INDIVIDUAL DISCURSIVE MEMORY PRACTICES: EXPERIENCE OF A FAMILY HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Abstract

The article offers some results of the authors’ search for answers to questions about the causes and consequences of what happened at the family and everyday level against the background of large-scale events in the period spanning a century and a half of the Russian history. Detailed research in a complex interdisciplinary field, covering such auxiliary scientific disciplines as genealogy, biography, prosopography, narrative and discourse analysis, etc., includes work with a family photo archive. Along with a detailed study of the biographies of representatives of previous generations, travels took place in memory of five of them. One of the main sources for determining the direction and organizing the route, visiting certain objects on the spot is the family photo archive. There is a brief review about the travels of one of the authors over the past ten years, associated with the memory of ancestors. The travel to Kamchatka in September 2021 was the fifth in a row dedicated to the memory of the ancestor of the authors on the maternal side Porfiry Alexandrovich Mordovin (03.11.1852–after 1918), an officer of the Russian Imperial Navy, who had gone through twenty six-months campaigns, a participant in the Battle of Tsushima, who went missing in March 1918. The official record of accomplishment indicates that Porfiry Aleksandrovich from 19.05.1880 to 22.05.1883 and from 01.09.1891 to 01.11.1898 was on the clipper “Zabiyaka” on a foreign voyage. Photos in the album refer to the second period of his stay in the Far East. The complete archive of P. A. Mordovin, including these expeditions, was lost or deliberately destroyed in Soviet times, several buttons from his uniform, a dagger and a photo album have survived, 97 photos of 250 belong to the Pacific region, and 50 photos contain signatures indicating Petropavlovsk (now the capital of the region Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky) and the surrounding area. The preliminary result of the research is the introduction into scientific circulation of 30 out of 97 photographs of 1892–1894 from the album of Porfiry Alexandrovich Mordovin, relating to the Far East region. Photographs of persons, their places of residence at one stage or another of their biography are the way that authors use as an “observation tool” when preparing for a travel, during it and during the subsequent description. Additional research will require the issues of memory mapping and memory distortions about representatives of the genus and their activities in distant eras