Narrative encounters of social and cultural threats in ego-documents
(from motifs to semantic fields)

The paper presents the narrative analysis of Alexander Benoit’s private diary. Alexander Benoit
was a prominent Russian painter and intellectual on the verge of the 20th century. The key
problem under discussion is to reveal the narrative markers of social and cultural threats that Russia
was facing in 1917. Unfolding against the continuing war, the two revolutions radically
changed the everyday life and landscape of Petrograd’s artistic intellectual community and unavoidably
surfaced on the pages of private diaries, with Alexander Benoit’s diary being an extraordinary
one. It is a voluminous narrative created synchronously to the events mentioned above
from the «involved outsidedness» standpoint (Mikhail Bakhtin’s term).
We define three semantic fields: premonition of the threat, experiencing the threat and postthreat
(reflection and lessons). A semantic field is defined by common mental, discursive and
behavioral reactions of a social group to certain events. We observe a narrative structural component
of the semantic field, a motif. Motifs are persistent verbal expressions (found in folklore and
fiction narratives) that provide the basis for the plot (Yury Lotman called them «plot genes»).
Motifs in documentary narratives have certain specific qualities, such as being frequently narrowed
down to topics, as shown in prior research. Reducing the private diary narrative to motifs
allows us to reveal the underlying mythological roots and thus introduce the immediate observer’s
reactions into the domain of mythemes and archetypes. For instance, the premonition of threat
semantic field shows two frequent motifs linked to Grigory Rasputin: «Tsar’s Sinister Advisor»
and «Murder of the Sinister Advisor». However, it proved impossible to reduce a diary record to
one of the motifs without introducing an intermediate element we call a protomotif. It condenses
several diary records from different times into one brief narrative unit. Our analysis of Alexander Benoit’s diary reveals the basic adaptive devices of Petrograd’s artistic
intellectuals of the period in the context of the social commotions in 1917, e. g., amplification
of histrionic gestures and reinforcement of irony and sarcasm.