“In the digital era, a literature historian becomes a detective to a greater extent than in papyrus”

Daria Moscow, head of the manuscript department and deputy director of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, spoke about working with the archives of writers of the 20th century Elena Penska, professor of the Faculty of Humanities of the Higher School of Economics, and the head of the autograph project. The Autograph portal collaborates with IMLI RAS in many directions. One of the main ones is the study of the creative archive of M.A. Sholokhov. In November 2020, an agreement was reached on the digitization of the manuscripts of the Pacific Don from the collection of the institute.

- Please tell us about the history of the manuscripts of the Institute of World Literature.

- Compared to RGALI or the literary unit of GARF, on the Berezhkovskaya embankment, our archive was always “closed”. Unlike IRLI, he joined the system of the Academy of Sciences only in 1938. It was created as a “gift” to Gorky, in response to his wish to introduce workers and peasants to world literature and literary creativity. Archive workers were engaged by the new Soviet government. And initially were not academic employees, but enlighteners. Then this project was divided into two parts. The Literary Institute named after Gorky on Tversky Boulevard, 25, where creativity began to train proletarian and peasant youth, and Imly became an academic institute. We were a gift to Gorky, and Gorky made a gift to us. After the death of Alexei Maksimovich, his archive, the largest archive of the writer of the 20th century, entered IMLI. And this archive is our pride, since, in fact, a biography of Russian and world cultural policy from the border of centuries to the 1930s was captured in it.

As for the manuscript department, it also has existed from the very beginning of the history of the institute. And the establishment itself to collect in the department of manuscripts of the Institute of World Literature the archives of the writers of the peoples of Russia and the then USSR, as well as the archives of the writers of the abroad-and we keep the manuscripts of Theodore Dreiser, Martin Andersen-Nex, Bertold Brecht, Knut Gamsun, Andre Muzam, Leon Feihwanger, Stefan Zweiga and Stephan Other authors are an idea associated with the Gorky dream to create a “sorbonne of literary criticism”, an institution on the study of world literature.

- How did the manuscripts of famous Russian writers enter the department? What other funds do your archive keep?

-It is important to take into account the connection of IMLI with the modern writers. The funds of Eduard Bagritsky, Demyan of the Poor, Evgeny Zamyatin, Nikolai Klyuyev, Sergey Yesenin, Osip Mandelstam, Alexei Tolstoy, Veliky Khlebnikov, Nikolai Teleshov, Dmitry Furmanov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Andrei Platonov gathered in the manuscript department.

The resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee, adopted in April 1932, demanded to destroy the “group of group” within the writer's fraternity and led to the dissolution of a number of proletarian and fortune -playing writers. And just the invaluable archives of these organizations were replenished in the late 1930s, the department of manuscripts IMLI. In 1936 and 1937, many leaders of these unions were shot or arrested. Immediately after the receipt of the archives of these organizations, our predecessors began their scientific processing to the IMLI manuscripts. Formally, as archival workers, we are their heirs. Formally - I emphasize. And now, opening the documents processed in those years, we find inserts with the table of table and see the litter of the archivist-Chistor: “The enemy of the people of the Kirshon is acting”; "The enemy of the Averbach people is acting." It was because of the content of the documents that our department was not very well known for a long time. He did not work on the entrance and exit. Access to it received a certain circle of researchers who had permission to work with such funds.

The archive has been replenished all these years and still mainly thanks to our connections with the Moscow Writing Union, writers' organizations and associations. The archives of writers are acted, as a rule, unusual - in bags or in boxes. We measure their volume in archival boxes or - literally - in meters.

We also have unique revenues. The choice of heirs to transfer to IMLI a valuable writing archive is explained by the fact that we have not just an archive, but a research center, and documents will be studied and published. Such is the fate of the archive of Andrei Platonov. It became the basis for creating the first scientific collected works of this writer.

-Is the order formalized somehow-this process of replenishing funds, archival work at the institute? Are there regulations? Protocols?

- Probably (I will say carefully), this protocol exists in the bowels of the Rosarchiv and, perhaps, the Ministry of Culture. I know one thing: we hunt for funds. We are looking for them. We rejoice when they contact us, especially if the funds are profile. Without changing ourselves, we want to collect the archives of writers XX, XXI for centuries.

But, I will not hide it, I came across this situation: I was completely deliberately hunted for the archive of one writer's edition, and we were already close to the goal when one of the leaders of large archival units called me and reported me because I, so to speak, attempted to attempted to someone else's territory. My answer was simple: your materials will be stored and waiting for the researcher, and we are working with them now. Now we have a part of this fund, and we study it, we see the scientific prospect of a deep study of the history of the stock -former, in this case it is a major publishing house. Thanks to this conversation, I realized that there was apparently a certain regulation, because my searches and even some success on this path were perceived by my interlocutor with a hidden reproach that it was not he, but we asked the fate of the archive of this institution. I say without naming names. But it is possible that the case is typical.

From our last and valuable revenues-the archive of the proletarian writer, playwright, functionary of the RAPP, close to Stalin in the late 1920s, and in 1937 the executed, the author of the poems “I asked the ash ...” Vladimir Mikhailovich Kirshon. The writer's manuscripts were handed over to us by the heir Dmitry Vladimirovich Rode. Our plans include the publication of these archival documents.

- And how, from your point of view, the layer of disassembled and unsubstantiated documents in the IMLI manuscript department correlates?

- The usual, standard situation for archives. Approximately 30% of funds still require systematization and description. It is impossible not to say that undeveloped materials are not processed at all. The fact is that we accept the archives, already knowing their content, and, as a rule, upon admission, although they come in bags, we have something like a delivery inventory from the stock former, therefore, of course, the composition of the unprocessed funds is known to us.

- How is the processing carried out?

- This is done quite painfully and difficult. And by and large it is a matter of space, space. In order to disassemble the fund, it must be grouped, put into heaps. I had the experience of analyzing one fund at home. My mother worked at the Publishing House "Children's Literature", and from the heirs a small personal fund of the director of the publishing house K.F. Piskunov received us. He acted from his mother’s friends, and I laid it on the floor, systematized in heaps and piles, packaged in folders. These piles and piles were determined, as they were collected by a thematic principle. This is the beginning of the scientific processing of the fund.

We cannot boast of the volume of the area in the old mansion on the 25a, but we have quite a lot of small rooms. The processing problem is solved due to multi -tiered racks. So, laying out on racks, a group of collected works of Platonov processed the writer's fund.

- What principles are guided by the archivist during systematization? What are filters that contribute to the distinction between published and unpublished? How is this designated for an external user when contacting a particular fund?

- There are two algorithms. A professional archivist is guided by standard principles for describing materials. But there is another logic, a different approach, terribly interesting, when the fund processes an unprofessional archivist, just what, I will not hide, we are all, with some exceptions. Professional archivists necessarily work in our archival divisions, but our main mass is philologists, literature historians, and we have a research task. And we otherwise see the connections of documents - notebooks, options and editors of texts, preparatory materials. When processing, what is called criticism of the text occurs - an examination confirming the belonging of the text to the author or the compliance of it or another known dating. This work is fraught with discoveries. That is how the case was processed by the Foundation of Alexei Tolstoy, when new sources were identified for the story “Bread”. In fact, the scientific processing of inventories is a literal immersion in the history of literature, the birthplace of a real specialist, such as, for example, Marietta Omarovna Chudakova. Attribution, dating, laying out manuscripts in heaps, systematizing some kind of fireproof paper, where the name of the famous work first appears, is a detective work, which in the language of literary critics is called textology or text history.

- And if you turn to now - the computer era: what prospects do you see for the archive in the 21st century? How do the principles of textology change, which deals mainly with the electronic archive of the writer?

- I think that in the 21st century we will encounter the phenomenon of the virtual archive. What is stored on a hard drive is good if the first options for works, editing levels, or if we had the opportunity to restore them with the help of appropriate software tools ... But this may not be.

Of course, this is a kind of miracle - and at the same time a mystery: what future awaits a textology based on the data of our gadgets. But, as you know, the history of the text is composed of so many elements. Apparently, the reconstruction of the history of the text will be based on some other evidence, for example, memories of contemporaries, official documents: agreements with the publishing house, applications, etc.. In addition, there are many other fixation methods. For example, audio or video recording. Different “traces” remain on Facebook, in Instagram.

There are all sorts of surprises. So, for example, Boris Akunin pleased his subscribers, declaring in front of them a scheme for the plot of his detective novels. It is very tasty and nutritious. However, one must keep in mind that writers can be “unreliable narrators”, that is, create legends about themselves. This is another interesting plot.

One way or another, in the digital era, a literature historian becomes a detective to an even greater extent than in the papyrus era.

- The researcher, as a rule, is sensitive to the original, the document, the state of its texture. It seems to you, is it that there is no depersonalization, the loss of such a “contact” with the material when it comes to electronic copies?

- If you mean the question of what is better to deal with - with a number or paper, then a lot depends on the quality of the scan. For example, it is known that in one of the archival institutions of the Gogol manuscripts were scanned in such a way that marginalia disappeared, and with them the instruments of the author or censor, date, name options and much more related to the history of the text. And therefore, the textologist doubts, wants to work with paper directly, de Visu. On the other hand, a high -quality scan allows us to consider what we will not see through a magnifying glass. And finally, in private with an electronic archive, we can spend a sleepless working night.

- What new opportunities does the digital archive open?

- One of the responsibilities of any archival unit is to ensure the safety of documents. And this is a problem - everyone has a hearing story with fires in funds and the death of valuable primary sources. Therefore, when we talk about digitization, digging is the creation of a preserved manuscript fund. It should be created on a very high -quality technique. Previously, these were cameras, now - high -quality contactless scanners. And copies should be stored somewhere separately from the main archive. However, this year has helped to realize another purpose of the digital archive. Pandemia showed that we need an archive and a library at home. We are coming to us now: "Scan, send." And we stood on this path, as it retains the opportunity to continue research work.

- What is the most relevant digit project at the moment?

- Now a group of researchers of IMLI RAS is carried out by the RNF project “Streetogram”: “Politics and literature. The digital archive of literary organizations of the 1920-1930s (No. 20–18–00394). ”

Redograms are sometimes up to two hundred stitched sheets of speeches, discussions, literary struggle. As a historian of literature, I must study them from crust to crust, because the transcript is like a documentary, this is an amazing story of everyday life, which we know little about, despite all our knowledge. To comprehend it, I absolutely need the opportunity to sit at night and read these thick folios.

Now we have digging this handwritten layer of literary everyday life, which has postponed the funds of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. We know how Mayakovsky entered the RAPP and how it ended. But how did the constructivists enter and on what conditions - Zelinsky, Lugovskaya, Selvinsky? How did the new patrons react to them, that the constructivists promised in return? The transcripts reveal these details. It turns out a completely different picture. Volumetric, or something. But in order to consider it (if we want to build a high -quality history of literature of the 20th century), we must have access to a giant volume of archival documents.

- It is believed that in our archives the proportion of manuscript sources that are not read, not read, is quite high. And with those that are digitized, it is still inconvenient to work. There is no intelligible search engine. What prospects do you see for technologies oriented towards text recognition?

- It is clear that there are typewriters that are easily translated into such a type that we can set the search by keywords. But this has nothing to do with our typewriters: bad paper, often cigarette, many manuscript corrections and so on. As for the manuscript text, we ourselves are not always capable of reading it. I think that there is one solution here in the framework of our project, which we are now implementing. We assume to create comments on the transcripts. And by keywords in the commentary, we will be able to conduct a subsequently search. Comments are a metatext tool that provides the possibility of finding the necessary documents.

- The reasons why the manuscript department was open selectively was understandable. But how is it now? The information is open, especially the digital archive involves free access to any document from anywhere in the world. Are you for the abolition of any restrictions?

- The secret always becomes clear. And so what is the point of hiding something? Everyone, I am sure, has the right to judge in his own way. Moreover, we need a new look, new approaches. And here it is necessary to open the road to young specialists, students, graduate students who, with their youth, will “stole” the old schemes (using the term of Shklovsky), will give a new impetus to old science. Openness stimulates international discussion, the search for the truth-Istina, because it is born only in dialogue. Creating a digital archive is an absolutely correct solution. Now admission to the archives is simplified. There are true exceptions related to the fact that the publication is being prepared on the basis of a fund. This was done in RGALI, and for example, I could not use documents from the Eichenbaum Foundation. This state of affairs is associated with obligations to a publishing house, which requires, as a rule, exclusive materials for printing.

- Allow the completely profane question. In the circles of non -specialists, there is often a point of view: why know about all the drafts, options, editions, endless versions, when the reader is only interested in the published final result? Why put up all this intimate process of creativity for public display? Why restore this writing cuisine, laboratory?

- Textology, the reconstruction of the history of the text is a detective investigation, and the historian of literature is not inclined to trust other people's testimony. He wants to conduct his own examination. Recently, the department received a letter from a colleague from France, in which he asked for a very famous Russian writer about the scan of a certain text. This text was published many times in scientific publications and was equipped with a textological description. It turns out that the researcher needs to see where exactly in the fields, what ink and in what sequence the edit was made. And here you can’t argue. It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

That is why the works of Alexei Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, the most famous works of Sholokhov are reprinted again. Requirement is needed. Текстологу надо увидеть все этапы роста текста, чтобы произвести реконструкцию авторского пути к своему замыслу, чтобы решить, какова же была воля автора относительно своего творения, какой из вариантов его он считал лучшим, самым совершенным. И поэтому я буду по-прежнему перепроверять выводы моих предшественников, желать видеть своими собственными глазами первоисточник, пусть даже и оцифрованный. Первоисточник — это свидетельство «обвинения» или «защиты» текста.

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