Draft time

Now, in the era of pandemia, when museums, archives, libraries are closed - the question is not only about the preservation of heritage, including a manuscript, but also about access to it. Digitalization of documents has become one of the most pressing tasks. I would like to talk about some experience in this area.

For the first time, the idea to create a literary digital portal “Autograph” arose in the group of research programs of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Almost immediately, the project was supported by the Pushkin house (IRLI RAS). The year 2014 was very important for the “autograph” - the year of the creation of the Russian Scientific Fund, which began to finance research on this scale. It was not only about the annual digitization of several thousand manuscript pages, but also about fundamental textual work - the creation of a digital history of a work that restores the sequence of editors in manuscripts from various storage facilities.

Serious scientific potential gradually brought the “autograph” beyond the scope of the archival industry. The Akhmatova Museum of Akhmatova and the manuscript department of the Russian State Library was transferred their materials for the portal. Now on the portal of more than 20 thousand electronic images of manuscript pages - 15 sites of Russian writers and poets of the twentieth century: Innocent of Annensky, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Belo, Fedor Sologub, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexander Mayakovsky, Veliky Khlebnikov, Nikolai Gumilyov, Valeri Bryusov, Konstantin Balmon, Mikhail Bulgakova, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Zoshchenko. On the partner sites you can familiarize yourself with the manuscripts of Anna Akhmatova, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Ivan Bunin, Varlam Shalamov, Osip Mandelstam.

The expansion of the project’s geography was very important: not only Russian researchers work on the portal, but also Slavists from universities in the USA, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Serbia. The vast majority of the portal users are students and graduate students, at the same time the most promising and most unprotected group. For organizational and financial reasons, it is much more difficult for a young scientist to access the original manuscript than the venerable professor or academician. But it is the youth that is most susceptible to a different reading of “canonical” texts, ready to see many options in artificially formed unity. The active participation of students, cooperation with foreign universities and the development of digital technologies brought a project to the Higher School of Economics, where there are many humanitarian students. Since 2019, Autograph has been working there.

The main idea of ​​the project is as follows. The manuscript heritage of writers allows you to take a different look at the familiar texts: to sequentially see each stage of the creative process - from the first notes in diaries, draft and white manuscript autographs to the editing of the already published work on the pages of books, in newspaper clippings, in the fields of notebooks and in letters. Turning to the manuscript original, we can get acquainted with the features of handwriting, press pressure, sequence and inconsistency of records - all what is called “living text”. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, all this information, often fundamentally changing the interpretation of the text, remains closed to the researcher. Archival meetings are located in different cities, sometimes in different states, and access to manuscripts itself is far from always possible. Therefore, even in the collected works, we look at the work of the through the eyes of a textologist and see only what he saw. Or considered it necessary to see.

This problem is solved using a digital archive that allows you to study the electronic copy of the manuscript posted on the Internet.

Currently, the project is concentrated on the digital history of texts of the 1920-1930s. We are preparing the sites of Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Isaac Babel and Mikhail Zoshchenko. According to the agreement on cooperation and conducting source studies, the creation and placement of electronic copies of manuscripts from the IRLI RAS collection on the Internet, in 2020 the digitization of one of the most valuable funds stored in the Pushkin House, the theater archive of Mikhail Bulgakov: Chernov and Blovoy Autograms of Playations, the history of their prohibitions and approvals, theatrical albums, in which the author Commented on all the vicissitudes of the staged fate of his works, correspondence, ironic drawings and cartoons. "Autograph" intends to continue to work on the integration of Bulgakov materials that are in other national archives. Until 1993, the manuscripts of large writers, significant documents of the era were in the so -called special guard. Even now, on archival folders with these materials is the NV vulture (“not issued”). Even after removing ideological restrictions, there are too many actual obstacles that make it difficult to access them.

The fate of the Babel archive is still unknown.

Fifty years ago, Mikhail Bakhtin called the text "the primary reality of humanitarian science." In the 21st century, we can talk about a literary text not only as a “given” in the collected works, but also as a digital history. It seems to us that the time has come to discuss the role of a textologist in the new environment and the choice that is facing a modern scientist: how and to what extent to use the qualification of a textologist and how to build a dialogue with a manuscript on your own.

Elena Penskaya, Dokt. Filol. sciences, project manager "Autograph" 1 ,
Lyubov Khachaturian, candidate of cultural studies, associate professor of the Higher School of Economics

The Autograph project initiates the discussion.
The first interview is with Daria Sergeevna Moscow , head of the manuscript department of IMLI RAS.
To be continued.

1 “Autograph. XX century ". Electronic archive of Russian literature. Literature- Archive.ru/ru . RNF No. 19-18-00353, NRU HSE.

The publication was prepared with the support of the RNF. Project No. 19-18-00353, NIU HSE