REGIONAL VERSIONS OF THE SOVIET NARRATIVE: ON THE PROBLEM OF PUBLISHING ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of two editions of the correspondence between medievalists M.Y. Syuzyumov (1893–1982) and V.T. Sirotenko (1915–2006). The first of them was predominantly a Byzantine scholar, the second studied the period of transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in Europe; Syuzyumov actually acted as a consultant for Sirotenko writing his doctoral thesis. The publication of 25 letters was made in 2021 in two versions: in the monograph by A. Wenger and in the article by K.R. Kapsalykova; both versions are independent of each other and differ from each other in dozens of more or less significant details. The article shows that such a difference is explained by: technical errors; different principles of publishing archival materials and individual decisions made by publishers who had to deal with typos, inaccuracies and author's punctuation of the participants in the correspondence. Further, the author demonstrates what details in the correspondence did not get attention from the publishers, which reduced the scientific value of the publication. The correspondence can serve as good evidence of the state of affairs in the provincial scholarship in the late Soviet period, showing the formation of regional versions of the Soviet historical narrative. Recently, the publication of archival sources on the history of Soviet science has acquired a large scale. Therefore, we have the right to raise the question of the quality of publications, which includes both the technical side of the matter and the problems of commenting on the published material. Accordingly, the quality of a source is determined not only by its content, but also by the extent to which the publisher manages to show its meaning in a wider context; when this context is incomprehensible to the publisher himself, then the source will remain “closed” to most readers.