As a result of technological advances, digital archives now have a significant role to play in the conservation of history. Video games have also become a part of this preservation. Video game archives are created all over the world for scientific, historical, cultural, and technical interests. The goal of this article is to build a reflection on the functions of video games and the possibility of considering them as archives. Four archive functions and four video games (Hell Let Loose, Company of Heroes 2, Kholat and Assassin’s Creed: Origins) containing cultural and historical elements from Russia will allow to clarify the functions of video games, as well as the similarities with archives and to bring a new look on the cultural and educational value of video games.
In considering how to propose a new reading of the writing of Sorana Gurian (1913-1956), a French- and Romanian-language Jewish writer, I will refer to some of her forty-one unpublished texts, including thirty-seven poems and four prose texts, preserved in manuscript or typescript form. These documents have never been discussed or even mentioned in the research on this writer until December 2020. The analysis of this material in the context of Gurian’s writing as a whole allows, in my opinion, to enrich the interpretation of her main texts: her literary drafts, for which I will use the term “pre-text”, give direct access to her creative process, as they contain elements that she will later include in her published texts. Thus, I will present her literary work in a retrograde manner, i.e. through manuscripts and typescripts, so that I can show the importance of some of these unpublished texts, despite their secondary or unofficial character due to their draft status.
This article studies the pictural manuscript of the unfinished novel Vadim, that Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) composed between 1832 and 1834. Lermontov’s archive, as a material testimony of literary creation, offers a possibility to access the author’s work without an editorial intermediary. The page full of drawings and sketches, that we can call the paratext of a manuscript, accompanies Vadim’s text and characterizes Lermontov as a producer of text’s imaginary. By investigating through a comparative analysis of text and image how Lermontov draws a portrait of a generation, this article shows that the pictorial paratext of the manuscript does not illustrate a concrete work, but the creative process and Lermontov’s aesthetic research.
Through the films The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Prochkin (2000), and Ekaterina Mixajlova (2005), adapted from the novel of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, this article aims to highlight the influence of the Russian Imperial Archives on the development of these post-Soviet era productions. While many directors have adapted Pushkin’s literary narrative, inspired by real events, only the 2000 production makes as much use of the information from the essay History of Pugachev, which served as the basis for the novel. This study attempts to shed light on how post-Soviet cinema looks at the history of this revolt, perceived by the Soviets as a precursor to the popular uprising that accompanied the revolution of 1917. It allows us to distinguish the mechanism of deconstruction of the emancipatory figure of Pugachev, which takes place after the fall of the Soviet Union, through a parallel with the animated film by Ekaterina Mixajlova.
This article offers to rethink the chronological paradigm in which literary fairy tales would be a natural evolution of oral and folk tales. In view of the Russian literary tales published during the Romantic period, where, due to a still incomplete archiving process, access to oral and folk tales was still unequal for writers, the reasoning that the literary fairy tale would necessarily be based on previous oral and folk tales can indeed be questioned. By looking at the way in which authors associate their text with an earlier document, this study aims at highlighting the fact that the presence of a folk tale as a source within several Russian literary fairy tales of the Romantic period is more a result of a staging on the part of the writers, rather than a real proof of authenticity.
