“We will never get out of this power”: The literary centrism of Memories by Grigory Potanin

The article discusses the specificity of the literary centrism of Vospominaniya [Memories] by Grigory Potanin, which became the final book of the leader of Siberian regionalism. The subject of the study determined the composition of the material taken. In addition to Vospominaniya, the analysis involves Krymskie Pis'ma Sibiryaka [The Crimean Letters of a Siberian], the brochure Vozrozhdenie Rossii i Ministerstvo Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya [The Revival of Russia and the Ministry of Public Education], Potanin's anniversary speech in 1915, as well as letters from the “senior” regionalist (first of all, letters to his second wife, the poetess M.G. Vasilyeva). The author refers to the methodology of research in the field of life-creation (Sh. Shahadat, A.L. Zorin), works on the literary centrism of Russian culture (Yu.M. Lotman, M. Berg, A.I. Zhuravleva), milestone research in Siberian studies (B.A. Chmykhalo, K.V. Anisimov, A.V. Remnev). The aim of the article is to consider the modes of literary centrism of Vospominaniya in the context of the literary centrism of Potanin's worldview and the views of “senior” regionalists on the relationship between literature and extra-literary reality. Though Vospominaniya belongs to non-fictional literature, its text is dominated by literary centrism. The key modes of literary centrism of the book are revealed. Their correlation with other manifestations of the literary centrism of Potanin's worldview is traced. The analysis led to the following conclusions. In his memoirs, Potanin intended to represent the events of his own life through the prism of literature as a reservoir of plot and behavioral models and psychological proto-narratives. Life in the cadet corps is portrayed as a place of spontaneous life-creation experience, the source of which was Nikolai Gogol's prose (first of all, Taras Bulba). The departure to St. Petersburg University is described with the help of an ironic auto-projection onto the mythologized biography of Mikhail Lomonosov. The episode of the meeting with Dostoevsky in Semipalatinsk is created according to the patterns of a scene from Mertvye Dushi [Dead Souls]. While developing “purely Siberian topics” in his Vospominaniya, Potanin actively turned to the resources of all-Russian literature, using its most significant achievements, which conflicted with the regional program of the 1860s-1870s and was more difficult to correlate with Potanin's views of the 1900s-1910s. Fictional literature did not occupy a dominant place in Potanin's legacy (and in that of “senior” regionalists in general), either structurally or in purely quantitative terms. At the same time, Potanin's most varied works had an almost invariable literature-centric focus, the apotheosis of which was Vospo-minaniya.

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