“ARZAMAS”-TEAM: Literature on the Way to the Genre of Absolute Frankness

The largest part of the book is probably the sketch of the large-scale research “The Russian Memoir Literature”. Such texts do not become outdated either in content (some, at first glance, inconsistency with the title of the book is imaginary in the whole, since “Arzamas” and the genre of the diary are twin brothers) or methodologically — the growth of memoirs in number from the XIX century to the XX, and further, has not become a stimulus to the literary interest in studying this kind of literature.

Memoirs have spread out as a colossal blank spot on the history map of the Russian literature. ‘Memoirs (this statement remains relevant because their number increased during the decades of the downtime of this text) were at the crossroads of many studies but they were not considered as a full-fledged phenomenon of literature. The perspective on memoirs primarily as on a source, a guide, and an additional proof, which has been very common to date, undoubtedly downplayed the independent importance of this kind of literature. The historical-documentary approach to it has received, in a certain sense, exclusive rights and has extended its influence on researchers with hypothetical force.²

Yes, the research approaches which had already emerged by that time — a historical and literary one, with a strictly limited group of memoirs containing information about the literary life of the past; the textual and monographic one, which studies the memoirs of the literary heritage of a certain writer as additional material for the study of the author's oeuvre; the psychological approach, which unveils the mysteries of literary work psychology — are made similar through the subordinate role of memoirs in respect to the goals of the research.

What is a memoir fact with its special retrospective load? ‘Recollection creates a situation that fundamentally changes the inner meaning of the depicted phenomenon. In a new situation, the author is not only a participant in the experience but also an onlooker. By recreating the past, the author builds a model of the world that partially equalises the beginning and the end of the situation and tightly keeps each fact between the two knowns — development and result. The natural course of events is an imitation; the action in the memoirs is not a copy of that how reality is constructed, it is also caused by a force absent in a real action, which is retrospection, the ability to perceive the time of the described situation as a single past.³