Pamiat’. Istoricheskii sbornik

“Pamiat'”, 5, Paris 1982. Source: “Vtoraia-Literatura” Archive.

Title of the journal:
“Pamiat’. Istoricheskii sbornik” [Memory. Historical Collection]

Dates: 1976-1981

Place of publication: Moscow-Leningrad (later Paris-New York)

Total issues: 5

Description:
“Pamiat’” (Memory) was published from 1976 to 1981, with the subtitle “Istoricheskii sbornik” (Historical collection).  In total there were five issues with numbers 2 to 5 written in Leningrad, distributed in Moscow, and published in Paris by Khronica Press and YMCA Press). The founding group was formed in Tartu in 1967, when Valery Sazhin, a young student at the Leningrad Faculty of Arts, attended a conference where he met Iurii Lotman’s students, Gabriel’ Superfiin and Arsenii Roginskii. They became friends and their relationship was consolidated in Leningrad, where Roginskii arrived shortly afterwards to finish his studies, and where the project for a magazine took shape. The idea of creating an unofficial historical collection was born in 1974, following news of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and expulsion from the Soviet Union (cf. Sveshnikov 2017: 63-66). Historian and philologist Arseny Roginskj was the founder and editor of the historical collection, and Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia, a poet forced to emigrate in 1975, became the collection’s representative abroad. Young experts from Moscow and Leningrad, not linked to official academia, such as Aleksander Daniėl’, Aleksander Dobkin, Sergei Dediulin, Dmitrii Zubarev, and Aleksei Korotaev, joined the editorial committee.
The collection was divided into categories: Vospominaniia (Memories), Stat’i i ocherki (Articles and Essays), Iz istorii kul’tury (From cultural history), Varia, Retsenzii (Reviews) and Dokumenty (Documents) which included articles, documents and testimonies.
The first issue included an anonymous introduction – in truth written by Roginskii, Dediulin, Daniėl, and the muscovite historian Mikhail Gefter – which set out the journal’s objectives: to save historical facts from oblivion, and remember prominent characters from Russian culture often victims of smear campaigns, as well as contemporaries who had been imprisoned and interrogated.
The magazine’s pages numbered had from 500 to 800, and included memories and studies, mainly published under pseudonyms. The works addressed different aspects of twentieth-century Russian history (for example, the history of non-communist political parties, of diplomacy and of literary criticism), and contained previously unpublished material held in public and private archives such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Pumpianskii’s letters to Matvei Kagan (1921-1923), in the fourth issue (1981) and later published in the Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, almanac, under the name “Nevelskaia” (pseudonym for Iudif Kagan, the philosopher’s daughter ), correspondence from the young Berdiaev (4, 1981) and letters by Nadezhda Mandel’shtam (5, 1982).
The main difference between “Pamiat’” and other samizdat and tamizdat collections was its scientific approach to creating a cultural space in which the academic community could discuss characters and subjects disliked and/or censored by the establishment. Its articles often commented on cultural history as well as literature theory and drew on a wide range of published and unpublished documentary sources.
After Roginskii’s arrest in 1981, Aleksandr Dobkin prepared the sixth issue of the collection in Paris, but it remained unpublished. After this, “Pamiat’” ceased publication.

Giuseppina Larocca
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Diletta Bacci

Bibliography

• Sveshnikov A., Martin B. (eds.), Istoricheskii sbornik Pamiat’. Issledovaniia i materialy, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moskva 2017.
• Sveshnikov A., Istoricheskii sbornik Pamiat’: istoriia i konteksty in A. Svešnikov, B. Martin (eds.), Istoricheskii sbornik Pamiat’. Issledovaniia i materialy, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moskva 2017: 60-165.