How are oral histories about the past “selected” into tradition? In this article the mechanisms of this selection are discussed using in-depth interviews collected in 2000–2023. The topic of the stories is the Holocaust in the occupied part of the Soviet Union and the saving of Jews by other Soviet citizens. According to our hypothesis, stories that can gain a foothold in tradition may pass through some special “filters”. They must correspond to the worldview formed by Soviet, post-Soviet and Western media and ideology (in other words they need to fit into the social framework of memory of the Holocaust). They must also have an understandable and memorable structure similar to folk fables and memorates. In addition, when remembering the Holocaust people often talk about traumatic experiences and violence, so there is a specific way to talk about these complicated topics. Stories that do not pass through these “filters” usually cannot gain a foothold in tradition — so they may be told only by eyewitnesses. On the other hand, stories that have the features described above are being told not only among eyewitnesses of events, but also among young people. They become part of family memory and of local memory.

Today, many Krasnodar residents say that during the German occupation of the city, the Nazis rounded up residents using gaswagens (mobile gas chambers, gas vans). According to these stories, anyone could become a victim of a raid and die in a gaswagen, regardless of ethnicity or political loyalty, while in reality specific categories of population became victims of gas vans. The article focuses on the reasons for the emergence and popularity of such stories in Krasnodar. The narrative basis for the stories of gas vans and indiscriminate raids was created by Soviet propaganda texts that appeared immediately after the liberation of the city. In late Soviet times, gas vans became a part of the cultural memory (A. Assmann) thanks to an inscription on the city’s main war memorial. The propaganda thesis about indiscriminate killings by means of gaswagens became fixed in oral tradition, since there was a ready-made form for it — the story of a dangerous black car that personified state terror. Like other oral histories of the distant past, stories about gas vans that “grabbed everyone” help storytellers maintain an identity that is relevant for them: they confirm the city’s status as a victim of the Nazis and thereby help compensate for the official lack of recognition of its heroic deeds.

 In December 1942, in the village of Ust-Labinskaya near the city of Krasnodar, a mass execution of Jews took place, during which 12-year-old violinist Musya Pinkenzon perished. According to press publications that began to appear in the spring of 1943, before his death he performed the communist anthem “The Internationale” on the violin. There are doubts about the reliability of this version, but thanks to it, the story of Musya Pinkenzon became known throughout the Soviet Union. After the war, a memorial community was formed in the city of Ust-Labinsk around Musya Pinkenzon. This community has been keeping alive the memory of this pioneer hero for many decades. Using the case of Musya Pinkenzon as an example, this article examines the question of how local oral historical memory is formed and what it consists of. The material for this study is 12 memoirs, most of which were obtained during two expeditions to Krasnodar and Ust-Labinsk, undertaken in 2022–2023 as part of the project “Jewish commemorative practices and the modern cult of Victory”, as well as observations and interviews with local residents. Memories of Musya Pinkenzon are considered part of a special literary and folklore tradition. It turns out that the “official” version of the circumstances of the shooting, which is based on the motif of “heroic music-making on the verge of death”, was more demanded by the local community and therefore it crowded out the real experience of eyewitnesses from memory. The article analyzes the content of the memoirs about Musya Pinkenzon — in particular, the general plot elements and rhetorical devices found in them. As a result, it turns out that one part of them is drawn from the media, literary sources, folklore and memories of predecessors, and the other performs a utilitarian function — it confirms the narrator’s right to testify and emphasize his positive role in this story. Thus, historical memory is a product of the socio-political, cultural, information environment and the interests of the narrator himself and his community.

People who were eyewitnesses of the Great Patriotic War and have real memories have been playing an important role in preserving historical memory in USSR and Russia over the past decades. For instance, WWII veterans used to visit schools and tell children about their paths in the military, Nowadays, when the war is 80 years in our past, these people are passing away. However, the role of personal experience in war stories did not decrease due to the death if the eyewitnesses. In modern Russia there has grown a need for institutions for preserving and transmitting the memory of this war. In this article we will explore that “memory industry”. By that term we mean some institutionalized ways and practices aiming to reproduce — or even produce — personal stories about war. Nowadays veterans’ stories are published on the Internet, used to create vernacular or state museums, and as a base for patriotic upbringing of the youth. Such widespread use of personal stories from veterans and other adult eyewitnesses also affects stories told by the next generation: “the children of war”. Their memories cannot be substantive and in-depth due to their youth, so their stories often are unintentionally supplemented from the culture: folklore or media.

In this study devoted to book censorship in the time of Henry VIII the author tries to supplement general knowledge about political censorship by analyzing its forms, methods, and aims characteristic of a specific historical period and situation. A combination of linguistic (syntactic, grammatical), contextual and bibliographical approaches is used to show the interrelation between political agenda, text semantics, language and text structure, and the forms of medialitypresent in a certain epoch, as manifested by post-factum censorship (that is, applied to texts made public long before). As source material, a valuable copy of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495, now kept in the incunabula collection of the Russian State Library in Moscow, is presented and examined. It offers ample evidence of 16thcentury postfactum censorship carried out in an early printed book. The dating of marginal notes and questions of provenance are discussed in connection with the validity of the copy as a witness of 16thcentury England. The method of ‘blotting out’, introduced by Henry VIII to support his Protestant reforms (cf.: ‘cutte or blotte ‹…› in such wise, as they cannot be perceiued nor red’) concerned certain unwanted words (in the present case this was the lexeme ‘Pope’). Through linguistic and textological analysis the method of post-factum censorship by ‘blotting out’ is theoretically confronted with the concept of linguistic ellipsis. On this basis the blotting outtechnique is analyzed and its effectivity evaluated. It is shown that post-factum censorship by blotting out does not achieve efficient suppression of Catholic ideas in the historical memory; an alternative explanation for its employment would therefore be, that its aim is to enforce obedience and compliance with the current agenda.

Folk religious poetry is quite often included in the sphere of funeral and memorial rites. Singers of spiritual verses often write them down in special “memorial” notebooks, which they use during performances. There is a controversial issue that has not yet been resolved. Do written collections existing in different territories display such a noticeable originality that would allow us to assert the presence of special local or regional manuscript traditions? In this article, the author characterizes memorial notebooks that arose in the Middle Urals, in the zone of active Russian-KomiPermyak contacts, where Russian-Yurlinians and Kochev KomiPermyaks live. A collection of 29 manuscripts serves as our material, of which 5 are analyzed in detail. The specificity of memorial notebooks is manifested in a typical set of spiritual poems, accompanying genres, choice of titles, acceptable forms of writing (with or without division into poetic lines), etc. Most of these handwritten notebooks include not only spiritual verses, but also prayers, essentially becoming “vernacular prayer books”. Typical poem titles include a mention of genre; indicate a place in the ritual; name the main characters; repeat the first line or its keyword. In Komi-Permyak notebooks, more often than in Russian ones, the traditional set of poems is expanded by including new verses. The “horizontal” organization of the text here becomes one of two conventional ways of writing spiritual verses. Elements of the written form acquire additional content, they become conventional and are reproduced within the community.

The article examines the forms and functions of the text in the artistic practice of S. N. Maslov (1952–2002), a representative of contemporary art in Kazakhstan. Based on the material of the artistic avant-garde in Kazakhstan, text-centricity and literature-centricity as universal properties of late Soviet and post-Soviet visual culture are analyzed for the first time. The texts created by the Kazakhstani author in various modifications of contemporary art were chronologically different: they appeared before, during and after the creation of the visual image. The features identified in the article include the creation by this post-avant-garde author not so much of a work-result, but more of a work-process, with the author’s obligatory manipulation of the text in space and time, when artistic practice turns into a multilayered game in front of the audience (readers). The article presents how Sergei Maslov managed to capture and convey through the text, woven by him into the plot of his artistic actions, the main issues in the specifics of post-Soviet existence and daily life, and then to transform them into the aesthetics of absurdity. One of these ways, as shown in the article, was the use of the aesthetics of mass media forms of the text: traditional writing, bureaucratic instructions and the horoscope, as well as the form of a multimedia novel. The art practice of S. N. Maslov reflected his characteristic literary centrism with the simultaneous access of this artist and performer to the features of the modern digital artistic environment.

The article discusses the thematic range of feuilletons featuring the New Poet published in the Sovremennik magazine between 1847 and 1862, as well as the changes in their thematics over time. An analysis of the content of these feuilletons shows that their authors, including Ivan Panaev, were well aware of the existing tradition of the feuilleton genre and at first adhered to its conventions. However, over time, they moved away from conventional, genre-specific approaches to selecting feuilleton topics and adapted the notes about the New Poet to current events. The feuilleton authors of Sovremennik sought to develop an idealized image of a writer who represented the project of a new literature during the last years of the reign of Nicholas I, as who was an active member of society during the Great Reforms era — a person familiar with contemporary public debates. In addition, Panaev and his co-authors rely on the gradual expansion of the thematic diversity in the feuilleton genre, trying to orient the reader in a larger context of events and perspectives. The main methods used in the article are structural topic modeling, which highlights broad subject-semantic fields, as well as assessment of information entropy that indicates the degree of diversity in the feuilleton themes.

The article analyzes the stylistic features of Nabokov’s Russian-language novels in the context of Russian interwar prose. The main method is Burrows’s Delta — one of the most reliable stylometric tools that allows comparing texts with each other based on the distribution of the most frequent function words. In addition, SVM and KNN methods are also used to classify texts. The study has two objectives: 1) to carry out a primary clustering of the styles of leading Russian prose writers of a certain era, and also, through the use of modern algorithms, to determine the place among them of the style of Nabokov (Sirin); 2) to test these algorithms for their ability to informatively and adequately solve the tasks of stylistic distribution and for the consistency of the results. It turns out that stylistically close to Nabokov’s novels are the texts of Leonov, Gazdanov and Grin. A particularly clear similarity is found between Nabokov’s late novels, Leonov’s Skutarevsky and Gazdanov’s An Evening with Claire. Nabokov’s eight Russian-language novels are divided into two groups. The first consists of Mashenka, The Defense, King, Queen, Knave, Glory, Laughter in the Dark. The second is made up of the novels of the 1930s: Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift.

This article draws upon the material of Russian cultural and linguistic tradition and analyses one particular phenomenon. In this phenomenon, a mythological character never existed in the folk belief system, but rather was generated by a linguistic sign or a text fragment. By their nature, the names of the characters studied in this paper derive from two types of verbal signs: 1) character names formed from regular lexical units — common nouns (роди́мчик, rodímchik ‘a seizure accompanied by convulsions and loss of consciousness’ > a character named Ро́дька, Ród’ka) or proper nouns (the forest Хéмерово, Khémerovo in the Arkhangelsk region > the forest spirit Хéмеровский, Khémerovskii); 2) character names that have a textual nature. The latter are constructions, or syntagms, that exist as an interconnected whole only within their “parent” text and then “migrate” outside it (Лель (Lel’), И́лия (Íliia) < song refrains алё-ле, ай люли (alio-le, ai liuli)). For a new character to appear, two stimuli are required: a linguistic stimulus proper (the existence of a name that “seeks” a content plane) and a cultural stimulus (a semiotically intense context: a situation associated with danger, prohibition, omen, aggression, magical practices). These stimuli are often combined, so the mythological nominative fund is almost guaranteed to renew constantly. The authors demonstrate that when “armchair” mythologists create characters based on linguistic stimuli, the same mechanisms are at work as those that function in “simple” folk tradition.

In this paper the constant interest of the writer Nikolai Leskov in Russian antiquity, church everyday life, and the life of clergy is noted. Church surnames, characteristic of the Russian clergy in the 18th–19th centuries, were often formed from Greek, Latin, and Church Slavonic terms. The choice of a surname or name for a character of his prose was very important for Leskov: he himself often paid attention to this issue and the heroes of his works talk about it. In modern literary studies, many scholars discuss onomastics in Leskov’s texts, but such an aspect as the Latin language (and related classical antiquity) in Leskov’s writings is rarely touched upon. This paper deals with anthroponomy of the chronicle The Cathedral Folk by Leskov. A more precise explanation of the origin and meaning of the “artificial” ecclesiastical surnames of some characters (Benefaktov, Benefisov, Prepotensky, Omnepotensky) is offered. One episode about Philaret, Metropolitan of Kiev, and his Latin words from Leskov’s ‘Trifles from the Life of Archbishops’ is considered. Some episodes of other works by Leskov are also considered (including At Daggers Drawn and Episcopal Justice). It is noted that Leskov was an “autodidact”: he entered the gymnasium long before the large-scale introduction of classical education in Russia, studied poorly and did not graduate from the gymnasium. He did not have excellent grades in Latin and did not enter the university. It is concluded that there are cases of misunderstanding of Latin vocabulary and grammar in Leskov’s works. He was not interested in Latin and had a poor understanding of this language. 

The article deals with some linguistic aspects of the functioning of Greek mythological proper names (gods, heroes etc.), which became precedent nouns-mythonyms in the Modern Greek language, expanding their semantic structure. Over the course of millennia, mythonyms underwent a number of semantic changes and expanded their meanings; in this regard, the relevance of our research is due to the fact that analysis of precedent mythonyms serves as the key to a clearer understanding of the national linguistic picture of the world of a native Greek speaker and of the meaning and influence of ancient Greek mythology in Modern Greek. The purpose of the study is to identify the additional meanings formed during the actualization of mythonyms as precedent proper names in the discursive field of Modern Greek culture. Semantic derivation is the way of mythonyms’ integration into the discourse of the Modern Greek language, and proper names become common nouns because of their precedental character. The results show that the most frequent parameters for the transformation of mythonyms into precedent names are behavior, character and appearance of the hero or goddess, and these main features create metaphoric transfer and create the precedental character. The analysis expands the understanding of how semantic transformation forms the field of mythonyms’ precedentality in Modern Greek; thus, we take the first step to create a dictionary of precedentality based on the Greek language.

The historical essay “Stenka Razin” by Prosper Mérimée (first published in 1861) has never been translated into Russian. It was long considered an abridged translation into French of N. I. Kostomarov’s monograph The Revolt of Stenka Razin (1858). Yet, comparing both texts, one must recognize the real historical and literary originality of the French writer. Unlike Kostomarov, who gives a broad picture of a popular revolt, Mérimée’s narrative is centered on the figure of the Cossack ataman. The fragment translated here, based on the French edition of 1865, is the third chapter of the essay. It tells of the Persian campaign of the “raiding Cossacks” (1668–1669), followed by their triumphant return to the Don with rich booty. The central part of this chapter deals with the legend of the captive Persian princess, whom Razin allegedly threw into the waters of the Volga River. Mérimée, following Kostomarov, provides various explanations for this cruel action by the ataman, which looks senseless only at first glance. The successful outcome of the Cossack robber raids, as well as the generosity of the dashing ataman, contributed to the growth of his authority among the poor, and attracted more and more supporters to his army. In general, the events described in the third chapter appear as preparation for the culminating stage of the Razin movement, which occurred in 1670–1671.

The Department of Manuscript Collections of the State Literary Museum holds a handwritten album from the Alyabyev family that may have belonged to Natalia Pavlovna Khvoshchinskaya, Alyabyev’s wife. But it is also quite likely that the first owner of the album was Ekaterina Avraamovna Khvoshchinskaya, married to Akinfov, whose granddaughter became the wife of B. I. Alyabyev. Both N. P. Alyabyeva and E. A. Akinfova maintained relations with their cousin, the writer Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaya, whose prose, signed with the pseudonym V. Krestovsky, was already famous in the middle of the 19th century. The introductory part examines the history of the writer’s relationship with each of her cousins and hypothetically establishes the ownership of the album. In 1857 N. D. Khvoshchinskaya recorded 22 of her poems from 1848–1852 in this album under the general heading “From the poems of Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaya”. Khvoshchinskaya’s poetry, contrary to the unfounded opinion of her as a supporter of “pure art,” is imbued with civic sentiments. Unlike most poetesses, she was interested in social and philosophical problems, and she often spoke on behalf of the collective “we”, that is people of her generation, whose maturity occurred in the 1850s. Some of the rewritten texts had previously been published, but nine poems, which particularly clearly expressed the author’s social ideals and her abiding interest in European political processes, could not be published at the time. These never-beforepublished poems are included in this selection.

The article analyzes an original historical document, a letter from a Soviet German, Jacob Martins, who lived in the village of Velikoknyazhesky in the North Caucasus Region of the RSFSR in the early 1930s. This letter, introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time, was extracted from “On the political state of the German colonies of the North Caucasus Region,”, a memorandum by the plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU (the Joint State Political Directorate), E. G. Evdokimov, to the head of the political sector of OGPU, A. M. Shteyngart. Dated December 15, 1933, the memorandum is stored in the Center for Documentation of Contemporary History of the Rostov Region. The letter by J. Martins contains an account of the catastrophic situation in the Soviet countryside during the mass famine of 1932–1933. It was addressed to German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, whose support the author hoped for, who offered to organize a “correspondence” in order to “get better acquainted” with the work of the social fascists and begin a joint struggle against communism. J. Martins’ letter perfectly illustrates the public mood of part of the German community in the USSR in the early 1930s and helps to better understand the reaction of Soviet citizens to the policies of the Stalinist leadership during the period of modernization.

The publication contains an analysis of an original archival document from the collections of the Center for Documentation of Contemporary History of the Rostov Region. The document, introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time, provides information about little-known and insufficiently studied aspects of the partisan movement in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. This is a memorandum, “On the issue of relationships in the leadership of the Upper-Don district [Rostov Region]”, addressed to B. A. Dvinsky. the first secretary of the Rostov regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party(Bolsheviks) and compiled by the deputy secretary of the regional committee, Gorshkov, in early December 1943. The report describes in detail the acute interpersonal conflict that flared up within the leadership of the Upper-Don district of the Rostov region in August 1943. The root cause of the conflict was the reluctance of the district prosecutor, Onushko, to join the partisan detachment formed from local communists when Nazi troops approached the Upper-Don region in the summer of 1942. Onushko’s inappropriate behavior provoked criticism from other members of the district leadership, for which the prosecutor tried to take revenge using his official position. Thus, Gorshkov’s memo allows us to consider the partisan movement in the light of interpersonal relationships, which creates opportunities for a more in-depth study of the moods of Soviet partisans, their conflicts and contacts, everyday life, etc.

A review of: Kozintsev, A. G. (2024). Iazyk — real’nost’ — igra —  smekh: Antropologicheskie fragmenty [Language — reality — game — laughter: Anthropological fragments]. Izdatel’skii dom IaSK. 368 pp. (In Russian).