Authorship/subjectivity in the experience of russian biographical projects of the first half of the 20th century

Abstract

In the first half of the 20th century a number of projects with a historical and biographical "stuffing" were carried out in our country, from psychologist N. Rybnikov's activity to establish Biographical Institute up to Gorky's "History of the Civil War", "History of Factories and Plants" and the Mintz Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War. The affiliation of these projects to the first stage of the development of the biographical method, better known from the studies of the Chicago school, is asserted. The article attempts to analyze Russian projects on the subject of authorship / subjectivity constructions arising in them in an interdisciplinary way of the biographical method, as well as using a multiscalar approach to the study of social memory. It has been shown that "mass character" in these constructions has several aspects: A) involvement of the "masses", b) key to verification and consensus in describing the past through the recollections of many participants, c) performativity. The democratization of biography-writing is considered in the context of the 'Halbwachs Theorem'. In order for people unaccustomed to producing memories to be included in biographical practices, as well as to ensure the completeness and comparability of information obtained not only for political, but also for research purposes, semi-formalized methods were developed. Nevertheless, with all the declarations that the workers are now writing history, for the most part they were only suppliers of raw material, and the complex constructions of distributed authorship actually acted. © 2020 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.