Disconnecting from civilization or burying yourself in documents

The reenactment method is one of the most popular in historical science. Everything can be restored: the course of battles, clothing, interiors and even cooking. According to the writer Andrey Rubanov, the most difficult thing is to restore the thinking of a person who lived in a time far from us. To understand how such a person thought, the author suggested going to a remote village, turning off the phone and completely distancing yourself from civilization for a month. This is one of the currently available ways to put yourself in the shoes of, for example, a medieval person. The second option that Rubanov suggested is to work in a monastery.

Sergey Belyakov, the author of the book Parisian boys in Stalin’s Moscowdescribes himself primarily as a historian, not as a writer. He believes that nothing needs to be invented because everything already exists in our history.

“You don’t need to invent anything, you need to find something. You need to find it in documents, letters and old newspapers. And then restore the world in which people lived. I like this approach not only because of my professional preferences, but also because nowadays there are a lot of lies and deceptions. Today you read an article on the Internet and tomorrow it’s gone. Technology can erase the past. And a historian digs up the real thing and tells us what happened. This way we all gain solid ground under our feet,” said Sergei Belyakov.

His book tells the story of Marina Tsvetaeva’s son – Georgy Mur Efron. The novel by Helena Pobyarzhina Valsarb is also dedicated to him. Mur died defending Helena’s hometown of Braslav. At the same time, this story is practically unknown in the writer’s homeland. Pobyarzhina was fascinated by Marina Tsvetayeva’s work since childhood and was very worried about the “forgetting of historical memory.”

“I thought for a long time about how to write the story of Mur. But at some point I came up with the idea of ​​talking about a girl and a soldier who wander around like a ghost, the restless soul of the city. In the 1970s, a monument to Georgi Efron was erected near Braslav, but in the city itself, on the mass grave of the defenders of Braslav, his name is no longer inscribed. And this is very sad,” said Helena Pobyarschina.

In addition to the history of Mura, Helena Pobyarzhina also talks about the Holocaust and the Braslav ghetto. In her opinion, the city’s residents are still unaware of this part of history.

Vasily Avchenko wrote a book about the Soviet writer Oleg Kuvayev, who died in 1975 at the age of 40. As Avchenko said, it was not difficult for him to restore the life of the hero of his book, since many of the writer’s contemporaries were still alive. He based his work mainly on numerous interviews with contemporary witnesses.

“In Moscow, I met his relatives and heirs, his elder sister, and the writer’s nephew manages his archive. Everything is very simple here: there are many documents and living witnesses. In addition, whenever possible, I traveled around Kolyma and Chukotka, where I also found numerous documentary evidence and witnesses. When a historian looks for facts, I had a different task – to find the key to the creation of a book, to find the intonation,” added Vasily Avchenko.

“Language is one of the main characters of fiction”

When an author conveys the atmosphere of the time, he is faced with the question of how and in what language to depict the events so that the modern reader can understand them. Andrey Rubanov noted that in historical non-fiction, the language should be as simple and understandable as possible for the modern reader. In fiction, on the other hand, everything depends on the author’s taste. However, he later added that the more complex the stylization, the fewer people would read the book.

This idea was supported by Sergei Belyakov. He said that he tries to write in a simple language. Although the language of the heroes in his works also does not have to be stylized, they are not far from our time. They lived mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Where it is necessary to cite an old document, I quote. In the book Mazepa’s Shadowthere are quotes in Ukrainian that I have explicitly quoted in the original language with translation. The only thing is that I myself never switch to the language of a particular generation,” noted Sergei Belyakov.

Writer Alexey Avchenko does not quite agree with the opinion of his colleagues. He believes that when discussing non-fiction, it is necessary to add details. For example, there is a genre of documentary prose, where, according to Avchenko, it is necessary to use all acceptable artistic techniques. He said that in this case, not only the facts should be important for a writer, but also how they are presented, what images are used and what rhythm the text has.

“I write in a modern language, but certain words of a certain time are important to convey the era. I do this with the help of quotes from documents and letters, but I do not adapt the author’s speech to a specific time. The author’s voice belongs to the author, and the hero’s voice should have individual features that are characteristic only for him, as well as for the time and area,” Avchenko added.

About the work of Helena Pobyarzhina ValsarbFor her, “language is one of the main characters of fiction.”

“In my case, language is the most important character. The thing is that I have been writing poetry all my life, so my prose is the prose of a poet. My novels have chapters written entirely in rhyme,” said the writer.

When Helena Pobyarzhina wrote Valsarbshe studied not only Tsvetaeva’s biography, but also the diaries of Georgi Efron. Pobyarschina incorporated magical elements into her novel, Mur appeared to the main character as a ghost. And the author stylized her speech so that it corresponded to the real diaries of Tsvetaeva’s son.

There is an opinion that language is understandable for 200 years, and then the syntax changes. The language becomes difficult to understand. Not because of outdated words, but because of the different construction of the sentence and language in general. Perhaps in 200 years schoolchildren from the future will look at the works of contemporary authors with the same bewilderment as children of today The story of Igor’s campaign.

Ekaterina Petrova is a book critic for the online newspaper “Realnoe Vremya”, the author of the Telegram channel “Poppy Seed Muffins” and the founder of the first online subscription book club “Makulatura”.

Ekaterina Petrova