53 | 2023. Archives et traces : enjeux, usages et poétiques. Actes des Doctoriales de l’Europe médiane, de l’espace russe et (post)soviétique (DEMEPS 2021)

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1. Introduction

Anastasia Kozyreva ; Denis Lakine ; Paul Wolkenstein.

Les Doctoriales de l’Europe médiane, de l’espace russe et (post)soviétique, organisées par le Centre de recherche Europes-Eurasie (CREE) en juin 2021, ont réuni des doctorants et jeunes chercheurs autour du thème des archives, considérées à la fois comme outil et objet de recherche. Cette thématique, qui recouvre plusieurs disciplines et concerne plusieurs étapes de l’élaboration d’une thèse, a permis d’enclencher une réflexion fructueuse des participants sur leurs propres pratiques de recherche. Ayant pour objectif de mettre en valeur les travaux de jeunes chercheurs francophones qui contribuent à découvrir des archives inédites, mais aussi à renouveler le regard porté sur des documents déjà étudiés, cette publication entend également contribuer aux études interdisciplinaires des archives et de leurs usages dans les espaces d’Europe centrale et orientale et de l’ex-URSS.

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2. « Qui s'en souvient ? »: Poétique de l’archive et pratiques nostalgiques sur les communautés en ligne d’ex-citoyens soviétiques

Bénédicte Stoufflet.

On the VKontakte and Odnoklasniki networks, communities entitled “Born in the USSR” give Internet users the opportunity to immerse themselves in their lost homeland through the publication of photographic archives from everyday life in Soviet Union. The archives are allusions that can arouse memories of the lived past and engage users into a collective reconstruction of the past. It is a playful activity of recollection: the visitor finds objects and is invited to recognize them by the recurrent addressed question “who remembers that?”. Thanks to the accumulation of archives, the communities also offer a synthesis of Soviet culture. Thus, the archives act as triggers for memory and as representative samples of the disappeared world. This article aims to take an anthropological look at the notion of archive, focusing on how individuals use them to stimulate their memories and to belong to the community.

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3. Les archives du communisme en république de Moldavie : entre idéologie et mémoire politique

Ecaterina Ojoga.

The process of writing history in Moldova, as in many ex-Soviet countries, is still a source of political conflict on a memorial background. This difficult context presumes the use of sources as a factor of impartiality. However, the picture becomes clouded if the document also participates in differences of opinions that confuse past and present. The history of communism is marked by the Party’s desire to control the dissemination of information, both in the short and long term. Thus, Moldova inherited the Bessarabian archives, the focus of the particularism of Romanian and Soviet communism in the interwar period. As is customary in countries with a communist past, the post-1989-1991 period is representative of slow and complex change. On that account, the Archives of the Party of the RSSM became the Archives of the socio-political organizations of the Republic of Moldova (AOSPRM) in an almost identical image to the Russian archives RGASPI. For to multiple reasons, it is complicated for historians researching Romanian or transnational communism to work on this type of document, and access to the archives remains difficult. Although located in the city center of the capital, the premises keep several marks of the Soviet heritage, which renders the consultation problematic, especially for foreign visitors. The archival funds are also difficult to access because of the bureaucratic formulation of requests. Moreover, the funds have kept the communist inventory of documents, as […]

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4. Le rôle de la caricature et du cinéma dans la construction de la mémoire collective de l'émigration russe après la Révolution de 1917

Kateryna Lobodenko.

This article addresses the problem of preserving the memory of first-wave Russian emigrants who settled in France between the two world wars. The author is interested in the visual and audiovisual heritage of exiles, in particular, press caricatures and cinema, one of whose functions was to transmit not only current events but also life experiences of Russians in all their forms (various emotions and feelings, sublimations of traumas, memories of the past). The author studies some examples of visual representations of exile and emigrants in cinema and caricature, selected from a large corpus of nearly 1,000 drawings and 50 films preserved today in library collections and audiovisual archives in France.

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5. Le conte littéraire russe de la période romantique face à ses sources : la place des archives dans la construction du genre

Simon Albertino.

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.

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6. Un spectre plane sur la Russie : l'image de la révolte de Pougatchov à l'ère du cinéma post-soviétique à travers le film Révolte Russe d'Alexandre Prochkine (2000)

Amine Afellous.

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.

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7. Le paratexte d'un manuscrit : Mikhaïl Lermontov auto-illustré

Anastasia Kozyreva.

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.

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8. Pour une relecture de l’œuvre de Sorana Gurian d’après ses manuscrits et tapuscrits inédits

Tomasz Krupa.

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.

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9. L'archive et le jeu vidéo

Viktoriia Rybina.

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.

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10. Naissance d'un édifice soviétique : aborder et faire parler les archives d'architecture

Paul Wolkenstein.

The buildings that comprise my research corpus encourage me to question my archival approach to architecture in a socialist environment. The study of an architectural project requires looking at the constraints, the reasons for the construction, and the interpretation. Architectural archives are also research objects in themselves. Indeed, there are several components that should be studied in parallel with the buildings: “administrative”, “graphic”, “oral” and “in-situ”. This paper is an opportunity to become familiar with the different sources invoked in architectural analysis.

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11. In vino veritas ou faut-il boire pour comprendre Erofeev ?: Remarques à propos de l’enregistrement sonore de la lecture publique de Moscou-sur-Vodka par Erofeev

Denis Lakine.

The purpose of this article is to develop an approach to integrating a recorded public reading of a novel by its author into literary research. More specifically, the article focuses on the recording of Venedikt Erofeev’s reading of Moscow to the End of the Line in 1980. This public reading raises the problem of literary interpretation and the voice in literature. Indeed, due to Erofeev’s double interference during the writing and the public reading of the text, this recording could possibly restrict the interpretative diversity of the work. However, the context and the nature of this public reading do not necessarily lead to the pitfall of a strictly author-centric interpretation. Rather, Erofeev’s recorded reading is a reminder of the intrinsic vocality of the work—an aspect of the text that can be lost in repeated silent reading.

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12. La réception en France de la musique soviétique : l'évolution de la censure de 1948 à 1958

Thomas Thisselin.

This paper offers a study of the way Soviet authorities’ discourses on music were received in France. The post-war period is very interesting in many aspects. The political landscape changed following Zhdanov and Stalin’s deaths, and two decrees regarding music production were published in 1948 and 1958. The press bulletins of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the journalistic and intellectual production with scholarly pretensions of the PCF inform us about the reception of Soviet music in the French public space. We understand the evolution of censorship in the USSR thanks to the discourse in France about the professional Soviet musician and about the Soviet opera. Since censorship in the USSR was not always controlled, it is appropriate to question the role of Soviet and French communist intellectuals. As such, we study socialist realism in music, but also the conflicts that the enforcement of such ideological principles produces. Moreover, although French sympathizers covered Soviet musical news extensively, we observe divergences of opinion resulting from the diversity of the editorial frameworks.

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