Article

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

Authors: Yuriy L. Troitsky

Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: ego-document, motif, semantic field, social and cultural threat, adaptive devices

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