Visiting Tomsk Residents'': a manuscript of early 20th century about Tomsk

The problem of memoirs texts classification had been posed by scholars time and again, as well as the question of differentiation between memoirs and fiction, travel notes, social and political essays, etc. N.P. Matkhanova described the problem in details with regard to Siberian materials in her monograph. The aims of memoirs writing have been changing over time. Thus, convergence of memoirs with fiction took place in the second half of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. A lot of such texts were published in Siberian periodicals in the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. A manuscript from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department of Tomsk State University Research Library is an example of a document of this type. The author titled it ''Visiting Tomsk Residents''; it is a manuscript of 1901. The dating was made on the ground of the following information from the text: reference to the coming exhibition in Paris, as well as speeches about the importance of the Siberian railway. A corresponding assembly lecture was given by M.N. Sobolev, Professor of Tomsk University, on October 22, 1900. The author described those events as ''last year events'', so, there is a good likelihood that the text was written a year later. The author worked on the manuscript: there is author's editing in the text made with black and green ink. Probably, the text was being prepared for publication: there is also editing with blue and red pencils. There are obviously fictional characters in the text beginning with the main character, who is the narrator, and his Tomsk uncle with his typical, depersonalized language. At the same time, the author obviously based on his own impressions and observation. He was familiar with the city topography and realia of city life. Some topics from Tomsk periodicals of the turn of the centuries were present in characters' speech. So, the problem is to find a way to classify texts where fictional characters act in a real scenery. Such texts seem to belong to the same category, which N.P. Matkhanova characterizes as the periphery of the memoir genre. The text is interesting in the first place as a city life panorama, written by one of the townspeople. It is also important that memoirs about Tomsk are neither studied in detail nor all revealed or published. It is pleasant that scholars have started to pay closer attention to this kind of historical source recently.

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