From Memory Maps to Five-Year Plans

This article examines the intellectual aspirations of the academic community in the early 1920s, which recognised the need to bridge the gap between theoretical science and the practical, concrete knowledge of ‘ordinary people’, and within the framework of a nationwide local history project that sought a productive synthesis of the humanities and natural sciences. The brief ‘golden age’ of regional studies coincided with the attempt to establish a distinct discipline, i. e. local history, intended to serve as a bridge between geography and local culture. Local history scholarship in the 1920s was characterised by a keen awareness of the issues facing the land and the local population, which shaped the poetics and pragmatics of fiction in the early decades of the Soviet era. The subsequent fate of local history as a method of historical scholarship and as a worldview is bound up with the transformation of the local history movement from an academic-enlightening project into an instrument of socialist construction. The originality of this study lies in reconstructing the ways in which local history, as both a mass public movement and a scholarly method, was institutionally incorporated into the Soviet literary production system, and in identifying the reasons why local history literature of the artistic-documentary type lost its substantive and artistic distinctiveness. The study is grounded in historical-literary and historical-cultural approaches, together with archival hermeneutics and elements of institutional analysis. It traces the evolution of the concepts of ‘local’, ‘production-oriented’, and ‘socialist’ in the literary-critical discourse of the late 1920s and early 1930s and shows how they are refracted in Andrei Platonov’s satirical prose. The authors conclude that the nationalisation of local history and its absorption into the genre forms of the production essay resulted not only in the loss of an anthropological perspective on culture and in the disappearance of local history as a method of ‘concrete knowledge’ about human beings and place, but also in the erosion of an intuitive and inductive mode of world understanding mediated by artistic imagery

Bridge (graph theory) · Hermeneutics · Historiography · Intellectual history · Local History · New Culture Movement · Originality · Poetics · Scholarship · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Soviet and Russian History