Anatomy of a clerical autobiography in the contemporary history of Russia: composition and content of texts

The aim of the article is to reveal changes in the composition and content of a clerical autobiography in the 20th century. A clerical autobiography is a document in which authors write about their lives when they apply for a job, enter the university, take part in election (re-election) or in appointment to a position and move in the service or join the party. The material of the research is 300 autobiographies written from the 1930s to the 1990s contained in the personal history folders (that is why they are called "clerical") and are deposited in the State Archives of Tomsk Region, the Contemporary History Documentation Centre of Tomsk Region, the archives of the universities of Tomsk and in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. In all the analyzed documents, authors describe their lives from the moment of birth till the time of the text writing. Autobiographies are mostly built according to the following scheme: information about the date and place of birth, social background, education, activities (professional, social, political), military service, family members, parents, brothers, sisters and life at the time of writing the autobiography. At the end of the document the date of its writing and signature are situated. The information is given in a chronological order. However, the composition and the content of the texts changed in the 20th century. It depended on the events in the country and the requirements by the governmental power for autobiography creation. Throughout the twentieth century people wrote clerical autobiographies on sheets of clean paper or on a special paper with instructions of what information should be in the text. Formal autobiographies on forms were found in the material of 1940, 1949, 1954, 1959, 1955, 1958, 1979, 1990. In formal autobiographies the authors oft he article revealed thematic units which are required in different definitions and in different order, and appear or disappear in different years: the time and place of birth ^ information about parents and family ^ education ^ employment/professional activities ^ questions about relatives deprived of suffrage ^ questions about the prosecution of the author of the autobiography and his/her relatives ^ participation in the revolutionary movement ^ military service and participation in armed conflicts ^ partisanship, membership in the Komsomol ^ family ^ suggestions for the composing of autobiographies ^ signature ^ date. Requirements to the writing of autobiographies shaped the human genre consciousness, because people reproduce certain constructions (from formal autobiographies) in their autobiographies in the time when requirements did not exist. Thus, a clerical autobiography is not only a document about the life of its author, but also about the time of the text's writing, and a peculiar instrument of citizen's control by the governmental power.

Keywords

Authors

References