Memories as ego-text: children's rear everyday life of the Siberian province during the Great Patriotic War (World war II)

The article, based on the recollections of the “children of war”, reveals strategies and practices of adaptive behavior of the provincial population in the conditions of a “difficult life situation”, which was the sociocultural context of everyday life of citizens during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. The use of the complex and ambiguous concept of “ego-text” (“self-evidence”, “auto-text”, “I-document”) in the article implies a shift in research attention from the study of events to the study of states. As a result, the ego source, in contrast to the source of personal origin, is positioned not so much as a provider of information, but as a reservoir and translator of personal experiences, internal spiritual sensations and author’s identity. The achievement of the goal of the study was accompanied by the development of the historiographic tradition of the studied problems. It was found that the theme of children’s rear everyday life, for many years, was a peripheral plot of historiography, which was largely due to the orientation of historians to understanding the role of the “first plan” man in the historical process. Under the conditions of an anthropological turn of the 20th - 21st century, an obvious drift of research interest has been outlined in the direction of studying the fate of people who were not the subject of scientific reflection of historians. Thus, an appeal to the corpus of memoirs of contemporaries of events - children of war, provided an opportunity not only to reveal the diversity of individual reactions of provincial residents to a series of political, cultural, social phenomena initiated by the events of the war years, but also to reconstruct the everyday world of rear childhood, placed in the context of catastrophic events era. During the study, the memories of respondents born in 1925-1939 who lived in the countryside during the war were attracted. It was considered that the memory of the subject-memoirist, with such characteristic signs as memory gaps, inaccuracies in names, event, is the basis of the memories. As a result of processing the ego texts of the memoirs of “children of war”, a hypothesis was put forward and substantiated, according to which in the rural environment of the Siberian province, as in the pre-war period, the main structures of children’s everyday life continued to be family, school, street. Through the emotionally expressive perception and broadcast by respondents of life episodes of rear everyday life, it becomes possible to uncover the impact of the formal (school), partially informal (family) and informal (street) environment on the organization of children’s everyday behavior.

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