Creating the historical memory of Siberia in Russian literature of the 1820s: the ballad “Ermak” by A. N. Muravyov

Abstract

The paper focuses on the genre aspect of literary works, in which the historical memory of the conquest of Siberia was generated. The ballad “Ermak” written by A. N. Muravyov, considered in terms of historiography and fiction of its time, served as the primary source. The study has revealed that the ballad genre model developed in the 1810s was implemented in the material not common for ballads, i.e. the history of Siberia. Such an approach allowed the poet to revise the “Ermak’s plot” taken from the late-medieval chronicles and poetry of modern times in the context of current historical and cultural challenges of the post- Napoleonic era. Muravyov was the first to adapt the “imported” European genre of a literary ballad with its chronotope to the thematic space of the Russian eastern periphery and presented the history of Siberia as a fully-fledged and meaningful part of the country’s history. Thus, it is not the ethnographic details of the journey beyond the Urals, but the problem of historical memory and the symbolic monument to Ermak that the poet focuses on. The constructive and semantic dominant of this genre, i.e. the invasion of the past into the present in the guise of “alive” and “dead” allowed the poet to actualize the memory of the conquest of Siberia in the national memory and revise the image of Ermak image within a framework of the genre form and the spirit of the time.