Vote in the living chronicle competition. A living chronicle of the fate of a family in the history of the country
ARKHANGELSK, October 27 – RIA Novosti. The Arkhangelsk region was the first in the country to join the all-Russian project “Living Chronicle. The fate of the family in the history of the country,” reports a RIA Novosti correspondent.
Pomorie schoolchildren became the authors of collections dedicated to their native land. In their literary works, students in grades 6-11 from six dozen schools in the region tried to tell the history of their family, showing how closely it is intertwined with the history of Russia. In total, more than 350 texts were submitted to the competition. Teachers coordinated the process and participated in the compilation of collections.
At the end of the competition, the regional government awarded the participants whose works were recognized as the best. The jury that evaluated the works of young northerners included theater and film actress Alisa Grebenshchikova and TV presenter Tutta Larsen, and was headed by the regional governor Igor Orlov.
Chairman of the Government of the Arkhangelsk Region Alexey Alsufiev joined the celebration of the winners. “You correlated the chronicles of your families with the events that took place in our country in previous, very difficult times. It is very important to know the history of your state, your land, your family. And it is wonderful that in the year of the 80th anniversary of our region we had the honor of becoming pilot region and open this competition,” the prime minister noted.
According to the organizers of the competition, some works can be called genuine literature, but the most important thing is that all the stories have an amazing, lively intonation.
Alisa Grebenshchikova noted that all competition entries breathe love and sincerity, they show passion and immersion in their research. “This is a passion for both the history of one’s own family and the history of the country. People who own a pen and know how to act as chroniclers have always been valued. And what these guys have done today is very valuable,” she is sure.
Thanks to the support of the governor, schoolchildren in the Arkhangelsk region will continue to participate in the project next year. According to Orlov, the competition instills family values in young people, makes it possible to compare and correlate the collected facts with the events taking place in the country, to understand that behind the numbers and dates lie the destinies and lives of people, including their ancestors.
Young writers who have already participated in the project “Living Chronicle. The Fate of the Family in the History of the Country” received published collections of their works and many other prizes as a reward for their work. The most unexpected gift turned out to be postcards autographed by science fiction writer George R.R. Martin, based on whose works the cult television series “Game of Thrones” was based.
The pilot stage of the literary competition “Living Chronicle. The fate of the family in the history of the country" - for six months, schoolchildren in the Arkhangelsk region researched the stories of their families, and then wrote books about them. Competition coordinator Alexander Gavrilov talks about how young authors managed to combine literature and history, find their own intonation, stretch the thread of the historical narrative back several generations, and how the chronicle of one region can help heal the traumas of an entire country.
When we conceived the “Living Chronicle” (this honor personally belongs to Alexander Krasnokutsky, who heads the publishing startup Ridero), we, of course, were afraid of insincerity. Each of us went through high school. All of us at school had the experience of secrecy, the experience of not expressing ourselves. The teacher says: “Now write an essay on the topic “We look up to those who are ahead of time” - and the teenager understands that even if he has some ideas, he does not want to express his own, because he needs to reproduce someone else’s.
And we wanted people to talk about the true history of their families, not smoothed over, not embellished - as they tell it at home, and not as they tell it to government officials. I think it was a success.
From the collection “Good Memory”
Bileva Ksenia My dad's grandparents only met at their wedding. Before this, the grandmother, then young Masha, saw her future husband only once. And that was from behind a curtain, on the stove. He, according to the customs of those years, came to her father’s house in the neighboring village of Podlesnaya to make a match. Now there is not a single house left in that village. There is only a telephone booth, installed in accordance with the village telephone program. This was at the end of the 20s of the last century. Dad, relaying the stories of his grandmother, Maria Nikolaevna Bileva, says that people lived well in those years: they sowed rye, oats, flax, grew vegetables, and kept livestock. But then the period of “collectivization” and “dekulakization” began: all families that had more than one horse, or one cow, or 10 sheep were considered kulaks. Kulak families were subject to exile, and to avoid this, the family of my great-grandparents’ parents was forced to “voluntarily” give one horse and two cows to the newly formed collective farm. Not far from the village of Babino, where my great-grandmother and great-grandfather lived, a train of “dispossessed” families from Ukraine was unloaded right into an open field. It was nearing winter, and in order to build at least dugouts, they went to the village to ask for construction tools. Village residents were forced to join the collective farm. It was not prohibited to keep their own cattle, imposing a tax on this right of 3 liters of milk daily, therefore, like other peasant families, the Bilevs kept a cow and a dozen sheep, which later saved the lives of them and their children. Not everyone, really.I read more than 40 books of the chronicle, each book contained from one to seven texts. Over these forty books, I’m embarrassed to admit, I burst into tears a hundred times. It’s not that I’m calling for measuring the quality of literature in sobs. And the tears welled up not so much from horror and hopelessness, but from something exactly the opposite. For example, on the strength and honesty of memory.
Here, for example, is Ksenia Bileva, whose work is cited above. She talks about how those dispossessed in the Russian North were simply transferred from one village to another, taking away their livestock, house, yard, and farmstead. And at the same time, she notices that next door there was a field where dispossessed people from Ukraine were brought. And so all autumn they went to the village to ask for a shovel, so that they could at least dig some dugouts for themselves. The fact that elders tell a child or schoolchild about this, that this detail is kept through at least three generations in family tradition, is a very strong and striking feature. We see this whole picture - strangers who were brought to a completely unfamiliar place. A village in which half of the people were taken to an unknown location, and the other was brought from an unknown location. And a shovel, which you need to go get every day and then you need to give it away, because there is only one on the farm, and it is needed. And people remember this three or four generations later and tell it again and again.
Pyotr Sarukhanov / Novaya Gazeta. But one more thing is important: schoolchildren manage to tell about history differently than we are used to hearing. They say: “There were very difficult years. I had to cope with them - go to work on a timber rafting operation, work knee-deep in water, hide from inspectors. And my family survived."
“In the fall of 1946, my grandmother was born - Tatiana. But even in the post-war years, life was not easy. The state forced people to buy government bonds, which cost one out of two salaries, and they had to pay a tax on livestock. My grandmother said: “Next to the cowshed, my father piled large piles of firewood, and when inspectors came once a month to establish the amount of the tax, we often hid goats and piglets behind these piles. I remember I was sitting behind the firewood, bandaging the goat’s muzzle so that it wouldn’t bleat, but I was both funny and scared.” Gorodishchenskaya Svetlana, 16 years old, SeverodvinskIt is precisely this “both funny and scary” that forms the amazing charm of these stories. It's not about how hard life was. And about how we overcame this unbearably difficult life. And each of the authors of these works is living evidence that the people had more strength than the power that tried to destroy the family. These are triumphant stories of survival as victory.
The hero of one of the works is a parish priest who served in three churches at the same time. He was arrested allegedly because in his sermon he called not to go to the collective farm. He was arrested, exiled, and died almost immediately. But pay attention to how the young author writes about this. He says that at home there was a conversation about this story after he watched a production of Boris Vasiliev’s story “Tomorrow there was a war.” As we remember, the father of the young heroine was also repressed and then returned. The young author, with the charming, radiant arrogance of a young winner, writes about it this way:
“Having experienced all the hardships of the “children of enemies of the people,” the children of Father Fedor insisted on his innocence, but were able to achieve his rehabilitation only in 1989. I am very sorry that Vika Lyuberetskaya, the heroine of Boris Vasiliev’s work “Tomorrow There Was War,” turned out to be so weak that instead of fighting for the honor of her father, she decided to die. Perhaps she did this because she was too young and there was no family nearby with whom she could share her misfortune. I am proud that Father Fedor’s children never gave up and always supported each other.” Fomin DmitryThe chronicle turned out to be much wider than a single area. In the 20s, there was an exodus from the villages to the factories, many came to the cities from some remote corners, and now their heirs live in the cities of the Arkhangelsk region, many people came. There are wonderful stories of multinational families, where, for example, the father, a policeman, participated in all the post-Soviet Caucasian wars, and now serves in the traffic police and guards the peace of his country on the roads. This type of pride in one’s country is also understandable to me. But when you read the texts of the heirs of the Pomor families, they sound special.
Severodvinsk gymnasium № 14 Imagine a small village on a steep river bank, surrounded by dense forests and impenetrable swamps. A harsh land of courageous people. The land of my ancestors - people of the old faith: Volkov Andrei Ivanovich and Ustinya Efimovna. The village they lived in was called Lavela. The Pinega River flowed nearby. All Lavelians were Old Believers. The places where the Old Believers were were rich in natural gifts. There were always huge barrels with different berries in the povets. There was a lot of fish in Pinega, especially pike. Men with nets and sticks up to their chests entered the river and began hitting the water, scaring and driving the fish into the shallow water. There they literally collected it with their bare hands and put it in baskets. There were so many fish in our northern rivers! Once a year, in the spring, when the water was high, a barge came to the Old Believers, loaded with sugar, flour, and grain, which were not available in the village. These goods filled the barns to the very top. But often barge traders brought misfortune to this village - diseases. Since the Lavelians had little contact with the outside world, they were susceptible to various infections. Sometimes half the village fell ill. Many died. This happened with the first husband of my great-great-grandmother, Ustinya Efimovna Volkova. She loved him very much, called him “basque”, that is, handsome. She was forcibly married again to my great-great-grandfather, Andrei Ivanovich Volkov. He was older than her and had a limp since childhood. Nevertheless, three children were born in this marriage. One of them was my great-grandmother, Maria Andreevna Volkova, when she was married - Focht. After the revolution it turned out that grandfather Andrei - kulak son. They couldn’t exile him - and so he lives in a remote northern village. You can’t send it to logging either - The leg is badly damaged. And then they sent his wife, Ustinya Efimovna, to work. There, my great-great-grandmother received severe rheumatism. She stood in cold water all the time, floating timber down the river. After a year or two of hard work in the logging camp, she was returned home. Such was the fate of wealthy peasants. In the houses of the Old Believers there were always many ancient icons, and the Volkovs also had ancient church books in gilded and silver frames, decorated with stones. With the advent of Soviet power, my great-grandmother, Maria Andreevna, joined the Communist Party and achieved great career heights in Severodvinsk. She was ashamed and afraid to admit that her father was an Old Believer, and also a son of a kulak. When Andrei Ivanovich died, his entire inheritance was many ancient icons, books and even silver coins of royal mintage - was of no value to the family. It seemed dangerous to them to keep such things in their possession. At that time, a museum expedition traveled around the Pinega region, collecting antiques. Maria Andreevna gave everything away and kept only two copper icons painted with azure. Now these icons are - family heirloom. Now the village of Old Believers lives only in the stories of my grandmother. Listening to them, it’s as if I’m touching that life, trying it on for myself.I noticed one detail - children often refer to their ancestors with a full, expanded title: last name, first name, patronymic. “When my great-great-grandfather Prokopiy Stepanovich Ladkin...” At first it seems like some kind of official stuff, but then you see: the young authors also call themselves solemnly and fully. A person belongs to this familia in the high Roman sense, he is the son of his father, and he is the son of his father, and this unbroken chain is absolutely unshakable, in it everyone has his place.
There are several stories from children from shipbuilder families. I really love this piece from the text by Bachin Ruslan Andreevich from the collection of students of school No. 4 in Onega:
“My grandmother, Bachina Ninel Grigorievna, told me that my great-great-grandfather lived in the village of Kushereka. This village consisted of several “nests”. The highest part was called Gora, and from it you can see the White Sea bay. Among the many parts of the village there is a name - Bachi village. Houses in Kusherek face the river. In 1893, the village was in 4th place in the county in terms of population. Once upon a time, at the request of merchant shipowners, a nautical class was opened to familiarize oneself with seafaring. All the villagers' hopes were connected with the sea. The guy, having got married, sought to quickly acquire his ship. Shipbuilders more often built coastal or coastal vessels. My great-great-grandfather, Mikhail Ivanovich Bachin, said that he harvested the wood for construction in the upper reaches of the Kusha River or in the Zolotukha forests, selected it and branded it himself. The wood was removed in winter so that after cutting the board would be doused with its own resin and would rot less. I chose pine with dense annual rings. Masted ships and schooners were built at the mouth of the river. Pomeranian karbas and boots were sewn near the house and lowered into the sea through the deep water. My great-grandfather had a sea schooner “Lydia”, and the Afonins (wife’s parents) had bot "Vision".I understand that ethnographic work is probably mixed in with the family legend here, but this understanding that everything begins with the selection of pine, that when cut, the board should be doused with resin, that the karbas is sewn, and not built, like the river vessels of Central Russia - I hear something absolutely genuine in this.
Next year, with a high degree of probability, we will continue the “Living Chronicle” in the Arkhangelsk region and will do it in the Smolensk region, which is also very interesting in a historical sense. I would dream of finding partners who would help us reach schools in the south, in Rostov and Krasnodar. To do this, the project needs to be supported by regional ministries of education. When we launched the competition in the Arkhangelsk region, everyone said: “What schools, what are you talking about! Teachers work from morning to night, fill out new magazines, spend nights working on homework.” And it's all true. But at the same time, it was the teachers who called us at night because a comma was placed incorrectly in the book, and now they don’t know what to do about it. This needs to be corrected immediately, because the work must be included in the competition. They were jealous of each other, they suspected that someone had peeked into their idea in order to draw up their own based on it. The passion that burns in them fascinates me. But I, of course, understand that if the local Ministry of Education does not give such passion, then holding the competition will be much more difficult.
And we, of course, were terribly lucky that the Vice-Governor for Social Affairs, Ekaterina Prokopyeva, quickly and passionately got involved. What happened in the Arkhangelsk region should show every administration and every region that they have a chance to write their lines in the real chronicle, where not only rulers and judges, but also everyone who is remembered by their children and grandchildren. And it’s not easy to organize such a large-scale project on your own; there are organizational costs: travel of technical specialists, work of the jury, and the laureates must be taken to where the awards are taking place. This year we will bring the winners to Moscow for the non/fiction fair. On December 3 at Litkaf they will tell their readers about how they worked on their books.
I would dream of holding this competition every year throughout the entire globe, because the Russian world is not the corner that the Russians managed to fence off with bayonets, but the Russian world is the world inhabited by people who speak Russian. I would be glad to see the Living Chronicle books written in Russian in Germany, Australia, Israel, and the USA. Today people who speak Russian live there, they raise their children, who also speak and write Russian. And their memory is also part of our common memory, which we would like to unite within this project. Each work uploaded to Ridero can be printed with the click of a button - at least one copy, at least five. Anyone can make a book that will take pride of place on the shelf of the family library.
Young authors write not only about the long past. Some convey the traumatic experience of the 90s: they talk about their grandfather, who was the best specialist at his factory, and then everyone left, and when orders returned in the 2000s, it turned out that there was no one to do them. But my grandfather remained at the plant, he knew how to do everything, now he is the most important, and for his experience and service they carry him in their arms. And even when the bitterness is very fresh, the grandchildren still talk about victory. A person cannot live only through grief. A person cannot live without memory of the past. A person must live in today. Since he is alive, his family has overcome all adversities.
Recorded it Anastasia Chukovskaya
Dedication
My grandmother -superhero!
Recently, my younger brother Egorka and I watched a movie about Spider-Man on TV. In the film, people got into various troubles, and the main character saved them. After the film, Egor tormented me with the question: “How to become a superhero?” I thought for a while, and then said: “Superhero -This is a person who helps everyone and always. Expects nothing in return. He just loves people, loves his homeland. He is firmly convinced that the most important thing in the world is"This is love, loyalty and decency." Then it was Yegorka’s turn to think, he was silent for a long time, and then sighed and said: “Are there such heroes next to us?” At that moment our grandmother entered the room. I looked at her and realized that there really was a superhero living next to us!
No, our grandmother does not have a black belt in karate, does not know how to run like the wind, and she does not have a special super suit that would protect her from fire and water. She has none of this. So why do I claim that she is a superhero? There are reasons for this.
My grandmother lived a difficult life. She went through an orphanage, a hungry childhood, a serious illness of her mother, lack of money, and difficult post-war years. It would seem that those who survived at that time should have grown up to be tight-fisted people. But grandma is not like that at all! Everything she has in her home, in her heart, in her soul, she is ready to give to people.
After graduating from school, she went to work in construction. The work is hard for a young girl! How not to break down, how not to start crying and blaming fate for everything, worrying about yourself. But grandma overcame everything, she thought more about others. That’s probably why I went to study to become a teacher and work in a school. Just imagine how scary it is to enter a classroom where students -your peers, take responsibility for their future! After all, if you don’t explain and teach in the right way, what will the guys turn out to be? But grandma did it! She simply sighed and entered the classroom.
Popov Eremey,
Novodvinsk
This is, in fact, grandma. Quite an unexpected superhero image
On October 26, the pilot stage of the literary competition “Living Chronicle. The fate of the family in the history of the country."
For six months, schoolchildren in the Arkhangelsk region prepared books about the history of their own families for publication. More than 100 schools in the Arkhangelsk region took part in the competition, and more than 350 texts were uploaded to the Ridero publishing system. Many of the works submitted to the competition by authors aged 12 to 17 turned out to be genuine literature.
Thanks to the support of the regional government, Pomorie schools will continue to participate in the project next year. In his greeting to the competition laureates, Governor I.A. Orlov noted: “ Often the history of our Motherland is presented to a child during lessons in the form of dry textbook texts; studying it involves memorizing important numbers and dates. Such information is difficult to perceive on a personal level. The competition provided an opportunity to create a “living history” based on personal and family memories. Connect the history of several generations of your family with the history of our country and our region. It really turned out to be a living story!»
All texts written by young authors can be readon the “Living Chronicle” page in Ridero . Teams from entire schools participated in the project. Participants uploaded their finished works to the Ridero publishing service. A popular vote took place on the Living Chronicle books page - thousands of users voted for their favorite works. Together with them, the works of young authors were evaluated by a qualified jury. Jury member Alisa Grebenshchikova flew to Arkhangelsk specifically to announce the winners and congratulate the laureates. " People who are able to tell about the history of their own family were important hundreds of years ago - and today everyone loves them too, and in a hundred years they will be remembered».
This year's winners:
3rd place - collection "Family Stories" Municipal Educational Institution Gymnasium of Novodvinsk (teacher Elena Ivanovna Boykova)
2nd place - collection “Living Chronicle” in two volumes of MBOU Lyceum No. 17 of Severodvinsk (teachers Nadezhda Valerievna Pervyshina and Yana Yurievna Kasatkina)
1 place - "Pomeranian root..." MBOU Secondary School No. 4 in Onega (teacher Nadezhda Vladimirovna Boldyreva)
More detailed information about the competition on the Ridero websitehttps://ridero.ru/contest/letopis/
Ridero is a service for creating and distributing books without intermediaries. The Ridero service allows any author to create a professionally designed electronic or paper book from text and images in a few minutes.
Conducted by the publishing house RIDERO, it started in Pomorie in April of this year. The competition is dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Arkhangelsk region, and our region was chosen as a pilot project.
The competition participants were children from sixth to eleventh grade, who were asked to tell about the history of their family and native land. As one of its organizers, program director of the Institute of Books Alexander Gavrilov, explained at the start of the competition, the main achievement of the competition is the opportunity to have a conversation within the family, touch one’s own history, and study family heirlooms. And find out what parents and grandparents were into 30-50 years ago.
The winners' works became real books. The guys prepared them for six months. Dozens of schools from all over the region took part in the competition. More than 350 texts were uploaded to the Ridero publishing system. And thousands of readers “live” could vote for their favorite work. The works were also evaluated by a qualified jury, which included actress Alisa Grebenshchikova and TV presenter Tutta Larsen.
The awarding of the winners took place on October 26 in the meeting room of the government of the Arkhangelsk region.
These are very personal works,” said Alexander Gavrilov, congratulating the guys. - These are stories about how the history of the family was intertwined with the history of the country. And these are bright literary works.
According to the Chairman of the Government of the Arkhangelsk Region, Alexei Alsufiev, he was struck by the fact that while studying the history of the family, some authors “reached the 17th century.”
This is an important work, which probably became a discovery for the young authors themselves,” noted Alexey Alsufiev.
Alisa Grebenshchikova also shared her impressions:
“All these works were written by caring people, and this is very valuable. It is very right to be caring, because caring people save the world. Those who care see and know much more, they are more susceptible to suffering and happiness. And people who own a pen and can describe their feelings, as chroniclers of the country's history, have always been highly valued. And they will be valued for many centuries to come.”
According to the organizers, Severodvinsk became one of the most active participants in the competition. The guys from Lyceum No. 17 were the first to send their work. And it is among the Severodvinsk residents, Alexander Gavrilov noted, that there are many who are particularly distinguished by their skill.
When we started reading, we realized that some of the stories were not just vivid diaries of experiences, but also real literary events,” noted Alexander Gavrilov. - As a result, the jury selected ten participants who were awarded personal prizes and personal diplomas. When we told about these literary works to our comrades involved in literature and book publishing, they responded quickly - the writer Max Frei gives his book to each author. Also among the gifts is a card signed by George R.R. Martin, the author of the book on which the Game of Thrones series was based.
Among the ten literary lucky ones were a brother and sister from Severodvinsk Lyceum No. 17 - Savva and Vasilisa Dergachev. The guys wrote a story about their great-great-grandfather Prokopiy Ladkin, who was a famous craftsman - he made carbass.
Procopius Ladkin sold the boat and bought gifts for the whole family,” Savva began his story. - But he still had money left, and to celebrate, he went to a tavern, where he met a stonemason, who offered him to buy a good gravestone. Procopius did not intend to die, since everyone in the family lived to be a hundred years old. But I bought the stone and stored it in the attic. But it so happened that Procopius died. Exactly one year after purchasing the stone... The seller was right about one thing. The stone turned out to be really good and still stands in the village cemetery.
An eighth-grade student from Severodvinsk, Anastasia Shavva, wrote a work that, according to Alexander Gavrilov, touched all members of the jury.
The idea for the story came to me spontaneously. I wrote the essay in three hours. This is a story about my great-grandfather Van. He went to the front and died. And my great-grandmother kept the scarf that her great-grandfather gave her before leaving all her life,” Anastasia explained.
Next year the Living Chronicle project will continue.
The 2017 winners were:
- 1st place - the book “Pomeranian Root...”, secondary school No. 4 of the city of Onega (teacher Nadezhda Boldyreva);
- 2nd place - collection “Living Chronicle” in two volumes, Lyceum No. 17 of Severodvinsk (teachers Nadezhda Pervyshina and Yana Kasatkina);
- 3rd place - collection “Family Stories”, Novodvinsk gymnasium (teacher Elena Boykova).
Competition “Living Chronicle. The fate of the family in the history of the country,” the results of which were summed up in Arkhangelsk last week, is difficult to consider as a purely cultural event - in this capacity, an essay competition on family history, organized by the Institute of Books, the publishing house Ridero and the administration of the Arkhangelsk region, looks quite obvious. What is more interesting in “The Living Chronicle” is the non-obvious - the opportunity to observe the transformation of the language of the essay’s authors, which diverges from the accepted ideas of what history is and what can happen in it.
The founder of the Institute of Books, Alexander Gavrilov, obviously understood perfectly well the practical guarantee of the success of the project, which from 2018 will be scaled up (and, apparently, with the support of the presidential administration) in many regions of the country. The boom of “private memory” projects in Russia, which is basically similar to similar stories in Central Europe in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, is obvious, and it makes no sense to look for a reflection of the pathos of “nation building” in it - ideologists and historians always do an excellent job with this . In the case of “The Living Chronicle,” the value for historical science of several hundred essays written by schoolchildren in the Arkhangelsk region based on family stories is limited: scientists work with such material in a fundamentally different way.
This is not the importance of what is happening at all. We are dealing with a large corpus of purely modern texts about family histories, written by today’s young people - and, moreover, not within the framework of the given standards of educational narrative. In this sense, the project of the Institute of Books is to a greater extent a literary project, in which the modern language of non-professional description of history in a family context is the main character. Over the past 20 years, we have been dealing mainly with professional works of anthropologists, historians and writers who quite productively correlate the “family” and “state” historical contexts. The Arkhangelsk texts are a fundamentally different phenomenon, to some extent the reverse side of such works, this is what remains in the language.
The results of 2017 for the Living Chronicle will be presented in the form of a book of selected essays at the Moscow Non/fiction fair. Ridero published some of the larger works as prizes for competition participants. In the meantime, it makes sense to tell what in the future big book and in these smaller books differs from what we are used to thinking about “people's history.”
The first is a predictable, but surprising in its categorical choice of “historical events” in a family context. The depth of the family history of Arkhangelsk texts typically does not exceed 150 years; in general, “history supported by memories” in the understanding of Arkhangelsk families is a rather narrow time period from the 20s to the 50s of the 20th century. There are three major events in it: collectivization, World War II and the post-war years, and the Great Terror. What seems important is the absence in the texts, and this is something like an intergenerational consensus, the “second side”, the enemy and the opponent - it’s not even that repression and collectivization in the essay have no characters and institutions at all (as there are no in this text and any noticeable “state”, which looks shocking at first). In the obligatory episodes of military family history, which was previously typical only for narratives about the First World War, there are actually no Germans/fascists as an opposing force. Moreover, although the families who wrote the essays are, of course, mostly urban residents, the texts are largely a “peasant” view of major historical events, the meaning of which is the tragic and irresistible intervention of impersonal external forces in the normal course of self-organized life. Life itself, and this is no less striking, is largely not career or political stories, but stories of love and family creation, private life at its core; The “outside world” relates to this narrative, but never back. It is very significant that these stories now also cover the “empty times” at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, known in Russia almost exclusively from professional work. In general, the folk history of the first post-war decades is known to the people mainly in professional processing, and in communication it usually exists as a low-quality derivative of historical works, supplemented by suitable episodes from everyday life and memoirs; in competitive essays this is not the case at all.
Of particular interest in the Arkhangelsk texts is the “non-living” part of the narrative - the interpretation and transformation by the authors of the layers of official ideologies of different times. We can only say that, in general, there is no fundamentally new way of interacting with these constructions in the Arkhangelsk texts - it is almost always a borrowed description language, used locally and mostly foreign. The negative result for the Arkhangelsk region - a region with a centuries-old tradition of high literacy, religious, secular and professional reading, and unusually active external contacts with other cultures - is important. The Living Chronicle, like most Russian texts about history, is, of course, not free from external cliches. But there is also something in the corpus that cannot be produced artificially - this is a modern language for describing personal history outside of social cliches, which the texts reproduce but very clearly isolate. Such a language is possible, just as it was several decades and several centuries ago - you can be convinced of this; for this you do not need to go to the ends of the earth, Arkhangelsk is enough.
