CHECKING SOMEONE ELSE’S PRESENT WITH YOUR OWN PAST (ON THE FORMATION OF AN ÉMIGRÉ HISTORIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE)

Abstract

The article analyzes the historiographic texts of the first wave of Russian émigré historians. In these texts, the Soviet historiographic process of the 1920s and 1930s was interpreted. The relevance of the study is associated both with the poor study of historiographic texts created during that period in emigration, and with the narrative turn of modern historical science, as well as with the experience of understanding the structure and nature of the Soviet narrative, which is beginning to be comprehended and problematized as an independent problem. The study of narratives makes it possible to move away from general assessments of the Soviet stage of historical studies to a more specific description of it through studying the stylistics of the text, isolating the standards and the uniqueness of their construction, with close attention to the problems of their unification. This process can be clarified and refined through the prism of the “emigre mirror”. The source base was the historiographic texts of P.N. Milyukov, A.A. Kizevetter, A.V. Florovsky, and E.F. Maksimovich in the form of published works and manuscript heritage from the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN) and the Slavic Library in Prague (Slovanská knihovna v Praze). Based on textual analysis and developments in the field of intellectual history, the author highlights the unifying features of the émigré narrative. These include: 1) scholars’ understanding of their special mission in emigration which consists of preserving the historiographic tradition and presenting Russian historical science to the world community as part of world science; 2) close attention to the classics, focus on tradition; 3) an assessment of the historiographic process within the framework of the reference time, the Golden age of pre-revolutionary historical science (late 19th – early 20th centuries); the criterion for assessing the current historiographic process was the compliance with the experience of Moscow and St. Petersburg scientific schools; 4) a statement about the lack of freedom of research, the monopoly of Marxist methodology and the hypertrophied class approach in relation to the historicist views of historians; 5) changes in the form and structure of the classic narrative – the proportion of reviews, literature reviews, obituaries in the structure of emigrant narrative was increasing; the deconstruction of the old narrative followed the path of its archaization; 6) the unifying factor that tightened the texts, gave them tension and a special emotional charge, was the figure of M.N. Pokrovsky. However, the verification of the current historiographic process by one’s own past is not without contradictions. On the one hand, this ensures the continuity of historiographic knowledge and confirms the thesis of the intrinsic value of the so-called «outdated innovations». In addition, in this regard, we can talk about the fundamental eclecticism of science as a cultural tradition. On the other hand, the reciprocating nature is fraught with a closure on the old. The absolutization of tradition leads to the blocking of intellectual transfers. In science of science, this process is called the rut effect. As an example of searching for «one’s own track», the article presents an attempt by A.V. Florovsky to understand and to clarify the phenomenon of Soviet historiography by coarsening the classical historiographic approach and using the inventory-registration method. As a result, he managed to present the meaningful complexity of the internal structure of Soviet historical science.