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Dni by V.V. Shul’gin (1922) and the Role of Witnessing in the Construction of the Anti-Semitic Myth: from History to Self Writing and back again

Paper · 2014 · Maria Gatti Racah

Summary

The article examines how a memoir can present itself as neutral eyewitness testimony while promoting a political reading of history. Its subject is the first part of Dni by V.V. Shul'gin, printed in «Russkaia Mysl'» in 1922. Shul'gin was a Kiev-born monarchist publicist and parliamentarian, known for political anti-Semitism, and he wrote the text in exile. He describes Kiev after the October Manifesto of 1905 and the pogrom that followed, then jumps to February 1917 and the abdication of Nicholas II. The premise is that the first revolution reveals the meaning of the last.

Gatti Racah sets aside the personal layer, his self-justification over the abdication, and analyses the collective layer. She draws on testimonial literature, Lejeune's autobiographical pact and the use and abuse of memory (Todorov, Ricoeur). She argues that the witness framing gave credibility to a picture blaming Jews for the unrest. The goal was to make that picture the official history of the émigré community. Critical replies exposed the manipulation, which shows that a diaspora contains competing memories rather than one shared story.

Key points

  • The object of study is the first part of Dni (Shul'gin 1922, «Russkaia Mysl'»). A foreword attributed to P. Struve praised it as a major human and historical document.
  • The narrative goes from Kiev in October 1905 directly to 1917, following Shul'gin's idea that the "alpha" of 1905 determines the "omega" of 1917.
  • The analytical tools include:
    • testimonial literature (Violi 2009);
    • the reader pact (Lejeune 1975);
    • Dufoix's "exopolity", meaning an exile community that rejects the homeland regime as illegitimate;
    • Tartakovskii's four-volume index of émigré memoirs (2003).
  • Apart from Ulianitskii, all published replies to Dni came from intellectuals of Jewish origin. The author reads this as a sign of the state of Russian-Jewish relations in early-1920s emigration.
  • The paper leaves open whether the distortion was deliberate or an unconscious reaction to cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957). It argues the effect on history-writing is the same either way. A footnote notes that Shul'gin's trip described in Tri stolitsy (1927) was arranged by Trest, an organization infiltrated by the OGPU.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The first-person witness stance makes a text feel truthful whatever its accuracy, so credibility and veracity should be treated as separate properties.
  • I2. A single memoir mixes a personal timeline with sweeping claims about whole groups, and these layers serve different purposes.
  • I3. Putting 1905 and 1917 next to each other, while skipping the years between, works as an argument for causation without ever stating it.
  • I4. One respected endorser (Struve) helped a biased account spread, and only independent dissenting voices produced a second version.
  • I5. The author's motive cannot be known, but the effect of the text on readers can still be analysed.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): tag each frame with its evidential source (narrator saw it, narrator reports it, narrator generalizes) instead of treating every narrated clause as an asserted fact.
  • I2 (world): keep the narrator's own events apart from group-level generalizations, and store generalizations as the narrator's evaluations rather than as states of the world.
  • I3 (world): when ordering events, do not turn textual adjacency into a causal link. Record any such link only as one the narrator implies.
  • I4 (learn): when building silver data, require agreement from witness parsers that are truly independent, and treat a lone authoritative source as unverified.
  • I5 (answer): let readers answer "what does the narrator want us to believe" separately from "what happened", so tale or memoir QA does not merge the two.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 worksPolitical Science and International Relations · 182 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Maria Gatti Racah. 2014. Dni by V.V. Shul’gin (1922) and the Role of Witnessing in the Construction of the Anti-Semitic Myth: from History to Self Writing and back again. Avtobiografija 0.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.25430/2281-6992/v3-307-318

@inproceedings{racah2014dni,
  title = {{Dni by V.V. Shul’gin (1922) and the Role of Witnessing in the Construction of the Anti-Semitic Myth: from History to Self Writing and back again}},
  author = {Maria Gatti Racah},
  booktitle = {Avtobiografija 0},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.25430/2281-6992/v3-307-318},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.25430/2281-6992/v3-307-318}
}

References

4 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Babkov 2008: D.I. Babkov, Politicheskaia publitsistika V. V. find
  2. Shul’gina v period grazhdanskoi voiny i emigratsii, «Voprosy istorii», 2008, III, pp. 92-‐106. Boyarin 2002: J. and D. Boyarin, Powers of diaspora. Two essays on the relevance of Jewish culture, University of Minnesota press, Minne-‐ apolis-‐London, 2002. Bruner 1993: J. Bruner, The autobiographical process, in R. Folken-‐ flik (ed.), The culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-‐ Representation, Stanford UP, Stanford (Cal.), 1993, pp. 38-‐56. Budnitskii 1999: O.V. Budnitskii (Ed.), Evrei i russkaja revoljucija, Gešarim, Moscow-‐Jerusalem, 1999. Budnitskii 2006: O.V. Budnitskii, Rossijskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (1917-‐1920), ROSSPEN, Moscow, 2006. D’Intino 1989: F. D’Intino, L’autobiografia moderna, Bulzoni, Roma, 1989. Dufoix 2003: S. Dufoix, Les diasporas, PUF, Paris, 2003. Festinger 1957: L. Festinger, A theory of cognitive dissonance, Stan-‐ ford UP, Stanford (Cal.), 1957. Fleishman 2003: L. Fleishman, V tiskakh provokacii: operatsiia ‘Trest’ i russkaia zarubezhnaia pechat’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moscow, 2003. Garetto 1996: E. Garetto, Memuary i tema pamiati v literature russkogo zarubezh’ia, «Blokovskii sbornik», 1996, XIII, pp. 101-‐109. Gerrits 2009: A. Gerrits, The Myth of Jewish Communism, Peter Lang, Brussels, 2009. Gousseff 2008: C. Gousseff, L’exile russe. La fabrique du réfugié apa-‐ tride (1920-‐1939), CNRS éditions, Paris, 2008. Lejeune 1975: P. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris, 1975. Levin 1922: I.O. Levin, Pis’mo redaktoru ‘Russkoi Mysli’, «Russkaja mysl’», 1922, IV, p.188-‐191. find
  3. N.R. 1922: N.R., Russkaia Mysl’, «Novoe Vremia», 1922, CCXCIX (25th of April); the review seems to belong to N.P. Rklitskii – according to a bibliography of V.B. Kudriavtsev, Periodicheskie i neperiodicheskie izdaniia russkogo zarub’ezhia, Moscow, 2011, p. 536. find
  4. Pipes 1980: R. Pipes, Struve, liberal on the right, 1905-‐1944, Harvard University Press, Cambridge-‐Massachussetts and London-‐England, 1980. Repnikov 2009: A.V. Repnikov, V.S. Khristoforov, Vasilii Vital’evich Shul’gin, «Rossiiskaia istoriia», 2009, V, pp. 155-‐169. Ricoeur 2000: P. Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Le Seuil, Paris, 2000. Shul’gin 1922: V.V. Shul’gin, Dni, «Russkaia Mysl’», 1922, I-‐II, pp. 136-‐172. Reprinted in Dni. 1920, Moscow, Sovremennik, 1989. Shul’gin 1927: V.V. Shul’gin, Tri stolicy. Puteshestvie v krasnuiu Rossiiu, Mednyi Vsadnik, Berlin, 1927. Shul’gin 1929: V.V. Shul’gin, Chto nam v nich ne nravitsja. Ob anti-‐ semitizme v Rossii, Russia Minor, Paris, 1929. Shul’gin i Struve 1922: Gg. Shul’gin i Struve pered litsom pravdy, «Evreiskaia Tribuna», 1922, CXX, p. 6 Tartakovskii 2003: A.G. Tartakovskii, T. Emmons, O.V. Budnitskii, Rossiia i rossiiskaia emigratsiia v vospominaniakh i dnevnikakh. Annoti-‐ rovannii ukazatel’ knig, zhurnal’nykh i gazetnykh publikacii, izdannykh za rubezhom v 1917-‐1991 gg. V 4-‐kh tomakh, ROSSPEN, Moscow, 2003. Todorov 1995: T. Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire, Arléa, Paris, 1995. Todorov 1978: T. Todorov, Les genres du discours, Seuil, Paris, 1978. Vinaver 1909: M.M. Vinaver, Otkrytoe pis’mo P.B. Struve, «Reč’», 1909; ristampato in M.A. Kolerov (Ed.), Nacionalizm. Polemika 1909-‐ 1917, DIK, Moskva, 2000, pp. 72-‐75. Vinaver 1922: M.M. Vinaver, Otkrytoe pis’mo Petru Bernargdovichu Struve, «Poslednie novosti», 1922, DXCVIII (28 marzo). Violi 2009: P. Violi, Narrazioni del sé tra autobiografia e testimo-‐ nianza, http://www.ec-‐ aiss.it/archivio/tematico/memoria_identita/memoria_identita.php, 20 of September, 2013. ↗

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