the works of Kazan [researcher E. G. Bushkanets. See the following works of this 1st: Revolutionary poems - proclamations of the late 850s - early 1860s // Revolutionary situation in > Russia in 1859 - 1961. - M., 1962. - P. 389 - 417; [legal poetry of revolutionary circles of the late 50s -[early 60s of the 19th century. - Kazan, 1961. - 41 e.;) features of the study of monuments of illegal revolutionary yueziya of the 19th century. - Kazan, 1962. - 53 e.; In search of a curtain (On the attribution of monuments of free Russian poetry I about documentary data // Russian literature and liberation movement. Scientific notes of the KSPI. - Issue. SSU. - Collection 1. - Kazan, 1968. - P. 3 - 24; Revolutionaries 1.870 's and the magazine "Word" // Russian literature and yawning movement. Scientific notes of the KSPI - Vol. 2. - Kazan, 1970. - P. 29 - 45 and other works. The topic received an interesting embodiment in the collection “The Revolutionary Situation in Russia in mid-19th centuries: figures and historians" edited by M. V. Nechkina (M., 1986).

In a similar way, the dissertation critically used the experience of pre-revolutionary intellectual self-reflection, which in Russia traditionally had much in common with socially oriented literary criticism.6

And yet, methodologically, we cannot rely either on the attempts of pre-revolutionary authors to replace the history of real people with the history of literary types,7 or on the study of literature practiced in Soviet historiography from the point of view of its reflection of objective reality (this is what the source study adaptation of Lenin’s theory of reflection looked like). In domestic source studies, interest in literary texts arose sporadically, since, in principle, the question of its auxiliary

6 Avdeev M.V. Our society (1820 - 1870) in the heroes and heroines of literature. - St. Petersburg, 1874. - 291 units; Social consciousness in Russian literature. Critical Essays. - St. Petersburg, 1900. - 302 e.; Pyin A. N. Characteristics of literary opinions from the twenties to the fifties. Historical essays. - Ed. 4th, add. - St. Petersburg, 1909. - 519 p.; Voitolovsky JI. Current moment and current literature: Toward the psychology of modern public sentiment. - St. Petersburg, 1908. - 48 e.; Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D.N. History of the Russian intelligentsia // Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D.N. Collection. Op. - vol. 9. - St. Petersburg, 1911. - 224 e.; Ivanov-Razumnik. Russian history social thought: individualism and philistinism in Russian literature and life of the 19th century. - T. 1.-SP6., 1911 -414 e.; T. 2- 520 e.;

7 In this sense, academic historiography did not differ methodologically from the tradition of intellectual self-reflection. Social and psychological characteristics, “ideas, views, feelings, impressions of people of a certain time” were sought in fiction by V. O. Klyuchevsky, followed by N. A. Rozhkov, S. F. Platonov, V. I. Semevsky and others And although their methods of working with literary texts are outdated today, and sometimes do not stand up to criticism, general understanding the possibilities of a literary source proposed by these historians dominates modern Russian historiography. Klyuchevsky V. O. Review of the study by S. F. Platonov “Ancient Russian legends and stories about the troubled times of the 17th century as a historical source” // Klyuchevsky V. O. Soch. In 9 vols. - M., 1989.- T. 7.- P. 124. See also: Klyuchevsky V. O. Eugene Onegin and his ancestors // Ibid. - T. 9. - P. 84 - 100; Fonvizin's minor: the experience of a historical explanation of the educational play I Ibid., pp. 55 - 76; Rozhkov N.A. Pushkinskaya Tatyana and Griboedovskaya Sofya in their connection with the history of Russian women of the 17th - 18th centuries And a magazine for everyone. -1899. - No. 5. - P. 558 - 566; Semovsky V.I. Serfdom and peasant reform in the works of M.E. Saltykov (Shchedrin) // History of the USSR. - 1978. - No. 1. - P. 130.

telny character was decided. In the 1930s, source scholars recognized the independence of literary sources only in relation to eras that left few other sources.8 Then the thaw of the 1960s touched on this problem, and the potential of literary texts in the field of psychological generalizations received limited recognition in the context of the history of the Soviet period.9 Finally, perestroika stimulated the creation of “history with a human face,” which in turn contributed to the awakening of interest in literary sources.10 During these years, the famous Russian source scholar S.O. Schmidt began work on a series of reports and articles, which to date are the last in a word of academic source study on the issue of literary text. Unlike other historians who turned to literary sources (N.I. Mironets, who emphasizes the educational and propaganda role of literature, and N.G. Dumova, who develops the tradition of studying " psychological types"), Schmidt takes into account the experience of the history of mentalities, considering works of literature

8 Saar G.P. Sources and methods of historical research. - Baku, 1930. - 174 p.; Mironets N.I. Fiction as a historical source: towards the historiography of the issue // History of the USSR. - 1976. - No. 1. -I 125-176.

9 Mnukhina R.S. On teaching source studies of modern history // Calling and modern history. -1961. - No. 4. - P. 127 -132; On the source of modern and contemporary history: to the results of the discussion // New and modern history. - 1963. - No. 4. - P. 121-125; Varshavchik M.A. About some “surveys of the source study of the history of the CPSU // Questions of the history of the CPSU.

1962. - No. 4. - P. 170 - 178; To the results of the discussion of some issues in the history of the CPSU // Questions of the history of the CPSU. - 1963. - No. >. - P. 101 - 105; Seleznev M. S. On the classification of historical sources in connection with the construction of a course on source studies at universities. - M., 1964. - P. 322 - 340; Ztp<"л,.с:::;й а. И. Теория и методика источниковедения истории СССР. -Сиев, 1968 . - С. 51 - 52.

10 Mironets N.I. Revolutionary poetry of the October Revolution and the Civil War as a historical source. - Kyiv, 1988. - 176 s; Dumova N. G. About artistic literature as a source for the study of social psychology // On the authenticity and reliability of a historical source. -Sazan, 1991. - P. 112 - 117.

ry and art “an important source for understanding the mentality of the time of their creation and subsequent existence...” It is obvious that when working with literary texts today, it is impossible to ignore the experience of world historiography, the research of cultural scientists and literary theorists - in a word, the entire complex of interdisciplinary knowledge , which was formed in the humanities in the post-war period.

Methodological basis of the study. Against the backdrop of the blurring of disciplinary boundaries between history, anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism and philosophy, the literary text has emerged as the object of a new interdisciplinary search. In the 1960s, structuralism, which dominated in philosophy, linguistics and history (the Braudelian generation of the Annales school), brought to the fore the study of static processes, which, in relation to literary documents, was expressed in the dictates of the literary approach (absolutization of the text; taking it out of context, etc. ). But at the end of the 1970s, a change in philosophical paradigms occurred, and the diachronic side of historical documents was rehabilitated. At this stage, actual historical methods of working with literary texts emerge and works that have already become classics are created, based on literary sources.12 In methodological terms, the very possibility of asking literary texts “historical questions” arose as a result of the rethinking of both positivist literary criticism and structuralism, in favor of semiotics.13

11 Schmidt S. O. Fiction and art as a source of the formation of historical ideas (1992) // Shmidt S. O. The path of a historian. Selected works on source studies and historiography. -M., 1997. - pp. 113 - 115. See also: Schmidt S. O. Historiographic sources and literary monuments // Ibid., pp. 92 - 97.

12 Ginzburg S. The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.-London and Henley., 1981; Darnton R. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes of French Cultural History.-New York., 1984; Hunt L. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. - Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992.

This study develops this methodological tendency in relation to the history of the Russian radical intelligentsia. The semiotic model is based on the idea of ​​the text as the intersection of the points of view of the creator of the text and the audience. The third component is the presence of certain structural features, perceived as signals of the text.14 In this way, the historian’s interest in what in literary studies was somewhat disparagingly called “context” is legitimized. If the text is thought of as a communicative event, then the context is an organic part of the text. Accordingly, the thesis about the mechanical reflection of the context in the text is removed, and the historian faces the problem of the functioning of the text in the context, the problem of the literary text as a reality that shapes the ideas and perceptions of people.15 Any literary text appears to the historian as a value-based compaction of the world (M. Bakhtin’s expression), built around literary heroes. Interpretation

13 In the West, this transition can be personified by the talented historian and writer Umberto Eco, while in Russia a parallel process is associated with the name of Yu. M. Lotman. See: Eco U. A Theory of Semiotics. -London., 1977; Idem. The Role of the Reader. -Bloomington., 1979; Idem. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. - Cambridge, Mass. and London., 1994; Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. - M., 1994. - 547 pp. by the talented historian and writer Umberto Eco, while in Russia a parallel process is associated with the name of Yu. M. Lotman. See: Eco U. A Theory of Semiotics. -London., 1977; Idem. The Role of the Reader. - Bloomington., 1979; Idem. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. - Cambridge, Mass. and London., 1994; Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. - M., 1994. - 547 p.

14 Lotman Yu. M. Culture and explosion. - M., 1992. - P. 179; Uspensky B. A. History and semiotics: the perception of time as a semiotic problem. Article one. // Mirror. Semiotics of mirroring. Works on sign systems. - Vol. 831. - Tartu, 1988. - P. 67.

15 In Russian historical science, this approach was first substantiated by M. V. Nechkina, who proposed studying “not just the artistic image as such, but precisely the function artistic image in the mind of the reader." Nechkina M.V. The function of the artistic image in the historical process. - M., 1982. - 318 pp. See also: Literature and history (Historical process in the creative consciousness of Russian writers of the 18th - 20th centuries). - St. Petersburg, 1992. - 360 p. Bely O. V. Secrets of the “underground” man. Artistic word - everyday consciousness - semiotics of power - Kiev, 1991. - 312 p.

tational intrigue consists in “unwinding” this value compaction, in building a system of value orientations of the author, heroes and readership within their cultural and historical context.16 This is how the main methodological thesis of this study, built on a semiotic understanding of the literary source, can be formulated.

Accordingly, we do not consider it possible to talk about the secondary, auxiliary nature of literary sources. The nature of a particular study determines the relative importance of sources, and in our case, literary texts are the main element of the source base of the work. It is necessary to make a reservation that by literary sources we mean only those works belles lettres, which are contemporary in time of occurrence to the events being studied, i.e. made “as if from within the described state..., using exclusively the metalanguage that was developed within a given tradition...” and a given time.17 Works of art that, in relation to the period under study, represent a later reflection ( historical novels, literary biographies, literary and philosophical essays) are historiographical sources and should be considered in a completely different context.18 Actually, a literary source is a special type of written sources, differing in the type of information encoding inherent in artistic discourse.

Since the historical use of literary sources is meaningless without taking into account the context, literary studies

16 Tyupa V.I. Towards a new paradigm of literary knowledge II Aesthetic discourse: semiotic studies in the field of literature. -Novosibirsk, 1991. - P. 4 - 16; Fukson L. Yu. The world of a literary work as a system of values ​​// Ibid., pp. 17 - 24.

17 Toporov V. N. On the cosmological sources of early historical descriptions II Collection of scientific articles in honor of M. M. Bakhtin. Works on sign systems. VI. - Vol. 308. - Tartu, 1973. - P. 109.

18 Schmidt S. O. Historiographic sources and literary monuments // S. O. Shmidt. The path of the historian. - P. 92 - 97.

sifications that ignore context and are based solely on the structural and genre characteristics of the works of art, are unlikely to be useful. In our opinion, the most instrumental in the context of historical research is the typology of texts in terms of the possibility of their functioning, developed by Yu. M. Lotman.19 Such a typology sets the limits to which the historian is free to ignore the aesthetic features of the text; it also immediately sets up a dialogical model of thinking, taking into account intentions of at least two poles: the author and the reader. The relevance of this typology for this study is obvious, since we are dealing with a special literature and a special readership. As noted above, the radical intelligentsia attributed functions to literature that went far beyond the aesthetic. Accordingly, in most cases we can talk about a fairly direct connection between the authors of the literature of Underground Russia and its readers. Thus, we methodologically justified our right to emphasize those aspects of this collaboration that are far from purely aesthetic.

Purpose and objectives of the study. The formulation of the purpose of this dissertation work - studying the possibilities of a literary source in the context of historical research dedicated to Russian radicalism of the early 20th century - involves solving the following problems:

Development of the concept of a literary source and the methodology of its analysis in the context of historical research;

Identification and source study interpretation of literary texts generated by the subculture of Russian radicalism of the early 20th century;

Involving them to create a history of the radical intelligentsia of the beginning of the century as a history of the formation and evolution of the compu-

19 Lotman Yu. M. The structure of a literary text. - M., 1970. - P. 347.

lexus of ideas, values ​​and stereotypes of thinking that defined Russian radicalism.

Scientific novelty. The novelty of the dissertation essay, which is based on literary texts, is obvious from the point of view of the theory and practice of domestic source studies. Having given literary texts the status of literary sources and proposed a multidisciplinary methodology for understanding them, we studied the possibilities of literary sources in relation to the history of Russian radicalism of the early 20th century. This made it possible to take the study of values, ideas, and ethical preferences of a social group from the sphere of speculation and conjecture into the sphere of strictly scientific analysis, verified within the framework of a source study approach.

Source base of the dissertation. The understanding of a literary text as a communicative event determined the source base of the dissertation. In addition to literary sources, the dissertation uses: newspaper and magazine journalism and criticism; memoirs and diaries of individual representatives of the radical intelligentsia; documentary sources (protocols of police investigations into cases of underground printing houses, lists of prohibited literature, medical histories, etc.). When working on the dissertation, materials from the following archives were used:

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF): f. No. 1167 (Collection of material evidence seized by Gendarmerie agencies during searches of the editorial offices of magazines, newspapers and individuals); f. 6753 (Konchevskaya Nadezhda Viktorovna); f. 5831 (Savinkov Boris Viktorovich); f. 328 (E. Sakharova-Vavilova). These funds contain documents covering the creative history of the creation of certain literary works, diary entries, as well as manuscripts confiscated during searches in the editorial offices of popular magazines of the early 20th century.

National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART): f. 199 (Kazan Provincial Gendarmerie Directorate); f. 977 (Kazan Imperial University). The NART documents we attracted are protocols of searches of underground printing houses, lists of prohibited and confiscated literature.

Archive of the Republican Psychiatric Hospital, Kazan. This archive preserves case histories from the period of the first Russian Revolution, containing information about the reproduction, even at the level of uncontrolled mental manifestations, of a normative behavioral pattern, vocabulary and imagery set by revolutionary fiction.

Bakhmeteff Archive (New York, USA), collection "S. R. Party". The materials of this collection were used to study the fate of one of the most famous characters of Underground Russia, the terrorist and writer B. Savinkov (literary pseudonym - V. Ropshin).

Slavonic Library, Helsinki University, manuscript department (formerly "Storage of the Russian Library of the Alexander University in Helsingfors"). The manuscript collections of this library contain autographs of student poems and songs of the late 19th century, which are necessary for understanding the origins of the specific literary creativity of the radical intelligentsia. In the dissertation essay we offer a more detailed description of the historical sources we use.

The bulk of the literary sources used in the work are fiction and poetry published in numerous magazines and literary collections of the beginning of the century. As a rule, the artistic level of these works is low, although there are exceptions. Most of the works of art we used have never been involved in scientific circulation either by literary scholars (due to lack of artistic value) or historians (due to lack of interest and adequate methods). The authors of these works are characterized by varying degrees of involvement in Underground Russia: from

direct membership in any political party to ideological support of the left opposition to the regime. Most party authors acted under pseudonyms, which gave them the opportunity to overcome party censorship and the self-censorship of intellectuals, using the form of a work of art to express their individual attitude to the world around them. In some cases (primarily this concerns manuscripts discovered in the archive), it was not possible to establish the authorship of the texts, but this did not deprive the texts themselves of source value, since we consider a literary source as a mass source. Only the identification and mastery of a significant number of fictional and poetic texts allowed us to talk about the thinking stereotypes and sustainable values ​​of the radical intelligentsia.

The most “transparent” for a historian is that part of the literary documents we collected that was created on the eve and during the years of the first Russian revolution - i.e. the actual classic works of Underground Russia. “Classical” in the sense that they most fully corresponded to the canon: the positive hero of these works was almost always the core of the plot, literary characters were identified with a specific function, positive and negative poles were clearly defined. Our method of working with this kind of literature is partly reminiscent of the approach proposed by V. Propp in his famous “Morphology of the Fairy Tale.”20 We also analyze the structural elements of a large group of texts of the same order, isolating the main functions of the characters and plots. But unlike Propp, we are interested in the cultural and historical context, part of which were the literary texts of Underground Russia. That is why it is so important for us to separate post-revolutionary texts into a special group, where the identity between hero and function disappears. It was on the basis of this divergence, which signaled the maturing crisis of radicalism, that new meanings, new meanings were created

20 Propp V. Morphology of a fairy tale. - L., 1928. - 151 p.

and new ideas. Literary texts The post-revolutionary decade represented an instrument of cultural regulation, indispensable in times of crisis and transformation. It was precisely in the destruction of the poetics of Underground Russia and in the search for paths to a new idea, to a new tradition, that was the historical mission of post-revolutionary literary texts, which not only distinguishes them as a special group, but also puts them in direct opposition to the classical literature of Underground Russia.

Structure of the dissertation. The dissertation consists of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion, notes, a list of references and sources.

2. MAIN CONTENTS AND CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY

The introduction substantiates the topic of the dissertation, its scientific relevance and novelty, offers an analysis of historiography and the source base of the research, provides a definition of a literary source, and the methodology for its use as historical evidence.

First chapter. “Literature and the Tradition of Radicalism in Russia” chronologically covers the period from the turn of the century to 1907 and is a basic description of the structural, qualitative and functional characteristics of the “classical” literature of Underground Russia. The chapter consists of three paragraphs.

The first paragraph examines the reasons and mechanism for the formation of the literary mythology of radicalism, the most influential works of art that contributed to the radicalization of the intelligentsia, and the relationship between the authors and readers of this literature. The paragraph traces how fiction imposed images and metaphors on reality, becoming at the same time an ideal, normative reality into which radical in-

the intelligentsia fit more organically than into the present. The main conclusion from Paragraph 1 is that the literature of Underground Russia did not simply reflect the existence of a radical subculture in society, but was its most important formative component.

The second paragraph examines the main value core of underground fiction - the revolutionary hero, and, increasingly, on the eve of 1905, the terrorist hero. The semantics of the sacrificial perception of the radical hero was set by the essays of Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and later it was strengthened in many texts of different orders. The hero of radical fiction was created as a mythological hero - the first among equals, and in accordance with the logic of myth, he resolved the contradictions in the perception of the real figure of the radical movement. Behind the hero of radical fiction there was almost always a recognizable real prototype, but it was precisely the fictional template that often dictated the assessment of the activities of a real person. This was traced by comparing various texts where the heroes were based on the same prototypes (the most popular “models” were Maria Spiridonova and Ivan Kalyaev), and by comparing the images of fictional heroes with contemporary documentary publications in the illegal party and legal “directional” press . Thus, Paragraph 2 demonstrated the mechanism of romanticization and justification of revolutionary violence through the medium of a fictional hero, who was both an ideal and a justification of Russian radicalism, its creation and its myth.

The third and final paragraph of Chapter 1 depicts the collision of literary myth and real mass revolutionary movement. The paragraph examines the mass mobilization of society, the reproduction of fictional patterns of normative behavior at different social levels: from school and student protest, then specific “revolutionary” psychoses and neuroses. The first Russian revolution demonstrated for the first time the distance between literary myth and reality, between terrorist

rum fictional and real. The material presented in the paragraph allowed us to conclude that literary texts that set normative life scenarios, formed ideas about radical politics and those who carried them out, did not stand the test of authenticity.

In general, the central source study conclusion of Chapter 1 is the thesis about the fundamental importance of literary sources in studying the structure of radical consciousness. If radical philosophy or ideology should be studied on the basis of a traditional set of sources, then the basic components of radical consciousness (ideas of good and evil, heroism, normative behavior, etc.) are most fully and adequately represented in literary sources of the late 1890s - x - 1907.

Second chapter. “The literary process in timelessness (1907-1914) and the crisis of radical consciousness in Russia: hero and party” consists of 13 four paragraphs. The first paragraph analyzes works created directly in the wake of the revolution of 1905-1907, and the reader's reaction to them. In the conclusions of the paragraph, we note that it was in the reviews of fictional publications that the main themes of post-revolutionary intellectual discussions first emerged: the crisis of the political doctrine of radicalism, the oral and ethical foundations of radical politics; the essence of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia.

The next paragraph is devoted to the story of the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist B. Sa-Inkov (who wrote under the literary pseudonym V. Ropshin) “The Pale Horse” (1909). The range of reactions to the publication of the story included the suicides of militants, the regrouping of forces in the [arty of socialist revolutionaries , the ardent support of a significant part of the radical and liberal intelligentsia, the complete denial of the other. The characters of Ropshin’s story were present in all later discussions about political terrorism, [turning into signs of the decomposition of the radical hero. Accordingly, we made a fundamental conclusion about the need for

the attractions of the story “The Pale Horse” when studying the evolution of terrorist doctrine and the attitude of the intelligentsia to power politics after 1907.

Paragraph 3 is devoted to M. Artsybashev’s novel “Sanin” (1907) and the movement of individualists “Sanin” provoked by it. Vulgarized, reduced Sanin's Nietzscheanism was a catalyst for broad discussions about individualism, about the human right to live for today. Artsybashev’s literary hero gave rise to a wave of imitators, and he also offered language, imagery, and a context for more serious reflection on the philosophy of individualism, which was alien to the radical subculture. In this sense, the literary source - the novel "Sanin" - has priority over other historical documents traditionally used to study the individualization of the consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia.

The final, fourth paragraph is devoted to the second work of the terrorist writer Ropshin-Savinkov, which was published in 1912. The novel “That Which Wasn’t” touched on the themes of the limitations of party existence and provocation as a generic feature of the underground world. In this paragraph we compare the fictional myths about Azef, created before the speech of Ropshin the novelist (among the creators of the latter was B. Savinkov’s mother), with his version, analyze the reactions of the readership, party interpretations, the influence of the popular novel on the perception of the “Azef case” and the post-revolutionary crisis of radical political parties. Thus, all the plots of the second chapter demonstrate the need to involve a specific work of art when studying one or another aspect of the political and social existence of the radical intelligentsia after 1907. A historian has no right to ignore a literary document that at one time set the perspective for the perception of reality, within the framework of which a new worldview was developed, which ultimately undermined the harmony of the world of the radical intelligentsia.

In the third chapter. "The fate of the mythology of Underground Russia in timelessness (1907 - 1914): literary revelations", three paragraphs.

The first examines imitations and modifications of V. Ropshin’s themes. We proceed from the assumption that it is possible to trace the process of adaptation, assimilation of an idea through its reproduction in other texts. In the logic of the subculture of radicalism, some fiction writers tried to mythologize the excesses of the revolution, while appealing to the authority of Ropshin. Around the “Russian themes” a certain division of “spheres of influence” took place: for example, the Social Democrats created the most interesting works about the limitations of party existence, while the Social Revolutionaries continued to write about terror and provocation. Non-partisan authors have priority in creating a new genre - the “revolutionary” detective story. They were the first to allow themselves ironic notes in relation to classic heroes and plots, the apotheosis of which was a parody of terrorist attack, committed, according to the author, in a psychiatric hospital. It was precisely the ironic attitude brought from outside that helped to finally overcome the hypnosis of radical mythology.

The second paragraph describes literature and semi-literary polemics around the spatial “emanations” of Underground Russia - exile and emigration. The paragraph establishes the priority of fiction in raising painful topics regarding the idealization and de-ideologization of exile and political emigration.

The third paragraph poses the problem of overcoming the crisis of a radical worldview. The material we have collected indicates the coexistence of two trends: departure from life or an attempt to reconcile with it. The epidemic of youth suicide, which we trace both statistically and descriptively, based on the notes and letters of suicides and numerous fiction and poetry about death and suicide, characterizes the first trend. Quite in accordance with the logic of the subculture of radicalism, the intelligentsia passed away with the end of Underground Russia. Without and outside of literature

She could not live and did not want to live the tour myth. Paradoxical as it may sound, the rehabilitation of the present, the attempt to build one’s own biography outside of myths and total ideological systems, sometimes required more courage than suicide. In 1912-1913, the topic of life rehabilitation came to the fore in mass intellectual fiction and criticism. Works appear that summarize the entire post-revolutionary experience, connecting all themes, synthesizing them on a new, life-affirming basis. Literature no longer stood between life and its perception as an ideal reality that could replace life. Accordingly, we have come to the conclusion that the fictionalization of reality has ceased as a mass phenomenon of radical worldview. This, in turn, indicates a relative decline in the value of literary sources for understanding the history of the intelligentsia of the period that began with the First World War. The World War, which gave the entire society an additional impetus to unite around the state idea, ended in the complete collapse of the old Russian statehood. In the fire of war, the shoots of a new attitude to life, hard-won by the intelligentsia, burned out. Wars and revolutions radicalize even moderate people, not to mention those whose adult lives were spent fighting for this very revolution. But the evolution of the radical intelligentsia of the early 20th century, which we traced on the basis of literary sources, also points to another possible outcome - less painful both for the intelligentsia itself and for the country as a whole.

In conclusion, it is stated that the conclusions of this dissertation concern both the informational features of literary sources created within the subculture of Russian radicalism of the early 20th century, and the general methodological basis for the use of literary texts in historical research.

The semiotic model of a literary text has justified itself

during testing on specific historical and literary material. We imagined the text as a function that exists at the intersection of the perspectives of the creator, the reader, and the text itself. We thought of the text as a communicative event, and accordingly, its study seemed impossible without analyzing the context, without studying the social functioning of a work of art, and finally, without reading it in terms of the readership, the cultural environment to which it was addressed. Not the opposition of a “subjective” literary text to “objective” reality, but an analysis of their interaction, social functions, which literature performed in a specific time and historical continuum, the influence of artistic models on the perception of reality made it possible to overcome the difficulties associated with the type of information encoding inherent in literary sources.

Implementing this methodological approach in practice, in each chapter of the dissertation we rose from the basic and necessary level of external and internal source criticism to the level of semiotic analysis. If at the first level we analyzed the external characteristics of handwritten and published literary sources on the topic, established the authorship, political orientation and party affiliation of the writers, the degree of documentation of their work, then at the second level of analysis we were interested in the author’s intentions, his picture of the world, his image of reality and understanding fiction; the role of a specific work of art in the process of the formation and functioning of radical consciousness and a radical type of politics. Ultimately, we were interested in the mechanism by which a work of art turns into a stimulus for direct ideological or political action. To answer this question, we examined in detail the entire path from the appearance of a work of art to its passage through the “filters” of legal and illegal publications, critical articles in the party and non-partisan press - to a specific reader.

This study demonstrates that, from a historical perspective, a literary source is especially productive as a mass source. Creating a history of ideas and values, a history of the circulation of ideas is possible only on the basis of an analysis of the interaction of many texts: high and low, addressed different categories readers, etc. Carrying out this work, we again rose from the basic level of comparative source analysis to semiotic interpretation. As a result, we were able to substantiate the thesis about the existence of a literary mythological space radical world(“Underground Russia”), where many literary texts of different orders were united by a single figurative structure and value scale, a common ethical attitude, and a high degree of interchangeability.

The artistic works of Underground Russia performed a certain ideological function in creating and updating radical mythology, which was fundamentally important for understanding the essence of Russian radicalism of the early 20th century. These texts required a specific audience and a special type of writer, behind whom stood an extraliterary political biography. Considering the high degree of structural and functional similarity of the literary sources we identified, we considered them as a kind of single text in which the process of semiosis took place (development new information and translating it into the language of a given cultural community, the process of cultural self-identification) that interests us.

Taking into account the methodological complexity of working with literary texts, we placed different methodological emphasis in each of the three chapters of the dissertation. Despite the fact that the structure of the work reflects the stages in the history of the formation and development of radical subculture in Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th, each individual chapter also acts as a testing ground for a certain methodological principle. Thus, in Chapter 1 we conducted a structural analysis of literary sources, presenting them

as a single text, and also used the methods of the sociology of reading necessary to study the readership and its relationships with writers.

In Chapter 2, we were particularly interested in the mechanism of transforming an artistic image into a subject of reality, into a stimulus for explicit political and ideological actions, into a tool for structuring and describing reality. Chapter 3 is methodologically focused on the study of the retransmission of ideas, their passage through the “filters” of other texts. It is precisely this multifaceted, multidisciplinary reading of literary texts that was necessary in order to transform them from illustrative and auxiliary historical sources into sources of information about the spiritual, moral, moral and ethical aspects of the existence of people of the past.

So, literary sources, created by the radical intelligentsia of the early 20th century, contain unique information about the spiritual and value world of its creators, about the mythological and utopian aspects of their consciousness, about the radical understanding of politics. The literary myth, structurally and semantically defined by S. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky’s “Underground Russia” essays, removed the fundamental contradictions of intellectual radicalism by romanticizing violence and isolating only one, the sacrificial, side of terrorism. Studying the process of formation and destruction of myths about the radical hero, about pure sacrifice, exile, emigration, made it possible to see how the space of Underground Russia unfolded, controlling more and more aspects of the life of the radical intelligentsia.

An analysis of the mythology of radicalism clearly demonstrated that Russian society gave its moral sanction to the romanticized image of the underground world, accepting the literary myth as reality. The massive nature of the fiction of Underground Russia, which created this myth, its popularity among people far from the underground, corrects the idea existing in historiography that “revolutionary subcultural

Tour flourished among a small group of radical intellectuals and industrial workers..."21

Advances in the radical picture of the world appeared when literature overcame the symbolic, value, and genre structures set by the radical subculture. This is where creativity began, old ideas about the norm were broken, and ways out of the crisis were sought. After 1907, the radical intelligentsia learned to take advantage of this relative freedom, making literature one of the mouthpieces of their experiences, turning it from the creator of radical mythology into the destroyer of old myths. This study demonstrates that without literary sources containing unique information about the evolution of the values ​​and ideals of the radical intelligentsia of the early 20th century, it is impossible to understand either its social or political existence.

It is obvious that literary sources not only bring us closer to understanding the inner world of man as the main object of interest of the historian, but also humanize historical knowledge itself, offering another, albeit complex and ambiguous, tool for dialogue with the past. This position is quite organically woven into the fabric of modern source studies, for which “the key is the definition of culture in the broadest sense,” and which studies “not just a historical source. It studies the system of relationships: person-work-person.”22

Scientific testing. The main provisions of the dissertation were presented at the conference "Historical Science in a Changing World" (Kazan, June 1993), the international conference "Theoretical Problems of Source Study" (Kazan, May 28 - 29, 1996), in

21 Stites R. Russian Popular Culture and Society since 1900. - Cambridge, Great Britain, 1992.

22 Medushevskaya O. M. Source study. Theory, history and method. - M.: Publishing house of the Russian State University for the Humanities, 1996. - P. 16; 20.

ode of a research seminar at the Institute of East European History of the Justus Liebig University (Giessen, Germany), as well as at the final scientific conferences of KSU 1992 - 1998.

Some topics of the dissertation are reflected in the following publications:

1. Mogilner M. Russian radical intelligentsia before the death // Social Sciences and Modernity. - 1994. - No. ¡. - P. 56 - 66;

2. Mogilner M. B. Literary text as a source of information about the mentality and value orientations of society // Historical science in a changing world. - Kazan: KSU, 1994;

3. Mogilner M. B. Boris Savinkov: “underground” and “legal” Russia in the vicissitudes of the same fate // Social Sciences and Contemporaneity. - 1995. - No. 4. - P. 79 - 89.

4. Mogilner M. B. Transformation of social norms during the transition period and mental disorders // Social sciences [modernity. - 1997. - No. 2. - P. 70 - 79.

5. Mogilner M. B. On the path to an open society: the crisis of radical consciousness in Russia (1907-1914). - M.: Publishing house Ma-istr, 1997. - 56 p.

Fiction as a historical source

Fiction includes works of writing that have public importance, aesthetically expressing and shaping public consciousness.

It is generally accepted that a person’s historical ideas are not formed under the influence of the works of professional historians, but are based on works of fiction and folklore sources. According to S. O. Schmidt, “the influence of the science of history on society is determined to a greater extent not directly by the research (or educational) works of historians (calculated, as a rule, narrow circle readers - mainly specialists), but by their journalistic writings or their concepts, conclusions and observations expressed in the writings of other publicists and masters of fiction."

In traditional source studies, only the most ancient literary texts were considered as historical sources. One of the reasons for the lack of attention on the part of professional historians of modern and contemporary times to fiction lies in the belief that the latter represents an extremely subjective, often biased, and therefore distorted picture of life that does not meet the source study criteria of reliability.

Supporters of the so-called “new intellectual history,” a movement that emerged in the 1970s. in foreign historiography, they questioned the usual understanding of historical truth, suggesting that the historian will create a text in the same way as a poet or writer. In their opinion, the historian's text is a narrative discourse, a narrative, subject to the same rules of rhetoric that are present in fiction. E. S. Senyavskaya also rightly notes that not a single historian, like a writer, is able to completely recreate the past (even following the principle of “getting used to” it), since he is inevitably pressed by the burden of knowledge and ideas of his time.

In Russian historiography, the question of the possibilities of using fiction as a historical source has been raised before. Back in 1899, V. O. Klyuchevsky, in a speech on the occasion of the opening of the monument to A. S. Pushkin in Moscow, called everything written by the great poet " historical document“: “Without Pushkin it is impossible to imagine the eras of the 20s and 30s, just as it is impossible to write the history of the first half of our century without his works.” In his opinion, incidents alone cannot serve as factual material for a historian: “... ideas, views, feelings, impressions of people of a certain time - the same facts and very important..."

The author of one of the first Soviet textbooks on source studies, G. P. Saar, included fiction and poetry among historical sources, but gave preference to “social novels” created by contemporaries of the events described. In subsequent years, the prevailing view was that works of art could be used in the study of public relations only those historical eras from which a sufficient amount of other evidence has not survived.

During the discussions that took place in 1962–1963. On the pages of the magazines "New and Contemporary History" and "Questions of the History of the CPSU", a variety of opinions were expressed regarding the source study perspective of fiction: from categorical objections to a call not to neglect sources that reflect "the multifaceted activities of the party and the ideological life of society."

Archaeological sites of the Paleolithic era according to archaeological data, the most ancient archaeological site Primorye, dated by radiocarbon - the cave of society - has an age of 32570 ± 1510 years ago. At this time, the vegetation of Primorye was dominated by broad-leaved forests in the lower mountain belt, cedar-broad-leaved forests in the middle mountains, dark coniferous taiga in the upper mountain belt. Siberian pine-broad-leaved forests dominated in the northern coastal region. The commercial fauna, identified from excavation materials, is represented mainly by ungulates - sika deer, wapiti, roe deer, bison, horse, goral. Among the predators, man hunted wolves, brown bear, hyena, tiger. other monuments of this era belong to the Osinovka culture - sites near the village of Osinovka, on Ilyushkina Hill, a site near the village. Astrakhanka, on the shore b. expedition. Crude pebble tools—choppers, flakes, and split pebbles—were discovered at these sites. the next period - the maximum cooling - the Upper Paleolithic - is represented by the Ustinov culture and is dated by radiocarbon from 18170±150 to 10780±50 years ago. From the beginning of the cooling to its maximum, the nature of vegetation changed. At this time, monotonous landscapes of birch and deciduous woodlands were widespread throughout most of the coastal territory. The upper and middle tiers of the mountains were occupied by char and mountain tundra. In the highest mountain ranges of the central and northern Sikhote-Alin, small karst glaciers existed. In the south of Primorye, islands of dark coniferous forests remained; in the basin of Lake Khanka there were extensive swamps framed by birch and birch-larch forests. During this era, people inhabited mainly mountain-taiga and forest-steppe areas of the inland part of the coastal region. The ecosystem of birch-deciduous forests had a fairly high productivity, which allowed people to provide themselves with food resources, mainly by hunting and gathering. human impact on environment was insignificant and amounted to burning and trampling of vegetation near settlements and sites. monuments of the Ustinov type are characterized by a more advanced (plate) technique of stone processing; the following fairly definite traces of human habitation date back to the period of the Pleistocene-Early Holocene boundary (12-10 thousand years ago; at this time the climate was drier and 3-4 degrees colder than the modern one. then some warming occurs (9.3 - 8.0 years ago). The climate was slightly warmer than the modern one by 1-2 degrees. Settlements of this time can mainly be traced along the (sides) edges of small valleys, near small tributaries of medium-sized rivers, streams and springs. Primorye population at this time develops technological traditions formed in the previous era. The following monuments belong to this time: Ustinovka (upper horizon), Oleniy 1 (lower horizon), etc. According to traceological analysis, several groups of tools can be distinguished for specialized operations - for cutting and processing hunting and fishing products. , trees. The economy of the population of that time, in a slightly more severe climate, was complex in nature - hunting, seasonal fishing, and collecting wild plants. paleolandscape analysis indicates the presence various types settlements - seasonal fishing sites, relatively permanent sites (associated with the presence of several types of natural resources in a favorable location), sites, sources of easily accessible raw materials for the production of stone tools.

Literary sources- written sources of the past, created not to satisfy aesthetic needs. Each source has 4 layers: literal, symbolic, allegorical and moral. Old Russian literature includes Christian literature, folklore, and folk beliefs. There is a division into secular and spiritual literature. There is a close connection between literature and Christianity; the original text is a translation from Greek. Since the 11th century, national literature has been developing. Difficulty of studying: it is difficult to understand the text without a linguist, the problem of comparing the translation with the original, understanding the semantic set of words.

Semantics (from Old Greekσημαντικός - denoting) - section linguistics, literary studies, studying meaninglanguage units, terms and concepts in their historical development.

Types of works:

Canonical and Apocryphal (secret and renounced)

Canon- “measure of length”, hence the Greek. kanes, lat. canna - “reed, reed, stick.” A stick that served as a ruler (elbow), a plumb line - a thread with a weight to determine the vertical. This is a rule, a norm, a law, a model, generally accepted, sanctified. The canon is a model, a criterion for evaluating works created according to its model.

Apocrypha(from ancient Greek ἀπόκρῠφος - hidden, intimate, secret) - spiritual works that are not included in the canon and do not correspond to the model, often prohibited for use. Gnosticism...

Canonical works have genres:

Scriptural – Old and New Testament

Liturgical – liturgical (books of hours, menaions, breviaries, breviaries)

Books of Hours- a liturgical book containing the texts of unchangeable prayers of the daily liturgical circle. It gets its name from the clock service it contains.

Menaia or chety-minaia, (that is, intended for reading, and not for worship) books of the lives of saints Orthodox Church, and these stories are presented in order of the months and days of each month...

Breviary- a liturgical book containing the rites of the Sacraments and other sacred rites performed by the church

Paremeyniki- a book of passages from the Holy Scriptures (quotation book).

This includes translations of the Bible, Psalter, Gospel, etc.

Doctrinal genre - symbols and statement of faith, catechetical teachings (catechisms), polemical works, interpretations.

Example - “Belief or Word about the right faith of John of Damascus,” Ladder of John Climacus. Preaching genre -

sermons. Treatises of Methodius of Patarsky, Collection of Svyatoslav 1703, Izmaragda. Hagiographic genre -

lives, biographies, words of praise to saints and tales of miracles.

Paterik is a collection of stories about ascetic monks.

Menaion - hagiographic stories by month, abridged edition.

Translations of gossip columns.

Byzantine chronicles are the basis of Russian chronicles. Through the chronicles there was an acquaintance with ancient literature. “The Tale of Akira the Wise”, “The Tale of Varlaam and Josaphai”.

Original ancient Russian literature.

Teachings and messages. “A Sermon on Law and Grace”, “Teaching to the Brethren”, “Teaching of Vladimir Monomakh”, “Prayer” by Daniil Zatochnik.

Everyday literature

Klyuchevsky V. Old Russian about the lives of saints as historical sources.

...life is not a biography of secular persons, this is a special form for expression cast in the consciousness of the people ideal image a holy person as a model (example) to follow. There are names that stepped out of the boundaries of the time when their bearers lived. This is because the work done by such a person, in its significance, went so far beyond the boundaries of his century, and with its beneficial effect so deeply captured the life of subsequent generations, that from the person who did it, in the consciousness of these generations, everything temporary and local gradually fell away. it turned from a historical figure into a popular idea, and the matter itself, from a historical fact, became a practical commandment, a covenant, what we are accustomed to calling an ideal. ... This is the name of St. Sergius [of Radonezh]: this is not only an edifying, joyful page in our history, but also a bright feature of our moral national content.”

Walking- descriptions of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The earliest is the Walk to Jerusalem of Abbot Daniel (1115). Walking beyond three seas by Afanasy Nikitin.

Military stories stood out from the chronicles. A word about Igor's Campaign. The story of the destruction of Ryazan by Batu in the 14th century. Zadonshchina. The legend of the Massacre of Mamayev.

An attempt to consider the techniques and methods of using fiction in teaching history. Criteria for selecting literary texts; the possibility practical application sources of this type in history lessons.

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The inclusion of organic images of fiction in the teacher’s presentation is one of the important methods of using it in teaching history. The teacher uses fiction as a source from which he borrows colorful images of comparison and apt words for his presentation. In these cases, the material of the work of art organically includes the teacher in the story, descriptions, characteristics and is perceived by the student not as a literary quotation, but as an inseparable element of a colorful presentation. When preparing for a lesson, it is useful for a novice teacher to include in the plan of his story individual, small passages, epithets, brief characteristics, vivid descriptions, apt expressions from the writer’s work. In teaching practice, a brief retelling takes place as one of the methods of using fiction and folklore. Being a rich source of information, fiction contains valuable material for affirming in the minds of students the high moral principles developed by humanity. But for a long time, in the scientific world ambiguous a thorough look at literature as a historical source.

“There is an unspoken and almost generally accepted opinion that fiction is not just subjective, but is in the realm of the author’s fantasies and cannot contain any historical facts; on this basis for a long time Traditional source studies, especially modern and contemporary history, did not consider fiction as a historical source." “Being closer to fiction in terms of the nature of its impact on the reader, historical knowledge must remain scientific, that is, obtained on the basis of historical sources,” which can be “reproduced and verified”[ 32, p. 40] . “The field of interaction between literature and history is an open system, and they correlate in this system, first of all, as two domains of culture: as culture changes, their interaction also changes”[ 28. c. 63].

Having a huge literary body, on the one hand, and a community of historians with naturally differentiated interests, on the other, “it makes no sense to even think about any special cataloging of literature for a historian. After the work that was done by the structuralist branch of social science in last decades, today there seems to be no other possibility than to consider all literary texts of the past and even the present as historical documents” [Ibid. c. 63]. Fiction has value “as a source reflecting the mentality of its time [Ibid., p. 144]. Literature has the ability to “grope” and record reality, to capture on an unconscious level the moods existing in society, long before they are systematized in the language of science and reflected in historiography.

The pre-revolutionary academic school (V.O. Klyuchevsky, N.A. Rozhkov, V.I. Semevsky and others), in the spirit of the traditions of positivist literary criticism, identified the history of literary types with the history of real people. Thus, the study by V.O. Klyuchevsky’s “Eugene Onegin and His Ancestors” (1887) was almost entirely based on an analysis of libraries from Pushkin’s era.

For a long time, the position of Soviet academic source studies in relation to fiction was quite clear: only literary texts of antiquity were considered as historical sources. The question of the right of a historian to use fiction as a historical source in the study of modern and contemporary history has long been passed over in silence, although in historical works the works of this period were often used as a commentary on events and phenomena public life. For the first time, the question of using literary and artistic text as a historical source was raised in the book by S.S. Danilov “Russian theater in fiction”, published in 1939. In the 60–80s of the 20th century, a number of works were published that testify to the desire of historians to develop clearer definitions of fiction as a historical source.

Among key issues brought up for discussion is the possibility of using fiction as a source for establishing historical facts. So, during the discussions that took place in 1962–1963. on the pages of the magazine “New and Contemporary History”, a variety of opinions were expressed regarding the source study perspective of fiction. Starting from categorical objections to securing the right to be called a historical source and ending with what is noteworthy for Soviet era the judgment that “the party historian has no right to neglect sources that in one form or another reflect the multifaceted activities of the party and the ideological life of society.”

The question of a historian’s right to use fiction as a historical source was first raised in 1964 in an article by A.V. Predtechensky "Fiction as a historical source". The author drew attention to expanding the limits of source study by separating independent branches of science from the cycle of auxiliary historical disciplines. Referring to a fairly extensive series of statements by public figures of the 19th–20th centuries, A.V. Predtechensky makes a conclusion about the identity of the cognitive role of fiction and the historical source as such, seeing the natural difference between one category and another in their belonging to phenomena of different social natures. Thus, to substantiate scientific truth, a system of evidence is required, while in art “nothing needs to be proven,” since the criterion of the “truth” of a work of art is its “artistic persuasiveness” [Ibid., p. 81]. A.V. Predtechensky notes: “in the works of some artists, the artistic persuasiveness is so great that the line between fiction and reality is blurred, and literary hero begins to exist as historical” [Ibid., p. 82].

Against the background of the above examples, the famous article by L.N. certainly stands out. Gumilyov “Can a work of fine literature be a historical source?” . In this work, the author, answering the question he put in the title, noted that “Fiction is not a lie, but a literary device that allows the author to convey to the reader the idea for which he undertook his work, which is always difficult. And here, even if there is large quantities mentions of historical facts, the latter are only a background for the plot, and their use is a literary device, and the accuracy or completeness of the presentation is not only optional, but simply not necessary. Does this mean that we should not use the information contained in ancient literature to supplement history? In no case! But compliance with certain precautions is mandatory" ... continuing his thought about the veracity of the source, the author writes "Fiction in the works historical genre only sometimes it involves the introduction into the plot outline of a hero born of the author’s imagination. But there is always a transformation of the real historical figures into the characters. The persona is the mask of an ancient actor. This means, unlike business prose, in a work of art it is not real figures of the era that appear, but images, under which the real people, but not those, but others that interest the author, but are not directly named. It is this literary technique that allows the author to express his thoughts with extreme precision and at the same time make it visual and intelligible”; “every great and even small work of literature can be a historical source, but not in the sense of a literal perception of its plot, but in itself, as a fact signifying the ideas and motives of the era. The content of such a fact is its meaning, direction and mood, and fiction plays the role of a mandatory device.”

For national history and science of 1991, the article by N.O. is of interest. Dumova “Fiction as a source for studying social psychology», dedicated to the novel M. Gorky “The Life of Klim Samgin”. In the source study context, the author divides fiction into three categories. The first includes works reflecting a distant period from which documentary evidence has not survived (Homer’s epic, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”). The second includes historical novels and stories written many years after the event based on studying it from surviving sources (“War and Peace”, “Peter I”). The third category consists of works of art written by eyewitnesses or participants in the events (A.T. Tvardovsky “Vasily Terkin”, V.S. Grossman “Life and Fate”). Works belonging to the first category serve as a historical source. Literary texts belonging to the second category are a source of an auxiliary nature. The works of the third group are valuable for the study of social psychology, the inner world of a person - his type of thinking, worldview.

In the 1990s, academic source studies represented by the Russian historian S.O. Schmidt expresses his “last word” on the issue of source study “possibilities” of fiction. Unlike humanists who defend the educational and propaganda role of literature or develop traditions of studying “psychological types,” S.O. Schmidt turned to the history of mentalities, considering works of literature as “the source of the formation of historical ideas” among mass reader, as valuable material “for understanding the mentality of the time of their creation and further existence...”. On the evolution of the views of domestic humanities scholars beginning of the XXI century on the source study status of fiction in connection with global changes in the methodology of humanitarian knowledge is provided by the materials of the collection “History of Russia in the 19th–20th centuries: new sources of understanding.” Thus, among the circumstances contributing to the rapprochement of historical science with fiction in solving source study problems, the authors of the collection name the following:

– a shift in emphasis in historical knowledge from the socio-political to the individual-psychological, which is due to a growing distrust of global historical constructs that are difficult to verify at the empirical level;

– the prevailing desire of both spheres of creativity – artistic and scientific-historical – to reproduce reality; the historicity of literature as a documented expression of the spiritual history of the country [Ibid. c. 63];

– the mutual inability of the writer and the historian to fully “recreate all facets of the past,” even following the “hermeneutic principle of getting used to it,” since “any person is inevitably pressed by the burden of knowledge and ideas of the time in which he himself lives and acts;

– the historicity of the language of literature as a “social meta-institution” that records “the realities, concepts and relationships of its time”;

– historical truth can be revealed in its entirety only through the means of art; literature has more opportunities to reveal historical truth than history itself; history-art is higher than history-science”;

Among the most important factors dividing literature and history according to different sides“barriers” in relation to the problem of the source study status of fiction, historians name the following:

– “any work of art contains a certain pre-aesthetic reality from the field of politics, economics, social life,” but “under the influence of artistic techniques it is so deformed that it ceases to be a source for scientific and historical research” [Sokolov A.K. Social history, literature, art: interaction in understanding the realities of the 20th century. ];

– there is an objective contradiction between the “linear” language style of historical science and the pictorial language of literary creativity, which allows for many interpretations when reading[ Right there. c. 75] ;

- scientific historical knowledge performs a socio-political function - “the formation of a common social memory as the basis for the unification of society and the information basis for making political decisions”, and in this function it retains its sovereignty[Ibid. c. 40].

As for the historian, for him (provided that he does not intend to go beyond the traditional boundaries of his field), fiction as a source of information will be of interest only in three cases:

– if the text is a carrier of unique information not recorded in other documents;

– if information about the character contained in the work is confirmed by sources of another kind; in this case, a literary text can be used either as an illustration of knowledge already obtained by other sciences, or as an additional source of evidence (or refutation) of scientific hypotheses, including in relation to the historical worldview of the author of the text.

The importance of works of art in the moral education of students is great. Learning about actions historical figure, students often transfer themselves to the same conditions, empathizing with the hero. One of my favorite heroes is the gladiator Spartacus, the leader of the restoration of slaves in Ancient Rome. You can ask students to prove, based on fragments of literary works and stories about the uprising, that Spartak possessed such traits as determination and determination, conviction, courage and courage. On behalf of the teacher, the student tells about the dramatic events of the slave uprising. His story can take the form of a memoir of a gladiator from Spartacus’s squad (the story includes fragments from R. Giovagnoli’s novel “Spartacus”).

But it’s not enough to attract students’ attention to heroic deeds outstanding personalities. In lessons, questions should be raised about the appropriateness of those forms of politics, about decency, dignity, kindness, and lasting friendship.