On the narrative effect of the authenticity of memoirs of Elizaveta Vodovozova

The paper is devoted to studying the memoir text in a narrative aspect. The ways of creating
an illusion of authenticity, which are based on personal testimonies, are analyzed. The object
of the analysis is a fragment of the memoirs of E. N. Vodovozova «At the dawn of life» (Na zare
zhizni) written at the beginning of the 20th century, the chapter «Among the Petersburg youth
of the sixties». The memoirs are generally considered as a fictionalized text, on the one hand having
the status of an «entertaining novel» in the reader’s perception, and on the other hand, being
a documentary source. The author’s meta-description of the text, reflected in the subtitle «from
personal experiences», allows us to view memories as an «ego-text» (Jacques Presser), that is, the
text where the author is both the one who writes and the one who acts in the text. Thus, the narrative
component of the text plays the first role. The study aims at identifying the ways of creating the «effect of reality», analyzing additional sources that the memoirist could use, and determining
their function in the structural and semantic plans. A hypothesis suggests that when writing this
chapter, Vodovozova could have used the articles of two critics of the leading journals of the
sixties («Sovremennik» and «Russkoe slovo») – M. A. Antonovich’s article «The Asmodeus
of our time» (1862) and the articles of D. I. Pisarev «Bazarov», «Unresolved issue» / «Realists»
(1862, 1864). The texts of these articles served for describing the dispute over Ivan Turgenev’s
novel «Fathers and sons» (1862), in which young people of the democratic circle, ardently expressed
their disagreement with the depiction of the nihilist Bazarov as a representative of the
whole generation. The paper shows the «parallel places» of the dispute and fragments of articles.
A conclusion is made that it is legitimate to consider the text of the articles as a means of creating
a method for simulating a live conversation of participants. It is noted that Pisarev used the kind
of temporary compression formed by combining different concepts of Bazarov in articles, published
at different times. All this suggests that the strategy for constructing the text, in this case,
was focused on the reproduction of only the most vivid and radical positions. However, it did not
reflect in general the dynamics of perception of Bazarov in the first half of the sixties but revealed
the mechanism for the formation of public opinion directly formed by the battle of the journal
leaders of the most authoritative journals. The results of observations allow us to consider the
«ego-text» as a compilation of materials of different degrees of likelihood.