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Fiction as a historical source. Source analysis of a literary text.
Works of fiction, as an integral part of public consciousness, have always acted as the "voice of history". Its social and moral nuances, content level and themes were often determined by the peculiarities of the philosophical and social thought of the era. That is why the development of the art of the word at all times was influenced by the most important political events, such as wars, revolutions, civil unrest and other socio-political phenomena. In addition, everyday worries and anxieties of representatives of various strata of society are reflected in fiction. Fiction is constantly paving new ways of understanding historical realities, seeking new ways to reflect reality.
As noted by L.N. Gumilyov, literary 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. In a work of art, reality is invariably typified, which, according to some researchers, even increases objectivity. The new cultural history seeks to comprehend historical phenomena through the ideas of the people of the past, through their spiritual life. The field of activity of the historian is expanding, which means that such subjective sources as fiction are becoming more and more in demand.
The final approval of fiction as a weighty historical source occurs only from the end of the 20th century. The original subjectivity of a literary text is perceived as one of the factors that form the historical and cognitive value of a literary work, since the reality presented with the help of living images is inevitably typified, thereby increasing the level of objectivity.
The source study consists of two stages:
- analysis of the origin (historical stage), which, in turn, includes the following steps: a) analysis of the historical conditions for the origin of the source; b) analysis of the authorship of the work; c) analysis of the circumstances of the creation of the source; G)
- analysis of the history of the text of the work; e) analysis of the publication history of the source;
content analysis (logical stage): a) source interpretation; b) analysis of the content of the source.
Methods of source study called ways to identify, describe and analyze historical sources. They differ depending on the tasks assigned to the study, in general, the following can be distinguished methods :
- research of the text for the presence of document-forming agents;
- study of the historical personalities of the work;
- study of the source of origin of the work - the definition of the author, his biography, the details of which influenced the writing of the work;
- the dating of the source under study, or the proximity of the date of its creation to the date of the events described in the work.
Among the most important stages of source analysis the following can be distinguished;
- comparison of the information contained in the source with well-known facts, the generally accepted interpretation of the phenomenon or event under study. As a result, it is about the fallacy of the source or the need to clarify the traditional point of view;
- comparison of data from the studied source with data from other sources. This compares early and later evidence;
- comparison of source information with objective circumstances. Determination of the truth of the described phenomenon and assessment of the conditions in which this phenomenon, event occurred according to the description in the source;
- assessment of the adequacy, reliability of naming, titles of actors;
- assessment of the reliability of such details as details of weapons, clothing, everyday life, culture, etc., their correspondence to the era and time;
- assessment of the degree of documentary text;
- identification in the source of information that could not get there due to a discrepancy in the time of their application to the described era or according to a geographical criterion;
- determination of the degree of originality of the reported information - compliance with their generally accepted, stereotyped point of view or with real events;
- assessment of the origin of the information contained in the work, the source of their receipt.
And history is a form of self-understanding, self-expression of society, their main theme, social science, human knowledge ”S. O. Schmidt“ The Way of the Historian ”
Just as in historical research much depends on the intuition of the historian, so writers and literary critics are capable of deep comprehension of life on an unconscious level. Traditionally, researchers have turned to fiction only in the absence of more reliable sources. In the study of the history of modern and recent times, literature was assigned only an illustrative role, but new directions of historical thought change the attitude towards the source. A literary work was considered extremely subjective, but it is in itself a fact of the history and biography of the author. There are different points of view on the significance of the artist's personality in historical and cultural research: some argue that the personality of the author is not significant, since all the details of his personal life are not available for observation. Others, on the contrary, believe that the personality of the artist is fundamentally significant, since a typological comparison can be made between the text and the biography.
The latter position is characteristic of the methodology in line with the new cultural history. For the researcher, a literary work is inseparable from the context. Knowing the biography and date of creation, we can identify the purpose of the author, his awareness of the phenomena described. A new cultural and new intellectual history was formed within the framework of historical anthropology. Many researchers prefer not to separate them; the difference between the new intellectual history is that it pays great attention to highly artistic texts.
Jacques Le Goff also spoke about the prospects of the following three areas in modern cultural history: the history of intellectual life, the history of mentalities and the history of value orientations. According to R. Darnton, the main principle of the new direction is to “catch otherness” (“grab alienness”), since people of the past perceived the world differently, the historian must also consider the object of his research as “alien”, explain the “strangeness” of another culture, reproducing the logic of the man of that time. The new cultural history rejects the clear separation of the sensible and the rational, it focuses on myths, symbols, static languages.
A distinctive feature is the recognition of the active role of language, text and narrative structures in the creation and description of historical reality. Within the framework of this approach, the boundaries between different areas of historical knowledge are blurred, cultural anthropology, the “linguistic turn” and theoretical literary criticism merge together. The interdisciplinary approach is intended to expand the possibilities of the historian, but the most controversial issues are the combination of methodologies of different scientific disciplines. The new direction requires a revision of methodological approaches in working with "non-traditional" sources. According to A.Ya. Gurevich, “even in cases where the sources do not allow us to penetrate the level of events, they can give us important information about the ideas and beliefs of the authors of these texts and, therefore, introduce us into the circle of ideological attitudes, that is, help us to realize the nature of the spiritual life of the era ... ". Reconstruction involves the "decoding" of the source by the widest disclosure of the context of its appearance.
It is impossible to completely recreate all the circumstances, but it is necessary to comprehend the “otherness”, the originality of a person of the past. In the words of P. Burke, "we are on the way to the cultural history of everything in the world: dreams, food, emotions, travel ...". An expanded understanding of culture makes it possible to connect art and literature with the study of everyday life. According to M.K. Lubart, the author of the monograph “The Family in French Society of the 18th – Early 20th Centuries”, fiction is “an invaluable source for the reconstruction of ideas related to marriage, family, raising children, intra-family relations ...” . Historical anthropology as an independent branch of knowledge coordinates with the new cultural history in the study of the history of mentalities, which also develops under the influence of psychology. The history of mentalities is interested in the hidden sides of social consciousness, which the researcher can discover in the sources against the will of their creators, and the events of the past are understood through the "otherness" of a person's worldview.
The history of mentalities introduced the method of psychological reconstruction into historical science, the "accommodation" of the researcher into the inner world of the creators of history texts, which stimulated the appeal of historians to "subjective" sources. An example of this approach is the article by E.S. Senyavskaya "Literature of the Front Generation as a Historical Source". The author recognizes military literature written by direct eyewitnesses as "the most benign" in terms of reliability, based on the psychological motives of its creators, and reflects not only events, details of military life, but also the subjective perception of events, their assessment, the construction of a holistic image, in this case, an image enemy.
Also worth mentioning are the works of S.S. Sekirinsky, a recognized portrait historian, who prepared a series of articles "History and Literature" in the journal "Domestic History". In the article “Fiction P.D. Boborykin: the history of a liberal personality in artistic sketches" he applies a new method of historical hermeneutics, tracing the history of ideological movements and social life in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. based on numerous works by Boborykin and biographical information. For a historian, Boborykin is valuable as a writer of everyday life, a recognized creator of the "encyclopedia of Russian life", who himself saw, heard and felt everything himself. His advantage over the "figures of events", the authors of diaries, letters and memoirs, is that, as an outside observer, he did not exaggerate his importance, he covered the "wide periphery". Of course, a work of art must be approached with all caution, not forgetting the external and internal criticism of the source.
Today we do not say that literature "reflects" life, we do not identify the history of literary types and real people, like the historians of the pre-revolutionary academic school. As M. Blok noted, “literature draws a lot of inherited themes, formal techniques, old aesthetic conventions”, which, in his opinion, does not allow literature to embrace the “great life movement”. At the same time, stereotypes and stereotypes of thinking can be considered within the framework of the history of mentalities as a manifestation of socio-psychological attitudes, habits of consciousness. For example, hagiographic literature does not provide truthful information about events and personalities, but from it we can understand religious ideas, features of the worldview of a person of remote eras.
According to L.N. Gumilyov, "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" . Reality in a work of art is invariably typified, which, according to some researchers, even increases objectivity. So, the new cultural history strives to comprehend historical phenomena through the ideas of the people of the past, their spiritual life.
The field of activity of the historian is expanding, therefore, such subjective sources as fiction are becoming more and more in demand.
List of sources and literature
1. Andreichuk V.G. Concentration camp prose as a historical source // Bulletin of the Baltic Federal University. I. Kant. 2012. No. 12. P. 94–101.
2. Burke P. Historical anthropology and new cultural history // New literary review. 2005, pp. 64–91.
3. Blok M. Apology of history. M.: Nauka, 1973. 234 p.
4. Gumilyov L.N. Can a work of belles lettres be a historical source? // Russian literature. 1972. No. 1. S. 73–82.
5. Gurevich A.Ya. Historian of the end of the 20th century in search of a method // Odysseus. 1996. M.: Nauka, 1996. S. 5–10.
6. Darnton R. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes from the History of French Culture. M.: New Literary Review, 2002. 384 p.
7. Le Goff J. From heaven to earth // Odysseus. Man in history. M.: Nauka, 1991. S. 28–43.
8. Lyubart M.K. The family in French society, XVIII - early XX century. M.: Nauka, 2005. 296 p.
9. Mankevich I.A. Literary and artistic heritage as a source of cultural information // Observatory of Culture. 2007. No. 5. S. 17–23.
10. Repina L.P. Historical science at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries: social theories and historiographical practice. M.: Krug, 2011. 560 p.
11. Sekirinsky S.S. Fiction P.D. Boborykina: the history of a liberal personality in artistic sketches // ACTIO NOVA. M.: Globus, 2000. S. 426–455.
12. Senyavskaya E.S. Literature of the front-line generation as a historical source // Patriotic history. 2002. No. 1. C. 101–109.
13. Khodnev A.S. New cultural history and a new history of leisure // Historical science today: Theories, methods, perspectives / Ed. L.P. Repina; 2nd ed. M.: LKI Publishing House, 2012. S. 462–473.
14. Schmidt S.O. The path of the historian. Selected works on source studies and historiography. M.: RGGU, 1997. 612 p.
N.V. Dashkov Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University. K.D. Ushinsky, Yaroslavl Scientific adviser: Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Arkhipova L.M.
Fiction as a historical source
Fiction includes works of writing that have social significance, aesthetically expressing and shaping public consciousness.
It is generally recognized that the historical ideas of a person are not formed under the influence of the work 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, for a narrow circle of readers - mainly specialists), but by their essays that are journalistic in form 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 a historical source. One of the reasons for the lack of attention on the part of professional historians of modern and recent 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 criteria of reliability.
Supporters of the so-called "new intellectual history", a trend that arose in the 1970s. in foreign historiography, called into question the usual understanding of historical truth, assuming that a historian would 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 that obeys 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 the burden of knowledge and ideas of his time inevitably weighs on him.
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 a “historical document”: “Without Pushkin, one cannot imagine the era of the 20s and 30s, as it is impossible to write the history of the first half of our century without his works. In his opinion, only incidents 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 preferred "social novels" created by contemporaries of the events described. In subsequent years, the point of view prevailed that works of art can be used in the study of social relations only in those historical epochs from which a sufficient amount of other evidence has not been preserved.
During the discussions that took place in 1962-1963. On the pages of the journals "New and Contemporary History" and "Questions of the History of the CPSU", a variety of opinions were expressed about the source study perspective of fiction: from categorical objections to a call not to neglect sources reflecting "the multifaceted activity of the party and the ideological life of society."
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, folk beliefs. There is a division into secular and spiritual literature. There is a close connection of literature with 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 other Greekσημαντικός - denoting) - section linguistics, literary critic, student meaninglanguage units, terms and concepts in their historical development.
Artwork types:
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 by a measure according to its model.
Apocrypha(from other Greek ἀπόκρῠφος - hidden, secret, secret) - spiritual works that are not included in the canon and do not meet the model, often prohibited for use. gnosticism...
Canonical works have genres:
Scripted - Old and New Testament
Liturgical - liturgical (books of hours, menaias, breviaries, paremeniki)
Books of hours- a liturgical book containing the texts of unchanging prayers of the daily liturgical circle. It takes its name from the watch service it contains.
Menaion or cheti-menai, (that is, intended for reading, and not for worship) books of the lives of the saints of the Orthodox Church, and these narratives are presented in the order of the months and days of each month ...
trebnik- a liturgical book containing the rites of the Sacraments and other sacred rites performed by the church
paremeniki- a book of excerpts from the Holy Scriptures (citation book).
This includes translations of the Bible, the Psalter, the Gospel, etc.
Doctrine genre - symbols and statements of faith, catechetical teachings (catechisms), polemical writings, interpretations. An example is “The Assurance or Word on the Right Faith of John of Damascus”, the Ladder of John of the Ladder.
The preaching genre sermons. Treatises of Methodius of Patara, Izbornik Svyatoslav 1703, Izmaragda.
Hagiographic genre - lives, biographies, laudatory words to the saints and tales of miracles.
Paterik is a collection of stories about ascetic monks.
Menaion - hagiographic stories by months, abridged edition.
Translations of gossip.
Byzantine chronicles are the basis of Russian chronicle writing. Through the chronicles there was an acquaintance with ancient literature. “The Tale of Akira the Wise”, “The Tale of Barlaam and Josaphay”.
Original ancient Russian literature.
Teachings and Messages. “Sermon on Law and Grace”, “Instruction to the Brethren”, “Instruction of Vladimir Monomakh”, “Prayer” by Daniil Zatochnik.
Living literature
The earliest is considered “Service to the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb” (about 1021), “The Life of Prince Vladimir”, Kiev-Pechersk Patericon (about the first monks of the monastery), “The Life of Anthony the Roman”, Hagiographic stories about Stephen of Perm, Sergius of Radonezh, Dmitry Prilutsky, Metropolitan Alexy.
Klyuchevsky V. Old Russian about the lives of saints as historical sources.
... life is not a biography of secular persons, it is a special form cast in the minds of the people for expressing the ideal image of a holy man as a model (example) for imitation. There are names that stepped out of the boundaries of the time when their carriers lived. This is because the deed done by such a person, in its significance, went so far beyond the limits of its century, its beneficial action so deeply captured the life of subsequent generations, that from the person who did it, in the minds of these generations, everything temporal and local gradually fell away, and it turned from a historical figure into a popular idea, and the deed itself turned from a historical fact into a practical commandment, a testament, what we used to call an ideal. ... Such is the name of St. Sergius [of Radonezh]: this is not only an instructive, encouraging page in our history, but also a bright feature of our moral national content.
Walking descriptions of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The earliest is the Journey to Jerusalem of Abbot Daniel (1115). Journey beyond the three seas Athanasius Nikitin.
Military stories - stood out from the annals. A word about Igor's Campaign. The story of the destruction of Ryazan by Batu in the 14th century. Zadonshchina. The legend of the Mamaev battle.
As a result of studying this chapter, the student should:
know
- the specifics of using works of fiction as a historical source;
- features of the transmission of oral tradition;
- modern methodological principles of source study of folklore sources;
be able to
- determine the belonging of a folklore source to a particular genre;
- highlight the pseudo-folklore component in the corpus of sources;
- characterize the features of modern urban folklore;
own
Tools and methods for analyzing works of individual and collective creativity.
Key terms and concepts: fiction, folklore, genres of folklore, oral sources.
Fiction as a historical source
To fiction include works of writing that have social significance, aesthetically expressing and shaping public consciousness.
It is generally recognized that the historical ideas of a person are not formed under the influence of the work 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, for a narrow circle of readers - mainly specialists), but by their essays that are journalistic in form 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 a historical source. One of the reasons for the lack of attention on the part of professional historians of modern and recent 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 criteria of reliability.
Supporters of the so-called "new intellectual history", a trend that arose in the 1970s. in foreign historiography, called into question the usual understanding of historical truth, assuming that a historian would 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 that obeys 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 the burden of knowledge and ideas of his time inevitably weighs on him.
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 a “historical document”: “Without Pushkin, one cannot imagine the era of the 20s and 30s, 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 preferred "social novels" created by contemporaries of the events described. In subsequent years, the point of view prevailed that works of art can be used in the study of social relations only in those historical epochs from which a sufficient amount of other evidence has not been preserved.
During the discussions that took place in 1962-1963. On the pages of the journals "New and Contemporary History" and "Questions of the History of the CPSU", a variety of opinions were expressed about the source study perspective of fiction: from categorical objections to a call not to neglect sources reflecting "the multifaceted activity of the party and the ideological life of society."
Usually, for a historian, fiction as a source was of interest if it contained unique information that was not reflected in other documents; if the author of the work of art was a direct witness to the events described; if the accuracy of the information contained in the work could be verified, i.e. corroborated by other sources. N. I. Mironets in an article in 1976 noted that fiction is primarily a source on the history of the cultural life of the country.
L. N. Gumilyov formulated a fundamentally different approach to the problem, expressing the opinion that "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 that marks ideas and motives epoch".
Today, more and more historians recognize that works of fiction and art are an important source for understanding the spirit of the time, knowledge of the circumstances that accompanied certain historical events. Especially promising is the use of fiction in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, as well as in works on social history and the history of everyday life. At the same time, each literary work as a source should be studied taking into account its historical conditionality, the mass consciousness of contemporary society, the author's worldview, stylistic and linguistic features of presentation.
According to A. K. Sokolov, literature and art have the property of "feeling" for reality, fixing emerging being, anticipating what will only later be reflected in historiography. Thus, W. Dunham put forward the concept of a "big deal" in the mid-1930s. Stalinist regime and the middle class of Soviet society. Today, this concept is considered universally recognized in social history, although the main work of V. Dunham ("In Stalin" s Time: Middleclass in Soviet Fiction ") is based on an analysis of production novels of the industrialization era.
A work of fiction can serve as an impetus for historical research, search and verification of the facts stated by the author. It is known, for example, about the circumstances of the writing of the novel "The Young Guard" by A. A. Fadeev. The writer had to create a landmark work in a short time. After a devastating review in Pravda, which spoke of the unacceptably weak reflection in the novel of the leading role of the party in creating an underground organization and an unacceptably colorful description of the retreat of the Soviet troops, the author was forced to prepare a second version of the novel (as he complained to the writer L. B. Libedinskaya - to remake the "young guard to the old one"). Relatives of many Young Guards turned to A. A. Fadeev and I. V. Stalin with complaints about the "incorrect coverage" of the activities of the youth underground, some members of which were "canonized" as heroes, others branded with shame as traitors. A. A. Fadeev himself in one of his letters admitted that in The Young Guard, as in any "novel on a historical theme", fiction and history are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate one from the other. However, for the majority of contemporaries, there was no need to reveal this correlation of truth and fiction. The novel received recognition because it dealt with a great victory, true heroes and universal problems. In this sense, the work was a document of the era. Even today, far from all archival materials have been declassified, and researchers' disputes about the "Young Guard" continue to this day. The very same story of the appearance of the novel by A. A. Fadeev is extremely indicative in terms of the mechanism for creating a myth.
The subject of independent historical research can be not only the works of fiction themselves, but also their social existence, the popularity of literary genres and the demand for authors, which reflects the tastes of the readership and the moral climate in society as a whole.
Value of fiction (which is understood as literature with a fictional character, fictional circumstances that are perceived by the reader as such) as a source lies in the ability to reflect the mentality of its time, to contribute to the reconstruction of certain historical types of behavior, thinking, perception, i.e. reproduce the subjective aspects of social reality. This makes works of fiction related to memoirs and folklore sources.
There are two points of view on the relationship between fiction and folklore. According to the first, fiction (art) opposes folklore (a form of spiritual activity of the people, which is the subject of study for ethnographers). According to the definition of the outstanding folklorist V. Ya. Propp, folklore is the "prehistory of literature".
The other extreme is the identification of folklore and literature in view of the recognition of a single "creative act" in both cases. Proponents of this approach singled out the same artistic styles in folklore as in literature, including socialist realism. Since folklore was considered the art of the uneducated (mostly rural) population, the point of view was expressed that it would be replaced by literature as literacy spread and storytellers turned into writers. This does not happen, since literature and folklore are related artistic systems, but they are based on different ways of imaginative thinking - individual and collective.
Works of fiction have in common with folklore sources in that they convey to us not so much reliable information about the past as certain matrices of social consciousness.
Both literature and folklore perform the functions of a symbolic regulator of social and cultural practices, assigning to certain texts both a certain audience and forms of social communication that serve as an experience of the subject's socialization, i.e. transform the individual into a member of a given cultural and historical community. The study of such experience, coupled with the study of readers and listeners (as consumers of texts), can significantly enrich historical knowledge.
