Manuscripts with mezzanines

The TRV-hobby publishes an interview with Mikhail Melnichenko ( www.facebook.com/misha.melnichenko)-organizer and head of the Internet project "Life" ( http://proozhito.org ). Questions were asked by Julia Radilovskaya.

- Michael, tell us about the project "Life". How and when did this idea arise?

- The project "Lived" is already about two and a half years old. At one time, when I worked on the sign of the notes of Soviet political jokes and was engaged in the search for such texts, I really lacked normal search tools for texts of personal origin. There were several bases of memoirs by which it was possible to score the keyword and see what is issued for this request in several dozen or hundreds of memories. And I, as a historian, needed such an instrument with which I could set the chronological boundaries of the search and look for what I need. At some point, I realized that this is easiest to do on the basis of diaries, because in diaries 95% of the material is dated up to one day, and we can set clear chronological intervals.

It immediately became clear that this is a rather large -scale task, dozens of working hands will be required to implement it. We decided to develop the project as a volunteer in order to attract caring people from the Internet to certain types of work. Over a year and a half of our activities, more than two hundred people have passed through the project. These are people who learned about us from the Internet and decided that they could spend several free hours a week on working with diaries - to type or mark the texts. Working with the text requires some perseverance, and not everyone is predisposed to this, so it’s normal that some of the volunteers disappeared almost immediately. But a rather strong working group formed the remaining ones - several dozen people who work with the texts of published diaries and with manuscripts in a convenient mode.

The network is now available mainly diaries in Russian, however, on the site that we open, there will be a Ukrainian section, texts in Ukrainian. In our new database, which is not yet available to users, I have already downloaded five or six Ukrainian diaries. In principle, we can do many linguistic sections. If there are volunteers who are ready to work with texts in their national languages, we will develop the appropriate language section, because “lived” is a project not only about Soviet times (which is mainly reflected in diaries), this is the project primarily about diaries as such. In addition, “Life” sets a certain standard for working with diary text.

We have two main directions: the first is work with already published diaries, and the second is with manuscripts that no one has ever introduced into the scientific werewolf. The bibliography of diaries published in Russian is very extensive-from the multi-volume diary of Mikhail Prishvin to three or four diaries of some “star” of the fourth size published in the journal “Bulletin of the Archivist” of the first half of the 1990s. At first we compiled a bibliography of 1.5 thousand units (just searched for any bibliographic signs, libraries). A significant part of the texts, more than half, we already have in one form or another. We searched for texts on the Internet, we scanned books, sent us diaries, we searched through social networks of publishers, heirs, requested these texts from them. It is quite simple to work with published diaries, because they have already been typed, and our task is to simply recognize them or somehow get this text, mark it by our rules and upload them to the system. This is the main work with which volunteers deal. And we are looking for manuscripts that are stored on the mezzanines, in cabinets, beg the heirs or owners of these manuscripts to remove an electronic copy or provide us with these manuscripts for the time so that we ourselves remove. After that, we send these scanned manuscripts to our volunteers and get the already typed text. Gradually, the manuscript is gained by the forces of several people, we coordinate the final version with the heirs, and after laying it on the network. We have quite a few diaries in the work, we received several dozen manuscripts - from very small to diaries of 80 common notebooks, which were led by geologist Boris Vronsky for almost half a century. This is a very interesting source, there is half expeditionary, and half classic diaries. We are probably busy with the preparation of these diaries, twenty -five people - more than a dozen ready -made notebooks will be available on the new site.

We are completely unprincipled by the social status of a person with whose diaries we work. The most interesting thing is the diaries of ordinary people, because this is how real polyphony of votes arises. If we focus on what lies on the surface, - Chukovsky, Blok, Prishvin, - a one -sided picture of the world is obtained. And if we turn on the diaries of Soviet students, old library workers of pre-revolutionary hardening, rare naive peasant diaries, then everything looks completely different.

And we are not a large library of personal diaries, but an electronic corps, that is, a systematic collection of texts. The main unit of our case is a diary entry, we can sort them out of absolutely any requests, the algorithms that we need. We can take the diaries of several people and read them with one renewal tape, where the recordings of several people will be located in chronological order mixed. On the new site, which we will open very soon, you can indicate which people's diaries will fall into this search area by age, floor and several more parameters. And we can limit the search chronology and the city in which the record is made to indicate any number of keywords. The most interesting thing is that now we can already take the diaries of people of the same social layer and age or even one circle of communication. For example, in the editorial office of the New World, a large number of people bicycle diaries: there were five diaries around Twardowski, and the Twardowski himself had a diary. We haven’t got everything and agreed yet, but at some point we will be able to read five or six diaries of this edition together with one text.

- Are there any interesting diaries of scientists in your database?

-We have many humanities of the 1920s, for example, historians: the wonderful diary of Gauthier, the diary of the Theological; Both are the very beginning of the 1920s or even the end of the 1910s. And these are all stories when an observant, smart, reflecting person who has an idea of ​​a conditionally normal life, who has experience of academic life before the revolution, and now they are faced with this frantic whirling of the first decades of Soviet power. There are few pre -war diaries, and few later, because the statute of limitations has not yet come out.

- What is the statute of limitations for the diaries, after which they can be published?

In general, the official statute of limitations, having violated which can be included in an article on personal information, is 75 years. But here, of course, much is determined by the position of the author and heirs.

-Tell us about the master classes that you arrange.

-Some time ago, we began to work with the Museum of the History of the Gulag: once a month we invite everyone to work with one specific manuscript. We look for a small interesting diary, which can be gained by a dozen people at a time. And all Those who wish come to us, bring with them some device-a tablet or laptop. We talk a little about the diary, after which we give everyone three scanned leaflets. All about twenty -five minutes they gain their fragment and then discuss what they read. After the lesson, we put all the fragments scored in one text, check it with the manuscript and put it on the site. So we scored one of the most interesting diaries with which I worked, is an anonymous diary of the 1932 peasant guy. This diary is small, it consists of two parts: biographies and diary entries in a short period, when the guy lived and worked at the agricultural engineering station by utility workers. He was 20 years old, he is an orphan, a native of a very poor peasant family. In the end, he left his village, first moved to Grozny, where he worked for several months at the oil refinery and felt lonely, "like a sheaf of hay in the middle of the oil lake." Then he got to the station near Michurinsky, where he worked as a forced worker. I have the feeling that he had some kind of writer's ambitions, he clearly honed the style in order to engage in writing. This is a naive fantastic text, terrible in places.

The other two diaries that we have prepared in the process of these laboratories are not yet posted on our website, because we stopped updating it until the new version is opened. These are the diaries of Mikhail of the presentation (Soviet statesman, the inhabitant of the Kremlin and the confident of Demyan Poor) and the girl, who in 1946 was imprisoned for six years “for espionage”, but in fact for contact with a foreigner. She lived in Arkhangelsk and dreamed of being an American actress. And she met in the interklub with an American sailor. She had a novel, a child was born from this American. When it was beneficial to the country, when it was necessary to entertain foreigners, such girls were not touched. And when the deliveries of Lend-Lease stopped, the inter-clubs were covered, and all the girls who were close to the American sailors were reduced. And this diary became evidence of her guilt. The author in the 1990s received it back from the departmental archive and later gave it to the Memorial, in which for three decades a powerful archive of documents related to state terror in the USSR has been created for three decades. Now we began to work with documents from the Memorial Assembly, and this diary will be the first joint publication.

- Who else do you cooperate with?

Since we are doing a common important business, many organizations and people made friends with us. We have excellent partnerships with the Memorial and the Museum of the History of the Gulag, we are working with the Museum of Prishvin in Dunino, and joint publications with Kunstkamer are now outlined. Much so that people learn about the “lived”, make a “Medusa” - they began to publish our thematic selection. Now we are actively used by different media - they are looking for notes in diaries, they often refer to us. Several publishers handed us the layouts of the diaries published from them-“Nestor-History”, “Kaleidoscope”.

Mikhail Melnichenko
Talked by Julia Radilovskaya