The article examines the main directions of research practices exploring the correlation of historical myths and collective memory. There is currently a new historiographic wave in historical science that deals with the study of commemorative practices (anniversaries of significant events of the past, reassessment of the activities and merits of historical, political and cultural “heroes”), which is reflected in the public space and largely shapes the current socio-political agenda. The systematization and analysis of existing theoretical and methodological approaches to comprehending commemorative practices aimed at preserving and/or eliminating the memory of the past in public space is one of the significant tasks of social sciences in general and historical science in particular. Historical memory is a key element in the construction of national identity. It is often based on one or several historical myths that not only determine a society’s perception of the past, but also in many respects construct attitudes to current events. Understanding the mechanisms of how commemoration of the past determines group behavior and individual strategies for interacting with the world is important from the perspective of studying the processes of national identity transformation and the stability of society as a whole.

The author analyzes Russian and foreign, personal and public, private and institutional digital projects related to sources of personal memories. Descriptions of projects, their goals, the organization of personal memories are discussed in detail. At the center of the analysis is the project “The People's History of Russia” (pastandnow.ru), launched in 2018. This project involves collecting oral stories about the cities of Russia and districts of Moscow told by the locals. The article provides examples of how private memories become part of a public history, and reveals how the researchers work. The aim of the article is to show how knowledge about the past is produced in digital data storages: how the “exploratory selection” of memories takes place, how the researchers' knowledge about the content of interviews is structured, which fragments of personal memory are unrepresented on the map and “forgotten”. The main ideas of the article are 1) to show the ever-increasing role of non-institutional archives of private memory (lifelogging, blogging), private digital archives, scattered publications of memories on social networks; to collect collections of some of them in order to “save” them from digital oblivion; 2) to describe some digital archives, including English-language ones, analyzing their ways of organizing and presenting materials; 3) to make the process of creating a private memory archive “The People's History of Russia” (pastandnow.ru) an object of reflection: to show the tools of the developers, tools for analysis, search machine and data markup.

The paper is based on material from the town of Engels (Saratov Region) and discusses the socio-cultural background that has determined the use of the pre-1931 oikonym Pokrovsk, on the one hand, and the double nomination Pokrovsk-Engels (Engels-Pokrovsk), on the other. The author analyzes reflection by the community about the semantics of these names. The period associated with the name Engels is filled with significant events and symbols to a greater degree than the period before 1931. Pokrovsk is associated with pre-Soviet “prehistory”. Since the town was initially named after the Orthodox feast of Intercession (Pokrov) of the Theotokos, its religious connotations were in demand at the end οf the 1980s and the 1990s. These connotations, on the one hand, actualize celebration of the mentioned feast as the “name day of the city”, and on the other hand, inspire discussions about the sacral protection, or pokrov (in Russian), over the town, whether or not it has been lost as a result of renaming in 1931. The rejection of Communist ideology favors the oblivion of F. Engels, commemorated in the actual oikonym. This is expressed, in the desemantization of the oikonym (as a play on words), its reinterpretation as a literal translation of German Engels ‘angels’, which also has religious connotations. The discussions and practices (both actional and linguistic) remove the need to return the name Pokrovsk, and thus compensate for the refusal to rename the town in the 1990s.

The article examines how information about the period of Stalin's rule is presented in the contemporary Russian media, as well as what role his figure plays in media representation of the era of his rule. The corpus used is based on a query in the “Medialogia” database with two keywords: Stalin and Stalinism. Proceeding from the position that any information circulating in the media field, including such that affects memory processes, will be explained not so much by the mechanisms of memory as by the way of presenting information, in particular, by framing, the author identifies four main ways of framing Stalin's personality: an ambivalent attitude, critical assessment, positive assessment, correction of the memory of the personality. The author examines in detail groups of texts showing an ambivalent attitude towards Stalin and aimed at correcting perceptions about him. The proposed typology can serve as a starting point for further clarification and more detailed analysis. Analysis of the third and fourth groups of texts showed that representation of an ambivalent attitude to the person and the era allows, to a lesser extent than unambiguous framing, to keep silent about significant events, thereby constructing the effect of forgetting, which is necessary in those cases for building a coherent discourse.

The paper discusses one episode of remembering in the late Soviet era the events of the West Siberian peasant uprising. The author focuses on the participants of Civil War events in the village of Krasnovo (Tyumen region) and on their descendants. The paper relies on both archival sources and oral interviews. The case allows us to demonstrate a number of reasons for oblivion of local events of the Civil War. This was the case not only with those local events that did not fit into the prevailing national framework of memory, but also those that fit within it. The author hypothesizes that the fact of inclusion of events of the Civil War in the Soviet foundation myth already in the 1920s interfered with the preservation of communicative memory of local events. The justifying history that emerged from the events of the recent revolutionary past made communicative memory unimportant and contributed to the forgetting of details, because such details were not important and not essential to explain the present within the existing framework of memory. At the same time, local details could seem dangerously discharging to the local rural community. In such conditions, paradoxically, the mechanisms of forgetting were activated both by local consensus and by the conditions of the national framework of memory.

The article raises questions of historical policy in the fields of culture and especially media-projects in the Republic of Kalmykia. As a topic that until recently (until 1990) was impossible to discuss in public, but is very important to Kalmyk identity, Stalin’s total deportation of the Kalmyks to Siberia in 1943-1957 - is reflected in theatrical actions organized by the state (such as rallies of Memory, Memory Trains), as well as visual Internet projects (documentary films They could and we can, 2017, author of the project - television host Sangadji Tarbaev; Kalmyks: Return, 2018, Sisters by Mingiyan Mandjiev). The author traces the dynamics of the interpretation during the last 30 years: from dramatized assessments to softer ones that inscribe the history of the deportation of the Kalmyks within the history of the Great Patriotic War. The author argues that theater and Internet projects are an important field of cultural production, in which the state sees not only an entertainment component, but also a laboratory that grows new meanings of the social. Theatricalization of the traumatic past becomes an instrument of reconciliation with the past: this leads to a change in the historical discourse in the community, which perceives such spectacles as allowing them to become eyewitnesses to a distant event. As for documentaries with oral testimonies about the deportation, they are perceived as a dialogue with relatives with whom the viewers did not get to speak.

The 22th Summer Olympic Games took place in Moscow in 1980. For their fortieth anniversary in 2020 many publications appeared in the mass media. In media discourse Olympics-80 is treated as an international event that was important in the history of sports. Personal stories from interviews with professional athletes are sometimes used to illustrate this position, while the opinions of ordinary city residents are voiced much less often. The aim of the work was to compare the forms of memories transmission and assessment of what took place, depending on the degree of involvement in the event by the recalling person. To highlight the modes of telling about the past, the psychological (V. V. Nourkova) classification of the positions of the recalling subject in relation to the historical event (Participant, Witness, Contemporary and Successor) was used. As the analysis of the texts has shown, in the memory of Muscovites who were not directly connected to the organization of the Olympics, it is basically an event that changed the city (in consumption practices, through the appearance of new urban objects). In all of these cases the storytellers concentrate not on the external event series (the schedule and the results of the competitions, etc.), but on the personally experienced Olympiad time or space (recounted via feelings).

In this article the process of cultural recycling is discussed using the case of children`s books. The focus of the research is on the reprinting of Soviet children's literature during 2007-2019, as well as readers' reviews of these reprinted editions. Analysis of the print runs reveals that Kornei Chukovsky, Agniia Barto, Samuil Marshak, Nikolai Nosov and Alexander Volkov were the five top best-selling Soviet children's authors in this period. Hence their works may be considered the core of the Soviet literary canon for children. Social practices that support conservation and reproduction of the canon of children's reading are discussed. Publishers devote book series to the reprints of Soviet works and engage in the selection of the reprinted authors. Readers, for their part, compile retrospective reading lists, compare modern reprinted versions with the original editions (looking for mismatches in text and illustrations), and pay attention to editors' comments in the reprinted editions. Nostalgic discourse about Soviet children's books serves contemporary Russian parents to reinforce their group identity based on the common reading experience in childhood. The preservation and revival of a book is enabled by three key features: a weak connection of the book's content to the Soviet political agenda, a renowned illustrator and recognizable book design, and, finally, adult nostalgia for the book read in childhood.

Among all the varieties of personal archives, those that were formed on purpose by their creators constitute a separate group. They are united by typological similarity, which is primarily associated with the personality traits of their compilers; identifying these traits helps us gain insights into the plan, motives and goals they were guided by while gathering the archive. Understanding the archive from the position of postmodernism as shaping the past, present and future of society can be applied not only to state archives, but also to private collections as products of deliberate action. With the state or society creating examples of what is important and necessary to preserve, future “archivists” use this information as a matrix for forming their own archives. This article examines the archive of O. M. Freidenberg - an outstanding Russian classicist, philologist, Leningrad State University professor, author of memoirs, including her notes on the Siege of Leningrad, the first woman in the USSR to become a Doctor of Philology, and Boris Pasternak's cousin - precisely in these terms. Analysis of the archive materials and correspondence between Freidenberg and Boris Pasternak allows us to determine the principles that guided her in compiling the archive as a way to preserve her creative heritage in the face of categorical rejection of her scientific ideas and civic position both by the state and the scientific community.

The last two decades saw a dramatic increase in the number of papers published on the subject of stylometry, which is often narrowly understood as the task of identification of the author of a particular text fragment based on its stylistic properties. We present a new lightweight algorithm for stylometric identification of authors of Latin prose texts based on Burrows’s Delta, computed over relative frequencies of 244 manually selected genre and topic neutral words, and the Dirichlet distribution, whose parameters we estimate using an iterative maximum-likelihood algorithm. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we present a case study of 3000-word fragments of texts by 36 classical and medieval authors and show that our method performs on par with Random Forest, a powerful general-purpose classification algorithm. We provide summary statistics of our algorithm’s performance together with confusion matrices demonstrating pairwise discriminability of texts by different authors. The advantages of our method are that it is very simple to implement, very quick to train and do inference with, and that it is very interpretable since it is a model-based algorithm: precision of the fitted Dirichlet distributions directly corresponds to the stylistic homogeneity of the texts by different authors. This makes it possible to use the algorithm as a general research tool in Latin stylistics.

Carmina Burana is a Latin-German manuscript written in the beginning of the 13th century. Our article is devoted to an analysis of the song ‘In taberna quando sumus’ from this collection. The poem describes the daily life of a medieval tavern and contains several typical elements of parodia sacra, ‘sacred parody’. In particular, it is characterized by multiple periphrases and direct quotations from the Bible and various important Catholic texts (for instance, the Roman Missal), placed in the context of a tavern feast. Parodia sacra is often constructed out of formulas and marked by reinterpretations of Christian symbols and rituals. These characteristics can be found in the song ‘In taberna quando sumus’. The tavern is a Church of drunkards, where money and not the Lord rules everything. Here, instead of hard work, people debauch, cast lots, similar to Roman soldiers, drink enormously (liturgical wine is replaced by profane, Bacchus takes the place of Christ). In the tavern, they drink to people instead of praying for them, and make thirteen toasts, and those who dare to scold these drunkards would face the same punishment as the enemies of King David. All of these elements, connected to the traditional motif of ‘memento mori’, allow us to consider the poem as a typical High Medieval Latin parody, which, in the words of M. M. Bakhtin, arose as a reaction to the ‘official’ hierarchical culture of the Middle Ages.

The collection of poems “Children’s Case” (2008) is the last book by Vsevolod Nekrasov published during his lifetime. It has a special status within Nekrasov’s legacy, including as it does poems from various periods: from the earliest (late 1950s - early 1960s) to texts that were finalized when the proofs were being checked. “Children’s Case” can be viewed as “a service of literary memory”, perceived as a deeply meaningful gesture. Since the reader naturally perceives this book as an integral work by Nekrasov himself, it seems essential to clarify certain features of the history of its creation that directly influenced its character and possible audience. These clarifications, which constitute the subject matter of the article, are made on the basis of personal memories of its authors and materials preserved in the personal archive of one of the authors, E. N. Penskaya. The book was compiled with the active participation of the poet’s wife, A. I. Zhuravleva, as well as S. V. Miturich (head of the “Three Squares” publishing house) and E. N. Penskaya. Miturich proposed a structure that was partly implemented in the publication. Zhuravleva and Penskaya influenced the selection of the poems, seeking to aim the book at the widest audience possible, including children; compared to the author’s original plans, some obviously “adult” poems were removed. The book was thus the fruit of teamwork, and Nekrasov had mixed feelings about the result (as manifested in interviews given after the book was published, and also in notes preserved in Nekrasov’s personal archive). The article presents the poet’s original plan for the book. Its subtle artistic logic, that is connected not only with essential features of Nekrasov’s poetics, but also with some important principles of construction of authorial poetic books in the 20th century, is described here in the most general terms and is yet to become the subject of philological reflection.

In this article we present behavior models of poets in the contemporary Russian literary milieu, ways of transmission of such models from generation to generation, and their dependence on belonging to one or another literary group. On the basis of interviews with contemporary poets, we analyze the most frequent ideas about “how to be a poet” among participants of the literary process in the 1990s-2000s, how (s)he has to behave with colleagues and among the public, what (s)he may or may not do. The collected material allowed us to distinguish two behavioral models that are widespread among contemporary poetic communities: the holistic and the reductionist. Each model is determined through the attitude to several leading themes: to readers (the audience is the customer, the tactics of acceptance; the poet is the educator, the tactics of mastering; orientation on the chosen reader; complete autonomy and tactics of avoiding the reader), to social norms (from the necessity of at least a minimal life experience to its undesirability and its avoidance, from fitting into social hierarchies to opposing oneself to them), and, finally, to one’s own text (coincidence of / discrepancy between the image of the author and the person of writer; different degrees of importance of the written). The research is based on in-depth interviews and observations of literary events in the spring of 2020.

A review of: Assman, A. (2014). Dlinnaia ten’ proshlogo: Memorial’naia kul’tura i istoricheskaia politika [Trans. from Assmann, A. (2006). Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Beck]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. 328 p. (In Russian).

A review of: ● Oparin, D., & Akimov, A. (2017). Istorii moskovskikh domov, rasskazannye ikh zhiteliami [The history of Moscow houses, told by their residents]. Eksmo. 320 p. (In Russian). ● Galkina, Iu., Kos’min, M., & Akimov, A. (2020). Istorii domov Peterburga, rasskazannye ikh zhiteliami [The history of Petersburg houses, told by their residents]. Eksmo. 432 p. (In Russian).

The review focuses on materials from the International conference “Biography and Memory of Culture” that took place October 14-16, 2020 in St. Petersburg.

The review presents materials of the International Conference “Image and Cult: Sacred Images in Christian Traditions”, held on November 20-21, 2020 in Moscow.