BAD MEMORY OR GOOD STORY? (ABOUT THE WORK OF M. A. GERSHENZON)

Abstract

A project to create Soviet historical fiction for children at the turn of the 1920s-1930s was closely connected with the tasks of creating a single historical narrative, addressed to adults and designed to present the victory of Soviet power as a natural result of all previous stages of the class struggle. Children’s literature had to be part of this narrative. One of those who participated in the production of historical works for children was the writer, translator and editor of Detgiz Mikhail Abramovich Gershenzon. The article examines his contribution to the development of the formalist idea about the impossibility of creating a holistic historical concept of the past in the literature. In Gershenzon’s works, this idea is demonstrated through the destructive power of montage as a compositional device, the subjective reassembly of events at the moment of their textual embodiment, and the rhetorical corrosion of historical narrative. At the same time, Mikhail Gershenzon was one of the first to demonstrate the limitations of using human memory as a historical source, the vulnerability of hope, by turning to the memories of eyewitnesses of historical events, to obtain reliable information “first-hand”. By linking the literary representation of oblivion with the construction of a historical narrative, Mikhail Gershenzon revised the very claim to create the only correct world history in literature for children.

Keywords: historical narrative, memory, Soviet children’s literature, Mikhail Gershenzon