Memories About the Great Patriotic War Based on the Memoirs of Kalevala District Residents
Abstract
This article describes the features of the collective memory of Kalevala District residents about the traumatic events of World War II. The source material for the analysis was testimonies of the participants of the Great Patriotic War published in the 1960s - 1970s and oral memoirs of our contemporaries. The stories of the respondents were collected in 2020 and provide information about both personal participation in the events (”children of war”) and stories of the deceased participants of the war preserved in the family. Factors that have had a significant impact on the authors of these recollections include: the decades that have passed since the war; the very ”image of the enemy” in the situation where the adversary was Karelian’s kin; the historical turns in the relationships between Russia and Finland; international and cross-border cooperation; and the role of the memory of the war in Russia’s historical and political discourse. The article presents the characteristic features of the collected body of modern war memoirs: symbiosis of official and individual discourses; the ethnographic nature; the presence of unique private facts that can form the basis for historical research; and “difficult” moments of personal history which often contradict the moral imperatives of the informants. The recollections contain a combination of heroic and traumatic narratives deepened by the cultural proximity of the war opponents: Karelians and Finns. The authors use the concept of ”identity” to separate historical research and historical memory, focusing on the latter. An individual’s historical memory of the war, a person’s reflections on what they remember and what they know from the official version of history, allow us to address the issue of the influence of the “war” factor on shaping the person’s identity.
Keywords: memory, oral history, World War II, Karelia, published memoirs, the past and the present
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